The Post-Partisan Emporium

Holland: The Political disguised as The Medical The Dutch Truman Show continues. Unbekoming I like Dutch people. I like them a lot. I like them so much I married one of them. I’ve been to Holland (and yes spare me, I know that’s not it’s REAL name) several times, have extended family there and several very good friends. I love the place. I wrote a long piece back in December 2020 about how the Dutch government was lying to its citizens in response to them running one of the more successful propaganda campaigns about having to air lift Covid patients to Germany. Lies are Unbekoming The Dutch COVID19 Truman Show This was first written in early December 2020. The Dutch are a very trusting people, it’s just one of many great things about their culture. They trust their Government, as over the years they have had no reason not to. The Government has taken advantage of that trust, and has and is actively lying to them… Read more 8 months ago · 1 like · Unbekoming The Dutch are such a trustin

Facemasks Are Not an 'Inconvenience', Facemasks Are Not Trivial: A List of Some of the Underappreciated and Hard-to-Articulate Reasons Forced Masking is so Distressing Being difficult to articulate does not make the harms and suffering inflicted by facemasks any less real, but does make them more distressing Ashmedai “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted” - DA Henderson, Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, 2006 One of the most trenchant arguments made by proponents of forced masking is some variation of “it’s just an inconvenience”, so/and/or “why do you have to make such a big deal about it”. (To be clear, this is not a legitimate scientific or factual argument for the adoption of any policy, but that is not what this article is about.) I am largely going to avoid the issues unique to masking

The Reality They Invent to Feed the Power They Crave BY  THOMAS HARRINGTON     The early 20 th  century Catalan philosopher and nationalist activist, Eugeni d’Ors was renowned for his aphorisms. The most oft-repeated of these concerned the thinker’s need to raise “the anecdote to a category.” Ors was a humanist, and this being the case, his intellectual  modus operandi  was essentially accretional and synthesis-based in nature.  When we write as humanists, we select from the inventory of verbal metaphors we have acquired in the course of our lives to tell a story that we believe will enlighten and will capture the attention of our readers. In providing them with this carefully arranged series of “charged” anecdotes we trust that we are, in some way, facilitating their own ability to forge a broader and more categorical understanding of the concept or phenomenon under discussion.  Stripped of the self-indulgent dramatism he always brought to his life and work, Ors’ aphorism is little mo