Thought it was turned off. Yet, I battled it all the way through the last comment.

I lost out on “musty” …

Or maybe the “U” and “I” are just too close on this tiny keypad. My fault either way.

Griffin on December 14, 2021 at 5:23 pm said:
I’m sure it will all work out.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/06/the-death-of-europe/“

Read the linked article. Some remarkable, if nonetheless predictable events are occuring in Europe.

What a nice idea the bureaucrats have come up with: punitive taxation. Of course taxation has always been to the mind of the coercionist much more than a means of funding government operations. In the hands of the statist it is the ideal tool of social control and population management: The power to reward, and the power to destroy using the unremarkable and everyday, and almost, I say “almost”, subliminal powers of the state.

The author did provide some inadvertently amusing interludes though. Do supposedly serious people still get musty-eyed and all trembly when citing “The Enlightenment” in the same way they now do “Science™”?

I mean you don’t have to be a member of Action Francaise, and a self announced obscurantist to have concluded that the “Principles of the Enlightenment” are as much a nice song and dance routine, or anthem, if you prefer to lend it dignity, as it is any kind of coherent set of axioms which either inexorably generate distributively life affirmimg results, or, are even capable of being defended in the purely secular terms in which they are framed.

It is a broader case of what one sees with the intellectual joke of utilitarianism. A doctrine which cannot be defended within its own framework but which must rely on closeted assumptions or inputs which one politely ignores – as when viewing a clever child’s model of a perpetual motion machine.

You would think that after the French Revolution, and all the subsequent murderous regimes of progress and enlightenment since then, people would have quit reciting the phrase “The Enlightenment” or even funnier, “Our Enlightenment values”, as if they carried real moral force, or even had some incantatory power.

That, is so … unenlightened!

Thanks for the Info. 🙂
It will be interesting to see what his book is like.

Great! Thanks. 🙂

I haven’t read the Atlas book, but reviews from the right side of the aisle tend to include phrases like “self-serving like all Washington memoirs” and “sometimes even a little self-righteous” along with all the praise. So when I read it I’ll filter for that, to be sure.

…Or, if you really want to know…,

I typed my original comment, thinking that neo was [against] Dr. Atlas’ book, + then I decided to join in her trashing his book…which I now see, that she was [not] doing. Heh! *TR looks red-faced. *

THAT will teach me, to read neo’s site, at 3am, + then pretend that I know what’s going on. 😀
My 1st comment ends up supporting a political plank, that it turns out I do [not] support.
I goofed on my comment, but it was fun to write, anyhow.
I [miss] creative writing class.
Have a Good Day. 🙂

If you can find where I said that Dr. Atlas’ statements were less truthful than DR. Fauci’s, in the page above, I’ll talk to my bank, + see about giving you $1,000.
Later On. 😉

We wrecked lives by the million. Stress kills. Stress causes severe illness. Lockdowns caused stress. And the sickness caused has to include the drug overdoses, the suicides, the addictions and other mental health breakdowns.