Liberty Relearned

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote possibly her most iconic passage of fiction.  It is a monologue spoken by a mysterious figure that comes out of the shadows after withdrawing from public life some twelve years earlier. During those twelve years of self-imposed exile, he formed his own community of talented, like-minded people he's enticed to go on “strike” from an ungrateful society consumed with taking their achievements for their own.  As a result of the strike depriving society of the inventors and entrepreneurs who made it run, the world has fallen into a state of disrepair and despair.  Near the end of the story, Galt returns to explain his actions is this famous monologue known to us as “This is John Galt Speaking”.

One of the chief themes of Galt's speech is the idea that society had begun to hold sacrifice as its highest virtue, but Galt points out that in society's twisted morality, societies concept of sacrifice was not that of noble self-sacrifice, it was responding to the demands of others that was held as a virtue. Virtue, in this fallen system, was to accede to the demands of others, even to the point of going against one's own best self-interest. This “virtue” of sacrifice stemmed from or perhaps caused a widespread sense of entitlement. People had stared to believe that they were entitled to the efforts of others.

“You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.”  – John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

The downside of writing off student loan debt.  The idea of writing off student loan debt sounds good to those who owe, but how about for the rest of us?  What are some of the unintended consequences of forgiving student loan debt, or pushing student loans in general?  Those who celebrate and demand the forgiveness of these debts condemn the next generation to continuing soaring tuition costs.  It also encourages young people do pursue degrees that don't give them marketable skills.  

Fear is a powerful motivator.  It's a survival mechanism and it's been around probably for as long as animals have been around. It can have positive effects, fear of a bear for instance, it can make you stop in your tracks and slowly put some distance between you and it.  Fear of your family starving can make you hunt that same bear for food.  It also can be used against you.  Fear of the socialist coming and taking away all private property led to the rise of fascism in Europe.  The fascists in turn, used fear of beatings, killings, vandalism, and imprisonment to control the population that did not agree with their methods.

Fear makes people treat others horribly. Look at what people did to each other during the height of the COVID pandemic. “Mask Nazis”, forced inoculations, masking of two-year-olds on airplanes and kids in school all became a thing because of fear. Businesses were shut, and our human rights to free speech, to assemble peacefully, and worship as we see fit, among others, were abridged with alarming ease and regularity by authorities on the word of experts. People who had developed natural immunity due to having the disease were fired for not getting vaccinated. A disease, dangerous to a certain portion of the population caused friends and neighbors to turn against each other. Even when it became apparent that some of the methods at best did little good, and at worst were counter-productive didn't matter, neither to those driven by fear, nor those who drove the fear.

Fear of nature is one of the oldest fears. It's why smart people don't go out in a thunderstorm, build houses in dry riverbeds, or build condos in the Sahara. Humans, despite all our technology, still cannot predict with any great accuracy earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or where lightning will strike next. We cannot even predict the weather more than a few days in advance. In ancient time, fear of Mother Nature caused people to throw others into volcanoes or disembowel them on stone alters. Centuries later, fearful still demand sacrifices be made in order to ensure good weather. We must sacrifice our farms, our comforts, sometimes even our livelihoods in the name of appeasing the gods of climate change. Entire countries have been destroyed, and still others are determined to follow their brothers down the path of economic and national suicide.

Many of those most easily convinced to alter their lifestyles, even subordinate their well-being and the well-being of their families because fear overwhelmingly share another trait besides, and perhaps because of their fears. They tend to be members of the political and social Left.  They prostrate themselves at the feet of the state, and of so-called experts. They are fully prepared to make others do the same.  In fact, they scoff at those who don't share their often-irrational fears.  Fearing perhaps their inability to make it on their own, tends towards the various forms of collectivism and the inevitable authoritarianism that follows.

On the other side of that same coin are the fear mongers who are all too willing to accommodate the fearful.  Fear is the coin of the realm for the Left. They employ tactics of fear and even terror to control others.  They use deception to exaggerate the nature of the danger, then they exaggerate or even falsify the effectiveness of their solutions.  They in turn fear that if they are not in control, someone else will be, or even worse...no one else, and that scares them the most. This sort of control also tends to be instrumental in achieving financial gains for those in power.   Convenient.

Fear is a powerful motivator.  It's a survival mechanism and it's been around probably for as long as animals have been around. It can have positive effects, fear of a bear for instance, it can make you stop in your tracks and slowly put some distance between you and it.  Fear of your family starving can make you hunt that same bear for food.  It also can be used against you.  Fear of the socialist coming and taking away all private property led to the rise of fascism in Europe.  The fascists in turn, used fear of beatings, killings, vandalism, and imprisonment to control the population that did not agree with their methods.

Many of those most easily convinced to alter their lifestyles, even subordinate their well-being and the well-being of their families because fear overwhelmingly share another trait besides, and perhaps because of their fears. They tend to be members of the political and social Left.  They prostrate themselves at the feet of the state, and of so-called experts. They are fully prepared to make others do the same.  In fact, they scoff at those who don't share their often-irrational fears.  Fearing perhaps their inability to make it on their own, tends towards the various forms of collectivism and the inevitable authoritarianism that follows.

On the other side of that same coin are the fear mongers who are all too willing to accommodate the fearful.  Fear is the coin of the realm for the Left. They employ tactics of fear and even terror to control others.  They use deception to exaggerate the nature of the danger, then they exaggerate or even falsify the effectiveness of their solutions.  They in turn fear that if they are not in control, someone else will be, or even worse...no one else, and that scares them the most. This sort of control also tends to be instrumental in achieving financial gains for those in power.   Convenient.

Back at Mar a Lago... It's becoming clear that the search for classified documents was just a pretense for the FBI to go on a fishing expedition. What were they fishing for?  Possibly evidence they believed that Trump documents that would exonerate him with regards to the Russia collusion hoax and implicate members of the deep state.  The swamp creatures in the DOJ and the Biden Regime would like nothing more than any documents that could exonerate Trump to disappear.  

Right problem, wrong solution?  The WEF put this out, so immediately it's suspect, but let's entertain the thought, nonetheless.  Online abuse is a real problem and occurs constantly.  Someone has proposed a way to help fight it.  So, what's the problem with that?  The problem is that who gets to decide what is "harmful"?  Who would be the subject matter experts mentioned in this scheme? The same people who decide what is racist, homophobic, or Islamophobic?  The same people who censored any information that questioned any the CDC's or WHO's recommendation on fighting COVID? Will adding AI add impartiality into the system, or simply amplify the agendas of those who control it?

Right problem, wrong solution?

The WEF put this out, so immediately it’s suspect in the minds of many, but let’s entertain the proposal, nonetheless. Online abuse is a real problem and occurs constantly. Someone has proposed a way to help fight it.

Here’s an excerpt from the article entitled: The solution to online abuse? AI plus human intelligence

While AI provides speed and scale and human moderators provide precision, their combined efforts are still not enough to proactively detect harm before it reaches platforms. To achieve proactivity, trust and safety teams must understand that abusive content doesn’t start and stop on their platforms. Before reaching mainstream platforms, threat actors congregate in the darkest corners of the web to define new keywords, share URLs to resources and discuss new dissemination tactics at length. These secret places where terrorists, hate groups, child predators and disinformation agents freely communicate can provide a trove of information for teams seeking to keep their users safe.

The problem is that accessing this information is in no way scalable. Classic intelligence collection requires deep research, expertise, access and a fair amount of assimilation skills – human capacities that cannot be mimicked by a machine.” – Inbal Goldberger via WEForum.org

So, what’s the problem with that? The problem is that who gets to decide what is “harmful”? Who would be the subject matter experts mentioned in this scheme? The same people who decide what is racist, homophobic, or Islamophobic? The same people who censored any information that questioned any the CDC’s or WHO’s recommendation on fighting COVID? Will adding AI add impartiality into the system, or simply amplify the agendas of those who control it?

Last week, President's Trump's home, Mar a Lago was searched by the FBI looking for classified documents.  Why did the FBI execute a search warrant instead of just subpoenaing the documents in question?  Did the Biden Administration have a secondary motive, like provoking the Republican base? We who support Trump and/or the conservative cause must be careful not to be goaded into an emotional response.  There is a time and place for those angered by the raid on Trump's home, that time is November, and the place is the ballot box.  The Democrats will do anything to marginalize and demonize Trump and his supporters.  We must not be baited into acting as they would, as demonstrated during the summer of 2020.  

If you had a time machine and went back to the late 20thCentury, then wrote a book giving an accurate depiction of life in America or Europe today, it would be classified as a work of dystopic fiction. The book would be compared with 1984, Atlas Shrugged, or any number of novels depicting a dystopian future. Most of the people that read it would hope that our society and culture would develop along a better, saner path.  It's to the point where one would swear the people today see Orwell's 1984, not as a warning to humanity, but as in instruction book.  We now live in the type of world that authors like Orwell, Rand, and Huxley tried to warn us about.

How did this dystopia come to be?  It's important to understand that we didn't get here overnight.  In fact, or current situation has been over a hundred years in the making.  Over the last century, a group we would now refer to as the “Left”, spurred on by two philosophies, collectivism and postmodernism have been vying for and gaining political power in the world.  Collectivism is the idea that man's highest purpose is to serve the needs of society.  The individual's needs are subordinate to those of the collective.  Examples of collectivism include communism, socialism, and fascism.  The ends of the Left is some sort of collectivist Utopia. Postmodernism is a philosophy that refutes the notion of objective reality.  It refutes the Enlightenment notion that Man advances his situation mainly though reason. The Enlightenment philosophies are the basis of modern Western democracies in general, and of the United States in particular. Enlightenment thinking stands in the way of establishing a collectivist Utopia, and so must be supplanted in the body-politic by the post-modern viewpoint.  Postmodernism can be said then, to be the philosophic means to that collectivist end.

Our dystopia and how we got in it. If you had a time machine and went back to the late 20th Century, then wrote a book giving an accurate depiction of life in America or Europe today, it would be classified as a work of dystopic fiction. The book would be compared with 1984, Atlas Shrugged, or any number of novels depicting a dystopian future. Most of the people that read it would hope that our society and culture would develop along a better, saner path. It’s to the point where one could swear some people today see Orwell’s 1984, not as a warning to humanity, but as in instruction manual. We now live in the type of world that authors like Orwell, Rand, and Huxley tried to warn us about.

How did this dystopia come to be? It’s important to understand that we didn’t get here overnight. In fact, our current situation has been over a hundred years in the making. Over the last century, a group we would now refer to as the “Left”, spurred on by two philosophies, collectivism and postmodernism have been vying for and gaining political power in the world. Collectivism is the idea that man’s highest purpose is to serve the needs of society. The individual’s needs are subordinate to those of the collective. Examples of collectivism include communism, socialism, and fascism. The ends the Left have in mind is some sort of collectivist Utopia. Before they can build their brave new world, they must tear down the old one. Postmodernism is a philosophy that refutes the notion of objective reality. It refutes the Enlightenment notion that Man advances his situation mainly though reason. Enlightenment philosophies are the basis of modern Western democracies in general, and of the United States in particular. Enlightenment thinking stands in the way of establishing a collectivist Utopia, and so must be supplanted in the body-politic by the post-modern viewpoint. Postmodernism can be said then, to be the philosophic means to that collectivist end.

Nowadays, the challenges Americans are facing are myriad and are on many fronts. Most of the suffering we are made to endure is by design.  The pain felt by the average American-- the high cost of household items, energy, gas, etc., is a pain not shared by the collectivist elites whose policies caused these problems. Our need to be free, to control our own destinies is in conflict with the elites' need for evermore power.  Our loss is their gain.  Here are some examples...

It's like that cynical, old joke: “It's all about mind over matter; they don't mind, and you don't matter.”

It may be a joke, but it's apropos to the apparent mindset of the global elite as typified by the World Economic Forum (WEF).  The Green agenda, the Great Reset and other agendas being pursued by those self-appointed philosopher kings we refer to as the “global elite” are taking their toll on ordinary people around the world. Dutch farmers are being told that nearly a third of their cattle need to go, and that they cannot use nitrogen-based fertilizers at the levels currently sustaining their crops.  The Sri Lankans were convinced to take on unsustainable debts to improve their social programs and to trade in tried-and-true farming principles to go 100% organic.  Listening to the advice of the globalists cost them their economy and their country. Farmers there, and in the Netherlands, as well as other countries are being told to forget what they have learned from centuries of farming to maximize food production in the face of a global food shortage and pursue suicidal polices prescribed to them by an international oligarchy of bankers and industrialists. In the United States, the war on fossil fuels was dealt a brief setback with the Supreme Court ruling that the EPA does not have carte blanche when it comes to regulating the U.S. energy industry.  Still, parts of the country are being warned to cut down on air conditioner usage for fear of brownouts. It's not that there's not enough energy under the ground, it's that the darlings of the green movement, wind and solar are woefully inadequate when it comes to U.S. energy needs.

People are going hungry in Sri Lanka.  Farmers in the Netherlands will be driven out of business.  Europeans will freeze and Americans will sweat.  Because their governments have decided to chase good ESG scores, instead of following best farming practices, people will go hungry and perhaps even starve this winter. Europeans if they don't go hungry, face the real possibility of freezing this winter, again because of short sighted whims of Eco-fascists.  According to Worldeconomics.com, Sri Lanka had a near-perfect 98.1 ESG score, suggesting in was following the globalists' plan to a tee. The Netherlands boasts a lusty 90.7 score.  Part of that score we can safely assume, is due to their commitment to lower nitrogen usage, best farm practices be damned. The Dutch government's slavish devotion to leftist environmental policies continues in the face of a world-wide food shortage.  That same environmental left in the U.S. Has convinced the Biden administration to continue its war on fossil fuels, despite energy costs skyrocketing adding to an already bad inflation problem.  People all across the globe will suffer.  Most of them, needlessly.  

So, why are so many made to suffer for so little benefit to them? There are many reasons for sure-- foolish belief in Utopian schemes, lust for power, and greed on the part of the global elites.  These people who occupy the top rungs of industry, academia, and politics are insulated from the effects of their questionable economic and environmental theories. They are not affected by inflation.  They themselves will not feel neither cold, heat, nor hunger in any amount that might make them uncomfortable. They are, in short, not us. They have the luxury of operation in a world of economic and environmental theory, they are not part of the real world, the world the rest of us plebs inhabit.  To them, we are but statistics, numbers on a spreadsheet.