The debate over censorship is maturing quickly. And the manner in which it is happening sends a clear message: the censors are losing the debate. They cannot defend what they have done over the last 4-plus years and now can only resort to forced silencing.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the day – resistance is rarely futileMarch 30th, 2024 |
 26 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – resistance is rarely futileLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I don’t think that there should be any debate. If you disagree with other people’s opinions you don’t silence them you refute them. If you can’t do that then it is pretty likely that you are the one that is wrong. In addition, if it turns out that you are wrong, change your mind, it doesn’t hurt and the alternative is to stay wrong.
Margaret Thatcher can teach today’s Tories how to win
Not so, John Galt, because today’s tories are nothing of the sort. Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t recognise what the Conservative Party has now become as even deserving of the name.
@JuliaM – Which is why we have to cast our minds back to 1975 and the words of St. Margaret to be reminded.
Tories delenda est!
Vote Reform!
In UK as in Belgium, EU or USA, the politicians are not the problem, but the people ..
Good post – Jeffrey Tucker is presenting a hopeful case.
The Collectivists know they are wrong, wrong about Covid, wrong about Net Zero, wrong about more money making the NHS and the benefits system work, wrong about race and “gender”, wrong about everything.
They resort to censorship because they know their policies, whether it is “equity based mathematics” (do not laugh – California, the largest population State in America, has just adopted this, vast numbers of children are being harmed) or anything else, do terrible harm – and they fear being exposed.
The evil, and the Collectivists are evil – they know their policies cause harm and they push them because they cause harm, are still greatly outnumbered – they understand that if the level of harm they are intentionally doing was exposed, ordinary people would defeat them.
Hence the censorship.
As for the specific point about the Covid “vaccines” – the evidence against them is great.
To carry on the “safe and effective” mantra is wrong, and to say “I can state, unequivocally, that the Covid vaccines are safe” to the House of Commons, is wrong.
What may have been a honest, but tragic, error some years ago – is not just an error now, Now when people say these things they know (yes know) they are not telling the truth.
Unfortunately, Paul, the first rule of telling lies is never, ever admit that you told a lie.
I’m now resigned to a Labour government to end out the year, no matter how I vote (and vote I will, even though it will prove fruitless).
@JuliaM – I wouldn’t get too disheartened. Talk of Labour having a landslide of 400+ seats is nonsense. Might have happened under Tony B. Liar but it won’t happen with Sir Kneels-a-lot.
This is something to the opposite of the “Shy Tory” phenomena, where all and sundry are claiming they will Vote Labour to get the Tories out (and I do agree the Tories need to be thrown out), but come poling day, whenever that is, I firmly believe that most will just stay home as always, riven by apathy.
Sure, the Red-Rosette-on-a-pig brigade will vote Labour, but that’s a far smaller constituency than ever before and declining. Some will wear a clothes peg on their nose and vote Tory simply because they can’t bring themselves to vote Labour under any circumstances and folk like myself will vote Reform.
So, I see a far more complex picture emerging after the election. Yes, I think Labour will still win with a working majority, since vast swathes of Tories staying home guarantees that, but it will be nowhere near the ridiculous number of seats that the poling organisations are talking about.
My expectation at the moment is a Labour majority of about 100.
Tories delenda est!
Vote Reform!
Rour le Jour – there is much (dark) wisdom in what you say, but had the Prime Minister said “there are indeed some doubts now – things we know now, that we did not know then” or something like that, then he could have maintained a position – after all he was NOT the person making health decisions when the injections were being pushed.
By saying “I can state, unequivocally, that the Covid vaccines are safe” the Gentleman destroyed the image of a “nice man who means well” that his staff were working to create.
The Gentleman did NOT have to admit ever lying himself, or that anyone else had lied, he just had to not lie to the House of Commons when asked the question a few wees ago (there were a thousand ways to answer Mr Bridgen’s question without telling a lie) – but, instead, we got the terrible “unequivocal” direct lie – showing contempt for the people killed and injured by the injections.
John Galt – a Labour Majority of 100 will be more than enough to destroy this country, I do not believe you grasp just how radical they are under the moderate sounding language. And voting “Reform” will make a Labour victory inevitable.
Yet what have I got to offer you instead? See above – and you will understand my desperate state of mind.
At this point it is hard, very hard, to keep the thoughts of leaving this world at bay.
Anybody saying “I can state, unequivocally, that the Covid vaccines are safe” is either lying or is a moron. It is impossible to say *ANY* biologically active influence is “unequivocally” safe. Drink more than 50 gallons of water and you’ll die. Eat more than 300 cough drops and you’ll die. Eat one peanut when you have a peanut allergy and you’ll die.
Can only resort to forced silencing? Forced silencing is the entire problem. If someone to keep his yap shut no one is forcing him to open it. Get serious, huh?
As I have been saying for years, now… It will be successful. Right up until it isn’t.
The various lying liars will be going in to work every morning, blithely happy in their labors. All will be normal, as it was…
And, then “suddenly”, it will not be the same, at all. All at once, it will seem, the switch will have been flipped, and we’ll be in a new world where all the paradigms of the past seem inoperable. Much surprise will be demonstrated at it all, innocent proclamations made of “I didn’t know!!!!”, and a bunch of people will be led off to the nearest convenient wall.
That’s the way of it. Things will go on, as they are… Until they don’t. Then, they’ll be… Different. Likely, unrecognizable to those who didn’t experience the inflection point, the transition. Nonetheless, they will eventuate.
Anyone expecting all this to continue as it has been is an idiot. The morons in charge are running a huge overdraft account with reality, and once the bankers in charge of that call in their dues, well… It’ll all be like unto Timisoara. Hardly anyone sees these things coming, in advance. They’re blindingly obvious, only in retrospect.
jgh – he is NOT a moron, therefore…..
And to the people saying to themselves “a politician lying – so what else in not new” – direct lying, about a life-and-death matter, to the House of Commons is quite rare.
Also note that not a single “Opposition” Party (Labour, Liberal, SNP….) has opposed any of this.
This is NOT one bad man who happens to be First Lord of the Treasury – this is the (all party) establishment in full cover-up mode.
And it is NOT “water under the bridge” – as the government may well be about to hand over power to the World Health Organisation.
The way the agreements are structured – to prevent such an international power grab a national government must formally say “no”, must formally opt out.
What are the chances of a formal “no” from the United Kingdom?
Kirk – some say the de facto bankruptcies of various Western nations are deliberate, that they are “not a bug – they are a feature”.
So that the governments of France, Britain, America and so on can at some point soon – perhaps as soon as 2025 – say “our national monetary and financial system has failed – we must move to an international system”.
NOT a return to gold or silver – to honest money and honest money lending (rather than Credit Bubble banking) – but rather a move to take fiat money and credit bubble finance to the ultimate extreme.
An extreme of an international digital currency (or linked digital currencies) which would control how much peopole could spend, how long they had to spend it, and what they spent it on (and, before anyone mentions the matter, I am aware of the statements of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor and I am aware of the family connections of the Prime Minister – this is a lot bigger than all that).
With such a system it would no longer matter what customers (ordinary people) thought about products and services – as all spending (in a system that Henri Saint-Simon could only dream of two centuries ago) would be guided by a Technocratic Corporate State elite – in the name of “science” and “equity”.
“In UK as in Belgium, EU or USA, the politicians are not the problem, but the people ..”
Or, as I like to say: A people always gets the government it deserves.
Paul Marks said:
I feel like I keep needing to make a point of reminding people this, because nobody seems to get it: All of these machinations fall down on one key point, which is that before they can implement their long dark night of financial world control, the new system has to work.
I see lots of signs that these cretins can break things. I see none that they can build anything that anyone else wants to participate in and support.
It’s the same fallacy behind the Gramscian scouring of the commons; sure, great… You have control of the heights, in the media and popular culture. Slight problem, though… Your ideological lock, as expressed in your worldview and utter lack of pragmatism means that those institutions you wormed your way into, capturing them? They don’t mean anything, any more: People aren’t paying attention to you because the bias is so obvious; people won’t go watch your politically correct entertainments. You’ve accomplished nothing, aside from burning up resources like an arsonist in a refinery tank farm.
So, great… They break international finance and bankrupt nations. Then what?
Observe the CCP’s fate, in coming years. You think that by disenfranchising all those people, and creating the incentives to suborn the system that they have, that the whole thing will somehow accrue to keep them going?
It won’t. It’ll all fail, spectacularly. These morons are all trying to recreate the old hydraulic empires of the ancient past, for the same reasons… Static power and wealth. Sad news, though: The modern world does not work that way. And, trying to force it into that form is going to have about as much success as keeping a river in its course. You can do it, for a bit… Eventually, that river will have its way, and the new course will likely destroy everything you tried to straight-jacket it with.
Let me try to lay out what is going on, in an easily digestible form (yeah, I know… I’m trying…):
The Klaus Schwab elite all think they’re smarter than everyone else, and should be running everything in the world. Problem is? Complexity, and their own arrogance.
Allow me to illustrate where that “I know better” mentality gets you, in some smaller circumstances…
We had a family-run lumberyard locally. Covered a goodly chunk of our part of the state, with four retail locations and a decent chunk of the construction market. Final owner didn’t have kids, got old, decided to sell out. Sold to another, slightly bigger operation. Way of the world, that…
Now, what’s really exquisitely stupid? The existing operation managed to make pretty good money, kept people happy, and competed quite well with bigger regional and national chains. New guys came in, brought their managers and so forth in, and… Yeah. The whole thing has been an exercise in pissing the existing client base off.
For one thing, one of the very first things that they did was move over their buying to their own people, running out of contractors in a major metro area. Everything that existed in terms of what the stores stocked, for the local market? Thrown out… Of course, the new guys are bigger and smarter! They know better…
Used to be, you needed something like an irrigation part or something, you went up there, they had it. Not a problem… Now? Oh, my Gawd… You go up, spend a half-hour trying to find something, and… Nope. No longer stocked, ‘cos the buyers in the big city didn’t see a need for it. Contractors can’t get the little stuff they used to be able to get, so it is now a twenty-thirty mile drive into the next biggest town.
You may not know this, but every successful retailer has in its possession some pretty valuable intellectual property: The knowledge of what has sold out of that location for years and years… You know what sort of toilet valve has been sold and installed in the area, you then know what to keep on hand for repair parts. Things like that… What brands of pesticides work best on the local bugs, what sort of lumber is needed when during the year…
All that sort of thing is invaluable, and theoretically, why the hell you bought out a local operation yourself instead of starting your own store in the area. There’s a wealth of knowledge embedded in that store’s customer base, the stocking lists, the suppliers… You change that? Willy-nilly, without thought as to the established norms and bases?
Don’t be real surprised when you start shedding customers, who can go elsewhere. If you don’t have the specific part they need to repair the toilet, then they’ll make the drive, go into the bigger town… And, likely start doing that for everything, instead of first giving you a chance at their money. Don’t be surprised when your stores start losing money.
You ask me where all this ties in with the Klaus Schwab types? It’s the same damn principle; they think they “know better” and imagine that they can run the world, ignoring all that embedded tribal knowledge that is embodied in the existing economic systems they’re trying to suborn. Guess what? They don’t even know the basic parameters of the problem; they imagine they do, sitting where they’re at, but… They can’t. It’s the same issue with the idiots running the stocking lists at our local lumberyard; they do not have the intimate market knowledge that these stores had, because they deliberately and with malice aforethought, threw it all away. Literally. I saw the reams and reams of printouts from decades of sales in the recycling bin, when they transitioned. They also don’t talk to their customers; they don’t even talk to their employees to find out what the customers are coming in for; there’s no way to even report that critical little detail of “Why did customer come in, look around, leave without making purchase…?”
The international idjit class is on the verge of doing this on an international scale with the financial system, imagining they can somehow keep all the balls in the air. Never mind that there are a bunch that are invisible to them, and some are way too big to juggle…
Kirk – yes the system being created will not work.
But they are going to do it anyway – so civilisation declines.
The “reforms” of the Emperor Diocletian (crushing taxation, state factories, everyone compelled to stay tied to the land, later in chains if it was deemed they might try and run away, or tied to some urban job) did not work – on the contrary they doomed Roman civilisation to decline. But these “reforms” are praised in all establishment history text books – we are told they “ended the crises of the third century” (the Empire had already been reunited by Aurelian and Probus – but “details-details”) and other blatant lies.
The establishment are just going to carry on with their insane doctrines (DEI, SEG, Net Zero, Digital Currency – and on and on, renaming the doctrines but carrying on with them) till they destroy what is left of Western civilisation, and the world is inherited by China, or by Islam, or by – whoever.
“there will have to be a vast expansion of NUCLEAR POWER.”
Our future is (eventually) thorium. If we are to have a future.
@Paul Marks,
See… The thing is, despair is a sin. Not to mention, we’re not in the situation that the Roman people were during Diocletian’s era.
There are self-correcting features in today’s society that were not present during his day. Do note the loss of credibility that the formerly monopolistic media are experiencing, with the accompanying loss of actual power.
The common man can readily see what is going on; the conditions are very, very different because of that.
I don’t know what is going to happen, but I don’t see them collapsing the system as badly as the Romans bunged up the Western Roman Empire.
And, do remember: Rome, as a whole, did not actually fall until 1453-ish, if you take the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople as your end-point.
You don’t have to be a participant in your own society committing self-murder. Your social construct does not have to go down with the mass; route around it.
O.K. Kirk – let us wait and see if you are correct.
We will know in November.
If there is no correction then, there will be no correction – as everything, including the Supreme Court (so no more Bill of Rights) will come under the control of the totalitarians if the left-establishment successfully rig the 2024 election.
And if America falls, the rest of the West can not stand.
I heartily disagree with Tucker’s conclusion, and with commenter Kirk’s premise.
The censors are not “losing the debate,” leviathan is not “losing its grip on power,” nor are they (or it) resorting to anything. “Speech bans” and “secret methods, courts and coercion” are strategically effective methods that must be deployed alongside PR campaigns in Western Civ-aligned nations.
Tucker focuses on the censors, but the censors are playing a role. At this point, they are trotted out to mouth words, dull the ears, dilly-dally the debate down various wormholes. Those in power (the nefarious “they”) don’t care who’s winning the current debate, for they know that having a debate at all indicates they are gaining the advantage, even if they are sailing into a strong headwind.
For example, China imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020. While defending/debating the original NSL, China kept tacking. On March 20, Hong Kong’s own legislature unanimously passed Article 23, a supplementary and more powerful NSL; it went into effect 3 days later. In 4 short years, Beijing brought everyone in line.
Tucker’s list of salient facts, including a woefully accurate assessment that “a whole generation of young adults with high-end educations are being taught that censorship is wonderful, necessary, and virtuous,” leads to his guardedly hopeful conclusion: “In any case, what matters now is that…we are only debating whether [government influence, collusion and/or coercion] is a good or bad thing and whether it should be legal to do so. One must suppose that this is progress.”
Yikes!! Any debate other than the length of Starbird’s prison sentence along with sentence recommendations for her DHS collaborators and scores of other federal agents and their subcontractors is an acquiescence to losing the war.
My opposition to Kirk’s premise (“the new system has to work”) is based on the same rationale and begins again with defining terms. No, the proposed new system doesn’t have to work in the way that Kirk uses the term. We know, they know, all educated persons know that it won’t work. However, it is the proposition of a new system that carries import. Based on analyses of historical examples (Hayek, Hoffer, others), the proposition must be dumbed down into repeatable, actionable slogans and then – accompanied by govt-enforced cancellations, censoring, etc – the proposition itself will carry the day, having accomplished the purpose for which it was designed: facilitating seizure of all economic activity and political power.
Censors have just won the debate in Scotland with the new law about causing offence.
Quentin – the least difficult way to “win” a debate is to prevent the debate by making dissent a “crime”.
The international elite are well aware of this – which is why they have “Hate Speech” laws in almost all countries.
The last country where there is, at least in theory, Freedom of Speech is the United States – you will lose your job (thanks to the “Woke” Corporations – backed by the Credit-Money of the Federal Reserve), but you will not be fined or sent to prison – but the left are eating away at that in the United States, declaring (for example) that pointing out that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged is some sort of offence (for which you will be disbarred as a lawyer), sending people to prison for joke “memes” (“memes” actually invented by their political opponents – who are NOT sent to prison), and fining Mark Steyn (a dying man) a million Dollars for telling the truth about the fraudster Michael Mann.
And it is not just corrupt judges – it is also corrupt juries, juries of leftists. We now know that leftist juries are even prepared to covinct someone of murder (to be sent to prison, to be cut up) when they know (they know) that no murder has taken place – that the “victim” died of drugs he willingly consumed.
So such juries have will have no problem at all in convicting people for “Hate Speech”.
A couple of appointments to the Supreme Court and it is all over – the 1st Amendment, and the rest of the Bill of Rights.
If the establishment get away with rigging the 2024 election as they did the 2020 election – that is the end, not just of the United States, but of all the West.
All dissent will be “Hate Speech” – everywhere.