Category Archives: Philosophy

What Is Real Wealth? by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on September 19, 2017 | Leave a comment

Philosophers have pondered the question through the ages: what is real wealth? Here’s Charles Hugh Smith’s answer, at oftwominds.com.

As for acquiring capital–the most important types of capital don’t require much money.
What is real wealth? Money, right? Currency, gold, quatloos, you name it. Money is real wealth because you can use it to buy whatever you want.
I would argue money in any form is only the means to acquire real wealth, which is the agency, opportunity and time to pursue your life’s work.
The conventional view of wealth is money and leisure has it all wrong. Let’s imagine the owner of a vault of conventional treasure: jewels, gold coins, etc.
If the “wealth” stays in the vault, what’s the point of owning this “wealth”? The secret satisfaction of being “wealthy”?
If “wealth” is only an internal state, then let’s measure friendship and being needed/wanted as the metrics of “wealth.” You see the point; if “wealth” is merely an internal state of satisfaction, then a vault full of “money” is a poor metric.
What money buys that is real wealth is freedom and control of one’s life. This control over one’s life is called agency. Agency is defined as “the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment.” This may not seem like a profound concept, but another way to describe agency is that agency is the opposite of powerlessness.
People with agency define themselves and their identity; they shape the world they inhabit rather than passively await whatever circumstances deliver up.
In the real world, people with agency move on when things no longer work for them in a particular situation. Agency is not just the opposite of feeling powerless; it’s also the opposite of victimhood, i.e. the state of being in which others are held responsible for all of one’s travails and difficulties.
To continue reading: What Is Real Wealth?
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How Women are Treated by Islam, by Denis MacEoin

Posted on September 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

This is a difficult article to read. Which means, as SLL always says about difficult articles, that this is one you should make sure you read. From Denis MacEoin at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • “No one wants to demonise a particular community but the fact that this is happening again and again in the same circumstances and communities is a fact we cannot ignore. I think there needs to be a national approach…” — Greg Stone, Liberal Democrat party.
  • If we look at a list of 265 convictions for grooming gangs and individuals in the UK between November 1997 and January 2017 (and if we add on another 18 for the recent Newcastle gang), we will note that more than 99% are for Muslim men, mainly young men in their 20s and 30s.
  • It is, however, not just white (that is, non-Muslim) women whom Muslim men hold in such contempt. This abuse starts at home in Islamic countries in the treatment of Muslim women. Its roots lie in aspects of Islamic law and doctrine that are retained in the 21st century, despite having been formulated in the 7thcentury and later.
  • The idea that a man is not responsible for rape or other sexual assault and that women bear the blame for such a crime goes far to help explain why Muslim men in Britain and elsewhere may feel themselves justified in grooming and sexually abusing young women and girls far less well covered.

Newcastle upon Tyne is a small city in the North-East of England which, in 2017, was acclaimed the best city in the UK in which to raise children (London was the worst). Imagine, then, the shock when the city again became national news on August 9 when a trial at the Crown Court ended in the conviction of 18 people for the sexual grooming of children. Juries “found the men guilty of a catalogue of nearly 100 offences – including rape, human trafficking, conspiracy to incite prostitution and drug supply – between 2011 and 2014.”

Of the 18, one was a white British woman. The rest were males of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iraqi, Turkish and Iranian backgrounds, all with Muslim names.

 

 

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Major Disinformation Trend In 2017: Fascists Were The Good Guys? by Brandon Smith

Posted on September 13, 2017 | Leave a comment

The globalists’ plan, according to Brandon Smith, is to link conservative and liberty movements with fascism. From Smith at alt-market.com:

Years ago in 2012, I published a thorough examination of disinformation tactics used by globalist institutions as well as government and political outfits to manipulate the public and undermine legitimate analysts working to expose particular truths of our social and economic conditions. If you have not read this article, titled Disinformation: How It Works, I highly recommend you do so now. It will act as a solid foundation for what I am about to discuss in this article. Without a basic understanding of how lies are utilized, you will be in no position to grasp the complexities of disinformation trends being implemented today.

Much of what I am about to discuss will probably not become apparent for much of the mainstream and portions of the liberty movement for many years to come. Sadly, the biggest lies are often the hardest to see until time and distance are achieved.

If you want to be able to predict geopolitical and economic trends with any accuracy, you must first accept a couple of hard realities. First and foremost, the majority of cultural shifts and fiscal developments within our system are a product of social engineering by an organized collective of power elites. Second, you must understand that this collective is driven by the ideology of globalism — the pursuit of total centralization of financial and political control into the hands of a select few deemed as “superior” concertmasters or “maestros.” As globalist insider, CFR member and mentor to Bill Clinton, Carroll Quigley, openly admitted in his book Tragedy And Hope:

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”

The philosophical basis for the globalist ideology is most clearly summarized in the principles of something called “Fabian Socialism,” a system founded in 1884 which promotes the subversive and deliberate manipulation of the masses towards total centralization, collectivism and population control through eugenics. Fabian Socialists prefer to carry out their strategies over a span of decades, turning a population against itself slowly, rather than trying to force changes to a system immediately and outright.  Their symbol is a coat of arms depicting a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or in some cases a turtle (slow and steady wins the race?) with the words “When I strike I strike hard.”

To continue reading; Major Disinformation Trend In 2017: Fascists Were The Good Guys?

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He Said That? 8/30/17

Posted on August 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

From Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), American writer on social and political philosophy (letter to Mrs. Blumberg 27 September 1977):

There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know precisely what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and want badly to say it, then all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice.

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“Liberal Socialism” — Another False Utopia, by Richard M. Ebeling

Posted on August 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

Good ideas are often ephemeral; bad ones have life everlasting. From Richard M. Ebeling at mises.org:

Very often bad and failed ideas do not die, they simply reappear during periods of supposed social and political crisis in slightly different intellectual garb, and offer “solutions” that would merely help to bring about some of the very types of crises for which they once again claim to have the answers. Socialism in its various “progressive” mutations represents one of the leading ones in our time.

The latest manifestation of this appeared on August 24, 2017 in the New Republic online in an article by John B. Judis on, “The Socialism America Needs Now.” He is heartened by the wide appeal, especially among younger voters, that Bernie Sanders received during the 2016 presidential contest. He thinks that this may herald a rebirth and a renewed possibility for a socialist alternative to the current American political and economic system.

Having traveled over the decades from the 1970s to the present from being a radical, revolutionary socialist to a more “moderate” one today, Mr. Judis admits that the Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries is now long passé. The embarrassing experience of “socialism-in-practice” in the form Lenin and Stalin created in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in China will not fly anymore.

From Soviet Central Planning to “Liberal Socialism”

Central planning seemed not to work too well, and the “communist” variation on the socialist theme also had a tendency to be “authoritarian” with some drawbacks for human life and liberty. (He tactfully avoids mentioning that Marxist-inspired regimes in the twentieth century murdered well over a 100 million people — with some estimates suggesting the number might have been closer to 150 million or more in the name of building the “bright, beautiful socialist future.” See my article, “The Human Cost of Socialism in Power”.)

He turns his mind and ideal to the “democratic socialist” parties and regimes in Western Europe in the post-World War II era, or as Mr. Judis prefers to call it, following John Maynard Keynes, “liberal socialism.” What makes this form of socialism “liberal”? It is belief that there can be a “socialism with a human face.” In other words, a form of “economic” socialism that leaves in place democratic politics with a respect for a broad range of personal and civil liberties.

To continue reading: “Liberal Socialism” — Another False Utopia

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He Said That? 8/25/17

Posted on August 25, 2017 | 1 comment

From Michelangelo (1475–1564), Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet:

The greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hits.

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Crossing the Line: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, by Doug “Uncola” Lynn

Posted on August 24, 2017 | Leave a comment

Will America be irretrievably divided? Has it already crossed a line into an unstoppable descent? Doug “Uncola” Lynn adroitly weaves Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian into an analysis of those questions. From Lynn at theburningplatform.com:

On August 21, 2017 the narrow line of a solar eclipse’s shadow cut a path of totality right through the middle of the United States, dividing north from south.  If one believed in signs from the heavens they could make a pretty good case of an astronomical pairing to recent headlines depicting America as broken in two.  Of course the division began long ago, perhaps from the time of our nation’s earliest constitutional convention, through the Civil War era, and onward into modernity as the country has once again become mired in a civil war; this time the fight raging between the globalists and those striving to maintain constitutional national sovereignty. Obviously, before the utopian one-worlders can realize their ultimate new economic, political, and possibly spiritual, order, the atavistic and anachronistic United States must fall.  It is a fight unto death.  The winners take all.

Like any anthropological conflict that has ever commenced upon the earth from the time since man first discovered stones to be denser than craniums, the squabbles are, at the beginning, ideological in nature.  Next, the divisions manifest, then materialize, politically and socially until finally, they are decided by rocks or blades or bullets and bombs.  No matter how noble sounding are the pronouncements of each side, soon lines are drawn, then crossed, as men drown in rivers of blood ebbing from battlefields into oceans on fire before coagulating down upon the ashen and soot-stained floors of hell.

To continue reading: Crossing the Line: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

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