Correct. The sad thing is that people in the most catholic of all European countries are going for this, to protect against a virus the vaccine will not protect you from, by and large, especially if over 65. This is what giving up on religion looks like. The land of the Vatican can't even make a small correlation between what is happening in their daily lives and the Book of Revelations, "no one will be able to work or trade without the mark." This has never been done before, and yet it is being done not in China, but in the Western democracies.
As i have said before on the substack I rarely write on (busy man!) -- the Western governing elites love the Chinese Communist Party model of anti-chaos and control. They believe the only problem with the CCP style of governance is that it doesn't allow for Pride Month. The West, meanwhile, is just wokefying it for you, with institutional support (and wide spread!) for issues related to racial justice, social justice, gender justice, trans and non-binary justice (cuz gays and lesbians are irrelevant now), climate justice. T his is how they sell it to you and trust me, the white educated masses are indeed buying it. The closer you are to a city, in fact, the more you double down on it.
So the problem with all of this is not that china let a virus escape, on purpose or not, with the help of a GMO Sars projected funded by the US and conducted by a Western biotech firm...the problem is that the leaders of the west -- their funders and their wandering minstrels in government, in the philanthropic NGOs, in the media and popular culture -- support all of this. They are not turning their sites on their domestic enemy -- the unvaccinated today, but tomorrow it will be anyone who questions policy fighting pandemics, fighting climate change, fighting the alien invasion from outerspace. They will be the terrorists. They will be the ones to hate. And at least half of the white, middle and upper classes, will absolutely positively fall for it.
China isn't the problem. The people I just mentioned are.
NONE of this is even an imitation of the China response to Covid. This is all on the democratic West.
What will they do when they have 100% vaccination rates and Sars still exists...? Start from zero with the boosters.
You hit a nail on the head there. Katie Herzog and Andrew Sullivan have been talking about this at length. Buck Angel as well. Katie in particular has discussed how many young lesbians have transitioned largely due to peer pressure and this new mentality that tomboy/butch lesbian=transman, no other choice. And I know this is widespread due to some comments made by a friend who is a butch lesbian under 30. And she mentioned this about 7 years ago.
Think about why that is? How can I get healthy people to pay me rent for their bodies? Well, I can mandate vaccines that need upgrades...that's a way. None of this one and done shit like polio and the one booster only MMRs at youth. We're talking forever, annualized at least. Seems like a decent income stream even if I'm just making $5 per person. 100 million in US get it, that's $500 million annually guaranteed. Not bad. Ill m
make that investment.
Or...another medical portfolio item: I can convince girls that they're boys and boys that they're girls. They will require drugs forever to "live their true identity"...that's another way. This is why it is supported institutionally. It's a grift. It requires the healthy to be fully plugged into medication -- forever -- or "lose" who they "really are". Lesbians don't need that. Gay men don't need that. But transmen and transwomen do. The only gaymen that's worth it to the medical industry are those on HIV drugs, which I assume is a minority. The only trans that's worth it to drug makers is....all of them.
Doesn’t the “a group of Polish insurrectionist attack a German radio station” have an eerie echo of the Jan 6th reporting, and subsequent details of the “infamous” unarmed raid on our capital?
As long as a significant portion of the public continues to treat them as rulers, they have the support they need to behave as rulers. And as long as dense urban populations remain easily influenced by media, that support will remain.
re: Italy - I have begun noticing this a few times in the United States, too. Employers aren't firing unvexxed workers, they are placing them on "unpaid leave".
It's a workaround to prevent themselves from bad publicity or from getting sued for unlawful termination. After all, the employee was never actually "terminated" so what's the problem? And look, he found a new job, to technically he quit!
I think American courts - no idea about Italy - would toss that out pretty quickly since the net effect is practically the same as being fired. It is well established labor law that you can't go too far mistreating employees to get around paying unemployment benefits.
if you suffer adverse reactions or death, then it's too late to make the company liable. The better way is this: to tell your employer, since vaccinated people can still get covid and spread it (show data from Israel, Vermont, Seychelles, etc. all the most vaccinated countries experiencing high levels of hospitalization from fully vaxxed people), then they, like us unvaccinated, should take the pcr test twice weekly to keep me safe. This is the mandate in Italy, you can be vaxxed or take the pcr 2x week. My husband will be suspended from work without pay starting Oct. 15. Courts here in Italy are corrupted, they do what the government says to do. Unions are in lock step with the government too.
Spot on as usual. The incentives are all screwed up because the people writing the rules are the same ones covering up that they were responsible for the virus.
Well...can’t agree with putting so much of the blame on leftists for today’s insanities.
That may seem reasonable in the USA, but if you look around the ‘democracies’ of the world, you’ll find that the right & center-right are in power in a great many countries with steamroller authoritarians in charge. And with (now or in the recent past) some of the worst restrictions on freedom anywhere.
Australia, Austria, France, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia – they’re all in there waving their Covid sticks.
Of course, plenty of left-leaning countries also get black marks. (Traditionally socialist Sweden, however, seems to value individual freedoms more than most other countries. At least for now.)
So I don’t think it’s a question of ideology anymore.
It’s really about this: way too few good, intelligent and honest people among politicians, governments and institutions in today’s world. In ANY political party, or of ANY political bent.
Why is this so?
My guess is simply that an overwhelming majority of folks give ‘lip service’ to values like freedom, equality, justice. But deep down, they’re apolitical. What truly counts for them is their own material well-being. They don’t care much who rules them.
In other words, a majority of people are ready to put aside their ‘values’ in exchange for a life on the fortunate side. They’ll enthusiastically back any party or politician who promises, and seems able, to deliver, maintain, or claw back that fortunate life.
Can’t fight it. This is the way of human nature. The way of the world.
Eighty years after WW2, it took 18 months of Covid to teach us this lesson.
Not really so far left, especially in Western Europe.
Sure most Western European countries put post-WW2 social policies in place concerning health care, education, pensions, etc. But they are all also bedrock capitalist countries, including the Nordic countries, which are home to many huge and powerful multinationals.
These countries are almost all very nice places to live. This is why they they usually take top places on those 'world happiness indexes' done by Gallup.
They're free countries. You can start a business. Try to become a billionaire if that's your ambition.
But you're also free from things like worry about medical bills for yourself and famly. Or from worrying about the cost of college tuition for your kids. Even in ultra free market capitalistic Switzerland, this is so. Tuition at a top class Swiss university costs less than $2000 a year.
The electorates in these countries have become quite volatile. But they don't follow ideologies anymore. They vote and act according to their fears and apprehensions of the moment. Fear of economic pain, of being overrun with migrants, of being exterminated by covid, etc.
Politicians and governments know this so well. So if you look closely, no matter what their political leanings are, they frequently change their tune to fit in with their ambitions and to mirror feelings in the public at large.
The enemy cannot be summed up as a leftist or a centrist or a right winger.
The enemy is people who are bad, and who are ready to do bad things. They come in all sizes, shapes, colors, religions, and ideologies.
"But you're also free from things like worry about medical bills for yourself and famly. Or from worrying about the cost of college tuition for your kids. Even in ultra free market capitalistic Switzerland, this is so. Tuition at a top class Swiss university costs less than $2000 a year."
you're mistaking the cage for freedom.
clearly, the larger issue is not left vs right but authoritarian vs libertarian, but the left has been the lead on the authoritarian charge for 30 years or more, just like they were in the 60's and 70's and just like they were in the 30's.
the populace becoming entranced by and dependent upon the baubles they offer where liberty used to be is precisely they goal of those on the top of the pile over there and precisely how they stay there by suppressing social mobility.
Every State's ultimate goal is the optimal subjugation of its host population to enable it to maximize the resources it is able to extract from the capite censi for its own benefit.
When seen correctly, every action the State takes is directed to this end. All forms of redistribution (the cage) are simply the State adapting to the lowest level of perceived value the particular population it afflicts will tolerate to continue to be coerced and robbed.
This truth has been known since antiquity, but only by the few, which is why after ten millennia of being abused and robbed by rulers, we are still surrounded by legions of useful idiots who cheer for their own oppression.
Someday, perhaps, this will change, but probably not today.
"Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else.
The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’ The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”
~ Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1548
A young UK based writer (philosophy PhD, working as a delivery driver to fund his writing) has written a very good article on how the unions drove (and continue to attempt to drive) the corona debacle in the UK. The theory is slowly getting mainstream media attention.
Gato, with all respect, I am certainly not mistaking cages for freedom.
In Western Europe, you’re free to benefit from social policies, and you’re free not to use them. You’re not obliged to send your children to public schools. You can send them anywhere you want, INSEAD, Oxford, MIT, Northwestern, La Sorbonne, wherever. Or, for younger ones, to my old private east coast high school (current annual tuition $35,000).
You don’t have to use the health services that are at your disposal. You can travel the world for the service you want. Just as Americans sometimes fly to Europe for specialized treatments.
These social institutions aren’t baubles or bribes, anymore than Medicare is one. They are understood social services.
Similarly, Western Europe has remarkable social mobility. Quality of life and standards of living in the original core EU countries have been exceptionally high for decades. And any EU citizen is free to move to any of the 25+ EU countries, find a better job, start a business, etc. And millions do move, every year. They can even set up in Switzerland and Norway, which are not a member countries.
On the other hand, I agree one could make a strong baubles + suppression argument for places like the Emirates or Saudi Arabia, which are absolute totalitarian monarchies (ironically, staunchly supported by the USA). Or many of the dozens of countries around the world that are perennially under military dictatorship.
I do think there’s something to what you say. Essentially, I think it comes down to whether you believe the individual is sovereign over his property (including his body). But there may also be an issue with definition of terms here.
For many of us, “left” means “state intervention in personal and economic matters, including forced collective provision of services” and “right” means extreme minarchism, if not market anarchism.
The “capitalist” countries you describe still have massive economic interventionism, including pro-business subsidies and tax breaks that create market distortions. I would not consider these economies essentially capitalist. They are corporatist at best.
Furthermore, these countries almost all limit firearm ownership even more than the United States does. I consider this a key indicator of freedom.
Thanks for the comment. Still, we mustn't kid each other. Just like European countries, the USA is 'capitalistic' with enormous state support for 'strategic industries', all kinds of handouts to corporations, tax breaks, bank bailouts, pharma contracts, etc. All Western countries play on the same economic instruments. No choice, if they want to stay in the global game.
Re gun ownership, the laws in various European countries are quite diverse, but most prohibit army type automatic weapons. Switzerland is something of an exception. If you're a male, you have to spend time in the army when you reach adulthood. You're issued a military assault rifle and you can take it to keep at home. You can even keep it after your spell of service if you want to.
Of course across Europe there are factions and mini-political parties clamoring for more liberal gun laws, but, truth be told, there's not much public interest.
"Well...can’t agree with putting so much of the blame on leftists for today’s insanities."
Please.
What we are currently enduring is the culmination of a century of leftism that has methodically and relentlessly empowered and enriched the State at the direct expense of the population at large.
In the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, the government was small and inexpensive, which had resulted in the highest period of economic growth in history.
Then the progressives took power. Starting with Woodrow "He Kept Us Out Of War" Wilson, who saddled us with both the income tax and the Federal Reserve, which have become the greatest engines of mass theft the world has ever seen, and which were the fundamental empowering factors for the growth of the leviathan that now afflicts us.
Then came the Mussolini-loving FDR* who instituted the administrative State, which has now largely replaced representative government with bureaucratic diktat.
So, in just over a century, the progressives have inflicted upon us the largest, most powerful, and most expensive State in the history of mankind, and in the process largely inverting the previous individual rights > collective interests paradigm the country was founded upon.
To paraphrase Tricky Dick Nixon, the progressive that gave us the EPA, finished off the gold standard, and broke bread with Mao, the greatest of all leftist genocidal murderers, "we are all progressives now".
Leftists of one stench or another have destroyed every society and economy they've seized control of. After a century of effort, they now control every major institution in the U.S., the U.N. and most of those in the rest of the nations that formerly comprised the free world.
It seems they believe that all the pieces are now in place, and they are going for the brass ring of the left: the complete subjugation of the population to the rulers.
They must not be permitted to prevail, or they will erase all the freedoms gained since the Magna Carta, and the unprecedented standards of living they created with it.
* Both Benito and Adolph were socialists, and therefore leftists, the nonsensical blather of of their communist brethren notwithstanding.
"if you want me to vaccinate as a condition of my work, then you bear the responsibility for the risks of vaccinating me."
1. Its just a bill. My bet: no floor vote. Even the GOP are all in...they are bought and paid for and weak. They barely supported Trump, their president. See Mitch McConnel, the defacto party leader.
If, by a magic wand, this whole pathetic pantomime was ever erased from our memories, Men In Black style, I'd still and always miss this cat catching mice as its ancestors did with the real black plague's culprits.
So I'd surely decline Agent K smooth invitation: "Look right here".
Can you follow-up on the Flight Surgeon's claims on Myocarditis follow-up death statistics? Every journal article I'm finding shows she's right - but the studies are relatively small. The all agree that LGE is the best indicator.
If Myocarditis has a 40% all cause mortality increase over 10 years then is that by definition a long-term effect?
I think the fascists of the 1930s used public health as one of the pretexts for their atrocities as well. I'll be surprised if Alabama passes that bill. Federal mandates for government intrusion into what you do with your body is just too good for them to pass up and use in other contexts.
Bob Slydell : So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh : Great.
Dom Portwood : So, uh, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell : Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.
Correct. The sad thing is that people in the most catholic of all European countries are going for this, to protect against a virus the vaccine will not protect you from, by and large, especially if over 65. This is what giving up on religion looks like. The land of the Vatican can't even make a small correlation between what is happening in their daily lives and the Book of Revelations, "no one will be able to work or trade without the mark." This has never been done before, and yet it is being done not in China, but in the Western democracies.
As i have said before on the substack I rarely write on (busy man!) -- the Western governing elites love the Chinese Communist Party model of anti-chaos and control. They believe the only problem with the CCP style of governance is that it doesn't allow for Pride Month. The West, meanwhile, is just wokefying it for you, with institutional support (and wide spread!) for issues related to racial justice, social justice, gender justice, trans and non-binary justice (cuz gays and lesbians are irrelevant now), climate justice. T his is how they sell it to you and trust me, the white educated masses are indeed buying it. The closer you are to a city, in fact, the more you double down on it.
So the problem with all of this is not that china let a virus escape, on purpose or not, with the help of a GMO Sars projected funded by the US and conducted by a Western biotech firm...the problem is that the leaders of the west -- their funders and their wandering minstrels in government, in the philanthropic NGOs, in the media and popular culture -- support all of this. They are not turning their sites on their domestic enemy -- the unvaccinated today, but tomorrow it will be anyone who questions policy fighting pandemics, fighting climate change, fighting the alien invasion from outerspace. They will be the terrorists. They will be the ones to hate. And at least half of the white, middle and upper classes, will absolutely positively fall for it.
China isn't the problem. The people I just mentioned are.
NONE of this is even an imitation of the China response to Covid. This is all on the democratic West.
What will they do when they have 100% vaccination rates and Sars still exists...? Start from zero with the boosters.
"(cuz gays and lesbians are irrelevant now)"
You hit a nail on the head there. Katie Herzog and Andrew Sullivan have been talking about this at length. Buck Angel as well. Katie in particular has discussed how many young lesbians have transitioned largely due to peer pressure and this new mentality that tomboy/butch lesbian=transman, no other choice. And I know this is widespread due to some comments made by a friend who is a butch lesbian under 30. And she mentioned this about 7 years ago.
Think about why that is? How can I get healthy people to pay me rent for their bodies? Well, I can mandate vaccines that need upgrades...that's a way. None of this one and done shit like polio and the one booster only MMRs at youth. We're talking forever, annualized at least. Seems like a decent income stream even if I'm just making $5 per person. 100 million in US get it, that's $500 million annually guaranteed. Not bad. Ill m
make that investment.
Or...another medical portfolio item: I can convince girls that they're boys and boys that they're girls. They will require drugs forever to "live their true identity"...that's another way. This is why it is supported institutionally. It's a grift. It requires the healthy to be fully plugged into medication -- forever -- or "lose" who they "really are". Lesbians don't need that. Gay men don't need that. But transmen and transwomen do. The only gaymen that's worth it to the medical industry are those on HIV drugs, which I assume is a minority. The only trans that's worth it to drug makers is....all of them.
And why detransitioners are so viciously attacked.
Should read "they are now turnign their sites" not "they are not turning their sites".
Doesn’t the “a group of Polish insurrectionist attack a German radio station” have an eerie echo of the Jan 6th reporting, and subsequent details of the “infamous” unarmed raid on our capital?
"reichstag fire" has entered the chat...
Ever wonder who it was that pioneered "health passports"?
I'll give you three guesses, but you're only going to need one.
https://realclimatescience.com/2021/09/the-1934-central-health-passport/
"your pesky rights get in the way of their plans" This is the crux of the problem with Public SERVANTS who mistake themselves as our rulers.
As long as a significant portion of the public continues to treat them as rulers, they have the support they need to behave as rulers. And as long as dense urban populations remain easily influenced by media, that support will remain.
power without authority is tyranny.
the us constitution gives no power to the presidiant or any other federal officer to force medical procedure on human being.
resist,
i will do not business with any one who insists their employees be vaxxed, that mean minimizing my access to medical faciliies so be it.
i will vote!
i will travel to no city or state that does what allies hanged people for after ww ii.
re: Italy - I have begun noticing this a few times in the United States, too. Employers aren't firing unvexxed workers, they are placing them on "unpaid leave".
It's a workaround to prevent themselves from bad publicity or from getting sued for unlawful termination. After all, the employee was never actually "terminated" so what's the problem? And look, he found a new job, to technically he quit!
I think American courts - no idea about Italy - would toss that out pretty quickly since the net effect is practically the same as being fired. It is well established labor law that you can't go too far mistreating employees to get around paying unemployment benefits.
It's constructive firing, and you're right that even with our leftist courts it won't stand.
if you suffer adverse reactions or death, then it's too late to make the company liable. The better way is this: to tell your employer, since vaccinated people can still get covid and spread it (show data from Israel, Vermont, Seychelles, etc. all the most vaccinated countries experiencing high levels of hospitalization from fully vaxxed people), then they, like us unvaccinated, should take the pcr test twice weekly to keep me safe. This is the mandate in Italy, you can be vaxxed or take the pcr 2x week. My husband will be suspended from work without pay starting Oct. 15. Courts here in Italy are corrupted, they do what the government says to do. Unions are in lock step with the government too.
Spot on as usual. The incentives are all screwed up because the people writing the rules are the same ones covering up that they were responsible for the virus.
Well...can’t agree with putting so much of the blame on leftists for today’s insanities.
That may seem reasonable in the USA, but if you look around the ‘democracies’ of the world, you’ll find that the right & center-right are in power in a great many countries with steamroller authoritarians in charge. And with (now or in the recent past) some of the worst restrictions on freedom anywhere.
Australia, Austria, France, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia – they’re all in there waving their Covid sticks.
Of course, plenty of left-leaning countries also get black marks. (Traditionally socialist Sweden, however, seems to value individual freedoms more than most other countries. At least for now.)
So I don’t think it’s a question of ideology anymore.
It’s really about this: way too few good, intelligent and honest people among politicians, governments and institutions in today’s world. In ANY political party, or of ANY political bent.
Why is this so?
My guess is simply that an overwhelming majority of folks give ‘lip service’ to values like freedom, equality, justice. But deep down, they’re apolitical. What truly counts for them is their own material well-being. They don’t care much who rules them.
In other words, a majority of people are ready to put aside their ‘values’ in exchange for a life on the fortunate side. They’ll enthusiastically back any party or politician who promises, and seems able, to deliver, maintain, or claw back that fortunate life.
Can’t fight it. This is the way of human nature. The way of the world.
Eighty years after WW2, it took 18 months of Covid to teach us this lesson.
i think many of those places are so far left that even their "right" by comparison fails to get anywhere near the actual midline.
most are flat out "social democracies" and moving deeper into it for decades.
sweden, interesting, is one of the few that HAS been moving further right.
Not really so far left, especially in Western Europe.
Sure most Western European countries put post-WW2 social policies in place concerning health care, education, pensions, etc. But they are all also bedrock capitalist countries, including the Nordic countries, which are home to many huge and powerful multinationals.
These countries are almost all very nice places to live. This is why they they usually take top places on those 'world happiness indexes' done by Gallup.
They're free countries. You can start a business. Try to become a billionaire if that's your ambition.
But you're also free from things like worry about medical bills for yourself and famly. Or from worrying about the cost of college tuition for your kids. Even in ultra free market capitalistic Switzerland, this is so. Tuition at a top class Swiss university costs less than $2000 a year.
The electorates in these countries have become quite volatile. But they don't follow ideologies anymore. They vote and act according to their fears and apprehensions of the moment. Fear of economic pain, of being overrun with migrants, of being exterminated by covid, etc.
Politicians and governments know this so well. So if you look closely, no matter what their political leanings are, they frequently change their tune to fit in with their ambitions and to mirror feelings in the public at large.
The enemy cannot be summed up as a leftist or a centrist or a right winger.
The enemy is people who are bad, and who are ready to do bad things. They come in all sizes, shapes, colors, religions, and ideologies.
"But you're also free from things like worry about medical bills for yourself and famly. Or from worrying about the cost of college tuition for your kids. Even in ultra free market capitalistic Switzerland, this is so. Tuition at a top class Swiss university costs less than $2000 a year."
you're mistaking the cage for freedom.
clearly, the larger issue is not left vs right but authoritarian vs libertarian, but the left has been the lead on the authoritarian charge for 30 years or more, just like they were in the 60's and 70's and just like they were in the 30's.
the populace becoming entranced by and dependent upon the baubles they offer where liberty used to be is precisely they goal of those on the top of the pile over there and precisely how they stay there by suppressing social mobility.
and it has worked.
"you're mistaking the cage for freedom."
Exactly right.
Every State's ultimate goal is the optimal subjugation of its host population to enable it to maximize the resources it is able to extract from the capite censi for its own benefit.
When seen correctly, every action the State takes is directed to this end. All forms of redistribution (the cage) are simply the State adapting to the lowest level of perceived value the particular population it afflicts will tolerate to continue to be coerced and robbed.
This truth has been known since antiquity, but only by the few, which is why after ten millennia of being abused and robbed by rulers, we are still surrounded by legions of useful idiots who cheer for their own oppression.
Someday, perhaps, this will change, but probably not today.
"Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else.
The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’ The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”
~ Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1548
My Good God.
Thanks
A young UK based writer (philosophy PhD, working as a delivery driver to fund his writing) has written a very good article on how the unions drove (and continue to attempt to drive) the corona debacle in the UK. The theory is slowly getting mainstream media attention.
https://twitter.com/BenIrvineAuthor/status/1429889081647972355?s=19
https://whistleblowerphilosopher.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-unions-and-u-turns.html?m=1
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/barricaded-from-covid-reality-by-government-and-media/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/09/21/cancer-backlog-scandal-much-worse-think/
Gato, with all respect, I am certainly not mistaking cages for freedom.
In Western Europe, you’re free to benefit from social policies, and you’re free not to use them. You’re not obliged to send your children to public schools. You can send them anywhere you want, INSEAD, Oxford, MIT, Northwestern, La Sorbonne, wherever. Or, for younger ones, to my old private east coast high school (current annual tuition $35,000).
You don’t have to use the health services that are at your disposal. You can travel the world for the service you want. Just as Americans sometimes fly to Europe for specialized treatments.
These social institutions aren’t baubles or bribes, anymore than Medicare is one. They are understood social services.
Similarly, Western Europe has remarkable social mobility. Quality of life and standards of living in the original core EU countries have been exceptionally high for decades. And any EU citizen is free to move to any of the 25+ EU countries, find a better job, start a business, etc. And millions do move, every year. They can even set up in Switzerland and Norway, which are not a member countries.
On the other hand, I agree one could make a strong baubles + suppression argument for places like the Emirates or Saudi Arabia, which are absolute totalitarian monarchies (ironically, staunchly supported by the USA). Or many of the dozens of countries around the world that are perennially under military dictatorship.
I do think there’s something to what you say. Essentially, I think it comes down to whether you believe the individual is sovereign over his property (including his body). But there may also be an issue with definition of terms here.
For many of us, “left” means “state intervention in personal and economic matters, including forced collective provision of services” and “right” means extreme minarchism, if not market anarchism.
The “capitalist” countries you describe still have massive economic interventionism, including pro-business subsidies and tax breaks that create market distortions. I would not consider these economies essentially capitalist. They are corporatist at best.
Furthermore, these countries almost all limit firearm ownership even more than the United States does. I consider this a key indicator of freedom.
Thanks for the comment. Still, we mustn't kid each other. Just like European countries, the USA is 'capitalistic' with enormous state support for 'strategic industries', all kinds of handouts to corporations, tax breaks, bank bailouts, pharma contracts, etc. All Western countries play on the same economic instruments. No choice, if they want to stay in the global game.
Re gun ownership, the laws in various European countries are quite diverse, but most prohibit army type automatic weapons. Switzerland is something of an exception. If you're a male, you have to spend time in the army when you reach adulthood. You're issued a military assault rifle and you can take it to keep at home. You can even keep it after your spell of service if you want to.
Of course across Europe there are factions and mini-political parties clamoring for more liberal gun laws, but, truth be told, there's not much public interest.
"Well...can’t agree with putting so much of the blame on leftists for today’s insanities."
Please.
What we are currently enduring is the culmination of a century of leftism that has methodically and relentlessly empowered and enriched the State at the direct expense of the population at large.
In the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, the government was small and inexpensive, which had resulted in the highest period of economic growth in history.
Then the progressives took power. Starting with Woodrow "He Kept Us Out Of War" Wilson, who saddled us with both the income tax and the Federal Reserve, which have become the greatest engines of mass theft the world has ever seen, and which were the fundamental empowering factors for the growth of the leviathan that now afflicts us.
Then came the Mussolini-loving FDR* who instituted the administrative State, which has now largely replaced representative government with bureaucratic diktat.
So, in just over a century, the progressives have inflicted upon us the largest, most powerful, and most expensive State in the history of mankind, and in the process largely inverting the previous individual rights > collective interests paradigm the country was founded upon.
To paraphrase Tricky Dick Nixon, the progressive that gave us the EPA, finished off the gold standard, and broke bread with Mao, the greatest of all leftist genocidal murderers, "we are all progressives now".
Leftists of one stench or another have destroyed every society and economy they've seized control of. After a century of effort, they now control every major institution in the U.S., the U.N. and most of those in the rest of the nations that formerly comprised the free world.
It seems they believe that all the pieces are now in place, and they are going for the brass ring of the left: the complete subjugation of the population to the rulers.
They must not be permitted to prevail, or they will erase all the freedoms gained since the Magna Carta, and the unprecedented standards of living they created with it.
* Both Benito and Adolph were socialists, and therefore leftists, the nonsensical blather of of their communist brethren notwithstanding.
"if you want me to vaccinate as a condition of my work, then you bear the responsibility for the risks of vaccinating me."
1. Its just a bill. My bet: no floor vote. Even the GOP are all in...they are bought and paid for and weak. They barely supported Trump, their president. See Mitch McConnel, the defacto party leader.
2. OSHA rules on this will over-ride.
There's reason to think that the mandate and OSHA rules were a head fake, similar to the FDA approval of Comirnaty.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/27/it-was-a-con-white-house-has-no-idea-when-or-even-if-osha-will-ever-provide-rules-to-support-legally-enforceable-worker-vaccine-mandate/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=it-was-a-con-white-house-has-no-idea-when-or-even-if-osha-will-ever-provide-rules-to-support-legally-enforceable-worker-vaccine-mandate
If, by a magic wand, this whole pathetic pantomime was ever erased from our memories, Men In Black style, I'd still and always miss this cat catching mice as its ancestors did with the real black plague's culprits.
So I'd surely decline Agent K smooth invitation: "Look right here".
https://youtu.be/PnEWvBsRjBo
Can you follow-up on the Flight Surgeon's claims on Myocarditis follow-up death statistics? Every journal article I'm finding shows she's right - but the studies are relatively small. The all agree that LGE is the best indicator.
If Myocarditis has a 40% all cause mortality increase over 10 years then is that by definition a long-term effect?
I think the fascists of the 1930s used public health as one of the pretexts for their atrocities as well. I'll be surprised if Alabama passes that bill. Federal mandates for government intrusion into what you do with your body is just too good for them to pass up and use in other contexts.
Life imitates art once again....
Bob Slydell : So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh : Great.
Dom Portwood : So, uh, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell : Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.
we will have SO many journalists ... me included. Of course the rules will be 'serious' journalism or some other regulatory capture ...
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/damn-you-hell-you-will-not-destroy-america-here-spartacus-covid-letter-thats-gone-viral
just read this
THANKS for passing it along 👍
YW
Is there evidence to help choose between the lesser of evils between Pfizer and moderna? Govt gun to my head, must choose