If it sounds like I’m on a bit of a rant, I am.
Freedom is dangerous. If you don’t believe me, ask the mandarins at Facebook or Twitter. Your unregulated actions may cause harm to yourself and others. A generally unenlightened public is voting for politicians who promise ever-increasing protections against harm, to regulate guns, food, and speech. The rules on what one may and may not say change regularly as norms of political correctness ebb and flow. Naturally those norms also change from tribe to tribe as the progressive left works to isolate people in their own balkanized culture. Thus what a black/negro/African person may say about black people to others has different limits than what a Hispanic or Asian person may say about the same black people, to others. Social appropriation holds that a white person shouldn’t drive-through a Taco Bell and order food because they are somehow demeaning Mexicans by their actions. Non-Italians who choose to eat pizzas are not condemned in the same way nor are Asians who stop somewhere for a hamburger. The social finger of condemnation is very fickle and unpredictable.
Freedom is dangerous. If you don’t believe me, ask the mandarins at Facebook or Twitter. Your unregulated actions may cause harm to yourself and others. A generally unenlightened public is voting for politicians who promise ever-increasing protections against harm, to regulate guns, food, and speech. The rules on what one may and may not say change regularly as norms of political correctness ebb and flow. Naturally those norms also change from tribe to tribe as the progressive left works to isolate people in their own balkanized culture. Thus what a black/negro/African person may say about black people to others has different limits than what a Hispanic or Asian person may say about the same black people, to others. Social appropriation holds that a white person shouldn’t drive-through a Taco Bell and order food because they are somehow demeaning Mexicans by their actions. Non-Italians who choose to eat pizzas are not condemned in the same way nor are Asians who stop somewhere for a hamburger. The social finger of condemnation is very fickle and unpredictable.
The US long ago chose freedom over safety; as Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
He should have been more specific — small liberties have been given up one by one, so that now most citizens could be prosecuted for some violation. The lack of enforcement of laws and regulations on the wealthiest and high-level machine politicians leads to cynicism and acceptance of lawlessness at the highest levels of government, while at the same time everyday life is more and more micromanaged by busybodies who want to control how others live.
Guillotine
The French Revolution had its governing Committee of Public Safety. Notice the language — no longer focused on protecting the citizens from hostile external powers, but policing safety — that is, finding enemies both internal and external. These ideologues came to a bad end as the revolutionaries were, one by one, found to be “problematic” and executed in service of the higher goal of perfecting and protecting the new State. The modern and humane guillotine made quick work of disposing of anyone who got in the way of Progress.
The Mob, the sans-culottes who could reliably rounded up on the streets of Paris to put muscle behind the Reign of Terror, were the power base of the factional leaders in the struggle to control the day-zero government which would overthrow all vested interests and rethink all customs. Today’s equivalent is the Twitter mob, ready to condemn, disemploy and socially disembowel anyone accused of harming a member of an oppressed class. But it is far easier in social media than it used to be in the physical world to destroy reputations and end careers. And the gusto with which the Twitter mob sentences its targets to punishments is related to the selective empathy employed — instead of recognizing each human being as an individual with goals and emotions that can be understood, targets are dehumanized and abstracted.
The killing fields of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge government are arguably the most horrific example of a real-world pogrom in recent history. The daughter of Cambodian genocide survivor, discussing the deaths of any who disagreed with the communists, was recently censored by Facebook.
Great rant LL and oh so true.
"1984". Control of free thought. The so called progs have infiltrated our schools and institutions to almost the point of saturation, just as their leftist commie brethren predicted.
"We will bury you. We will bury you from within" as Khrushchev said to the United Nations all those years ago and unfortunately we as a people are allowing it to happen once again just as so many other cultures have in the past.
The unenlightened allow the propaganda ministry to force feed them pablum while holding their hands out for more, as you mentioned above, while giving up more and more of their liberties and rights.
It's rather amazing when one can argue how Dr. Franklin in effect predicted with his statement above as well as his warning of "it is a Republic if we can keep it" exactly what is transpiring at tihs time
That's the plan. The more "unenlightened"/ lo/fo voters the prog/libs get, the more dem voters we'll see in election after election. I'm thankful that we did as well as we did in Florida this November. Looking forward, something has to change or they will tip us into dem-ville before 2020.
small liberties have been given up one by one, so that now most citizens could be prosecuted for some violation. With no end in sight.
cf "Three Felonies a Day" by Harvey Silvergate, which is now an old book. If some prosecutor decides to get you, they can find something on anyone anywhere.
One of the things about our modern, broken republic that scares me the most is the felonization of just about everything. More get added to the 3/day all the time, until you get things like the case of Alaskan inventor Krister Evertson. Federal agents forced his car off the road, forced him to the ground pointing hair trigger ARs at his head back '14. For what? Putting the wrong shipping label – with the correct instructions, mind you, but still the wrong label – on a box of raw sodium that he sold on eBay. Don't you think maybe something less violent could have worked for putting the wrong label on a box? Maybe a form letter?
A form letter or maybe just a kind word?
Florida stands at a crossroads. Free or Slave?
The Founding Fathers were visionary geniuses. And there was some doubt that we would F it up.
No one is holding a gun to anyone's head to make them use Twitter. I'm one of, I suspect, many who doesn't "get" Twitter and avoid the platform.
That being said, the demonization of conservatives will continue unabated until finally someone says, "Enough." Will it happen? I doubt it. People have been so dumbed down that independent thought is no longer possible. People have become sheep who think just because an idea is popular in their crowd, it must be right.
Proof of my contention? Just look at Black Friday.
Gresham's Law , political / personal version. bad drives out good. Then the agencies get filled with poor quality people. Sift them a few times for the real outliers and one can find some nasty types.
Good rant. Speaking of sans culottes, Paris is kicking off.
Will the globalist God Emperor Macron survive?
When asked by someone if we had a monarchy or republic, Franklin replied,"A republic if we can keep it." I hope we can but it appears it may be a struggle to do so.
I'm not a very good lemming. I didn't go out shopping on Black Friday or on Super Saturday (today). My general sense is "who cares" but, one of my sons-in-law bought me a shopvac today as a garage warming present and spent 40% of MSRP. Thus I could be considered guilty by extension.
It's a good law – defining some rotten results. Same with the Peter Principle. People rise to their level of incompetence and then stay there – or they get "kicked upstairs".
I think that Macron's time as God Emperor will come to a close and he will leave office with his wife/mother (wife looks like mom) in tow. People won't recall him with any degree of love, veneration or respect. He's just another globalist who doesn't care much for France or for the French people. Sort of a white Obama. Obama was 1/2 and I don't think that Macron is 1/2 black so I don't want to confuse anyone. My point is made.
Every generation faces the problem anew. We do what we can but our generation will pass and we can only hope that we've endowed our posterity with the wisdom, foresight and courage necessary to keep it going. Which, looking around, is not encouraging.
Soap, ballot, jury and ammo. I hope the first three will be sufficient, but I am stocking up on the forth. I'm getting too old for this.
Not just Florida. Look at Arizona. The whole nation will tip if they get enough lo/fo voters.
They have NO physical skin in the game, they hide behind the anonymity of the computer. If they had to actually confront the people they are threatening, I believe their responses might be 'significantly' different!
Good post and good comments.
The truths that get "censored for safety" on fb are annoying and scary.
I've seen dissent go from mimeographed polemics to the internet. Means change, but not motives. The question remains, whose "side" does it better?
Arizona had two RINO senators: McCain and Flake. Who can call either of them Republicans or conservative. Now they have a closet communist Democrat and an election to fill the McCain chair coming up.
We're all getting too old for this.
Maybe we'll fix that in the future.
>We're all getting too old for this.
Tennyson said:
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
[…]
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
>If they had to actually confront the people they are threatening
Most of us have two things holding us back: 1) we are basically law-abiding people, 2) we have ties of love and obligation to the important people in our lives, who would suffer were we to slip our leashes. I wonder and worry what will happen when a man with the right skills and mindset loses everyone in this world that he holds dear. Then the question becomes whether to strike against the specific cause of his loss (which would probably be some lowish-IQ, low-impulse control persons, whose deaths realistically would have little practical impact on the world — as there are plenty more just like them), or those whose plans and policies created and enabled those specific criminals. On bad days I see what is happening now as no less than a war for our very culture and being as a people. What then stops a man from deciding:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods
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