Discussion about this post

User's avatar
John Carter's avatar

We've been putting up with this bullshit for decades now. Second hand smoke studies turn out to be nonsense? Too bad, still can't smoke in bars. TSA hasn't stopped a single terrorist attack? Shut up and take your shoes off.

The only way this stops is when a critical mass of people just stop complying. We're not going to vote our way out: none of this stuff was ever part of any electoral platform in the first place. We're not going to get public health safetyists fired: those are entrenched bureaucracies that operate with total independence from any form of democratic oversight, staffed by myopic fanatics who could care less what the public thinks. We're not going to convince the NPCs.

The only way out is cultural. We need to develop an ethos of simply ignoring everything the state says, such that their fatwas become about as meaningful as a mullah's pronouncements against immorality in downtown Vegas.

Expand full comment
SCA's avatar

Be of good cheer. Life can't be stopped. Crush people as much as you can, there's still gonna be kids born who refuse to color within the lines no matter how often you rap them on the knuckles.

I'm sure the people sitting in the midst of the Roman Empire falling on their heads thought the end of civilization was a completely done deal, and yet eventually we had the Western Enlightenment.

I'm really grieved for my adult child and my adult child's friends, that they must endure this, but my grandma and her parents and siblings endured pogroms and the Russian Revolution and the loss of family to the slaughter in Uman 80 years ago, and yet here I am, a woman come to adulthood in what had been a reasonably free country where I could read anything I wanted and where at the moment I am a living breathing apostate to two religions who don't take kindly to that. Life can't, as I said, be stopped.

Expand full comment
322 more comments...

No posts