Enjoying the view from Limbo
Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim-immigration activist, who, like all activists, is easily susceptible to the foolish weakness of reducing all reality to his favorite cause, has led his Freedom Party to victory in the Dutch election, and will be the country’s next prime minister. That might be favorable news if you were viewing the situation entirely through the lens of concern over Western civilizational...
The populists of the world today, eager above all causes to bury Ukraine, though sometimes euphemizing the death they are willing as “fiscal responsibility” or “not getting mired in others’ problems” or “an end to endless wars” — whose interests do these populists seek to serve? It is not their own to be sure. For in abandoning a large and courageous nation to...
You can completely and vociferously sympathize with Israel’s position, and unequivocally condemn the ends and methods of Hamas and its radical Islamic allies, without necessarily believing that it is your country’s official duty to give material support to Israel’s self-defense. To take this position, one merely has to have the intellectual subtlety to grasp the distinction between the moral and the political, private...
Here is a new social media post from the leading candidate for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (and also for Chief Toilet Brush at Mar-a-Lago), in response to current events in Israel: Rockets are raining down on Israeli towns right now. We need to immediately help replenish Israel’s stockpile of Iron Dome missiles to protect more innocent civilians from getting killed....
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 7, 2023 · Last modified October 8, 2023
Jim Jordan, a careerist boob who would sell his soul (or rather has already sold it) to help Donald Trump win the presidency and Vladimir Putin win the war — two sides of the same coin — is vowing, as his primary pledge in seeking the speakership of the U.S. House of Representatives, to support no further financial aid for Ukraine. Rand Paul,...
Sincerity — if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Rand Paul gave the world a master class in the practical application of George Burns’ famous joke about the entertainment industry. A consummate libertarian of the performer class, Paul spoke in the U.S. Senate last week about his unwillingness to support any more military aid to Ukraine. His speech was passionate but...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 19, 2023
The American government’s old guard establishment in both parties wants Ukraine to lose the war, but slowly. The establishment’s upstart wing, comprised mainly of populists of the right, including the farcically-named House Freedom Caucus, wants Russia to win, and quickly. Neither side is quite willing to state its genuine position directly, at least so far, although the loonier puppets of the populist faction,...
It is fairly obvious now that President Biden’s administration (not Biden himself, who of course has no idea what is happening or why) wishes to help Ukraine stave off Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion just well enough to inflict severe damage to Putin’s military, but not well enough to defeat him outright or restore all of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. In other words, the goal...
Many of the same people urging Ukraine to accept land concessions as the necessary price of “peace,” where peace is defined as an invading dictator’s willingness to cease immediate hostilities, are, in their domestic political views, vehemently opposed to so-called redistributionist justice. In the latter case, they regularly cite both the moral illegitimacy of violating the property and self-determination of some in order...
When Vladimir Putin’s regime finally falls, or the Botox Tyrant himself withers and dies, probably in prison somewhere, will the apparent entity we call “Tucker Carlson” actually go poof, and the last two years of his “life” simply disappear entirely from the universe and the collective memory? I commit this thought to writing here in the nature of an experiment. Specifically, if my...
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