The tide of Capitalism

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The eventual extreme of current-day capitalism staying its course is that everything – absolutely everything in human life – becomes a commodity up for trade. Have Facebook’s unrestrained piecemeal sales of your most private data not yet woken you up to this?

Many people both right and center keep bemoaning the undesirability of any and all socialism, but really, you should question what hope you have in this world of not being turned into a canned product, if there is /no socialism whatsoever/ to stem the flood of commodification?

Sankte Hans, the 23rd of June

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Today, Denmark celebrates the marking of Midsummer under the local name and tradition of Skt. Hans. Unfortunately, the countryside is too dry to celebrate with the usual bonfires due to the fire hazard, so the celebrations are more “relaxed” for many. Few or no bonfires in any case.

I am happy to say that I’ve managed to reclaim my old domain Liberterran.org which I gave up on some years back – the ones that snatched it up have released it, so back into my fold it goes, albeit with /some/ changes to its original Paleo-liberal/Individualist-anarchist ideology. :o)

Happy Midsummer, all!

Reminder in re Freedom of Speech

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I’ll have you commit to mind, that the people who are dismissive or unsupportive of the freedom of speech and freedom of expression of others, rarely have anything of import or insight to say.

Was everything regarding statecraft and jurisprudence up to these people, liberal democracy would collapse into belligerent recriminations and violence in a year.

Happy 2022 to all

As we are entering the third year of the COVID-19 debacle, I hope this year will be the high watermark of the pandemic, though I sense we will have to arm ourselves with patience irt. when we will return to a semblance of normality.

We shall see. Best of luck to you all. Be sensible.

Quick responses to the usual GW skeptic talking points

“So much snow, how can this be global warming!?”
The world is bigger than your back garden, you know.

“It was such a long and cold winter two years ago, how can there be such a thing as global warming?!”
For the same reason that a drizzle of snow into April does not mean that summer’s cancelled.

“Scientists are only doing it for the money.”
Even in the decades before there was any significant political or media attention about the global climate?

Oh, yeah, those postdocs are /really/ living the sweet life with fat paycheques they get from their plentiful for research grants on their desks year in and year out!

“Climate and environment and all that stuff is only something lefties talk about.”
That’s because ‘lefties’ are the only ones who give a damn when scientists have something of concern to say.

“Green energy schemes and such just makes us poorer.”
The same way that sandbagging your house does when the levee is about to break? Sandbags are expensive, you know.

“Curtailing carbon energy use will crash the economy!”
Right, because a, say 0.5% short-term drop in GNP growth will spell permanent doom for society.

“Ending coal use causes unemployment!”

As if employment in a danky coal mine is just dandy. Miners lung and tunnel collapses are after all just is something that comes with the job, and better stick with the devil you know, right?

Yeah, okay. And mountaintop removal also gives the wife and kids the sorely needed food supplements since foodstuffs are generally deficient in lead and mercury. We don’t want to rob you of those benefits either, do we? Fecking environmentalists.

“I know that it’s all a hoax! I can prove it, I have years of expertise in <this or that field of engineering>”.

Then why the damn are you spending your time in this debate forum then when you could be out there harvesting fame and Nobel prizes left and right? Oh, wait.

“Climate is chaotic and can’t be modelled. So all these models are just bunk and useless!”

The movement of water molecules in a pot of boiling water on your stove is also chaotic, yet that doesn’t mean that you won’t be certain to scald your hand by plunging it into it.

“Government should stay out of this!”

Right, because all private economic decision makers that operates on a for-profit basis will spontaneously and cooperatively can be trsuted to act in the best interest of the global society and curtail their use of carbon fuels.

“There isn’t a problem, you or the goverment have nothing to do in this regard.”

Keep saying that when I’m opening up a landfill in front of your house. You got a problem with that? Tough.

“NASA just can’t be trusted.”

You have an alternative source of data and analysis of this data, then? If that is the case, why should we trust them with anything?

 

“You don’t get to take my money!”

I don’t give a feck about your money. Spend it on whatever you like. But DO care about what eventually happens  when you put to use whatever you buy with your money.

Buy yourself a buzzsaw, tear down the old pines in the back of the garden and have yourself a good time with the buddies. Lovely. Fine with me. But when you throw on some old tires on just for the hell of it, with me living right next door and having a garden party as well, then it’s not fine with me anymore.

I don’t care about you buying plenty of bourbon, but I DO care if you go on a merry drive in the city after having a generous sample of it.

Buy all the guns and ammo that you’d like and get to it at the firing range; I haven’t a care. In fact, that’s great! But the day your rounds start land on my grounds, then I start caring – a lot.

 

You get the point.  You got it before you read this far. Its likely that you even got it before you came to read this.

 

So, if you come up on a bunch of guys pissing in the big swimming pool where everyone else are spending their time, do you call them out on it* or tell yourself “nah, its probably lemonade”?

*) I was about to add “…and tell them to piss off”, but I caught myself.

Adding to Hitchens’ deconstruction of Islam,

…now, that one thing is that Islam is incoherent, parochial, backwards, stupid, brutal and basically false, as much is clear from not only Hitchens’ words and wit, but from the sources of scholarship on the subject. More unsettling is that that the political tradition that has historically, or at least over the past 200 or so years been in opposition to these religions of old, have over the past fifty years increasingly made themselves useful idiots for degrading western intellectual discourse and progressivism as well as societal coherence and stability by watering down the toxic nature of a backwards nomadic religion as entirely permissible, nay outright _desirable_ in the cultural makeup of a modern society. Now, actual, true to traditionally leftists are somewhat seen as heretics in the contemporary left-leaning political sphere since it is comme-il-faut to pay lip service to the culturally enhancing effect of open borders to people who have neither contributed to an affluent society by their labor yet expect to reap the benefit of membership of it, nor has added to and is less likely to contribute in maintaining a secular and progressive society of openness, absence of religious dominance of the citizenry, or the equal legal rights or general dignity of women.

Odd is it also that the degraded ranks of leftists have kowtow’d to what can likewise be considered a bastardized version of the economic-liberal notion of “free movement of labor”, only that it is less labor asmuch as it is a free movement of dysculture.

Distasteful, annoying, unpopular, indecent, but free and unharassed

Outlawing shitty speech won’t make shitty speech or the mindset it envelops go away, only make it less visible. It will linger in shadowy places where the public can barely see it, where it does not receive the scrutiny and scorn it might deserve and where awareness of it has faded to the point where civil and safe countermeasures against its spread will be too little and too late to halt its spread once it does once again advance.

Likewise, the outlawing of free speech tends to erode what speech is reasonable and necessary, though usually unpopular.

Where the former threatens to annihilate a free civil society in a backwards way by inducing a reactionary series of clamoring of hostilities and brazenly spurious calls for “law and order”, the latter will slowly eviscerate the freedoms and open institutions of a liberal democracy as well as civic associations by way of a dysmoral induction of citizens into the policing each other as that of a razor blade that progressively shaves a notch too closely, eventually leaving the skin not seemly, but bloodied.

The first tends to cause harm on the body of the public in a tangible manner, ie. authoritarian and brutal; the second leading to a rise of a diffuse totalitarianism by way of control of the mind of the public consciousness.

Freedom is preserved by members of the general public who posess the courage to walk the tightrope over a chasm of two species faux decency; that tightrope spun from the yarn of a freedom of discourse and expression of a standard high yet not unreasonably so, in a braid together with a firmness of conviction that the means of freedom are the ones that must be used to exhaustion to guard and preserve them as a whole, even when the means of force by ways of government or vigilante thuggery seem alluring to ‘solve’ these problems of individuals voicing their hatred and abomintion, real or imagined.

Surely, the nasty people with the nasty ideas will go away when swiped away by a mightier force; a hand directed by those of us decent. And we will probably never need to use that forceful hand again, will we? Or do we even care?

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May a free New Year be brought to you and your fellow citizens ask in return that you throw in your efforts to bring a free and thus hopefully good and safe New Year to them as well.