“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
“…The most considerable of the remaining objections is that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights.…I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous.” Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #84
I mean, the wording of 2A painfully proves that to be true. The entire preamble or whatever it's called - the "A well-regulated...security of a free state" - was wholly and totally unnecessary. No other of the first ten amendments includes an explanatory "why" clause, for good reason - the why is unnecessary when describing rights. They just ARE.
But 2A has that preamble, and it's caused nothing but trouble ever since.
"The right of The People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is ALL it needed to say, and if that is what it said, 2A would be in a much stronger position.
It doesn’t help that you have uneducated people who don’t realize what those words mean in an 18th century context. Well-regulated means that the government should be providing us with guns and ammo and training on a regular basis.
We have a Bill of Rights up here in the (not so) Great White North and it has been confirmed by the progressive, sorry I meant regressive libtard class, that it's clearly not worth the paper it's written on!!
I once had a friend who said "We should have a king, one man can not possibly steal that much". I think history has proved him wrong. To have a King there is also a House of Commons and a House of Lords and a bureaucratic / administrative / deep state / kleptocracy.
I have read this a few times over the years and I have slowly come to the conclusion that this is propaganda to promote robber barons.
It is making the problem we face into a false binary where one side that is irritating but mostly powerless is made to look even worse than the hidden force of the power elite that we are programmed to ignore and condone because it is not as bad as a hypothetical do-gooder in charge.
Both sides of the binary are bad but the middle ground where the people reap the rewards of the land and have a say in the management is preferable to either centrally directed nightmare.
Not as such. However the fact that the quote is repeated may be because it serves to make robber barons look less evil than the busybodies. I don't like either of them so having to choose subconsciously with the nudge against the busy bodies sounds like propaganda to me.
You see I suspect the robber barons are the ones getting the busy bodies to do their dirty work, if we focus on the busy bodies we miss the fact that they are not doing the will of the people but are being guided. Sort of like the online speech bill in the UK, it was proposed and supported by some bad organisations and not demanded by the public yet it is supposed to help the call for online protection but in reality it is just more control.
I feel the quot is bad as it hides dangerous hidden manipulation and does not educate about the dangers of totalitarian robber barons. Totalitarians of all stripes are BAD.
You miss the entire point which is this: as bad as robber barons are, they are not as bad as people wielding power over you who think they know what is best for you. It is one thing for there to be dominant corporate interests that gouge, it is another level entirely for your own government to take your liberties and force you to follow their tyrannical dictats. This is the main reason why socialism sucks, second only to it never works.
The quote is totally censored on Brave search and only has one page of somewhat critical results on google with none of them clearly attributing the author in the search result page extracts.
It was written by "Miri Finch" writing here on SubStack as "Miri AF".
She also wrote "If it’s headline news, then it’s a ruse." which is the other touch stone test for what is real.
You write "your own government to take your liberties and force you to follow their tyrannical dictats" but again fail to point out that the governments are captured by the lobby industry funded by the robber barons. We are continually told to hate/fear the implementers of misery while not saying the quiet part out aloud that it is the robber barons that control government and the social justice groups to make our lives miserable.
Regular humans have no inherent interest in policing people, they just want to mind their own business. However when perverse incentives (power, money, blackmail, virtue signalling) make it profitable to be mean regular well meaning people get sucked into performing the tyrannical deeds of the robber barons.
Socialism is not evil it is the essence of the village, direct distributed democracy is also not evil it is the right to self determination, centrally controlled economies either though so called socialism or so called democracy are are neither, they are just capital and dynasty controlled tyranny. We should always remember that it is the power of MONEY that warps ALL systems and the threat/fear of some OTHER system keeps the citizens scrambling and pointing fingers at each other and the current centrally controlled system in place which is the status quo that the robber barons was to maintain.
So pitting one mislabeled system against another mislabeled system is PROPAGANDA.
I do not know which team C.S. Lewis WAS batting for but I have found the one quote that "If you know their name, they are in the game." by a recent activist (name escapes me) explains how any people that willingly or accidentally espouse the methods of the robber barons will be promoted either before or after the fact while any critical thought is sidelined, cancelled, memory holed or censored if possible.
I love this quote, and it was referenced as being from in God in the Dock. I poured through that book, and couldn't find the exact quote. Neverthessless, I still love this quote because it is so true. Thomas Sowell says more or less the same thing too.
I think that the midwits misunderstand this quote. It stems from the fact that they think that they know everything but actually they don’t really know very much at all, especially about history.
History is a neglected subject in public school, and in the universities, it’s usually a bunch of Marxist drivel. If you were to compare Ancient Rome or 19th century Europe with its robber barons, to, I don’t know, the Spanish Inquisition, or the Iran of today, then you might begin to elucidate what CS Lewis meant by that quote, and why you would indeed be better off under robber barons. I know which one I would pick.
So said Lewis from his study at Oxford or Cambridge or wherever he sat his pompous ass, far from the squalor and oppression of working people under the boots of robber barons (who can sleep peacefully because their cruelty never does, taking its toll of class war in wretched poverty beyond the slave labor of industrial capitalism's "satanic mills" (William Blake)).
"The welfare of the people is always the alibi of tyrants." (Camus) Every pyramid scheme of society based on rule by the few over the many, however the robber barons yesterday and today hide behind lies, is out to get away with murder while laughing all the way to the bank.
"even the welfare nets themselves were viewed with disdain. people had too much pride to use them and would work fingers to bone rather than mooch off the neighbors. it was seen as shameful"
Maybe Archie was right when he and Edith sang, "didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight".
The societal product of Archie and Edith were hardworking, faithful, decent and breadwinning citizens. The product of the welfare state were assholes like Mike, and ditzes like Gloria who didn't work, didn't keep a marriage together and looked down their noses at everyone while living rent-free upstairs. Watching the show now, even though Lear probably didn't intend it, you realize Archie was the most real and sympathetic character on the show.
I saw a quote in an article that decried the banning of junk food from SNAP where some virtue signaling lib said something to the effect of 'keeping SNAP open to choices avoids the risk of shame when a purchase is denied'. Shame has been replaced with entitlement. We went through hard times growing up where there were times we had pancakes for dinner. Even had some relatives offer help, that my dad proudly refused, other than the second hand clothes from older cousins that constituted our 'back to school' wardrobe. That ethic now seems quaint, an artifact of a bygone era.
Except you have to come up with $ for the non food items. Was behind a young tattooed, appeared to be able bodied young couple with a small child in the grocery line yesterday. Heaping cart of groceries - swiped the card. But then had a balance they were fishing out cash for. No restrictions in MO yet. Although it will be a nightmare to implement as every store will have to re-program their software and tag every offending SKU. And no doubt some of the customers are going to get ugly with the poor cashiers.
It won't be very difficult for stores. Right now all food is tagged as either eligible for food stamps or not. At Walmart, an eligible item shows up on the receipt with a F next to it. I imagine most other retailers have similar systems.
The harder part will be needing to retrain shoppers for what's allowed or not, such as with labels or signs on the display shelves.
Oh I still hit the thrift stores from time to time as I love a bargain. I will take a carload to the thrift store and drop it off in the back, then go in the front and shop - my husband rolls his eyes and says, I thought you were cleaning stuff OUT. I say, I'm supporting a good cause....
Oh well, I am at the stage of life where less stuff is probably better anyway. ~20 years ago we hosted a Boy Scout garage sale fundraiser at our house and it poured down rain most of the weekend. I ended up picking out a dozen or so of the higher value items and listing them on Ebay and they made more off of that stuff + donations from people who felt bad the garage sale was mostly a washout than they did from the actual garage sale. But that was my only foray into selling stuff, the thrift store closest to us supports a transitional housing program that does great work so easier to just donate everything. Although we did list a big L shaped computer desk that was too big to haul somewhere in our cars on Marketplace for free. Just wanted it gone. A week of no shows before someone actually showed up and took it!
Hollywood has been used for social engineering purposes since its beginning and undermining conservative ideas (ideas that protect what works in civilizations) via humor (from Lear to Jon Stewart), exalting sexual licentiousness, violence, and victimhood are all part of the mix. Add in some empathetic dramas to pave the way for new legislation to address some emergent new needs...
It wasn't intended for Archie to be the most sympathetic and real character. I read about this somewhere years ago.
Viewers of the show were supposed to hate Archie and cheer along when he gets "owned" by the progressive skulls full 'o mush. The leftist writers and producers have been completely unaware of how people outside their bubble think for decades... it is not a recent phenomenon.
People didn't hate Archie, though. They loved the character, and the show was a hit. The "good guys" of the show (meathead, Gloria, and so on), as originally intended, became the ones people loved to see batted around by Archie the cat, rather than the other way around.
Archie was gruff and insulting at (many) times, but his insults, to me, never seemed to come from a place of true malice. Much of the time, he was making a valid point, and other times, his offhand comments like listing "blacks, Puerto Ricans, and regular people" seemed more like a quaint, even charming indication of his limited perspective more than anything actually bigoted or hateful.
To Archie, white people were "regular" people, and while you're not supposed to say it, it's human nature to think that people "like you" are "regular," because from your perspective as one of that kind of people, they are. Archie simply didn't know, or didn't care, that it was considered inappropriate to say so, and to me, he always seemed to say it with an air of innocence, not from a place of hate.
There were the poignant moments, like when he and meathead got locked in a cooler or someplace like that and Archie told the story of growing up poor and he had a shoe for one foot and a boot for the other and the kids all called him shoe bootie. Made you see that his gruff demeanor was a product of a hardscrabble life.
That was a good one. There's another episode where Mike pisses Edith off and she just *explodes* on him - totally unlike her usual demeanour - and tells Mike everything Archie had to struggle for and the audience just *erupts* in support of her.
Lear was pretty canny actually, I think he knew making Archie a caricature would have been a mistake and actually ensured he was more well-rounded.
Maybe i said something "inappropriate" the other day..... i'm not sure . I mean i was admiring the footwear on a middle aged lady and wanted to pay her a compliment . Some nice leather boots she wore.
I couldn't resist shouting out "Shake that bootie ! "
I was shocked when she offered to shove it up my behind . My, times have changed ................
Yes! My ex told me about this many years ago, going so far as to say Archie was played as difficult as possible, to reduce sympathy for him. So yes, this has been going on for awhile.
The irony of course is that Carroll O'Connor was very much a Democrat liberal, but it's a testament to how good an actor he was that he made Archie so convincing.
I've been wanting to track down the British original, "Til Death Do Us Part," to see if it has the same insights that I gained from All In the Family. Best I can do is the movie they made after the series ended...
I grew up in a family of depression era parents. They and their parents made do in hard times, working odd jobs and at times for the WPA, as well as growing their own vegetables. They forged their future through hard work and as gato points out through community. There was no hand out or looking for something free. That was something the Bowery bums did. Today too many are on the dole that should not be. The BBB was correct in imposing work requirements on able bodied Medicaid recipients. But to hear the whining from the left one would think a kid with CP would be abandoned.
When I worked in an inner city clinic the number of patients who were on disability was staggering. Young guys wearing high top basketball shoes and warm up suits would come in complaining of back pain so bad they could not bend much less work. I started using the $20 bill test, dropping the bill as I walked to the exam room door. If the patient jumped off the exam table, and bent over to pick up the bill I told them to hit the road (And give me my $20 back so I could use it on the next guy). It’s only gotten worse.
When you decline to give someone narcotics, or a work excuse just before a long holiday weekend, watch the immobilizing back pain instantly disappear when they get up to dress and leave.
I grew up with depression era parents as well. It was considered shameful to be "on the dole". My dad worked for the WPA in North Carolina breaking up rocks for roads like the chain gangs did. When WWII started, my family moved back to PA and my Dad was able to find work. And that's how war got to be good for everyone, except the victims of it.
It doesn't take long for this to happen and I don't think you can prevent it. I grew up in the late 60s, early 70s, and I was dirt poor. Both parents alcoholics and we had literally nothing. The first bike I ever had I built from bike pieces thrown in the garbage. My first car cost $100 and I had to rebuild the carburetor. Even now I fix and piece together everything. My garden tiller is from the 80s and I've replaced every part on it or fashioned my own and welded it on. My lawn mower is ancient, my cars are over 15 years old. My clothes are t shirts and jeans except for one nice suit I got at Goodwill. Etc., etc. I'm not a miser or tightwad, it's just the frame of mind I grew up with. You fix stuff and make do.
My kids, however, grew up solidly middle class. Sports, swimming pool, nice clothes, new bikes. We had 11 kids so I definitely couldn't afford to spoil them. They didn't get anything and everything they wanted. But they laugh at me when I suggest keeping or fixing up something old. They would rather buy new. Old stuff is just junk to them. They're not morons, but I think they're way softer than I am when it comes to material possessions.
At least your kids, as distinct from other parents' children, have a higher likelihood of rising to the occasion when the inevitable 'hard times' do come around.
Yeah, I think you're right. They were all homeschooled and they know how to fix things, I think they just don't see the value in it. My 7 oldest are all married and we have almost 30 grandchildren. Haha, I think they'll learn the value of hand-me-downs. 😁
I’ve noticed that the quality of goods is not what it used to be to be. Our society views consumerism as recreation. And we have an economy that has become dependent on throw away goods….furniture, clothes, etc. Quality goods are beyond reach for most young families….and as a result kids now grow up with the mindset of buy cheap and just replace when it wears out. Sad.
I laugh at some of the things like recycling or organic….in my mind, my parents did that as a way of life….old school. You canned your vegetables from the garden in the same canning jars year after year. And as the third girl in the family…I lived in hand me downs. Food scraps went over the “bankin” to decompose and return naturally to the earth. But to talk to somebody sold on saving the earth these days…..well, they think they have all the answers, no awareness that many of the answers pre-existed but we are too soft to employ them.
Quality goods are indeed expensive, that is irrefutable.
But also, there are a great many goods in the Western world that are obsolete in short order and for those, quality is less important than price/performance. What good is a very high quality 3G cell phone? When the labor to repair a lawn mower is more expensive than a new one, you start to understand the incentive structure of younger people.
Of course, you don't see this sort of thing in economies like Cuba or Venezuela.
Most kids, indeed most people, actually do make rational choices. The key to understanding is incentives.
I think it was Charlie Munger, though it might have been Buffett, whose most famous little aphorism is: "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes."
Incentivize Idiocracy and you get idiots. Incentivize a high trust society and you get a great nation.
I think also the key is understanding the QUALITY. The younger gens utterly fail to understand why a vintage Pendketon shirt is $150 on ebay. Its a fur shirt. Its from high altitude sheep fur having gone thru meticulous process cleaned combed carded dyed spun woven and tailored by Americans with craft.Now owned by China, and none know what that means. None know their textiles, woods, metals, fabrics and are happy to purchase offgassing glues and pressedwood,polyesters and poor plastics. And they do not care. Or care to know.
I checked into the GSR in Reno about 5 years ago, just when COVID-19 restrictions were starting to ease. The Furry convention was happening at the hotel. I was supposed to stay for 4 nights, but I had to check out the next morning due to the morons (Furry kids) that took over the place . I spoke to the hotel staff a few months later, and they told me that the management decided they’re never allowed back. It was one of the most disgusting and insane things I have ever witnessed. These kids or the Furry’s can’t function in a normal society.
You may know your civilization is in decline when the policies/ behavior of the state/government, elites, etc.etc are policies that would prevent a 3rd world country from becoming a 1st world country.
Food stamp lady--that has to be a parody. You would have to be an utter and complete moron to say what she said and mean it. American can't be that far gone (please).
Um, I haven't lived in the US for 23 years. I used to work in the food stamp program, as an auditor of stores (to ensure they really offered food for the stamps).
I remember when I was growing up in rural upstate NY back in the late 1960's, a "welfare rights activist" was brought to our school. She was enormous, unmarried, with a brood of children, and was apparently outraged at the pittance she was being given to survive on. At that time, in that place, I'm pretty sure no one was buying it. There was a lot of whispering behind hands and outright revulsion. We thought the whole notion of being an "activist" for this particular cause was outrageous. Mind you, this was not a wealthy community. It was mostly farmers getting their first taste of an increasingly inflation/recession-driven economy. Now she'd probably have thousands of followers on some social media platform, and be held up as a positive role model of "democracy in action." Where I grew up there was no cable TV, high-speed internet, and we had a party line for our telephone service. Today this woman would have these "essentials" provided for her. In my old age I'm thinking we are forever destined to repeat the same cycles you describe above. This isn't an aberration, and it is currently being encouraged and fueled by an elite of bad actors. The next stage, beyond our current welfare state, will be the cashless economy and Universal Basic Income. Think it can't happen? How many of us thought the notion of an American President attaching his name to free smart phones for the poor was impossible when it happened during Obama's Presidency? We're deliberately being divided, to be left snarling over the scraps of a once great economy. I'd love to believe The Donald can reverse all this in 4 years while we slip back into comfortable slumber, but they call it The Deep State for a reason and it has one Hell of a head start.
The sad part is, it was democracy in action when the enormous breeder demanded more of your parents' money for nothing.
Make loud noises about your cause, get people to listen, get them to make noise too, get them and others to vote for your cause, put your theory into practice: democracy.
Doesn't mean it's ethically right, or that it works practically, just that it was democratically decided.
Too many of us - either side of the Atlantic - equate "democracy" and democratically decided" with something being right, good and the correct way of doing something.
I know what you mean, although strictly speaking there's no contradiction in a state being both a constitutional republic and a democracy; constitutional republic is the form or shape of the state, democracy is the process for how leaders get their positions.
Which sadly tends to devolve towards the lowest common denominator: mob rule.
But that's fixating too much on the semantics I think - better we look at methods & results, and who did what, when - how - and to whom.
Personally, I think the problem revolves around the issue of franchise and citizenship being handed out like they were Halloween-candy.
Candied apples with razor-blades being your average politician's promises, to extend the metaphor.
Well, in non-Western societies one guy in the extended family is expected to get a good education (or alternatively be the biggest plunderer in the neighborhood) and support everyone who can claim the merest drop of blood relatedness.
They come here, they recognize at once that that onr guy's name is the welfare state.
But you know the very strange thing that's happening now in America? Both the communists and the re-emerging traditionalists are demonizing individuality; demanding conformity and submisison to a common good.
Our Founders, they were more genius than we can even comprehend. The enemies of liberty pop up where you least expect them.
But to your point about soft times--they breed malignant boredom too. It used to be that you had to be able to knit and whittle or else. Now we call essential life skills "hobbies" and good luck finding sets of grandmas and grandpas who can hand down practical talents. And you end up with a society choking because people just don't know what to do with their hands.
Well, to be honest though no welfare state is sustainable regardless of the demographics. Fifty years ago I was shocked by the characteristics of UK dole recipients. Free money ain't never a good idea.
A homogeneous western people can modify their system without the changes turning into ethnic warfare. One with tens of millions of non-western people bearing the mentality you yourself describe cannot.
Be honest about that, it’s an important part of the resulting collapse dynamics.
One of the appeals in moving to Australia for my dotage, is that seniors have lives here.
In the USA, they are cloistered off to their units, then their assisted living, and the family has little or nought to do with them. If they can't drive, they're alone.
Here, you see tiny little 90 year olds, pushing their wheelie walker to the grocery, playing bowls or cards at the club - even table tennis and pickle ball. It's a LOT easier to be a senior in this country.
Plus, most grandmas and grandpas got killed off in the last 5 years....
To add to the above, it was the altruistic folks of the 1960s and the Great Society federal welfare state that institutionalized this self-destruction. In Appalachia, poverty and self-sufficiency went hand in hand and the dole was shameful as EGM noted above.
However an army of earnest young Peace Corp types invaded Appalachia, seeking out the poor and convincing them it was a government program they were entitled to to relieve their material want.
So, the incentives to self-sufficiency or moving away to where the jobs were from where they weren't ended, and sloth and indolence and their subpathologies became a lifestyle...
I know this sounds simplistic, and it is, but: I think it all starts and ends with the media.
The media are where millions upon millions of people get their "news" and their indoctrination and their permission structures. I know smart, educated, successful people who cite...MSNBC and CNN as support for their (patently false, demonstrably untrue and idiotic) world views. The same people who, when confronted with the Socratic method, change the subject or leave the conversation rather than deal with questions, the answers to which would clearly expose their ignorance and their stupidity and their hypocrisy. (I have a fantastic example of this from around 2015, involving my sister and 5 of her women friends, all six of them being Hillary supporters, and the 7 of us in a brief Facebook conversation. But it's TL;DR material, so I'll spare you. But it's proof-positive of my point.)
If the media were honest and unbiased and just reported news straight and disinterestedly, and EVEN with the century-long deplorable state of public education in America, IF the media were as I described, the Democrat Party would be at most a fringe player in national politics, and the utterly stupid, idiotic ideas advanced by the Left lately would die on the vine, if they even bloomed at all.
The media are the cancer among us. The alphabet legacy corporate media and all their players need to be burned to the ground, the earth salted where they stood, and rebuilt from scratch. The media need to be Luigi'd if the Republic is to survive and thrive.
Bad Cat, it's really quite simple. As basic free market economics teaches us, people tend to act in ways that increase leisure. Therefore, in any prosperous society, we should (and do) see people moving away from what they HAVE to do towards what they WANT to do.
While some enjoy productive pursuits, most simply wish to eat, sleep and own stuff that they believe will make them look superior to others.
Some science fiction stories address this issue. Starship Troopers, for example, only gives franchise rights (the right to vote and hold office to Portland readers) to those who have served in the military and have been honorably discharged. In one (animated) Star Trek episode, Vulcans must pass through an ordeal, a "rite of passage" from which some do not return. Some real life societies, such as Sparta and to some extent Rome had similar cultures.
Perhaps, for a prosperous society to survive, such "rites of passage" must be incorporated within the societal structure for that society to survive.
Only taxpayers should be able to vote. That includes a household, so if you are married filing jointly, you get 1 vote for the house. If you pay no tax you get no vote. This would incentivize working, and at the same time our elected leaders would be more beholden to there voters. Instead we have a system that incentivizes the leeches of society. Politicians using government handouts to create voting blocs, promising free stuff. It’s a system as we now see is doomed to fail.
The Founders did not grant the right to direct taxation in the original Constitution - they knew better. It was Woodrow Wilson, our first "Intellectual" president who rammed the 16th amendment down American throats in 1913 along with the Federal Reserve, thus making American entry into The Great War possible.
I would rather see voting done away with. What I would like to see is representatives hired by the people - and if that representative does not perform, he/she can be fired by the people as well. That is, at least, honest.
Nitpick - in Starship Troopers, those who satisfactorily complete their term of service may vote, hold office (i.e. be elected), and hold certain jobs such as police or teacher of political history.
The majority do their service in any one of hundreds of civilian roles. Only a tiny percentage do it as military service, and of those again a tiny minority hold combat positions.
That it is only military veterans that are allowed to vote is a misconception due to Verhoeven's movie. The book explicitly points out that veterans are no more a better person than any other when it comes to crime, unemployment, et c - the only difference is that they volunteered to serve, out of their own free will, the greater good of the collective above their own personal leisure or desire or profit.
Exactly. I wasn't implying that veterans were better. Starship Troopers was simply an example I was giving of a fictional society that was built to somewhat limit comfort and convenience because people will always gravitate toward ease and comfort and away from work and toil and that, in doing so, we risk the "death by comfort" which I discuss with Gemini in one of my posted articles.
There needs to be opposition in order for us to stay strong and, as Bad Cat suggests, intelligent as well.
Eaxctly - there must be a cost, a real one, for something to have value.
And since partaking in society is an act of both wielding power and of solidarity with the greater whole and the individuals that make it up, that act of payment must be voluntary, for us to ascribe said value.
One thing I noticed when I was still in pol-sci was the utter abhorrence 99% of all academics in that field has for such ideas; that anything but class backgrund and social malleability/manipulativeness would decide rights, privileges and freedoms.
I can't. I just can't on principle. The US military serves the corporate interests of the US. I just can't justify a term of servitude to the corporate state. IF this were truly separation of powers, and the military were an honest defense affair, I would agree. But as long as the corps hold the strings - I cannot recommend military to anyone.
This is a terrible idea on every level. Compelled military service is a non starter in this country. You really would want your kids or grandkids to serve this corrupt country??? No thanks.
Just as we all carry cancer cells in our bodies that are well handled by a healthy immune system, a society always carries its own cancer cells within, that must be held in check by a healthy set of rules. We have destroyed our societal immune system and are not just letting the cancer run free but importing more, from the most deadly environments on earth.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis
"A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."
Alexander Hamilton
“…The most considerable of the remaining objections is that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights.…I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous.” Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #84
Just goes to show that they weren't infallible.
I mean, the wording of 2A painfully proves that to be true. The entire preamble or whatever it's called - the "A well-regulated...security of a free state" - was wholly and totally unnecessary. No other of the first ten amendments includes an explanatory "why" clause, for good reason - the why is unnecessary when describing rights. They just ARE.
But 2A has that preamble, and it's caused nothing but trouble ever since.
"The right of The People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is ALL it needed to say, and if that is what it said, 2A would be in a much stronger position.
Agreed.
It doesn’t help that you have uneducated people who don’t realize what those words mean in an 18th century context. Well-regulated means that the government should be providing us with guns and ammo and training on a regular basis.
We have a Bill of Rights up here in the (not so) Great White North and it has been confirmed by the progressive, sorry I meant regressive libtard class, that it's clearly not worth the paper it's written on!!
I once had a friend who said "We should have a king, one man can not possibly steal that much". I think history has proved him wrong. To have a King there is also a House of Commons and a House of Lords and a bureaucratic / administrative / deep state / kleptocracy.
Canada!
I have read this a few times over the years and I have slowly come to the conclusion that this is propaganda to promote robber barons.
It is making the problem we face into a false binary where one side that is irritating but mostly powerless is made to look even worse than the hidden force of the power elite that we are programmed to ignore and condone because it is not as bad as a hypothetical do-gooder in charge.
Both sides of the binary are bad but the middle ground where the people reap the rewards of the land and have a say in the management is preferable to either centrally directed nightmare.
You’re suggesting C.S. Lewis propagandized in service of robber barons?
Not as such. However the fact that the quote is repeated may be because it serves to make robber barons look less evil than the busybodies. I don't like either of them so having to choose subconsciously with the nudge against the busy bodies sounds like propaganda to me.
You see I suspect the robber barons are the ones getting the busy bodies to do their dirty work, if we focus on the busy bodies we miss the fact that they are not doing the will of the people but are being guided. Sort of like the online speech bill in the UK, it was proposed and supported by some bad organisations and not demanded by the public yet it is supposed to help the call for online protection but in reality it is just more control.
I feel the quot is bad as it hides dangerous hidden manipulation and does not educate about the dangers of totalitarian robber barons. Totalitarians of all stripes are BAD.
You miss the entire point which is this: as bad as robber barons are, they are not as bad as people wielding power over you who think they know what is best for you. It is one thing for there to be dominant corporate interests that gouge, it is another level entirely for your own government to take your liberties and force you to follow their tyrannical dictats. This is the main reason why socialism sucks, second only to it never works.
The quote is totally censored on Brave search and only has one page of somewhat critical results on google with none of them clearly attributing the author in the search result page extracts.
It was written by "Miri Finch" writing here on SubStack as "Miri AF".
She also wrote "If it’s headline news, then it’s a ruse." which is the other touch stone test for what is real.
You write "your own government to take your liberties and force you to follow their tyrannical dictats" but again fail to point out that the governments are captured by the lobby industry funded by the robber barons. We are continually told to hate/fear the implementers of misery while not saying the quiet part out aloud that it is the robber barons that control government and the social justice groups to make our lives miserable.
Regular humans have no inherent interest in policing people, they just want to mind their own business. However when perverse incentives (power, money, blackmail, virtue signalling) make it profitable to be mean regular well meaning people get sucked into performing the tyrannical deeds of the robber barons.
Socialism is not evil it is the essence of the village, direct distributed democracy is also not evil it is the right to self determination, centrally controlled economies either though so called socialism or so called democracy are are neither, they are just capital and dynasty controlled tyranny. We should always remember that it is the power of MONEY that warps ALL systems and the threat/fear of some OTHER system keeps the citizens scrambling and pointing fingers at each other and the current centrally controlled system in place which is the status quo that the robber barons was to maintain.
So pitting one mislabeled system against another mislabeled system is PROPAGANDA.
I do not know which team C.S. Lewis WAS batting for but I have found the one quote that "If you know their name, they are in the game." by a recent activist (name escapes me) explains how any people that willingly or accidentally espouse the methods of the robber barons will be promoted either before or after the fact while any critical thought is sidelined, cancelled, memory holed or censored if possible.
I love this quote, and it was referenced as being from in God in the Dock. I poured through that book, and couldn't find the exact quote. Neverthessless, I still love this quote because it is so true. Thomas Sowell says more or less the same thing too.
It's from the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment".
Thank you!
One of my favorites from Lewis.
I think that the midwits misunderstand this quote. It stems from the fact that they think that they know everything but actually they don’t really know very much at all, especially about history.
History is a neglected subject in public school, and in the universities, it’s usually a bunch of Marxist drivel. If you were to compare Ancient Rome or 19th century Europe with its robber barons, to, I don’t know, the Spanish Inquisition, or the Iran of today, then you might begin to elucidate what CS Lewis meant by that quote, and why you would indeed be better off under robber barons. I know which one I would pick.
So said Lewis from his study at Oxford or Cambridge or wherever he sat his pompous ass, far from the squalor and oppression of working people under the boots of robber barons (who can sleep peacefully because their cruelty never does, taking its toll of class war in wretched poverty beyond the slave labor of industrial capitalism's "satanic mills" (William Blake)).
"The welfare of the people is always the alibi of tyrants." (Camus) Every pyramid scheme of society based on rule by the few over the many, however the robber barons yesterday and today hide behind lies, is out to get away with murder while laughing all the way to the bank.
I wish the Narnia books had been so well written.
"even the welfare nets themselves were viewed with disdain. people had too much pride to use them and would work fingers to bone rather than mooch off the neighbors. it was seen as shameful"
Maybe Archie was right when he and Edith sang, "didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight".
The societal product of Archie and Edith were hardworking, faithful, decent and breadwinning citizens. The product of the welfare state were assholes like Mike, and ditzes like Gloria who didn't work, didn't keep a marriage together and looked down their noses at everyone while living rent-free upstairs. Watching the show now, even though Lear probably didn't intend it, you realize Archie was the most real and sympathetic character on the show.
I saw a quote in an article that decried the banning of junk food from SNAP where some virtue signaling lib said something to the effect of 'keeping SNAP open to choices avoids the risk of shame when a purchase is denied'. Shame has been replaced with entitlement. We went through hard times growing up where there were times we had pancakes for dinner. Even had some relatives offer help, that my dad proudly refused, other than the second hand clothes from older cousins that constituted our 'back to school' wardrobe. That ethic now seems quaint, an artifact of a bygone era.
And no more food stamps, that is embarrassing too, now they have a nice debit card, so it's looks just like the working people.
Except you have to come up with $ for the non food items. Was behind a young tattooed, appeared to be able bodied young couple with a small child in the grocery line yesterday. Heaping cart of groceries - swiped the card. But then had a balance they were fishing out cash for. No restrictions in MO yet. Although it will be a nightmare to implement as every store will have to re-program their software and tag every offending SKU. And no doubt some of the customers are going to get ugly with the poor cashiers.
It won't be very difficult for stores. Right now all food is tagged as either eligible for food stamps or not. At Walmart, an eligible item shows up on the receipt with a F next to it. I imagine most other retailers have similar systems.
The harder part will be needing to retrain shoppers for what's allowed or not, such as with labels or signs on the display shelves.
Have heard it also disguises how long the soup line would really be, as well, if it were still around in that form today.
I read somewhere that there were 40 million people on SNAP. Not sure if that number included illegals, but still a sad number.
I frequently got clothes from my well off second cousin. She had great taste.
Oh I still hit the thrift stores from time to time as I love a bargain. I will take a carload to the thrift store and drop it off in the back, then go in the front and shop - my husband rolls his eyes and says, I thought you were cleaning stuff OUT. I say, I'm supporting a good cause....
Thrift store bargains slid now that everything that has any value goes to Facebook Marketplace, E-bay, Poshmark, or some other social media site.
Even the brick and mortar thrifts sell the best stuff online.
Oh well, I am at the stage of life where less stuff is probably better anyway. ~20 years ago we hosted a Boy Scout garage sale fundraiser at our house and it poured down rain most of the weekend. I ended up picking out a dozen or so of the higher value items and listing them on Ebay and they made more off of that stuff + donations from people who felt bad the garage sale was mostly a washout than they did from the actual garage sale. But that was my only foray into selling stuff, the thrift store closest to us supports a transitional housing program that does great work so easier to just donate everything. Although we did list a big L shaped computer desk that was too big to haul somewhere in our cars on Marketplace for free. Just wanted it gone. A week of no shows before someone actually showed up and took it!
Hollywood has been used for social engineering purposes since its beginning and undermining conservative ideas (ideas that protect what works in civilizations) via humor (from Lear to Jon Stewart), exalting sexual licentiousness, violence, and victimhood are all part of the mix. Add in some empathetic dramas to pave the way for new legislation to address some emergent new needs...
That generation and their morals and ethics are gone.
In its place we have orcs ( WEF)
Zombie Apocalypse on its way.
It wasn't intended for Archie to be the most sympathetic and real character. I read about this somewhere years ago.
Viewers of the show were supposed to hate Archie and cheer along when he gets "owned" by the progressive skulls full 'o mush. The leftist writers and producers have been completely unaware of how people outside their bubble think for decades... it is not a recent phenomenon.
People didn't hate Archie, though. They loved the character, and the show was a hit. The "good guys" of the show (meathead, Gloria, and so on), as originally intended, became the ones people loved to see batted around by Archie the cat, rather than the other way around.
Archie was gruff and insulting at (many) times, but his insults, to me, never seemed to come from a place of true malice. Much of the time, he was making a valid point, and other times, his offhand comments like listing "blacks, Puerto Ricans, and regular people" seemed more like a quaint, even charming indication of his limited perspective more than anything actually bigoted or hateful.
To Archie, white people were "regular" people, and while you're not supposed to say it, it's human nature to think that people "like you" are "regular," because from your perspective as one of that kind of people, they are. Archie simply didn't know, or didn't care, that it was considered inappropriate to say so, and to me, he always seemed to say it with an air of innocence, not from a place of hate.
There were the poignant moments, like when he and meathead got locked in a cooler or someplace like that and Archie told the story of growing up poor and he had a shoe for one foot and a boot for the other and the kids all called him shoe bootie. Made you see that his gruff demeanor was a product of a hardscrabble life.
That was a good one. There's another episode where Mike pisses Edith off and she just *explodes* on him - totally unlike her usual demeanour - and tells Mike everything Archie had to struggle for and the audience just *erupts* in support of her.
Lear was pretty canny actually, I think he knew making Archie a caricature would have been a mistake and actually ensured he was more well-rounded.
Maybe i said something "inappropriate" the other day..... i'm not sure . I mean i was admiring the footwear on a middle aged lady and wanted to pay her a compliment . Some nice leather boots she wore.
I couldn't resist shouting out "Shake that bootie ! "
I was shocked when she offered to shove it up my behind . My, times have changed ................
Yes! My ex told me about this many years ago, going so far as to say Archie was played as difficult as possible, to reduce sympathy for him. So yes, this has been going on for awhile.
and the more he raged, the more we loved him. He said what nobody dared at the time.
The irony of course is that Carroll O'Connor was very much a Democrat liberal, but it's a testament to how good an actor he was that he made Archie so convincing.
And you knew who you were, then. Girls were girls, and men were men.
The hardworking, under-appreciated dad in his recliner, after a long day, often is.
I've been wanting to track down the British original, "Til Death Do Us Part," to see if it has the same insights that I gained from All In the Family. Best I can do is the movie they made after the series ended...
That's a *very* difficult show to get a hold of. It might be available in the UK, same with the Three's Company inspiration, Man About the House.
I grew up in a family of depression era parents. They and their parents made do in hard times, working odd jobs and at times for the WPA, as well as growing their own vegetables. They forged their future through hard work and as gato points out through community. There was no hand out or looking for something free. That was something the Bowery bums did. Today too many are on the dole that should not be. The BBB was correct in imposing work requirements on able bodied Medicaid recipients. But to hear the whining from the left one would think a kid with CP would be abandoned.
When I worked in an inner city clinic the number of patients who were on disability was staggering. Young guys wearing high top basketball shoes and warm up suits would come in complaining of back pain so bad they could not bend much less work. I started using the $20 bill test, dropping the bill as I walked to the exam room door. If the patient jumped off the exam table, and bent over to pick up the bill I told them to hit the road (And give me my $20 back so I could use it on the next guy). It’s only gotten worse.
When you decline to give someone narcotics, or a work excuse just before a long holiday weekend, watch the immobilizing back pain instantly disappear when they get up to dress and leave.
Always have them undress for the examination.
I grew up with depression era parents as well. It was considered shameful to be "on the dole". My dad worked for the WPA in North Carolina breaking up rocks for roads like the chain gangs did. When WWII started, my family moved back to PA and my Dad was able to find work. And that's how war got to be good for everyone, except the victims of it.
Yup. My folks told me that only the war truly ended the depression. And yes, lots of stigma about being on the dole.
It doesn't take long for this to happen and I don't think you can prevent it. I grew up in the late 60s, early 70s, and I was dirt poor. Both parents alcoholics and we had literally nothing. The first bike I ever had I built from bike pieces thrown in the garbage. My first car cost $100 and I had to rebuild the carburetor. Even now I fix and piece together everything. My garden tiller is from the 80s and I've replaced every part on it or fashioned my own and welded it on. My lawn mower is ancient, my cars are over 15 years old. My clothes are t shirts and jeans except for one nice suit I got at Goodwill. Etc., etc. I'm not a miser or tightwad, it's just the frame of mind I grew up with. You fix stuff and make do.
My kids, however, grew up solidly middle class. Sports, swimming pool, nice clothes, new bikes. We had 11 kids so I definitely couldn't afford to spoil them. They didn't get anything and everything they wanted. But they laugh at me when I suggest keeping or fixing up something old. They would rather buy new. Old stuff is just junk to them. They're not morons, but I think they're way softer than I am when it comes to material possessions.
At least your kids, as distinct from other parents' children, have a higher likelihood of rising to the occasion when the inevitable 'hard times' do come around.
Yeah, I think you're right. They were all homeschooled and they know how to fix things, I think they just don't see the value in it. My 7 oldest are all married and we have almost 30 grandchildren. Haha, I think they'll learn the value of hand-me-downs. 😁
I’ve noticed that the quality of goods is not what it used to be to be. Our society views consumerism as recreation. And we have an economy that has become dependent on throw away goods….furniture, clothes, etc. Quality goods are beyond reach for most young families….and as a result kids now grow up with the mindset of buy cheap and just replace when it wears out. Sad.
I laugh at some of the things like recycling or organic….in my mind, my parents did that as a way of life….old school. You canned your vegetables from the garden in the same canning jars year after year. And as the third girl in the family…I lived in hand me downs. Food scraps went over the “bankin” to decompose and return naturally to the earth. But to talk to somebody sold on saving the earth these days…..well, they think they have all the answers, no awareness that many of the answers pre-existed but we are too soft to employ them.
Quality goods are indeed expensive, that is irrefutable.
But also, there are a great many goods in the Western world that are obsolete in short order and for those, quality is less important than price/performance. What good is a very high quality 3G cell phone? When the labor to repair a lawn mower is more expensive than a new one, you start to understand the incentive structure of younger people.
Of course, you don't see this sort of thing in economies like Cuba or Venezuela.
That ancient handmade stool (I think Grandpa built it) is so much sturdier and happier than the $10 one we bought from IKEA....
Most kids, indeed most people, actually do make rational choices. The key to understanding is incentives.
I think it was Charlie Munger, though it might have been Buffett, whose most famous little aphorism is: "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes."
Incentivize Idiocracy and you get idiots. Incentivize a high trust society and you get a great nation.
I think also the key is understanding the QUALITY. The younger gens utterly fail to understand why a vintage Pendketon shirt is $150 on ebay. Its a fur shirt. Its from high altitude sheep fur having gone thru meticulous process cleaned combed carded dyed spun woven and tailored by Americans with craft.Now owned by China, and none know what that means. None know their textiles, woods, metals, fabrics and are happy to purchase offgassing glues and pressedwood,polyesters and poor plastics. And they do not care. Or care to know.
OH the people I see in polyester.
Polyester people.
Oh you should see Polythene Pam....
We’re at Stage 3, where soft men/women/non-binary otherkins/furrys/etc make hard times.
Once society shunned their crazies/useless members.
Then they were cared for/institutionalized.
Then they were set free because it was cruel not too.
Then they were lauded as virtuous special snowflakes.
The pendulum has only just begun to swing back, and it usually doesn’t stop in the middle.
Hard Times are going to be, well, hard.
I checked into the GSR in Reno about 5 years ago, just when COVID-19 restrictions were starting to ease. The Furry convention was happening at the hotel. I was supposed to stay for 4 nights, but I had to check out the next morning due to the morons (Furry kids) that took over the place . I spoke to the hotel staff a few months later, and they told me that the management decided they’re never allowed back. It was one of the most disgusting and insane things I have ever witnessed. These kids or the Furry’s can’t function in a normal society.
Words fail me that any sane person would go along with that nonsense.
Do you mean Fury (violence, anger) or Furry (kids who identify as animals)?
Sorry that was a typo
Good, because the Fury Kids sounded kind of scary.
What’s so scary about soy-based life forms?
Furry Kids are soy-based life forms. Fury Kids sounds like an Alt-Right version of the Boy Scouts.
Furrys used to be a fetish, a narrow segment of the BDSM population.
Now it's on the streets, along with all the other fetishes.
Trust me you want them to keep their costumes on. These kids are so ugly they make Ron Jeremy look sexy.
Bring it on! I am so over living in Crazyland where normal, responsible people feel as if they need to hide out on the fringes of society.
You may know your civilization is in decline when the policies/ behavior of the state/government, elites, etc.etc are policies that would prevent a 3rd world country from becoming a 1st world country.
Food stamp lady--that has to be a parody. You would have to be an utter and complete moron to say what she said and mean it. American can't be that far gone (please).
I admire your optimism while I shake my head at your naivety.
In which case America is well and truly done. Yikes.
Yes...that Ameruca is gone.
Now we have Amerika LLC, Inc.
run by Technocrats and their unsympathetic machines.
Monodrex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIHkMZMMFao
Yeah, she made sure to repeat the "soda, cereal, and chips" many times. I'm voting parody.
She's just stupid.
With her child, who can't get her attention, screaming for Daddy. (So I guess he's home, too.)
Doubt that.
I think maybe for her they ARE the three main food groups.
Um, I haven't lived in the US for 23 years. I used to work in the food stamp program, as an auditor of stores (to ensure they really offered food for the stamps).
I was unsurprised by this woman.
I think the food stamp lady won’t work not can’t work. Big difference. Really sad. As my dad used to say “can’t never could do nothing”.
Is there any chance that person in food stamp lady was performing a parody? It is becoming hard to tell the difference.
Possibly but for a parody to work it has to be based on a kernel of truth.
It's hard to work if you have 5 kids...
It's hard to have 5 kids if you work.
Idiocracy.
I remember when I was growing up in rural upstate NY back in the late 1960's, a "welfare rights activist" was brought to our school. She was enormous, unmarried, with a brood of children, and was apparently outraged at the pittance she was being given to survive on. At that time, in that place, I'm pretty sure no one was buying it. There was a lot of whispering behind hands and outright revulsion. We thought the whole notion of being an "activist" for this particular cause was outrageous. Mind you, this was not a wealthy community. It was mostly farmers getting their first taste of an increasingly inflation/recession-driven economy. Now she'd probably have thousands of followers on some social media platform, and be held up as a positive role model of "democracy in action." Where I grew up there was no cable TV, high-speed internet, and we had a party line for our telephone service. Today this woman would have these "essentials" provided for her. In my old age I'm thinking we are forever destined to repeat the same cycles you describe above. This isn't an aberration, and it is currently being encouraged and fueled by an elite of bad actors. The next stage, beyond our current welfare state, will be the cashless economy and Universal Basic Income. Think it can't happen? How many of us thought the notion of an American President attaching his name to free smart phones for the poor was impossible when it happened during Obama's Presidency? We're deliberately being divided, to be left snarling over the scraps of a once great economy. I'd love to believe The Donald can reverse all this in 4 years while we slip back into comfortable slumber, but they call it The Deep State for a reason and it has one Hell of a head start.
The sad part is, it was democracy in action when the enormous breeder demanded more of your parents' money for nothing.
Make loud noises about your cause, get people to listen, get them to make noise too, get them and others to vote for your cause, put your theory into practice: democracy.
Doesn't mean it's ethically right, or that it works practically, just that it was democratically decided.
Too many of us - either side of the Atlantic - equate "democracy" and democratically decided" with something being right, good and the correct way of doing something.
(Not saying you do that!)
It’s why the founders gave us a republic, if you can keep it (we obviously didn’t) and not a democracy. Democracy is nothing but mob rule, period.
I know what you mean, although strictly speaking there's no contradiction in a state being both a constitutional republic and a democracy; constitutional republic is the form or shape of the state, democracy is the process for how leaders get their positions.
Which sadly tends to devolve towards the lowest common denominator: mob rule.
But that's fixating too much on the semantics I think - better we look at methods & results, and who did what, when - how - and to whom.
Personally, I think the problem revolves around the issue of franchise and citizenship being handed out like they were Halloween-candy.
Candied apples with razor-blades being your average politician's promises, to extend the metaphor.
Well, in non-Western societies one guy in the extended family is expected to get a good education (or alternatively be the biggest plunderer in the neighborhood) and support everyone who can claim the merest drop of blood relatedness.
They come here, they recognize at once that that onr guy's name is the welfare state.
But you know the very strange thing that's happening now in America? Both the communists and the re-emerging traditionalists are demonizing individuality; demanding conformity and submisison to a common good.
Our Founders, they were more genius than we can even comprehend. The enemies of liberty pop up where you least expect them.
But to your point about soft times--they breed malignant boredom too. It used to be that you had to be able to knit and whittle or else. Now we call essential life skills "hobbies" and good luck finding sets of grandmas and grandpas who can hand down practical talents. And you end up with a society choking because people just don't know what to do with their hands.
This. A welfare state, plus tens of millions with this non-western mentality, means certain collapse.
Well, to be honest though no welfare state is sustainable regardless of the demographics. Fifty years ago I was shocked by the characteristics of UK dole recipients. Free money ain't never a good idea.
It was fully sustainable here, until the 1990s.
After we opened out borders to migrants from Asia and Africa en masse, it started collapsing due to over-use and corruption.
But when it only applied to people with Nordic Protestant work ethics it worked just fine.
Yes, but there's always been a white underclass in the UK that was abusing the welfare system before mass migration from all points east and south.
A homogeneous western people can modify their system without the changes turning into ethnic warfare. One with tens of millions of non-western people bearing the mentality you yourself describe cannot.
Be honest about that, it’s an important part of the resulting collapse dynamics.
There's no pressure to modify the system while enough people can waste their lives exploiting it.
You’re still diverting.
Take it how you like.
"can hand down practical talents" Ha! They learned how to do it 'the rightway' on Utube.
One of the appeals in moving to Australia for my dotage, is that seniors have lives here.
In the USA, they are cloistered off to their units, then their assisted living, and the family has little or nought to do with them. If they can't drive, they're alone.
Here, you see tiny little 90 year olds, pushing their wheelie walker to the grocery, playing bowls or cards at the club - even table tennis and pickle ball. It's a LOT easier to be a senior in this country.
Plus, most grandmas and grandpas got killed off in the last 5 years....
To add to the above, it was the altruistic folks of the 1960s and the Great Society federal welfare state that institutionalized this self-destruction. In Appalachia, poverty and self-sufficiency went hand in hand and the dole was shameful as EGM noted above.
However an army of earnest young Peace Corp types invaded Appalachia, seeking out the poor and convincing them it was a government program they were entitled to to relieve their material want.
So, the incentives to self-sufficiency or moving away to where the jobs were from where they weren't ended, and sloth and indolence and their subpathologies became a lifestyle...
ah....and when industry deserted after NAFTA....THIS is where the oxy crisis started.
I know this sounds simplistic, and it is, but: I think it all starts and ends with the media.
The media are where millions upon millions of people get their "news" and their indoctrination and their permission structures. I know smart, educated, successful people who cite...MSNBC and CNN as support for their (patently false, demonstrably untrue and idiotic) world views. The same people who, when confronted with the Socratic method, change the subject or leave the conversation rather than deal with questions, the answers to which would clearly expose their ignorance and their stupidity and their hypocrisy. (I have a fantastic example of this from around 2015, involving my sister and 5 of her women friends, all six of them being Hillary supporters, and the 7 of us in a brief Facebook conversation. But it's TL;DR material, so I'll spare you. But it's proof-positive of my point.)
If the media were honest and unbiased and just reported news straight and disinterestedly, and EVEN with the century-long deplorable state of public education in America, IF the media were as I described, the Democrat Party would be at most a fringe player in national politics, and the utterly stupid, idiotic ideas advanced by the Left lately would die on the vine, if they even bloomed at all.
The media are the cancer among us. The alphabet legacy corporate media and all their players need to be burned to the ground, the earth salted where they stood, and rebuilt from scratch. The media need to be Luigi'd if the Republic is to survive and thrive.
All this stupidity fertilizer is literally anti-eugenics. Bad genes are now selected for.
Bad Cat, it's really quite simple. As basic free market economics teaches us, people tend to act in ways that increase leisure. Therefore, in any prosperous society, we should (and do) see people moving away from what they HAVE to do towards what they WANT to do.
While some enjoy productive pursuits, most simply wish to eat, sleep and own stuff that they believe will make them look superior to others.
Some science fiction stories address this issue. Starship Troopers, for example, only gives franchise rights (the right to vote and hold office to Portland readers) to those who have served in the military and have been honorably discharged. In one (animated) Star Trek episode, Vulcans must pass through an ordeal, a "rite of passage" from which some do not return. Some real life societies, such as Sparta and to some extent Rome had similar cultures.
Perhaps, for a prosperous society to survive, such "rites of passage" must be incorporated within the societal structure for that society to survive.
Only taxpayers should be able to vote. That includes a household, so if you are married filing jointly, you get 1 vote for the house. If you pay no tax you get no vote. This would incentivize working, and at the same time our elected leaders would be more beholden to there voters. Instead we have a system that incentivizes the leeches of society. Politicians using government handouts to create voting blocs, promising free stuff. It’s a system as we now see is doomed to fail.
The Founders did not grant the right to direct taxation in the original Constitution - they knew better. It was Woodrow Wilson, our first "Intellectual" president who rammed the 16th amendment down American throats in 1913 along with the Federal Reserve, thus making American entry into The Great War possible.
I would rather see voting done away with. What I would like to see is representatives hired by the people - and if that representative does not perform, he/she can be fired by the people as well. That is, at least, honest.
Interesting idea. And yes the income tax is straight up theft, but it’s isn’t going anywhere.
Funny how the framers thought the exact same thing, and things went so well in the US for so long as a result.
Best idea so far: simple, short ‘n’ sweet.
Nitpick - in Starship Troopers, those who satisfactorily complete their term of service may vote, hold office (i.e. be elected), and hold certain jobs such as police or teacher of political history.
The majority do their service in any one of hundreds of civilian roles. Only a tiny percentage do it as military service, and of those again a tiny minority hold combat positions.
That it is only military veterans that are allowed to vote is a misconception due to Verhoeven's movie. The book explicitly points out that veterans are no more a better person than any other when it comes to crime, unemployment, et c - the only difference is that they volunteered to serve, out of their own free will, the greater good of the collective above their own personal leisure or desire or profit.
Exactly. I wasn't implying that veterans were better. Starship Troopers was simply an example I was giving of a fictional society that was built to somewhat limit comfort and convenience because people will always gravitate toward ease and comfort and away from work and toil and that, in doing so, we risk the "death by comfort" which I discuss with Gemini in one of my posted articles.
There needs to be opposition in order for us to stay strong and, as Bad Cat suggests, intelligent as well.
Eaxctly - there must be a cost, a real one, for something to have value.
And since partaking in society is an act of both wielding power and of solidarity with the greater whole and the individuals that make it up, that act of payment must be voluntary, for us to ascribe said value.
One thing I noticed when I was still in pol-sci was the utter abhorrence 99% of all academics in that field has for such ideas; that anything but class backgrund and social malleability/manipulativeness would decide rights, privileges and freedoms.
How about Israel or Switzerland? Real world examples instead of fiction.
I'm all for the idea that Americans should have to serve in the military--in any capacity, from front lines to lunch lines--in order to earn the vote.
I would settle for just showing up, in person, with proper ID at this point.
What would the military do with all the morons?
🤣
teach them to obey. I think the IQ requirement for grunt is 65.
it's 84. Avg black population IQ is 85.
lower the 84 people become a danger to self and others in emergencies, and otherwise need to much supervision.
I can't. I just can't on principle. The US military serves the corporate interests of the US. I just can't justify a term of servitude to the corporate state. IF this were truly separation of powers, and the military were an honest defense affair, I would agree. But as long as the corps hold the strings - I cannot recommend military to anyone.
This is a terrible idea on every level. Compelled military service is a non starter in this country. You really would want your kids or grandkids to serve this corrupt country??? No thanks.
Just as we all carry cancer cells in our bodies that are well handled by a healthy immune system, a society always carries its own cancer cells within, that must be held in check by a healthy set of rules. We have destroyed our societal immune system and are not just letting the cancer run free but importing more, from the most deadly environments on earth.
This doesn't end well.
This is your book title, you realize, right?