@JohnRalstonSaul On Twitter, A vocal Critic of Neo Liberalism on the #CovidTrain? #CognitiveDissonance #BetweenTheLines #Austerity . Covid 19 is it the new End of History?

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After a considerable trawl through the Nuts and Bolts of the Housing Market and affordability questions I noticed that those posts on my Blog were not being read this morning but one post that was being read was this one.


Its an analysis of General Elections in the Uk going back to the 1983, Post Falklands Election. Including a Look at Voltaire’s Bastards , Looking at John Majors Bastards and Looking at The UK’s Remain Bastards , Prorogation anyone?
I noticed this as I felt that Austerity as visited on the British people by the Cameron / Clegg Coalition seems a likely scenario for a replay post Covid 19?


Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion and The Unconscious Civilization[edit]
Saul’s non-fiction began with the trilogy comprising the bestseller Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), the polemic philosophical dictionary The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (1994), and the book that grew out of his 1995 Massey Lectures, The Unconscious Civilization (1995).

These books deal with themes such as the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities, how it can be used for any ends especially in a directionless state that rewards the pursuit of power for power’s sake. He argues that this leads to deformations of thought such as ideology promoted as truth; the rational but anti-democratic structures of corporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language and expertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm caused by this, and what else our society might do. He argues that the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation. He calls for a pursuit of a more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy. These attributes are elaborated upon in his 2001 book On Equilibrium.


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/tracking-unprecedented-federal-coronavirus-spending-1.5827045
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s financial update on Nov. 30 pegged total government spending on the pandemic at $322.3 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2021. However, that figure includes newly pledged funds and budgeted amounts yet to be spent.

“We don’t really have a good view — almost no view — of the government spending today. We have estimates of what the government thinks it will spend for 2020, 2021,” said Page, who now heads the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy. “But those are not the actual monies that are going out the door.”

What is Mr Saul saying between the lines, can one divine a view from a Twitter feed?

In Mr Sauls favourite interview he mentions killing of writers being on the edge of the West, he means murder not mere Spiking by editors or Career destruction.

I will leave this just dangling here , I have neither the time or inclination to work this broad idea into anything that would pass for pretty prose in my own pages here.