the enlightenment that failed

Apparently Beagles is happy enough with puffery because Dump has so far done nothing to keep out  muslims or build the wall, and given his modus operandi (by the way what is O tempora! O mores! ?) is to raise a mighty wind and fuck up the implementation.

And it's just as well since these are terrible measures, terrible morally and for the good name of America and for the good fortune of our country.  But I'm not going to argue them now, I have before many times and it all has come to nought.  In the four years of the Institute and the two or three years of emails before that, I have managed to convince Beagles that Obama is not a muslim, and beyond that no headway,  

It is all the problem of liberalism which was born of the enlightenment which, by the way, brought us deism.  There were armies of protestants and of Catholics but there were no armies of the enlightenment.  The enlightenment didn't  believe in armies, it believed in the spoken and written word, it believed in reason, it didn't believe in furthering its message by the sword, but by civil discourse with the facts on its side.

We liberals believe in education, that is how we spread our message of liberty, fraternity, and equality.  In the early days of our nation we had slavery, women were chattels, poor people couldn't vote, a lot of our education consisted of bible readings, and Beagles could not marry his gay dog.  We've come a long way on that, but now there is a backlash.  We thought everybody was being educated, everybody was being enlightened, but that wasn't the case, about half the population has not been along for the ride,  

Well people hate being preached to and we liberals are a preacjhy sort, and people prefer to cling to the faith of their fathers and not think over anything too deeply.

So there we are,


Demonstrators don't accomplish much I think.  It makes their souls feel good because they have done what they think is the right thing, but I don't know if it's the right thing to do if it doesn't change any minds.  Still you get to mingle with like-minded people and depending on the turnout (like the women's march) you can see that you have strength and maybe that will propel you to more effective action,  My sister went on the women's march and now she is phoning congressmen.  I don't think she looks like a monkey.


I've always been a little skeptical of people who say they don't hate other people they pity them, it's kind of self righteous like see I am above hate, and really it's a way of putting the person down even further like they are not even worthy of your hate, and the pity seems kind of hypocritical you never see the pitier slipping a fiver into the pitied's hat.


When Beagles wants to lighten his prose he often adds a phrase along the lines of I make joke, and that was the reference I was, er, referencing in the discussion of airport detention centers.

I just wanted to speculate about dreams and hear what others thought, I had no particular point of view I wanted to press.

I think I saw that article about Dump not reading his executive orders.  I think I saw it in google news which picked it up from Huffpo which picked it up from somewhere else.  It was basically just a Dump hate piece, just some wiseacre wisecracking, not that there is anything wrong with that.