C. S Lewis: Talking about Bicycles

If someone is complaining, it makes a good deal of difference whether they are complaining because they have never been Enchanted by the thing, or if they are complaining because they have been Disenchanted.

[Suppose] you read an author in whom love is treated as lust and all war as murder—and so forth. But are you reading a Disenchanted man or only an Unenchanted man? Has the writer been through the Enchantment and come out on to the bleak highlands, or is he simply a subman who is . . . free from the heroic mirage as a coward is free? If Disenchanted, he may have something worthwhile to say, though less than a Re-enchanted man. If Unenchanted, into the fire with his book. He is talking of what he doesn’t understand. But the great danger we have to guard against in this age is the Unenchanted man, mistaking himself for, and mistaken by others for, the Disenchanted man.”

In the same way, if someone is lauding something, it makes a good deal of difference whether they are only Enchanted, or if they have passed through Disenchantment and become Re-enchanted.

Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure Part II

Heavily bureaucratised Western governments are a recent development. They are a product of the Industrial Revolution and the mass society that it enabled. Before the modern bureaucratic apparatus arose, governments behaved more legibly, towards a much more confined set of purposes. Primarily, they collected taxes and waged wars. What the bureaucracy has brought us, is a wealth of ancillary government functions that nobody even 100 years ago could have imagined, together with a suite of bizarre and unpredictable behaviour that nobody can explain. Corona has been an object lesson in all of the truly crazy and destructive things a broadly distributed bureaucratic policy consensus founded upon false premises can achieve.

Youngkin Won by Campaigning on Cultural Issues 

There are a number of lessons for those of us on the real right—not the GOP establishment—to learn from Tuesday’s election in Virginia.

First, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory came not so much from bringing the races and parties together, as the usual suspects on Fox News declared, but rather because he won Republican counties in Southwestern Virginia and traditionally Republican suburbs by a larger margin than Trump. Youngkin also flipped some suburbs from blue to red and kept his losses down in Northern Virginia better than recent Republican candidates.

Peak Antinatalism

Last week, another piece of the vaccine mythology unraveled.

In a new examination of the CDC’s study on the effects of the Covid-19 vaccine on pregnant women, two doctors from New Zealand found the shot caused 82 to 91 percent of women in their first trimester to experience a “spontaneous abortion,” or miscarriage. This figure is seven to eight times higher than the average rate of pregnancy loss for women in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The original CDC study claims only 12.6 percent of the vaccinated pregnant women had a spontaneous abortion during the course of the study, on par with typical early pregnancy loss. However, the majority of women studied—between 700 to 713 of 827—were exposed to the vaccine after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, the most vulnerable stage. Of those who were early in their pregnancy, the miscarriage rate was far higher. Doctors Aleisha Brock and Simon Thornley concluded not only that the original CDC study is misleading, but that the vaccine should not be recommended for pregnant or breastfeeding women, as well as children and anyone in the general population of childbearing age, due to this high incidence of miscarriage.