It’s not just about eating bugs. It’s about a whole theory and practice of life and salvation itself, a new religion to replace all the old ones. Cough up your government-issued ID, send your package if you must, think twice before complaining about anything on social media, and figure out a way to channel your depression and despair into quiet humble gratitude and acquiescence., Don’t forget to recycle. The flagellants have taken over the world.
The measure of freedom in any society is the degree of inclusion for those who stand on the margins, those who linger on the edge, and those who suffer in silence. The potential and eventual realisation of inclusion is evidence of a free society, of genuine enfranchisement for all who seek it. Good rulers take care of those who come under their authority, including those parties on the losing side of military conflicts. Freedom is not achieved by overturning the results of conflict, revising the past, or instilling guilt and shame on the victors.
What we can’t do is act like censorious leftists, demanding the scalp of anyone who says something we don’t like. Either we’re the side that truly believes in free speech—or else there is no such side anymore.
Everything is dirty. Nothing works. But everything’s also more expensive. And oh, by the way, you don’t have privacy anymore.
In the Munk debate, no one mentioned COVID restrictions. No one mentioned the decline of the rule of law and weaponization of the legal system for political ends. No one mentioned government censorship or media collusion.
Absent concerted action on our part, our recent past is our foreseeable future, because neither the ideology nor the power-centers profiting from it have changed. At stake in our response is our liberal democracy and our humanity.
Those who favor reform that reduces the governmentalization of social affairs need a name for that Smithian outlook. Whatever name we adopt, it will be abused or stolen by those whose characters and deeds spell the governmentalization of social affairs. We should remember who we are. We should return to the great liberal arc of the last 500 years, rising out of Christendom. There is only one liberalism 1.0. Let’s recover it and stick with it.
I will argue that the spreading dominance of the woke agenda was a key enabling environment in 2020 for the Covid interventions. Wokism is a war on Western civilization. Resisting the Covid tyranny is a war to defend the products of the Western Enlightenment.
This account of Lacan’s discourse theory enables one to make sense of the discursive struggles currently occurring in global space. And once one has an intellectual grasp of one’s adversary’s ‘master moves’ in this space, one can better prepare to counter them through the hysteric’s and analyst’s discourses.
Gratitude and its rewarding expression were sorely lacking during the Pandemic. Masks, medicines, and the disease of politics created wide rifts amongst friends and family. Some of the wounds may never heal, but the holiday where we remember our dead is over. Now we move into the season where we give thanks to those still with us.
Political elites made it simultaneously dangerous to utter anything remotely disparaging of some groups and fashionable to trash other groups. Their double standard was a display of power, not hypocrisy
The prejudice observed against the unvaccinated was far from minimal. It was two and a half times greater than the exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants from the Middle East. Researchers discovered that the unvaccinated were as disliked as individuals struggling with drug addiction and significantly more so than people who had been released from prison.
