Quote of the Day

Thanks to the NHS, all taxpayers are stakeholders in the wider health of our nation. This involvement should make us less tolerant of any section of society creating a healthcare burden through any promotion of ignorance.

Jamie Blackett
June 11, 2024
Vegans are slowly killing themselves (msn.com)

This is just one of the problems with socialized health care. Your “ignorance” becomes the business of the government. And if they decide your decisions about your body are “ignorant” then they claim the moral and legal authority to override your decisions.

The worst case scenario is, of course, when they decide your continued existence it not worth the cost of keeping you alive. But there are lots of other situations where things get ugly. Forced use of insufficiently tested drugs or vaccines. Denial of use of unapproved procedures or medicine even when the patient has nothing to loose.

I realize there are problems with a completely free market, but Jefferson has it right:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty
than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson
December 23, 1791
From Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 23 December 1791 (archives.gov)

Quote of the Day

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long
oppressions of enormous public debt…If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Thomas Jefferson
June 4, 1798
Letter to John Taylor, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson p. 1050.

Witches have taken power again. I’m not certain patience, luck, and principles will prevail this time but I dread the burnings at the stake.

Quote of the Day

The best way to tell whether someone wants to end American freedom for good is to check how angry he is about the separation of powers in our government. Anyone who says out loud he wishes he could disrupt the system of checks and balances that has prevented tyrannical government overreach for nearly 250 years, is showing that what he really wants is a dictatorship. Of course, they all believe that said dictatorship would be benign to them and vicious to their political opponents, forever. Always an apparatchik, never a kulak!

There’s something in the human psyche that longs for a king to follow. Perhaps it hearkens back to our prehistory, when our little tribe had one chieftain and we just did what he said. Perhaps it’s a subconscious desire to submit, to let someone else worry about the details. It’s a system that may work out okay for small, family-based groups, but it has never produced a nation that respects human rights.

Mo Rockwel
June 6, 2024
Anti-Gun Pols Try to Delegitimize Supreme Court before ’24 Elections – Freedom’s Lodge (freedomslodge.com)

While I think this is accurate and a great point, it is not just a desire for a king. As an alternative path to essentially the same thing, many believe a majority vote is sufficient for the creation of an enforceable law as well. As if 50+% voting to enslave the minority of a population is entirely reasonable.

As pointed out in the quote above the deeper truth is probably that people want someone else to take responsibility for most of their actions. In essence, they yearn to be slaves in return for a promise of the necessities of life. How else do you explain the persistent popularity of socialism and ultimately communism?

Whether it is a tribal leader, a king, or the “central committee”, “Someone” should decide what is best for all of society and force everyone to work together for “the greater good.” The problem is that while this was almost certainly true at the tribe level it does not scale as the group size grows into the thousands, millions, and billions. Religion and then governments came to replace the tribe and mostly solve the scale problems but these create new problems. Here are some hints of how these problems manifest themselves.

I further suspect that because of the evolutionary advantage this gave tribes over individuals it now has some genetic component that can only be overridden by a conscious application of rational thought and examination of historical data. This means there is a constant yearning for the “freedom” of no responsibility and the “comfort” of slavery.

Combine the masses yearning to be told what to do, a few claiming they were born to rule and you have the conditions for tyranny and justification for genocide.

Hence, freedom is a constant struggle.

Quote of the Day

It is foolish and naive to believe that censorship will be “temporary” or “restricted.” Once a government succeeds in establishing a Ministry of Truth and dictating what can and cannot be said, it will inevitably use these powers to silence any genuine opposition. When governments arrogate to themselves the power to determine what is true and what is false, they open the door to tyranny. It is a slippery slope that leads inexorably to the suppression of dissent and the erosion of democracy. Until recently, this was a point of consensus among liberals and conservatives alike. It appears that is no longer the case.

Paulo Figueiredo
May 24, 2024
Lula’s Brazil: A Cautionary Tale For Free Speech In The West

Emphasis in the original.

Canada, England, and don’t forget: Joe Biden’s Disinformation Board Likened to Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ – Newsweek. See also: Quote of the day—Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke | The View From North Central Idaho.

And that doesn’t even count all the private “censorship” by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.. We are in some dark times.

Prepare appropriately.

Quote of the Day

Let me explain how Marxism works as a religion with regard to its theory of sin/evil.

Ludicrous Marxist beliefs about criminality and whatnot are all really easy to understand when you realize Marxism is a religion built out of the same Christian motifs reoriented and turned inside-out.

In Marxist faith, the Fall of Man isn’t the result of disobedience to God but instead individualism realized through private property. That is, it’s the result of disobedience to Man as a collectivist “species-being,” in Marx’s terminology: a being that lives for the whole species instead of just himself. (Marx had an entitlement complex he turned into an evil religion.)

So, private property, capitalism with it, and individualism are Marxism’s Original Sin, so they create man’s sinful (depraved) nature, and so all bad things (like crime, etc.) are downstream from that. Repentance of the sin of individualism, through the abolition by spiritual transcendence of private property, which requires the destruction of capitalism on the macro scale, is therefore the Marxist theory of salvation (soteriology).

If you overcome the ravages of capitalism by abolishing private property rights and transcending the idea of private property in your own spiritual development, and thus eliminating the basis for individualism, you also undo the sinful nature of man, which would end all evil, all crime, and so on.

This is why you see them forward asinine programs like Restorative Justice and offering to pay criminals to stop crime and claims that all crime is the result of systemic racism and everything that follows from all of that. They believe that they’re socially ameliorating the source of human depravity, thus their will to sin (against Man).

Of course, they’re completely wrong. You don’t have to accept the Christian view of sin to see this, but you certainly could. This is another reason Marxism can never work. It’s completely wrong about human nature at a completely fundamental level, not just on a practical level in terms of motivations to be productive.

The soteriology (theory of salvation) of Marxism still ultimately depends on repentance, then. You have to repent of individualism, partly by renouncing (transcending) private property. It’s only salvific if everyone else does it too, though. Universal salvation or none.

James Lindsay, full varsity @ConceptualJames
Posted on X May 1, 2024 (and here)

Hmmm… That seems to fit the facts as I know them.

Comments?

Quote of the Day

America has been cleaved into two separate and antithetical ideologies — two opposing worldviews — with the communists and radical takers of the country supporting a dark vision of tyranny and the conservatives and independent producers supporting the light of truth and a vision of freedom and liberty. They are both hanging in the balance and waiting for gravity or some monumental event to throw the lever that moves them to act and take the country by storm, with the Democrats willing to use every illegal means imaginable.

Justin Smith
April 6, 2024
America Is Hurtling Toward a Full Blown Hot Civil War – The Burning Platform

I’m not convinced “the conservatives” support “the light of truth and a vision of freedom and liberty” but I do regard them as the lesser of the two evils.

Prepare appropriately.

Quote of the Day

I’ll never forget the @FBI calling me into their office in Seattle in 2020.

They were looking for footage of a suspect I had taken during one of the many riots.

That’s when I asked them about Antifa.

The FBI agent told me Antifa was NOT a cause of concern, nor were they a terror group.

That’s when I lost all respect for the agency and refused to take any further calls.

I watched Antifa assault police, press, and innocent bystanders, as well as burn Seattle and Portland to the ground for nine months.

All without repercussions.

Imagine if a conservative did this?

Katie Daviscourt @KatieDaviscourt
Posted on X February 18, 2024

I’m reminded of stories in Gulag Archipelago. The police ignored and even encouraged criminal activity against the opponents of communism. History may not repeat but it does rhyme.

Prepare appropriately.