Category Archives: Philosophy

An Outline of Post-Western Civilization, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on September 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

When you get rid of the best parts of the generations that proceeded yours, it’s not generally an improvement. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

Western civilization is over. It may live on in some of us, but at the public level it has been replaced. Every major institution has thrown in with the new civilization.

The question facing us, then, is what this new civilization is like. And so, with the usual caveats, here are the essential components of the new boss, Post-Western civilization:

Governance: Democracy may remain as a sort of talisman, but fewer and fewer changes of power will be forthcoming. Already Europe is controlled by unelected apparatchiks and the United States is ruled by executive order. (Canada has perhaps been worse and Australia has very definitely been worse.) Resistance has been minimal. Public information has been censored and police forces have been willing to enforce almost anything.

Commerce: Stakeholders (giant corporations, states and a few others) have taken control. Small businesses have been destroyed en masse and the middle class has been hollowed out. Commerce and state are no longer separated.

Debt: Debt would normally be considered part of commerce, but over the past two decades, it has been universally available and Westerners have used it to maintain an illusion of prosperity. This left them unable to resist a usurping civilization. To put it simply, Westerners have been silenced by a variant of Coach Lombardi’s dictum: Debt makes cowards of us all.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Culture, Debt, Economy, Government, History, Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Society

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The Triumph of Collectivism, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on September 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Your life is government property. If you don’t think so, ask yourself what, if anything, can the government not do to you? From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Collectivism

The French Revolution began in 1789. Maximilien Robespierre was one of its most eager proponents. An extreme left-winger, he sought a totalitarian rule that claimed to be “for the people” (echoing the recently successful American Revolution), but in reality was “for the rulers.” He in turn inspired Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto.

Both Robespierre and Marx had been well-born and well-educated but rather spoiled and, as young adults, found that they had no particular talent or inclination to pay their own way in life through gainful employment. Consequently, they shared a hatred for those who succeeded economically through their own efforts and sought a governmental system that would drain such people of their achievements, to be shared amongst those who had achieved less.

Interestingly, neither one saw himself as a mere equal to the proletariat that they championed. Each saw himself in the role of the one who was to cut up the spoils and make the decisions for the rest of society.

It’s worthy of note that collectivist leaders never see themselves as becoming the humble and patient recipients of whatever bones the government chooses to throw them. They always see themselves in the role of rulers.

Collectivism has remained unchanged in its essence to the present day. It attracts those who would take the productivity of others, enrich themselves, and dole out the remainder to the masses. Seen in this light, collectivism would seem abhorrent. Who in his right mind would wish to lose his freedom, to end up as a member of the lumpenproletariat?

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The Unsung Death of ‘My Body, My Choice’, by Jack Cashill

Posted on September 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

When you can claim bodily autonomy for abortion and at the same time insist that nobody has bodily autonomy for the vaccination decision, the internal contradiction must at some point lead to a cranial implosion. From Jack Cashill at americanthinker.com:

As late as 3:43 p.m. on Thursday, September 9, the long-lived mantra of the pro-abortion movement, “My Body, My Choice,” was still showing signs of life. It was at that time, that the White House published the remarks made by Vice-President Kamala Harris at a “Reproductive Rights” roundtable.

“The President and I are unequivocal in our support of Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, and the right of women to make decisions for themselves with whomever they choose — about their own bodies,” said Ms. Harris.

“And, needless to say,” Harris continued much too quotably, “the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision; it is their body.”

So far is Harris out of the White House power loop that she may not have known the mantra had less than two hours to live.

Although clearly on the defensive, Harris was targeting the wrong enemy at the White House roundtable. She thought the threat to “My Body, My Choice” came from those rascally Republicans in Texas that had passed the Texas Heartbeat Act. Despite legal challenges, the new law had gone into effect just a week earlier. Attempts to challenge the terminology of the “heartbeat” bills inevitably reinforced just whose body was being violated, namely the baby with the beating heart. And unlike other heartbeat states, say, Mississippi or North Dakota, Texas was too big to boycott.

In a jam, the abortion rights crowd turned to Harris. As attorney general of California, she had proved her killer instinct. When undercover journalist David Daleiden recorded Planned Parenthood’s traffic in baby body parts—and even Hillary Clinton conceded his videos were “disturbing”—Harris had Daleiden arrested and silenced. End of threat.

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The First Libertarian, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on September 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

Lao-Tzu sounds like my kind of guy. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Most libertarians count Murray Rothbard as one of their mentors. They will know that Rothbard’s primary mentors were Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. But Rothbard dug deeper in his search for libertarian thinking. Here is a little-seen paper that he wrote in 1967:

The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. Little is known about his life, but apparently he was a personal acquaintance of Confucius in the late sixth century BC and like the latter came from the state of Sung and was descended from the lower aristocracy of the Yin dynasty.

Unlike the notable apologist for the rule of philosopher-bureaucrats, however, Lao-tzu developed a radical libertarian creed. For Lao-tzu the individual and his happiness was the key unit and goal of society. If social institutions hampered the individual’s flowering and his happiness, then those institutions should be reduced or abolished altogether. To the individualist Lao-tzu, government, with its “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox,” was a vicious oppressor of the individual, and “more to be feared than fierce tigers.”

Government, in sum, must be limited to the smallest possible minimum; “inaction” was the proper function of government, since only inaction can permit the individual to flourish and achieve happiness. Any intervention by government, Lao-tzu declared, would be counterproductive, and would lead to confusion and turmoil. After referring to the common experience of mankind with government, Lao-tzu came to this incisive conclusion: “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished… The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

The wisest course, then, is to keep the government simple and for it to take no action, for then the world “stabilizes itself.” As Lao-tzu put it, “Therefore the Sage says: I take no action yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves…”

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Leftists Have Appointed Themselves As Our “Cultural Educators” – But They Have Nothing To Teach

Posted on September 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

For all their pseudo-intellectual poses, leftists are a boring bunch. From Brandon Smith at alt-markets.us:

By Brandon Smith

It is often said that ignorance is the source of all evil, however, I find that the most destructive people in the world are not the most ignorant, but the most arrogant. Purely ignorant people are more likely to become victims, while arrogant people tend to have enough intelligence to knowingly absorb and regurgitate a particular dogma in a way that appeals to unsuspecting bystanders that were never given the tools to defend themselves. In other words, it’s malicious “educators” that promote incendiary collectivism, usually by preying on those that lack the armor of reason. Ignorance is encouraged by these supposed teachers as a marinade; it tenderizes their victims and makes them ready to absorb more and more cultism.

Their arrogance is the key to all of this because these folks are really just middlemen for an agenda that is ultimately designed to harm them. They see themselves as brilliant minds that cannot be denied; they think they are the prophets of our age. They do what they do because they have a bias or hatred of independent thought, or, they believe they are earning a seat at the table of power by evangelizing for totalitarianism. The reality is that the globalist establishment will throw the leftists away as soon as they have what they want. History shows us that the most devout messengers of totalitarian regimes are usually lined up against a wall and shot once the revolution is achieved, but their hubris blinds them to this inevitable outcome.

They generally fall into two categories – the young acolytes and the aging adherents, and the vast majority of them are leftists. Whenever I examine the dangers of leftists I inevitably get accusations that I am “perpetuating the false left/right paradigm”, but the people that make this argument don’t understand what the left/right paradigm is.

At the top of any government pyramid you will find that the politicians may claim to represent different parties or ideologies but when it comes to their policies these leaders are all the same. Their vested interests are in maintaining power for themselves and the globalists that line their pockets. This is not to say all politicians are frauds, just most of them, and the higher up you go in government the more frauds you will find.

The opposite is true in terms of the bottom of the pyramid among regular citizens – There is no “false paradigm” for the masses – The leftists are truly ideologically obsessed in their collectivism and communism, and conservatives and constitutionalists truly embrace personal freedom and civil liberties. The divide is not fake, it is very real. There are people who want to control others and there are people that want to be left alone, and the political left is staunchly on the side of control.

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LIBERA NOS A MALO: Considerations on the Great Reset and the New World Order, by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

Posted on September 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

Heretical thoughts from a Catholic archbishop whose views contradict the church’s institutional embrace of the New World Order. From Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò at insidethe vatican.com:

    Letter #100, 2021, Tuesday, August 31: Viganò issues a new letter entitled “Deliver us from evil” (in Latin, “Libera nos a malo,” the last words of the Lord’s prayer)

    I received today a new text from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and send it out here below.

    There is a video of the archbishop delivering this text in Italian at this Lifesitenews link. By reading the English text below while clicking on the link, you can hear the text in Italian, and follow along in English.

    P.S. The archbishop has also granted a long, wide-ranging videotaped interview, in English, to be released later this week.

LIBERA NOS A MALO
Considerations on the Great Reset
and the New World Order
by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
August 28, 2021
Feast of St. Augustine

No one will be part of the New World Order
unless he carries out an act of worship to Lucifer.
No one will enter the New Age unless he receives Luciferian initiation.
                 —David Spangler, Director of the United Nations Planetary Initiative Project (Reflections on The Christ, Findhorn, 1978) 

    For more than a year and a half we have been helplessly witnessing the succession of incongruent events to which most of us are unable to give a plausible justification.

    The pandemic emergency has made particularly evident the contradictions and illogicalities of measures nominally intended to limit contagion – lockdowns, curfews, closures of commercial activities, limitations of public services and classes, suspension of citizens’ rights – but which are disavowed daily by conflicting voices, by clear evidence of ineffectiveness, by contradictions on the part of the same health authorities.

    There is no need to list the measures that almost all the governments of the world have taken without achieving the promised results.

    If we limit ourselves to the presumed advantages that the experimental gene serum should have brought to the community — above all immunity to the virus and renewed freedom of movement — we discover that an Oxford University study published in The Lancet (here) stated that the viral load of those vaccinated with a double dose is 251 times greater than the first strains of the virus (here), despite the proclamations of world leaders, starting with the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, according to whom “whoever gets vaccinated lives, whoever does not get the vaccine dies.”

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China’s Marxist “Profound Revolution” Is Here, And Nobody In The West Is Ready, by Michael Every

Posted on September 5, 2021 | 1 comment

It’s important not to forget that Chinese communists are communists, especially if you’re putting money into Chinese investments. From Michael Every at Rabobank via zerohedge.com:

Pro-Fund or Profound Revolution?

Summary

  • Developments in China continue to confound market optimists, with new talk of a “profound revolution” towards a new target of “Common Prosperity”
  • Rather than simply react to these events, we analyze the history of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Thought to try to put current moves under Xi Jinping Thought in a larger context
  • This also provides a framework of a hypothetical Marxist policy path forwards
  • We briefly discuss the meaning of Common Prosperity over time, and how it is a bellwether
  • We conclude with likely market reactions to an economy not saying “because markets”

“Profound Revolution”?

Political developments in China have been front page news in the financial press over the past few months. Beijing’s crackdown on Ant Financial, largely dismissed by Wall Street, then spread to Didi and on to the broader sectors these championed, fin- and transport-tech; then it grew to encompass swathes of the economy, from tech to health to education to property to private equity to gaming.

In terms of tech, there are now sharp limits on IPOs in the US (mirrored from the US side) and new algo/pricing and data regulations that require Beijing to hold on to it; the private tuition field was made non-profit; there has been a sharp reduction in credit to property developers along with the official message that “houses are for living in, not speculation”, and rental increase caps of 5% annually; under-18s have been limited to just 3 hours of computer gaming a week, in allotted slots; and private equity has been cut off from residential investment.

Beijing has also called for curbs on “excessive” income, and for the wealthy and profitable firms “to give back more to society.” (Tencent already pledged $15bn.) This is also matched by: a social campaign against excessive business drinking, “unpatriotic” karaoke songs, and celebrity culture; ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ made obligatory at all schools and universities; and, as Bloomberg puts it, controls on social media financial commentary – “China to Cleanse Online Content that ‘Bad Mouths’ its Economy”.

This has all taken place under the slogan of “Common Prosperity”. (And for those who need the market-facing implications of this first, please see What is to be done?)

Going further, commentary reposted by Chinese state media on 30 August stressed these changes are a “profound revolution” sweeping the country, warning anyone who resisted would face punishment. It added: “This is a return from the capital group to the masses of the people, and this is a transformation from capital-centred to people-centred,” marking a return to the original intention of the Communist Party, and “Therefore, this is a political change, and the people are becoming the main body of this change again, and all those who block this people-centred change will be discarded.”

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The Orwellian Vaccine Passport Agenda Relies On The Lie Of The “Social Contract”, by Brandon Smith

Posted on September 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

There is no such thing as group rights apart from the individual rights of the individuals in the group. Nobody can be justly bound by a contract he or she did not sign or agree to, particularly a “social contract.” From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:

There is a fundamental question that needs to be asked when examining the vaccine passport issue, and what I find is that almost no one in the mainstream is tackling it directly. The question is this:

Is it legally and morally acceptable to constrict the rights and economic access of people in order to force them to submit to an experimental “vaccine”, or any other medical procedure for that matter?

Furthermore, who gets to decide what medical procedures are acceptable to enforce? Who gets to be the all powerful and benevolent overseer of every human being’s health path. I ask this because I don’t think many people realize the future repercussions of allowing governments or corporations (the same thing these days) to dictate covid vaccinations. It doesn’t stop there; in fact, we have no idea where this stops once the Pandora’s box is opened.

For example, the primary argument of the covid cult and the establishment in favor of vaccine passports is the “social contract” fantasy. They claim that because we “live in a society”, everything we do affects everyone else in some way, and because we are all interconnected in our “collective” we are thus beholden to the collective. In other words, the collective has the “right” to micro-manage the life of the individual because if the individual is allowed to make his/her own decisions they might potentially cause harm to the whole group.

In case you are not familiar with this philosophy it is an extension of socialism and cultural Marxism, and it stands at the very core of vaccine passport propaganda. I have actually had public debates with pro-socialist people in the past who have tried to defend the merits of socialism and every single time the argument comes down to one singular disconnect – I say that if a group of people want to go off and start their own little socialist community they have every right to…as long as it is VOLUNTARY. Then if it fails and collapses it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t affect me or anyone else who did not want to participate.

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When the Constitution Fails Us, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on September 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

When the Constitution fails us, it’s time for new arrangements. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

I have been writing for years asking if we still have the U.S. Constitution. That issue has come into sharper focus in the past 18 months as mayors and governors have created dictatorial powers and exercised those powers to interfere with personal autonomy in America. They have done this in utter disregard for the freedoms protected by the Constitution they have sworn to uphold by asserting that public health trumps personal liberty.

Here is the backstory.

Government is essentially the negation of freedom. If the values underlying the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — maximum personal liberty and minimal government — are to be taken seriously, then we all know that government has gone so far astray as to make it unrecognizable to the revolutionaries who fought the British and the founders and framers who wrote and ratified the Constitution and its first 10 amendments.

Those underlying values are generally articulated in the first eight amendments, which restrain the government from interfering in personal liberty. The Ninth Amendment codifies that our rights are too numerous to list, and thus it requires the government to respect the natural unenumerated rights of all persons, in addition to those rights specifically enumerated.

The 10th Amendment reflects the ratifiers’ public understanding that the Constitution is a compact, voluntarily entered into by sovereign states; and when they entered, they only surrendered to the federal government those powers enumerated in the Constitution, and thus they retained the powers not surrendered.

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Force Ruins Everything, by Eric Peters

Posted on August 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

The day a person realizes the essential nature of government—its foundation is violence, it rules by force—is the day that person becomes “woke,” and there’s no going back. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

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When the government requires you to buy something (or take something) it is prima facie evidence there is probably something wrong with it. That there is little, if any, benefit to you – especially if you are a responsible, prudent person – and probably a great benefit to those who are not. Who are almost invariably the ones insisting you be made to buy (or take) whatever it is they favor forcing you to buy (or take).

Car insurance falls into this category.

It is not an evil thing, as such – but becomes so when it is required. The latter being too polite, too evasive a word. When the government requires anything it is threatening everyone.

You will buy insurance – or else.

So as to be made to pay for the harms you haven’t caused – as well as those caused by others.

Instead of coverage based upon you, the individual – and your individual risk profile, based on actuals harms you have or have not caused and your particular individual likelihood of causing harm in the future, extrapolated from your specific record – you are collectivized into a herd of people whose risk (and actual causing of harms) is higher. And because this mafia can force you to pay, you are made to pay on the basis of tenuous-at-best “risk factors” such as the number of tickets you have received for various traffic infractions.

All of them pretexts and excuses.

If they had no power to force you to pay, they would not dare to raise your premium to the exorbitant levels now commonplace – which are commonplace precisely because they can force you to pay them. They wouldn’t be able to impose a 20 percent “surcharge” just because you received a ticket for doing 42 in a 35 – because you could simply cancel the policy.

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