A criminal bullies an old man, defending an act of theft by his loser girlfriend. He aggresses against the old man. Who, in self defense, stabs him. He dies.
That is a good story. Not a great story. Not exactly uplifting. But justice prevailed. Aggressive criminals who commit crimes lose the right to life in violent situations they themselves cause. The righteous must defend themselves, and when criminals die in such cases, only their families should weep. The rest of us? Our sympathies should be muted. Extremely muted, if existent at all.
But it was the aging Puerto Rican store clerk who was arrested and charged with murder.
Thus it is that thugs possess more effective legal rights than peaceful people do, the aggressed-against have fewer legal defenses than the aggressors. And the government and social media corporations? Why, they side with the thugs — GoFundMe denied the store clerk access to its fundraising mechanisms, so he is basically thrown back into the old days of the poor being poorly served by the judicial system.
Why, you ask.
The idea of self-defense — upon which rested the old liberal justification for government — is anathema to the dominant, ruling ideology, statism.
Statism’s a technical term for a whole swath of government ideologies, including fascism, social democracy, modish and old-fashioned Progressivism. And of course socialism. But caution: all these statist ideologies provide cover for what is really going on, which could be called technocratic class tyranny: Rule by the cognitive elites and plutocratic backers who control the Deep State and the Wide State, and who gain great advantages by leveraging their insider status.
And these elites use criminals and unthinkingly violent mobs to hold onto power. The policy that is key to their success is anarcho-tyranny. And that depends upon unleashing criminals and would-be criminals (illegal immigrants, for example) against normal peaceful people.
Here is Tucker Carlson getting close to the the core issues:
Tucker fingers a villain behind the scenes — George Soros — and this man, Soros, is indeed quite the villain, subsidizing local campaigns in major cities around America to put in progressive, pro-criminal prosecuting attorneys. Not liberal prosecutors, who stick to liberal principles, but actual pro-criminal attorneys. But we should wonder who’s behind Soros. For there may indeed be a cabal of the very rich who do indeed select and nurture a few wealthy investors and entrepreneurs and then make them perform their most unseemly moves in full light of public.
But one should doubt that, too, for we do not know the secrets of those who play behind the façades of “democracy.” For what really is going on here may be just the contagion of really bad ideas. These ideas infect people low and high, and those ideas are so constructed to reward most of their adherents in ways that the adherents never quite acknowledge, for it might make them feel a bit icky. Being rewarded doesn’t. So they continue the exploitation system.
But here’s the big deal, in America: a government that denies the right of self-defense is a revolutionists’ tyranny, illiberal and quite un-American. It has negated any plausible claim to the authority to govern.
And if you have read the Declaration of Independence, you know what that means.
twv
N.B. It is worth mentioning that the mayor of New York has shown some public sympathy for Alba, according to the New York Times story linked above:
A number of city officials have criticized the decision by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to charge Mr. Alba with murder and to ask initially that he be held on $500,000 bail. The emergence of surveillance video that showed Mr. Simon shoving Mr. Alba raised the specter that Mr. Alba was acting in self-defense.
Jeffery C. Mays, “Adams Shows Support for Man Charged in Bodega Killing That Caused Outcry,” July 8, 2022.
But a politicians expressing sympathy is just a politician begging for forgiveness, not stopping governmental misdeeds. It is cheap. He wants cheap grace. Anything else? Probably not.
A mathematics teacher keeps trying to kill himself in this somewhat satirical novel set in 2166 A.D. Why? The big reveal comes in the final chapters, where we learn that telepathic immortals are behind his suicides, because he and his kind are too close to them genetically. They fear competition. Being found out. So fearful are they that they unleash a worldwide plague to kill off much of humanity.
October 1969 edition, p. 138.
So I wonder: when our civilization develops truly successful life-extension methods, the political ramifications will necessarily become enormous. To fend off demographics-based chaos, the new immortals will seek to severely cut down the size of the global population, probably with a series of plagues . . . and rigged inoculations.
How will we know when the big advances in longevity research had’ve been achieved? When we witness a series of designer diseases with designer drugs developed in tandem.
Has the crucial advance in longevity research been achieved? Yes: it has already happened. SARS-CoV-2.
The novel lacks something, though it is very well-written, the first half reading more like a satire of academic life than an sf novel. But one reads science fiction at least partially to make one think. A thumb’s up.
Until a recent video by Rebel Wisdom, I had never heard of Samo Burja. I just do not follow international affairs well enough, I guess. But Mr. Burja’s discussion of Putin and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine struck me as not only interesting, but very much along familiar lines:
This analyst makes three predictions:
1. China develops more financial alternatives to First World financial systems and offers them to rogue states around the world. (I’ve talked about this before, on Paul Jacob’s podcast a few weeks ago. This could help collapse the dollar, by the way.)
2. Russia successfully occupies large chunks of Ukraine that it did not control before. (Seems likely. Surely Putin’s keeping the eastern sectors, but, this man says, more than just the Donbas region.)
3. Putin remains in power for the next year.
He also says Russia will become something of a vassal state to China, which is something neither we nor the Russians should want. But it is something the Chinese quasi-commies want (why don’t we just call the CCP elite caste the warlords or oligarchs? Please advise). And it is something that the embargoes will ensure. This is also a point I’ve made before.
The Romney position that Russia is America’s most dangerous enemy — the position that Obama once mocked but now Democrats push with spittle flying — is something China needs us to believe, for I suspect (and, again, have said as much to friends) that China pushed Russia to do this as part of its plan to weaken America which would allow it to conquer Taiwan. That’s not the only end game, but it’s a huge one, and Burja identifies it as Xi Jinping’s life goal. Seems likely.
Given that China has invested so much in the Democratic Party (Biden being a paid stooge and almost certainly a traitor in technical terms, and worthy of the firing squad), that all of the media has rallied propaganda to this diversion is hardly surprising at all.
Above all I do not want WWIII, which I think is likely if Biden loses control of what remains of his senses. What I think the corrupt insider Democrats yearn for is a protracted set of brushfire wars with a weakened Russia. But pushing Russia is really, really dangerous. Past Ukrainian policy by the Dems has been as insane as their desire to regime change Assad and their “successful” regime change of Qaddafi. These people seem like fools, but I don’t know precisely what they want. But if they want a One World Government with the power center in Beijing, they appear to be doing great.
Secondarily I don’t want the U.S. to become any more like China. Or Russia. This element — an unintended effect of international conflict known to classical liberals for centuries — is also something that Mr. Burja makes clear.
In recent podcasts with Paul Jacob, I tried also to make this point:
First (6:50), I suggest that the COVID over-reaction police states of New Zealand and Australia maybe disqualify them from “free nation” status, and therefore as American allies. Then (9:46) I explain my concern over how disastrous American interventions have been generally — in one country after another — and most recently in Ukraine. And when I got to the subject of biolabs in Ukraine, Paul Jacob not only agreed with me but expressed a bigger worry: that these may have been established there the better to escape American law prohibiting bioweapons research (just as the American military did with torture under Bush/Cheney). And I went on (22:39) to suggest that the current war started in 2020 with the release and psy-op packaging of SARS-CoV-2 into global society, courtesy of the Wuhan biolab, and that the point of China egging on Russia was to demoralize Americans from war to allow China an easier walk-in over the Taiwan Strait. And Democrats, because they are basically crazed enviro-nuts who think that energy is bad and are willing to make Americans poor the better to virtue-signal their commitment to “the planet,” are helping China along.
This is not the first time American foreign policy has been shanghaied to subvert our own freedom. Without any pressure from Spain, the United States succumbed to liberticidal imperialism during the McKinley administration, as William Graham Sumner made so clear in “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”
The extent to which the Democrats at large are bought off by the Chinese is probably limited. Actual, direct “Manchurian Candidate” subversion of an American political figure is probably limited to Joe Biden himself (though a subverted president is nothing to sneeze at). The rest just go along with subversion for the very reason subversion works, according to Yuri Bezmenov: you cannot subvert someone who does not want to be subverted, and Democrats have been pinko for my whole lifetime. They love big government transfer programs and all the rest, and since they themselves get involved in the government racket, they can add class-interest to their lust for subversion of the American system . . . which once upon a time was based on private property and distributed responsibility.
Which is why Democrats became such true believers in Trump’s vaccine program as well as enthusiastic pushers of lockdowns and mask mandates. They do not care about medical results, not really: they care about regimenting society, abridging the freedom of all for the sake of all (the basic idea of republican governance, but also of socialism) and, especially, of targeted victim groups. This is, after all, the basic game progressives play in psycho-politics: sacrifice by all for the benefit of a few. But the utility of the pandemic to the Chinazis and the globalists has been waning. People around the world now chafe under the lockdowns and idiotic (and obviously ineffective) mask mandates.
So: invasion to “the rescue” — the rescue of globalists’ subversion plans. The Great Reset and all.
Just how limp a noodle the COVID flail has become can be seen in how kid-gloved YouTube has been to Dr. John Campbell. In a series of videos, recently, he has explored the data that shows how destructive pandemic policy has been. And he has been allowed to continue. A half year ago he would have been de-platformed by the Deep State’s Internet service wing, Google/Alphabet.
And it is worth noting how amazing Campbell’s turn has been on the subject. Steve Kirsch, writing on Substack, explains the situation pretty well: “a former advocate of the vaccine, trusted by millions of people, has now realized he’s been deceived and he’s not happy about it at all.”
Paul Jacob wrote about Dr. Campbell’s discussion of recent Ivermectin study results, in “This Is Just Huge.” Kirsch fixes upon the doctor’s consideration of recent revelations from Pfizer about adverse effects of the mRNA treatment.
I share this not because the news seems all that new to me, but because many folks are just now realizing how wrong “the experts” were. In the wake of proof that the government has lied to us about the safety of mRNA coronavirus “vaccines,” we now get a lot of “how could people reject this information” and “how could they have suppressed information about adverse effects” sputterings.
Oh, the naivety. It is so very easy. Those on the inside had a lot of money and prestige on the line, while the masses of people are generally serviles, demanding to be saved by higher-ups. What I’ve seen over and over on this latter is incredulity that great groups of people could commit fraud and great harm, knowingly coupled with this: the belief that some must be sacrificed for the greater good — if some people must die that the majority be saved, all the better!
This sacrifice ideology, absolutely central to life in a wealth-transfer state, has been endemic for a century now. It is a sign that people have tacitly embraced what they would otherwise, in moments of clarity, describe as “fascist” or “Nazi” or “communist” principles. Because of this, along with propaganda-induced fear and tribal allegiances, the masses and the elites have pushed dangerous and deadly-to-some pseudo-vaccines while suppressing less expensive yet more efficient treatment and prophylactic regimens.
I think this is a sign of a decadent civilization.
To me, a decent, life-affirming political philosophy begins with the realization that majorities and even consensus opinion can be wrong. The low-level democratic idea insists that only a few “bad people” can commit great evils. This is obviously way off, and is the wedge notion that allows for a massacre society. Which we now live in.
And is that why we can actually encounter leftist Democrats talk about nuclear first strikes?
How low our society has sunk. But it can go lower, and, I fear, will. Under pressure to fulfill the entelechies they have already nurtured — let their adopted memes take over their lives and infect others — and as subverted by Chinese psy-ops and their own fears of imperialist Russia, American Democrats and neocons could actually destroy civilization. All it takes is a few nuclear bombs. Or a real plague. Or globalist totalitarianism.
If it is a fact that a majority of Canadians support Trudeau’s tyrannical measures, from this it does not follow that those measures are justified.
The fact that self-styled “Liberal” MPs support those measures does not make those measures “liberal” rather than “totalitarian.”
Trudeau has repeatedly characterized his opponents as “racist” (though many of his opponents are non-white) and “sexist” (though his opponents are made up of both sexes) and “anti-science” (though they can and have cited scientists and used plausible “scientific” arguments to oppose vaccine mandates and lockdowns). What we should take from this is that Trudeau is a typical tyrant who lies about his opposition and uses propagandistic assertions to trigger his followers into blind, reflexive tribal loyalty.
What wars can America’s real, permanent government win?
Political ones.
It’s been a year since the Capitol Hill brouhaha on January 6, 2021, became a super-brouhaha for the Democrats, who immediately claimed that the “storming of the Capitol” part of the event constituted an “insurrection.”
That was always a stretch. No attempt was made to overthrow the government, but the “peaceful transfer of power” from Donald Trump to Joe Biden was . . . almost . . . kinda . . . compromised.
The rioters, for their part, thought that the Democrats had stolen the election and, having been urged by Trump to pressure the Senate to not certify all the Electoral College slates — with the aim of getting accurate, non-fraudulent votes from a few key states — they thought theirs was a righteous protest. The Democrats, on the other hand, demanded that everyone pretend that everything about Death Race 2020 was on the up-and-up and that Biden be placed into office without a whiff of scandal.
The charge of vote fraud and election tampering made by the Trump forces had always been a difficult one to push, since our system doesn’t really offer a coherent way to handle such charges. Legal maneuvers made by Donald Trump’s team had failed, over and over, from Election Day to the Sixth. Though fraud charges lingered, the biggest problems with the election — the unconstitutional changes in voting in several states — never really got addressed. Trump’s January Sixth speech instigating a march on Capitol Hill to protest the “stolen election” and get the Senate to throw a monkey wrench into Biden’s accession to power was not even over when the “insurrection” began.
Then things got weird.
The behavior of the police was strange. The trespassers — not all of whom knew they were trespassing, apparently (though those who broke windows and doors surely knew) — were indeed “mostly peaceful.” No fires. No murders. Only one death, and that was by the police not of the police. After the event, Democrats made much of the “five” or more “deaths caused by Trump,” but that all turned out to be propagandistic prevarication.
Donald Trump went down in history because of this, the Democratic House impeaching him a record second time. That seemed ultra-odd — Trump was out of office before the Senate voted — not to mention petty and vindictive and . . . what was really going on here?
Glenn Greenwald gave us a clue, yesterday, on Rumble. Trump had been seriously considering pardoning Edward Snowden, maybe even Julian Assange. The Deep State’s dearest senators, like Lindsay Graham, threatened Trump with voting against him in the post-Biden accession Senate trial if he did so.
The upshot? Trump was completely outplayed by the Deep State. To avoid the sting of the Democrats’ impeachment ploy, he caved to the military industrial complex and the Wars Forever faction, leaving both Assange and Snowden in jeopardy, enemies of the Deep State.
Meanwhile, the Democrats still sling loose talk of “insurrection.” Funny, though, that in their prosecutions against the “insurrectionists” (whom they treated very badly in prison) that they haven’t lifted a finger against the one January Sixth conspirator caught with video actually promoting the capitol incursion. Democrats won’t even whisper his name: RayEpps.
The Deep State may have won this battle, but when all the truth comes out, my guess is that it will become quite clear that the “insurrection” element of the January Sixth events was a Deep State false flag app. Not unlike the FBI’s botched Whitmer kidnapping plot.
As always, Americans let partisan allegiances prevent them from identifying their true enemy: their own government.
Over a year ago I began talking up the idea that lockdowns would yield shortages and poverty. The government cannot just “write checks” and expect “the economy” to hum along nicely. Wealth depends on goods and services, not money. Force people not to work, and less will get done.
When I wrote and spoke these thoughts — before Elon Musk encapsulated the idea more pithily — a few people mocked me and I am sure many rolled their eyes. They had the illusion of free fall: everything seems fine until you hit the pavement.
Now that supply chains are coming up short in sector after sector and misery and conflict come out in the open, Democrats are doubling down and firing people en masse for not accepting the mandated leaky vaccines that cannot induce herd immunity: herd vaccination will not produce the effects promised, but progressives have the faith of true believers in their failed god.
Things will only get worse until folks like Inslee, Whitmer and Biden are removed from office. Their unconstitutional affronts can only be met with mass resistance and outright pressure, or everything goes to tyranny — and at some point there will be probably be fighting in the streets.
As I expected in 2015 when Democrats backed Antifa and BAMN in open violence.
Once a political movement embraces open initiatory street violence, there is no easy way to prevent the slide to tyrannical barbarism. Democrats gave up reason long ago, and are now openly pushing anti-democratic totalitarian measures such as concentration camps.
They must repent, but seem unlikely to do so. Proud fools, convinced of their moral purity, they have embraced evil. Every Democratic voter who does not loudly oppose current insanity is no better (and perhaps worse) than the worst they have accused others.
Books that just came into my library, or that I have just begun reading.
Two months ago or so, my little sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in its later stages. Though she had had a tough case of the COVID in 2020, the hospital required her to take one of the “vaccines.” She chose the Johnson & Johnson, and then, in early July she endured her first chemotherapy treatment. In eight days she was dead.
I have been as listless as many who have taken the pushed treatments, since. No desire to make a podcast or write anything of much importance. But the times are not waiting for me. The onslaught of medical tyranny is coming.
Last night, my dog woke me up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I went on a binge of posting to Twitter and Facebook, doing little on Gab. My previous day’s Twitter foray was described as crazy by one Twitter follower:
I take my alarmist cue in part from seeing what is happening Australia and New Zealand and taking these societies as bellwethers. The tyrannies being set up there are quite horrific. I’ve been catching occasional news about it all, but one YouTuber — a fascinating and extremely odd gentleman going under the name Theoria Apophasis — has been engaged in a string of videos on the subject of Pandemic Over-Reaction Down Under:
Though things look grim, the logic of it all is so fractured that it is hard not to laugh. Somebody satirized the logic in a fine parody:
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO’S ‘WHO’S BEEN VACCINATED?’
Bud: ‘You can’t come in here!’
Lou: ‘Why not?’
Bud: ‘Well because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But I’m not sick.’
Bud: ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Lou: ‘Well, why does that guy get to go in?’
Bud: ‘Because he’s vaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But he’s sick!’
Bud: ‘It’s alright. Everyone in here is vaccinated.’
Lou: ‘Wait a minute. Are you saying everyone in there is vaccinated?’
Bud: ‘Yes.’
Lou: ‘So then why can’t I go in there if everyone is vaccinated?’
Bud: ‘Because you’ll make them sick.’
Lou: ‘How will I make them sick if I’m NOT sick and they’re vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘Because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But they’re vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘But they can still get sick.’
Lou: ‘So what the heck does the vaccine do?’
Bud: ‘It vaccinates.’
Lou: ‘So vaccinated people can’t spread covid?’
Bud: ‘Oh no. They can spread covid just as easily as an unvaccinated person.’
Lou: ‘I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Look. I’m not sick.
Bud: ‘Ok.’ Lou: ‘And the guy you let in IS sick.’
Bud: ‘That’s right.’
Lou: ‘And everybody in there can still get sick even though they’re vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘Certainly.’
Lou: ‘So why can’t I go in again?’
Bud: ‘Because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘I’m not asking who’s vaccinated or not!’
Bud: ‘I’m just telling you how it is.’
Lou: ‘Nevermind. I’ll just put on my mask.’
Bud: ‘That’s fine.’
Lou: ‘Now I can go in?’
Bud: ‘Absolutely not?’
Lou: ‘But I have a mask!’
Bud: ‘Doesn’t matter.’
Lou: ‘I was able to come in here yesterday with a mask.’
Bud: ‘I know.’
Lou: So why can’t I come in here today with a mask? ….If you say ‘because I’m unvaccinated’ again, I’ll break your arm.’
Bud: ‘Take it easy buddy.’
Lou: ‘So the mask is no good anymore.’
Bud: ‘No, it’s still good.’
Lou: ‘But I can’t come in?’
Bud: ‘Correct.’
Lou: ‘Why not?’
Bud: ‘Because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But the mask prevents the germs from getting out.’
Bud: ‘Yes, but people can still catch your germs.’
Lou: ‘But they’re all vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘Yes, but they can still get sick.’
Lou: ‘But I’m not sick!!’
Bud: ‘You can still get them sick.’
Lou: ‘So then masks don’t work!’
Bud: ‘Masks work quite well.’
Lou: ‘So how in the heck can I get vaccinated people sick if I’m not sick and masks work?’
Bud: ‘Third base.’
And…scene…
The illogic of it all is the astounding thing. Paul Jacob captured this yesterday by showing how challengeable the official line is:
A recent Reasonarticle on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made . . .” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made.
What case is it?
Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.”
Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.
The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-to-spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.
Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.
“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S-based’ Covid-19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of . . . the rate of vaccine coverage.”
Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.
Is he right? I don’t know.
But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-approved “scientific” opinion.
Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.
The Reason article Paul quoted notes that there are no exceptions given, under de Blasio’s regime, for natural immunity. You have to take “the jab” no matter what, or no society for you. You will be kept out of all public buildings. Including “private” businesses. An astounding thing. My Facebook reaction to this policy was brief:
The irrationality here should be obvious. The consequences of the irrationality are perhaps less obvious, because Americans have never really seen their own society break into pure terror and mob-fueled totalitarianism before. They are unprepared. And most will deny the warning, calling the warning itself irrational. But Folly now calls to its own, and we can expect the madness to grow exponentially. It has been fun, so to speak. Now it gets grim. The end of the republic is at hand. Woo-hoo? (Ugh.)
Theoria Apophasis calls the process underway “bringing a people to its knees.” But it is not just the madness of crowds. There are guiding hands, as I argued, and it has been going on a long time. Take the vaccines. Vaccination has been hyped and the case for their success grossly overstated:
We are propagandized about vaccines for reasons of power: medical and political. More important than vaccination in [nearly] eradicating traditional major diseases was the automobile replacing horses (which shat everywhere) and the development of good plumbing and sewage systems.
“Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his own excreta.” Brian Aldiss, The Dark Light Years
Folks who like public Uplift could take credit for these two major developments, since government was involved in strategic ways. But why don’t they? Because there is scant more power to be gained by their promotion. The next ramp-up of power is from the medicalization of everyday life. Therapeutic tyranny is, as Thomas Szasz predicted, the next big thing.
And fabulism about vaccination efficacy is a key propaganda point to ushering in the new form of control.
New York’s vaccination passport is merely the first step. Politicians, bureaucrats, doctors and Big Pharma will take it all — take away as much freedom and dissolve as much distributed responsibility as possible — if we let them.
The rationales for masks, lockdowns, and the vaccines are all very bad. Courtesy of historian Tom Woods, I shared an important chart:
Here are the death numbers for Germany and Sweden. Sweden is at about 9% mask compliance; Germany has a medical-grade mask mandate. Yet same trajectory, same numbers. £ It’s almost like the virus does what it will, regardless of our “I feel better if I’m doing something even if it’s pointless” interventions. [Tom Woods]
My comment on this was succinct:
I’m so tired of the way most folks argue for masks. That is, like religious zealots. I argue against masks every which way — except one: I think masking when sick would be socially useful; masking when not showing symptoms, on the other hand, is socially detrimental. I’ve made the case before. It’s fairly obvious.
My view of the near future is quite bleak. But I do agree that not all hope is lost:
An intransigent minority can win. And did. In Afghanistan.
And, just so, if Americans wish to regain freedom, the would-be free must become intransigent, or they shall be ground down quickly. The grinding machinery of mob government is at the door….
And I do have a vision of how a freer society would handle contagions like the current one — and worse:
A free people would negotiate with each other openly and rationally on matters of how to handle sociality during a contagion.
They would not mandate coercive policies with ambiguous effects and then stick to their “sides” as if the issue were Eternal Security and the proper way to settle arguments were to point at specific Bible verses.
They would not revise their history books to conform to the latest policy whim, as the author of that history of the Spanish Flu did this past year. They would not blithely suppress ideas they disagree with. They would not scream at those whom they disagree with in public, and sic the cops onto children to pepper spray them for non-compliance with an ineffective mask mandate.
But we are not a free people. We are a disgraceful one.
That reference to a cop pepper-spraying a child who wasn’t complying with an idiotic mask mandate came from Australia, actually. But I feel at one with Australia. This is not just one country utterly pissing away freedom, here. It is most of a civilization. Ours. “Western,” so to speak.
So many things seemed off from the beginning of the COVID biz.
The panic itself smacked of unreason. Indeed, it turned out to be easy to induce panic in the world population — over something that was not catastrophic. Like a very bad flu, it takes out the weakest. This was known from the get-go, with the afflicted cruise ship. Mainly, it was only the old folks and those with “co-morbidities” who died. The rest weathered the storm of the contagion remarkably well.
Many got sick and got over it. I did, in February 2020.
But natural experiments like the cruise ship were quickly forgotten, and hysterical hyping of the possible dangers took hold of the popular imagination. But perhaps it was who got sick that made the difference. Remember Tom Hanks? We started freaking out when our beloved celebrities took sick!
And I immediately began to suspect a weird class element here. Had the contagion stayed to the very old and the immune-compromised, would we have freaked? I began to wonder whether it was pressure, initially, from the rich, that turned the tide: they could die too.
But they didn’t. It was mainly the old. All along.
Now, this week, one octogenarian in Australia dies and the totalitarian rulers there hammer the lockdown regime again, under a “No regrets” policy. What a framing! As if one cannot regret all the damage one does when one takes away freedoms!!!
Some day the sheep of the field may rise up against their overlords and burn them at the stake, or behead them on guillotines. I wonder: “no regrets” then?
What I take away from this is “no freedom.” The masses fear freedom.
People do not valorize freedom much at all if they let it be taken away for so insignificant of reasons. It is always the case that people die. There are many, many causes of death, including the lockdowns themselves. But I go further: Your lack of immunity to a disease does not obligate me. You have to convince me to change my ways to protect you. You have to inspire me, get me to aspire to do what you think is “the right thing.” To accomplish this in a free society you would ask nicely. You would use reason. You would debate the epidemiology and the virology and you would be very concerned about the origin of the disease, to make sure it was not some form of biological warfare to change our policies in a way an enemy, say, might want them changed. Now that we have good reason to believe that the virus was cooked up in a lab (or two), and was released (by accident? on purpose?) and the release covered up, and by an enemy of the United States no less — well, that should give people pause.
But no. Bleating sheep don’t contemplate the malign agendas of shepherds.
I ranted about the misuse of the Precautionary Principle over a year ago. My point was that it is almost always used by one type of person for one effect. In the case of this Current Contagion, Precautionary Principle abusers looked at the relevant scenarios as leading to only ONE KIND of “mitigation effort”: lockdowns, mandatory mask-wearing, and the rush to produce “vaccines” that had been under-tested. Since my rant of March 2020, I keep coming back to my focus on biological warfare. I argued we should emphasize the possibility out of precaution for how power-seeking, illiberal politicians might use panic to secure for them the privilege and power and who-knows-what-else such folks lust for. Oh, and Money. Lots of money for well-connected pharmaceutical companies.
For MASS DEATH wasn’t the most likely result of the contagion. In our servile society, MASS LIBERTICIDE was the most likely. And it came to pass. For the people have been primed by the ideologies of socialism and progressivism and even “conservatism”: some people at risk obligates everyone to give up liberty. That is the key notion of the sentimentalist socialism we all grew up with.
It is the Weaker Brethren doctrine applied to government policy and political ideology. I always thought that it was a bad argument from a Christian point of view, about Christian liberty and the eating of meat offered to idols. (Paul said to “take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak,” thus enjoining the free Christian to curb his liberty so not to offend weak folk who cannot handle liberty.) This is the basic idea at the root of much late-stage churning state nonsense today, only translated from Christian worship and custom to the duties imposed by the State.
For the weak’s sake, we must disable the strong.
Thus the whining envy of socialists and progressives about what the rich spend their money on, or what the healthy do to survive and thrive. Why, the rich should give up all that they have and send it to the poor! Why, the healthy must mask up and stop working so they do not spread their cooties to others, who might infect the weak!
It is all the same sort of thing. Of course there are risks to sociality. Diseases of all sorts can wreak havoc. But the idea that especially in times of crisis our behavior must be regulated by the State, regulating even innocent sociality as a threat? That is a confidence game, a trick. For the servility and fragility of the mass man is now well known, and our enemies know it too.
Our enemies in China.
Our enemies in our own government.
Our enemies among our neighbors who would mob against us and, in high moral dudgeon, destroy us. Just to feel . . . powerful. Even if the whole response is a sign of powerlessness of the poltroon and the puny.
Of course, courage is always something a person could develop. The weak could bear the responsibility for their weakness as do the strong. Going into a disease, we all know that we could die of it — indeed, we all know that one day we will die. Man is mortal. We can be considerate of each other in the face of our mortality, but that does not play in just one direction, just as the Precautionary Principle does not play in the direction of one policy. The weak should understand their claims on others are few. And acknowledge that the strong have their rights as well. No one has a right to life that is open-ended. Under an ill-defined right to life, any obligation can be contemplated and pushed and, since all obligations are backed by force, in the governmental realm, our rights to life could shackle us all forever. But the argument for liberty has always been strong, and, in the end, it serves the weak, too. Their liberty to stay at home is the same as the strong’s liberty to stay at home. But liberty implies the opposite choice. The liberty to seek society must always be defended. And should people want to practically amend the terms of sociality, this has to be done voluntarily, not through state mandate.
The Left has captured the Democratic Party . . . and leftist resentment at having even to answer challenges is fueling their mad lust to engage in full-on mob- and state-based attacks against all major competing ideas, personalities and platforms.
And libertarians who yammer on about how awful Trump is, and how he should, in January 2021, be impeached, place themselves on the side of these new totalitarians. Sure Trump was what he was: no savior. But he was also wasn’t what he wasn’t: an Antichrist. But what the Democrats now yearn for is an Antichrist, their own false savior in The State. And they are gearing up to stamp and contract-trace every citizen they can.
In the past, I have warned that when the insiders — or, more properly, our overlords — take away cash, replacing it with digital fiat currency, freedom would be over.
The end of “democratic liberty,” such as it is, would be at hand.
That is coming soon, under cover of COVID, to be pushed as a saving measure by the new Democrat administration.
The rationale will be the same as the lockdowns: save the pensioners!
For Social Security and private pensions both are in the process of being destroyed.
Of course you saw this coming, as secular debt accumulation.
But you looked the other way.
You won’t look away from the next step, though. You will turn on your neighbors, in fear.
The new totalitarianism is almost in place.
Your compliance is appreciated by your overlords. Your compliance is the source of their power. You, the mask-wearing public, are the enemies of freedom.
In free fall, you feel fine. On the sidewalk, you’re a blot, and feel nothing any longer.
Mocking the possibility of a terminus on the way down is what fools do. The “we owe it to ourselves” counsel regarding debt accumulation has been the classic free fall folly — and one that is quite out-of-date, for we are now can see how the higher-ups and insiders plan on handling the conversion of financial systems.
The old dollar system is going to die. It will be replaced by a digital currency as if right out of the Book of the Revelation. The death of cash, which insiders are plotting (and is why it was absolutely necessary to get Trump out of the White House), will spell the loss of the last bit of liberty in society.
In the future, only criminals will be free.
And criminal freedom is not liberty.
On the other hand, as Catherine Austin Fitts admits in a recent much-shared video, the technology for an international digital fiat currency is not ready. And the idea that the U.S. Government could manage such a transition seems laughable.
Which is why, I guess, I assume it will not be the U.S. Treasury or the Federal Reserve that takes the lead on the project.
Till then, there is Bitcoin and many private digital fiat currencies. I am sure our overlords are watching these closely. For clues on how to do it, and what not to do.
My friends have all been gung-ho on the eleutherian possibilities of Bitcoin, but I expect Bitcoin to be cracked down upon big time should the new, cashless worldwide currency replacement actually occur. Let me just say, Bitcoin users: get used to riding on trains. For expect a last train ride in a boxcar, cramped.
Wirkman Comment 