Reply With QuoteOpinion piece on Sweden's response to the corona virus.
realclearpolitics.com
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Is that information on the list?Originally Posted by anticausal
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From Kevin Williamson: Canada Trucker Protest: Trudeau Controls Banks | National Review
Justin Trudeau may be the best thing to happen to crypto since Satoshi Nakamoto.
With a considerable share of U.S.–Canada trade on pause and much of daily life disrupted across Canada’s cities, Prime Minister Trudeau has invoked, for the first time in his country’s history, Emergency Measures Act powers to shut down a domestic political protest, the so-called Freedom Convoy movement that began with complaints about the imposition of vaccine mandates on Canadian truckers reentering Canadian territory from the United States, and that has since become associated with, as these things now do, a long litany of complaints concerning everything from ordinary political business to QAnon nonsense and other exotic imports from south of the border.
In this so-called emergency, Trudeau is not sending in the troops. He is cutting off the money.
Trudeau, sounding a little like the old southern segregationists who complained about “outside agitators,” insists that the protests have been driven by “social media and illicit funding” rather than by genuine disapproval of his government’s policies. And so he is using the Emergency Measures Act to invest himself with the unilateral power to freeze bank accounts and cancel insurance policies, without so much as a court order and with essentially no recourse for those he targets. Canadian banks and financial-services companies will be ordered to disable clients suspected of being involved in the protests.
Trudeau says the protests are illegal. That is not quite right. The protests are not illegal per se, though some of the protesters certainly are breaking the law, for instance by blocking public roads and the like. The obvious parallel is the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Canada, which also included some law-breaking. Trudeau did not invoke Emergency Measures Act powers to suppress those protests, even though they brought together large crowds during a particularly dangerous phase of the Covid-19 epidemic contrary to the advice of Trudeau’s government — and the advice out of his own mouth, for that matter. Far from shutting down those protests, Trudeau actually participated in them, making a pious spectacle out of himself.
In leaning on the sensitive pressure point of financial services, Trudeau is following the example of Democrats in the United States, who have used strategies ranging from securities investigations to insurance regulation to punish political enemies ranging from the National Rifle Association to oil companies. Using financial regulation to crush freedom of speech isn’t financial regulation — it is crushing freedom of speech by abusing the powers of a government office.
This kind of thing is not exactly new — in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt used emergency powers to seize all gold in private hands in the United States in order to fortify the Federal Reserve — but technological changes have made such schemes more insidious. Paper money can be stuffed into mattresses, and coins can be buried in coffee cans. But when money is electronic and the information architecture enabling most financial transactions is heavily regulated and easily subjected to invasive surveillance, then financial regulators enjoy powers that no FDR — or Napoleon, or Lenin — ever dreamt of possessing. The opportunities for mischief are serious and worrisome — and so are the opportunities for tyranny.
Activists who have tried to use politicized financial regulation to undermine the Second Amendment, to take one example, never seem to think about how the same tactics could be used against the First Amendment: The New York Times may enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights, but without access to banking and commerce, that constitutional right cannot be effectively acted upon, and, hence, may as well not exist as a practical matter. Try running a newspaper or a political party with no bank account.
I myself do not particularly sympathize with the aims or the tactics of the protesters in Canada. I don’t care much for unruly mobs of any persuasion. But even so, it is impossible not to see the plain fact that these protesters are being targeted not for their practical effect or their tactics but for their beliefs and for the sort of people they are, that an obvious double standard is at play, and that this is deeply illiberal. A politically neutral police effort to open the roads and protect the rights of property and travel would be one thing, but this is the opposite: far from politically neutral, and intended to narrow social life and political discourse rather than to keep them open. When the laws are enforced exclusively (or with extra vigor) against political enemies, that is not law enforcement — that is political repression.
And it is political repression even in instances in which the content of the law itself is unobjectionable — for example, there is a difference between reviewing the paperwork of tax-exempt groups and reviewing the paperwork of tax-exempt groups that you consider political enemies and hope to harm. Permitting protests you endorse and shutting down those that are critical of your government — and that is precisely what Trudeau is trying to do — is illegitimate.
In our time, we don’t burn forbidden books — Amazon just makes politically nonconformist works disappear. We don’t lock people up for having the wrong political beliefs — but we do make sure they cannot earn a living, go to school, or raise their children in peace. And we don’t have to send men with jackboots and billy clubs to break up protests — we have very polite Canadian bankers to do that for us.
It can be no surprise, then, that people are looking for digital platforms that protect their anonymity and keep their communications slightly beyond the reach of the long arm of the state. People who do not expect to be treated fairly and who have no confidence that their rights (or even their interests) will be taken into consideration are forced to improvise. And it’s even less surprising that cryptocurrencies and other escape routes from the banking system increasingly appeal to people who are neither cartel bosses nor international men of mystery. In a world in which unpopular political views can cut an individual or an organization off from the financial main stream, such innovations are necessities.
When people cannot trust their governments to protect their liberties, they will seek protection elsewhere. That imposes real costs on a society. Canadians should think twice about whether they wish to pay those costs for the sake of Mr. Trudeau’s prejudice and ease.
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Opinion piece on Sweden's response to the corona virus.
realclearpolitics.com
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I've said this before; get your fiat out of the banks and invest it in hard assets. The shit show is already here. Orwell would be impressed.
Impending financial system collapse not withstanding, now your access to fiat will be monitored and controlled by tyrants who would like to silence dissenting views.
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No idea, but at least it can be checked.
A connection to their people as a people and not as human cogs that can be replaced by any other human cog on the planet. In other words, the very healthy attitude most people in the West would now call "racism" and "xenophobia". National communism, even in its most brutal forms, was objectively less destructive than global capitalism. At least Russia is still Russia, Poland is still Poland, etc.
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So, what to do with your fiat? How does your roof look, or your car tires? How old is your furnace, hot water heater, appliances? You can buy all that stuff now and keep it on hand until you're ready to use it, and probably for far less cost with the rising inflation at a roaring pace.
Do you have property to farm and raise livestock, or the equipment necessary to do so? Might be a worthwhile investment.
How bout an old timey hand pump to crank water out of the ground, or a 500 gallon ethanol free gas tank and pump on your property? A second propane tank, filled up of course?
I happen to like PMs also, gold, silver, brass, and lead. Stock up, it doesn't go bad.
The list goes on.
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Prussian socialism, you say? It does seem at the very least that the intensely socially conservative nature of Stalin's communism protected these post-USSR societies against overtly subversive elements and ideas, unlike our capitalistic liberal democracies. He hunted these people down and murdered them. There was no debate. No 'market place of ideas'. No free speech. The boot wasn't taken off their neck, even for a second.
The dual-citizenship question is one probably one area we can't get into here, but there's a reason our societies were inured to this sort of thing and the East didn't suffer the same fate. In the last 30 years, globalism has taken over and run with it, but the seeds of the West's destruction were definitely planted before then. If these societies really are significantly behind the West in their level of social disintegration, then it may be that they will serve as Byzantium-like, eugenic, hopeful pockets of the West in future as our civilisation slowly collapses. It's obvious that socially conservative, Christian societies are producing babies are higher rates than us individualists in the secular, materialistic, socially liberal, "free", West. They aren't being replaced by people who think and behave differently to themselves, and politics is downstream from culture, as you see in places like NY, Cali and London.
This really highlights what a mess we're in. You know democracy is a bare faced lie when intelligent people choose a candidate based not on policy pledges or even charisma or even who has the nicer set of tits, but instead based on the likelihood of getting a rigged election result. If mass formation psychosis is indeed a real thing, its best seen in the people who still believe they actually have agency, and political choice, and that their society is a "democracy".
To Americans, if your guns and the tacit, ever-present truth that you *will* and *can* use them to prevent overt, hard tyranny by your government keeps you safe, then that is great, and I'm jealous of them... but in the face of the real power of soft tyranny (they call it "democracy") your guns are about as effective as my UK legal, non-locking 3" pocket knife which I am "allowed" by my overlords to carry on my person in public.
Covid-19 does mark a turning point where Western governments are now comfortable enough in using overtly totalitarian rule, and as we've just seen in Canada, the mass of people will still just generally go along with things. Why? Because people have been trained to essentially lack belief in anything.
Places like Texas are unique because there's still a core belief in freedom, and freedom as an idea exists at a visceral, being level in the people there. In the same way you'd react to a man smacking your girlfriend's ass. You don't need to enter into a rational, philosophical exploration of ideas before you make a fist and punch the guy in the mouth, and freedom is held in the mind in the same way for these people.
It is genetic. Think about America in 1800 as a place with its open borders and no government welfare or any safety-net whatsoever for those to left their homelands by sea and relocated there and knowingly risked their lives. Think about the kinds of people, and their genetic traits, who voluntarily decided to go, with nothing or very little - and out of these people think about those who survived and thrived and passed on their inheritable traits.
People elsewhere, however, don't all think this way. Partly because demographics is destiny, and lots of new Americans who were attracted by the revised American dream 2.0 (vote left & lemme cop dat mo' free shiiiet) are simply from a different stock of people to heritage Americans. It's also partly because there has been a conscious effort to change your worldview.
It's not just about subversive woke shit and leftist politics pushed in state schools and the media. It has been a long-term effort to get people to believe in nothing beyond materialism, and it hasn't happened by accident. They simply don't share the same feelings about "freedom" as a heritage Texan, and this is why the media's propaganda efforts to equate those protesting totalitarianism and speaking of "freedom" with "enemies of democracy"... "white supremacists"... "insurrectionists"... has worked! The Republican conservative right themselves believe in nothing, and so can't be relied on to offer any resistance to this kind of slander.
A large portion of people are spiritually and ideologically empty. There is nothing going on. The "nation state" has been dissolved and replaced with an economic zone in which anyone can participate if they profess to adhere to the vague values of diversity, tolerance and multiculturalism and some anti-white mumbo jumbo. The eugenic aspects associated with adherence to religion/traditional values, which resulted from evolutionary pressure, has been intentionally destroyed. Freedom still exists. As long as the highest for you is GDP, then you can exercise freedom in narrow bands. You are free to choose any degenerate perversion and bodily gratification without judgement. You're free to reassign the gender of your children, and they have the freedom to be free from judgement when they choose to twerk and gyrate for adults/paedophiles on social media. You're free to bully white people based on their race. You have all the freedom in the world when it comes to consumer choice. You have the freedom to be "anti-work", self-consciously bone-idle, poor as shit and eat yourself to death only to be kept alive by the state. Banks and corporations have the freedom to do stock buy-backs and steal from the working man. Political freedom exists in that you're allowed to vote for either the left and right wings of the same neo-liberal, globalist elite. This conception of freedom has replaced freedrom proper in the minds of the mass, and people no longer notice it, let alone question it.
This is why I have to agree with some of George's points about the tactical efficacy vs. the cost of such populist activism at the present time, but I cannot disavow the protestors like he did. There are plenty of people who feel there's something deeply wrong with society, but the mass simply won't be politically energised by viewing these images of distant micro-rebellions which get filtered through the Big Tech machine and presented to them through electronic screens, even if they sympathize with truckers' cause to varying degrees.
People who are that far gone are a completely different political species to those who still inhabit places like Texas, and actually believe in things, which essentially makes Texas a different country to the USA at this point.
All I know is history shows that pain and a sobering drop in standards of living and a taste of life below of the poverty line is the only thing that will wake Average Joe and Jane. How can they be expected to leave the comforts of The Shire and, en masse, go on a quest to defeat Sauron and restore peace? Nobody even knows an alternative to Sauron's rule is even possible, or that it exists in the first place, and it's much more comforting to believe the consensus that those who leave the boundary of The Shire, for whatever reason, are "troublemakers", or white supremacists, or insurrectionists.
We should remember the lessons of the anti-communist uprising of Hungary, 1956: Breaking the mass hypnosis -The Uprising of 56 - YouTube
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Crony capitalism is the result of government trying to manipulate the free market. Other systems where government gets to do that completely unchecked are not the answer. I don't know if I'd categorize Russia as putting their people first either. Putin plays nice with daddy Klaus, and I've seen plenty of rumblings about mask and vax mandates from there as well.
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Sure, your romantic version of Texas illustrates some interesting contrast. Your ideology is compelling. It’s just not accurate. Objectively across every demographic (and all things measurable) Texas looks like the USA. More so than less.
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