As things dwindle down to the wire, and the country is plunged into historic political divisions pitting one extreme against other, we’re dragged along in a frenzy of misdirected aggression. Paralyzed by limbic hijack, we resort to an imitation of each other’s motions—the wisdom of the crowds replaced with a teeming madness.
It may sound too simplistic but I fear the current debt burden so high that the mental and time dimensions to rectify this with civic behaviour is limited.
Perhaps for now we must Mock the system to endure this phase
See David Graeber, "Debt:the first 5000 years". That's only the start you have to put the oligarchy under control or the process just re-starts. Putin has spent over twenty years fixing Russia's oligarchs and reducing corruption and ironically the West's sanctions greatly helped the process. I don't see such hope for the west.
In short I don't see Putin as a servant of the oligarchs, he's the leader of the Russian Federation working demonstrably for the betterment of the nation.
I was in Russia late May and early June and before that in March for a few weeks each time. Nobody there thinks that they have the power to change anything. People are pretty circumspect about critiquing the power structures there but when they do they’ve not terribly kind about them.
Debt drives those holding it mad. It is not the debt, but the fear, the fever, the nausea, the terror, that someday those holding the debt will come to collect what is owed.
I have lived debt free since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Crash of 2008-09. I believed the whole system was about to go to zero. It did. They lied to us. I recommend living debt free highly. Being debt free is better than sex. Truly. Nothing beats being debt free. It clears the mind. And the soul. I swear this to be true.
From 1913 to 2007, the value of the USD had fallen 98-percent. Common knowledge. The GFC took the last 2-percent. That is why everything since 2010 seems so unreal, so insane. It is. Eventually, ultimately, inevitably, we will arrive at that moment, our last moment of "full faith in credit." To quote a great movie, Margin Call: "This is it! I'm telling you! This is it!"
No one should struggle their whole lives to have the money they have saved be worth nothing when they need it the most -- in their old age. This is where we are.
Pay the note off. At once. Go to friends or family. Better to owe them than some nameless stranger that sees a prepper refuge (No offense. I envy you.) as "the next big thing."
We are in a debt spiral. Local, state, federal, and corporate oligarchs (all of them) are desperate for money. Your money. Your assets. And the figures are all lies.
". . . [R]esearch showed that the average new-vehicle retail transaction price has fallen compared to a year ago. In June 2023, the average new car buyer paid $46,229, but that price declined to $44,857 in June 2024, a 3% drop."
That's a lie. The price keeps going up. The value is what you are willing pay to not travel on foot, or at the mercy of some transit company that demands to know your vaccination status.
The house I bought new in 2000 for $156,000 and sold in 2010 for $320,000 just went on the market in 2021 -- for $615,000. Something is seriously f*cked up. This is what I mean by we are in a debt spiral.
My parents bought the house I grew up in, the picture-perfect little Cape Cod Colonial, in what was, back in 1962, the sweetest little suburb you could imagine, just outside of Philadelphia, for $23,000. They sold it in 1974 for $55,000. The house sold again in 2006 for $354,000.
The end result is your money is worth nothing. Why?
Because the of rate of inflation destroys the value of your money, along with the purchasing power of that money.
So, we have inflation, even when we are not supposed to have any inflation. We have money printing (another, even more pernicious form of inflation), when the printing of money was supposed to have stopped. And, QE never goes away.
Throughout History Seventy-Two Empires Have Been Engineered to Fail in the Same Way.
The crash of civilisations does not happen by accident. The crash of civilisations does not happen all at once. The crash of civilisations takes a lot of planning over a long time.
Seventy-Two Empires have been recorded and every one of them has failed in the same way. The facts have been recorded that a totalitarian and satanic elite infil-traitored and took over all these Empires and that 72 once free, flourishing and rich republics were destroyed from within by Satanic Ritual - read Toynbee. The Satanic Wanker Banker Banksters are crashing the Financial System. Satanism is gradually being instituted as the New World Religion defined by Satanic Ritual.
What I am saying is that the crash of civilisations does not happen by accident. What I am saying is that the crash of civilisations does not happen all at once. What I am saying is that the crash of civilisations takes a lot of planning over a long time to bring down a civilisation once the trigger has been pulled.
“What is important to hold in mind is that through this entire post 1971 process, capitalism itself was thus slowly turned into a time bomb which could do nothing but collapse. This means that it is fatally wrong to consider the abuses of globalization or the collapse now underway as errors, but rather as the intended consequence of the system’s design itself.”
When you can't attack the information, always attack the author, please! Do it more because when you are over the target, the flack is always more intense.
Its no more engineered than the rise and fall of fox and rabbit populations (in a closed system, obviously). It is human nature to repeat the same cycles over and over. Eventually we may break out of it, just as finches evolved to eat seeds, but evolution takes many thousands of years. I read a quote once, by who I can't remember - "we are but evolution made aware of itself". It doesn't matter what we do, we cannot escape from our nature, or from evolution.
A good (and necessarily lugubrious) diagnosis. What spoke to me most was the paragraph ending "...work toward eliminating the most damaging ones, then let flower what may. Uproot the diseased weeds and give some time for the soil to regain health—it may then surprise you in finding its own more natural path forward."
I think this means abandoning urban settings and college towns as much as possible, quietly working out parallel structures largely out of view. (The fish always rots from the head. Staying away from the head is a good idea.)
This idea reminded me serendipitously of this recent post by Chris Bray:
It was encouraging to read that there are pockets of health and sanity, just off the beaten track. No top-down solution is going to work in this country-- it's going to have to emerge spontaneously.
All I can say about the current state of the US is this...I grew up in the '50s and '60s in a village of about 30.000, and we had tremendous community...Everyone would go out of their way to help neighbors, classmates, and even total strangers...And it was pretty much the same all over the country , even in the '70s and early '80s...which my brother and I explored thoroughly. on long automobile trips..even the big city....Then politicians decided that whipping up racial turmoil, and giving blacks special privileges and promotions was good for their careers...(BTW, I worked with many fine black folk, and also had them as clients, and many of them were a troubled by the use of race as a criterion for anything.). Now we have massive distrust in a fragmented society, which is starting to fall apart...
This is a minor quibble and question - no need to jump down my neck if I'm just misinformed. but...Wait, Louis CK is a leftist? I am not denying he is because I know next to nothing about him other than his former (and still?) habit of whippin out his member and jerkin it in front of uncomfortable younger women. He was temporarily canceled for it. But he's fabulously wealthy and I've heard his routines - nothing political at all.
It's an interesting question, because the guy has been really influential through comedy. Maybe nihilist is a better descriptor, and nihilism seems to be the major ailment afflicting our society, either as a symptom of a deeper disease or the disease itself through an absence of spiritualism or relationship with God.
What happened to the hoi polloi ? Maybe our/their brains aren't functioning naturally:
Dr. Michael Nehls
"The Indoctrinated Brain ''
Nehls wrote in his 2016 paper-- Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease, @ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27429752/ -- and alluded to in his book, that we have experienced an epidemic of Alzheimer's disease. The book is essentially a presentation of our covid experience as a case study of the effort to divest us of our humanity and our individuality via the weaponization of a man-made and otherwise unremarkable virus. Nehls cites the agendas of Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World " as the templates for what is intended. And BTW, Nehls believes we can successfully resist this assault.
His paper and book struck me as the most insightful and sickening summary of what we have been going through for at least the last 25 years. The Carlson interview --which is in transcript form as well as audio, @ https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/98752696-- met and exceeded my expectations. I don't expect to provide a more succinct summary of his work than he presented in this interview.
I agree with you. I have listened to the audio version of that book. However, there is no such thing as a virus. It is all pure fiction. Mortality data worldwide shows that there was no pandemic. However, now people are dying all over from the toxic fake vaccines.
Nevertheless, the premise of the book is correct. Only the writer did not go far enough. It was all in the mind - from A to Z.
The mind virus is real and ideas both good and bad can be passed between people. Once installed, functioning within a carefully constructed framework (provided by the education system). ideas can corrupt the conscious mind and hack the bio-feedback loop causing actual physical change.
I thought that book was about brain damage intentionally caused by propoganda induced fear, not covid. I haven’t read it, but I have listened to interviews with the author
Everyone sooner or later comes to the conclusion that the root of the problem is morality, but no one wonders where that morality comes from? when someone talks about "natural" rights, how is it justified that they are "natural"? Neither morality nor the "naturalness" of "rights" can be justified by pure reason. But if pure reason is not enough, although necessary, then what else is there?
Now talking about liberty, and related to the previously stated. what is freedom and what justifies that definition? It remembers me the St. Anselm definition of freedom in "De Libertate Arbitrii"; there, it is defined as the "capacity for preserving rectitude of the will for its own sake". For St. Anselm a rational agent has freedom if the actions of this agent are self-initiated, free from external pressure, and, aimed at sustaining moral correctness.
That definition of S.t Anselm seems illogical at first glance, but what rational, and really free agent would "voluntarily" do something that harms him? one would have to ask then why acting immorally, assuming that we agreed on the origin and definition of morality, does harm, not only to others, but to the one who acts immorally, as we can see in our current civilization, despite all its alleged "sophistication" and "modernity"...
Matt Taibbi's ripper article https://www.racket.news/p/were-all-living-season-5-of-the-wire is primarily a criticism of the pile of lies which characterize Democrat politics this last decade or two, without claiming the other side is much better. However, he also notes that the real problem is deeper: "a basic paradox of democracy, i.e. truth-telling is good governance but tends also to lose elections."
With faith in Christianity evaporating, many of the best and brightest are searching for alternative sources of the meaning and purpose they (quite rightly) crave. Naomi Wolf reports https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/can-you-go-home-again-yales-40th on Christopher F. Rufo's interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrZDSy6SG4c with Dr Ethan Haim, a whistleblower from Texas Children’s Hospital, regarding "gender affirming care" - how many medical professionals adopted likely destructive and irreversible surgeries and drug treatments for adolescents who were convinced (often, in large part or wholly, due to woke promotion of transgenderism as a social contagion). Naomi Wolf writes:
". . . the medical industry, and especially doctors and administrators in academic medicine, adopted an ideology around these harsh, irreversible and dramatic procedures, unquestioningly. . . . Why did so many physicians latch onto this unproven, dramatic, dangerous set of interventions? Dr Haim responded that science has become ideological — the unproven interventions of COVID being obvious examples. Dr Haim also explained that a main reason the medical community embraced an ideology of dangerous gender reassignment interventions, has not been in exchange for money, but rather, in a search 'for meaning'."
". . . certain cultural cancers may have to be forcibly cut out." Simpicius considers paring back or ejecting the most obvious threats to whatever it is we (Americans, the West - I am in Australia) are hoping to create, or recover, or preserve, on the basis that an overly enthusiastic, insufficiently cautious, pursuit of "liberty" has created a society with an excessive number and extent of branches, sub-sets or whatever which are at odds with the real, core, purpose and needs of the legitimate (however judged) citizens.
Such pruning is difficult enough for a top-down authoritarian government and probably impossible in any cohesive way when it must come from an already diverse population, for the purposes of reducing intolerance of that which should be tolerated, and reducing tolerance for that which should not.
The majority of illegal immigrants are a clear first target - the arguments are pretty simple: we the citizens of this ship should choose, fussily, who comes on board.
However, clamping down on homosexuals / lesbians is trickier, since a small but significant - and generally productive - subset of any population develops with their brain structures set up to be same-sex attracted. Rejecting excessive in-your-face and in-schools promotion of homosexuality is practical and well worthwhile. The same is true of true of genuine transsexuals - such people have brains wired partly or fully for their sense of self being the opposite sex of their physical body. Rejecting the trans-activist shit fest would greatly reduce the massive social contagion in which huge numbers of disturbed, opportunistic or clueless people believe, or act as if they believe, they are "misgendered at birth". Then we could get back to normal programming with these relatively small subsets of people getting by without oppression or the current totally excessive levels of attention, especially with now only a small fraction of supposedly trans people actually being genuinely trans.
Matt Johnson faces a similar problem of a complex and fragmented birds of a feather group rejecting, or not, the claims made by some that the path forward entails (returning to) Christian faith, because it is argued to be the most important foundation of the kind of civilisation we like. https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-god-divide-within-the-heterodox He rejects this path and many commenters support him, including by pointing out that many aspects of the civilisation we birds value arose precisely from rejecting of crucial aspects of religion.
I commented https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-god-divide-within-the-heterodox/comment/60001941 that his aim of "Building a liberal society that can accommodate many religious traditions, cultures, political movements, and conceptions of the good life is difficult . . ." devolves into figuring out how to be intolerant of some subset of intolerances and beliefs. I don't know any simple guiding principle for success in such an endeavor, but it is certainly needed in some form or other.
My "With faith in Christianity evaporating . . . " resembles lament, but I am not a Christian. I think there are some positive social and interpersonal relationship aspects of Christianity compared to other religions, but that the theology is 100% BS, like all other theologies. See my critique https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-god-divide-within-the-heterodox/comment/60105591 of someone who was promoting faith in a "kind and loving creator".
One positive aspect of Christian faith - and I guess other types of religious faith - is that it reduces the chance of the person searching for meaning in Wokism, New Age Wooism or whatever other crap system of belief, values and tribal allegiances which is doing the rounds. For instance, Republicans - who I assume are generally more Christian religious (and/or more Evangelical vs. Protestant/Catholic??) than Democrats - were and remain much less likely to fall for the deliberately whipped up COVID-19 hysteria which was intended to get everyone happy to accept mRNA and adenovirus so-called vaccines AND to pressure others into getting them, including by the use of federal government mandates backed up by imprisonment for those who refuse to take the shots: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/partner_surveys/jan_2022/covid_19_democratic_voters_support_harsh_measures_against_unvaccinated.
A common and pernicious set of false beliefs is the Inordinate faith in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and treatments posing as vaccines. (mRNA and adenovirus vector gene-therapies are not vaccines by prior and still reasonable definitions, since they program our cells to produce antigens, rather than introducing the antigens directly, which is what a vaccine does.) Those without religious faith are more susceptible to the lures of supposed meaning and purpose in joining the cult-like throngs of people who insist that vaccines and quasi-vaccines really are the ideal safe and effective means of protecting against infection and transmission of deadly diseases. The reality is that they are less effective and more dangerous than this. For instance, a large proportion of the population take flu vaccine injections every year. They probably believe that these would reduce the rates of hospitalisation and death from influenza in 65 year olds, but this is absolutely not the case, according to thorough research, by people who were expecting them to be protective: Anderson et al. 2020: The Effect of Influenza Vaccination for the Elderly on Hospitalization and Mortality - An Observational Study With a Regression Discontinuity Design, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2020-04-07 https://sci-hub.se/10.7326/M19-3075. See further research which supports this: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce.
So, for a significant proportion of the United States population, Christian faith protected them from being swept up in the vax-mania and so protected them from the injuries and death which resulted from the mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and adenovirus vector (J&J and, overseas, AstraZeneca) injections.
I cite or quote people if I think what they are writing or saying is of interest. I am not always aware of or interested in whether they are Jews or not. I like and agree with some of what Naomi Wolf writes but have no interest in her reading scripture, which some of her recent Substack posts consist of.
So you’re coming to the conclusion of Richard Dawkins. Cultural Christianity is good.
Thing is, there is no such thing. Cultural Christianity doesn’t exist. And when it does it is a temporary state that ultimately leads to atheistic materialism which leads to all the things you deplore.
There is only Christianity. Either one believes in it or not.
It is the orthodox belief in the Trinitarian God of the Christian and biblical Judaic faith (yes, I know it’s not common knowledge but look up Michael Heiser and his exposé on the Jewish text of “Two Powers in Heaven”) that lends credence to its moral and mental frameworks. Without that belief they are substitutable.
At the risk of quoting scripture, even God thinks Cultural Christianity doesn’t work.
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth" - Revelations 3:15,16
I would rather live in a society influenced by some positive (however judged) social influences from Christianity (there are plenty of negative ones, including excessive guilt, belief in the apocalypse and for *some*, focusing on the hereafter rather than life on Earth) than from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Voodoo, Scientology, Course in Miracles or any number of other religions. Likewise Wooism, such as this "Universe Manifest / Show Me!" stuff: https://www.tiktok.com/@the444agency/video/7311839695346879776.
This doesn't mean that I think Christian theology is any more true than others. Christianity, by any reasonable definition, absolutely is the belief in the divinity of Jesus and the validity of whatever he taught, or at least what is currently assumed to be what he taught, as interpreted by Paul and whoever wrote the gospels and formed the various rather divergent strands of current understanding of what Jesus taught.
I think it is a mistake to call oneself a Christian primarily due to belief in Christianity's foundational role in Western civilisation, rather than absolute belief in some version of what Jesus taught.
Myth / fiction can be good guidance for life. Some of it might be better than cold, hard facts. So I have no problem accepting that Christianity or in principle some other religion might be more socially helpful, according to some value system about ideal societies, than other religions or even other non-religious philosophies - even though I think the central, driving, core principles and true essence of Christianity are completely mistaken.
My best guess is that Jesus' focus on forgiveness, tolerance, support for others, and his message that each person is a unique individual with their own innate value makes a significant contribution to the positive social influence which tends to result from Christianity. This is much better than, for instance, Karma, in which a child born with profound mental and/or physical problems is assumed by its family to be a soul re-incarnated in this way because of something the child's soul did in a past life.
If I thought that the actual creator of the Universe (and so, truly, God) was asking or expecting people to believe in Him - and especially to worship Him as a "kind and loving creator" - I would be part of the resistance. In that situation, we would be His pets - and bitter experience shows numerous examples of extreme tragedy, suffering (much of which has nothing to do with human actions) and cruelty in which He did nothing to protect his pets from soul-crushing, life-destroying, love and relationship rupturing outcomes.
I think that arguments for the veracity of Christianity should be based on the gospels, not Revelations or anything earlier than the gospels, except perhaps those few pieces of Jewish scripture (Old Testament, to Christians) which Jesus specifically cited, quoted or supported.
You just repeated the same thing as before. You cannot divorce Jesus moral teachings from what he said about himself, and he clearly said he is God. What you are saying does NOT work.
Also, it’s clear that you don’t understand orthodox Christianity. What you are describing is at best pop Christianity and at worst Gnosticism. You need to know it as it is before you critique it.
Read “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis. It’s not enough but a decent start.
And again I repeat, without the belief in the Trinitarian God and Jesus the Christ following the orthodox faith, “Christianity” (as you describe it) does not exist.
If the creator of the Universe cared for humanity - to the point of loving humans individually or collectively as Christians claim - we would know all about it without needing to read scripture, works by CS Lewis, or arguments from people who believe one of the countless religious doctrines which have self-spawned and diverged over thousands of years.
Getting rid of the bad government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. More broadly, we need elite replacement and deportation of foreigners.
Even so, it will take a long time to recover at this point.
I agree with the analogies being drawn to Russian anti-LGBT legislation. On the other hand, I think we need to be careful with the Puritans. Americans won't like to hear it, but they (the Puritans) are the source of much of the problem with liberty in the first place -- the very notions of election and purity apart from tradition are unsustainable. They encourage people to draw all the worst kinds of lessons from the pioneer experience -- namely, that complete independence and limitless expansion are both our nature as Americans, and the very measures of good. This accounts for the odd paradox that moving away from failing America could be seen as the most "American" thing to do.
If this is truly the whole of our nature as a country and civilization, then we richly deserve to perish.
But I don't see it that way. And I don't think we need to continue to see it this way. If I might suggest one possible antidote to the Lockean-Smithian view, and also to the overreaction of Puritan austerity in morals... try Ferguson. The idea with him is that civic virtue is sustained by common activity, and especially by common struggle. This , he says, can't be commercial in nature, but must do with the overcoming of difficulties.
Our ancestors had plenty of difficulties, and built decent, working communities in response. We will have many such difficulties again; engaging them together rather than running and planting a new flag: here's where communal self-awareness will begin again.
Complete independence and limitless expansion are core American ideals, and are the very measures of good for most Americans. I don't think we necessarily deserve to die for it, but it is the past and current reality of American society, and we will have to change, willing or not. Respectfully, I believe there is a much greater possibility that said change will result in less communal self-awareness, as opposed to a renewal.
Well, given your user name, if by "communal self-awareness" you meant further consous racial awareness and self selection of groups, you may have a good if unfortunate point. If you meant that American citizens or society as whole would begin to have more communal self-awareness, I still disagree. As for what change I forsee, I don't think I or anyone can predict specifics, and I'm certainly no expert, but you don't have to be an expert to see America is trending down, a trend exacerbated by our past and current idiotic and insane foreign wars and policy, to say nothing of our corrupt facsimile of capitalism at home and abroad.
When you said "have to change" I took you to mean "here's what will have to be done in order to survive." Further decay is easy enough to envision.
Yes, I think race would be a part of communal identification, but not the only part. Ethnogenesis is a tricky thing. Whether "American" can remain, or rather a patchwork of more regional identities will come to the fore, I'm not sure.
My point in bringing up limitless expansion and complete independence is that they are not workable ideals, long-term, for *any* group of people. They worked for a time only due to the special circumstances of a nearly-empty continent. But even them, they were not the only outlook on the situation. They persist in liberal politics, in "pragmatist" philosophy, and expansionist foreign policy -- all things that have to go in the bin.
This is where the Louis CK video above is interesting. He seems to think US aggression overseas is the product of excessive nationalism -- leftists, and especially leftist Jews, tend to think this way. But in fact the opposite is the case: it's the lack of positive, substantive identification that feeds empire and expansion. With "liberty!!!" the focus is outward, for money and gain (or messianic moral projects), rather than inward, toward helping one's fellows.
Hopefully you won't mind some quibbling before the substance, but no political ideals work in the long-term for anybody. All circumstances change. Also, to paraphrase, "liberal politics" is like porn, we all know it when we see it, it's defining it that's a problem. That said. I think you and I have different meanings of "pragmatist" philosophy. I take it to be realism in the vein of Mearsheimer, etc. which I both agree with and believe is intrinsically opposed to expansionism in the current situation. But perhaps you're meaning more along Ayn Rand/ utilitarian lines, in which case that is indeed something to trash along with expansionism. To your point that excessive nationalism and aggression aren't linked so much as the overall societal lack of a substantive, positive identity is dysfunctional and leads to dysfunctional results in foreign policy, I don't disagree, but also want to point out that lack of organic identity is at the center of the American experiment. If we cannot live together without ethnic, racial, or religious ties, what does than make us one nation? I was raised and taught to believe that what essentially holds us together is belief in the Constitutional order, rule of law, and belief that all men (people) are created equal in the sense that all have equal rights and justice under the law, and not mindless, destructive flailing in an attempt to prop up an inherently exploitative and corrupt oligarchy. An objective look at past and recent events in particular proves me wrong. As there are no politically productive actions possible under the current regime, the only solution I see is to call a Constitutional Convention. Whether or not the American people have the political will to do so remains to be seen. I suspect not, and believe that America's economic situation and world position will soon collapse. I doubt anything good will come out of that long-term for us in the US, but it's not technically impossible, quite probably better for the rest of the world, and honestly if we don't start a nuclear war, I'll call it a manageable result.
No, I meant pragmatism in the formal philosophical sense: James, Dewey, and their descendants. That is characteristic American philosophy (yankee, at least), and has an inherently expansionist ethos: America imposing its own restlessness on the rest of the world.
I don't see defining liberalism as a problem at all. You're voicing it here with the voluntarist arguments you're making for the American order. And yes, I see the exclusive use of such arguments as a deep problem.
We do have ethnic, religious, racial ties, and the founders presupposed them. The idea that the Declaration is the essential condition of the American nation is neoconservative retconning; read what Jay or Washington had to say about the American people. Read Franklin's Increase of Mankind essay. Read Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia. And consider that the first act of congress was the immigration act of 1790 ("free white persons"). No one believed there was a "lack of organic identity." Quite the contrary.
Exclusive reliance on Lockean abstractions IS the issue.
Political ideals can and do work in the long run if they are sufficiently modest. You are assuming that liberal ones are the only ones available to us. Even the most liberal of the founders didn't see it that way.
Historically, moral decay is the phase before the collapse of the society / culture / empire / civilisation. The Christian West is too far gone. It will collapse before any rebuilding can take place. Don't be surprised at the terrible things that will happen before the aliens are sent back to their countries of origin - including the Jews.
I’m a Jewish 4th generation American. I’d like to know where I’m “from.” My great grandparents came from Poland, Austria and Russia. Where did your great grandparents come from?
That will depend on the policies of those who will get control when the Jews lose their grip on the media, politics, finance, Big Pharma, education, entertainment and much else of the West.
What is going to happen is not necessarily what I WANT to happen. I am 74. I will be gone before this all plays out. Martin Armstrong predicts that there will be an entirely different political system in the USA by 2032. And the USA will split into 4 parts. I suspect people like you will gravitate to what is today's California or New York.
I’m sorry? Ppl like me? Jews? Democrat walkaways? Substack readers? I already live in NYC, my family has been here for generations, but I no longer share the values of the locals
Also Jewish, "Ro". Hostility breeds hostility, and the results are rarely fair. If we can ask "is it good for the Jews?" they can ask "are Jews good for us?" And they are asking. And they will ask. How's that looking right now?
You've taken steps toward righteousness. Perhaps, like Lot, you'll get a hand from high places. Perhaps, like many other times in our history, you won't. So serve the Lord, serve your fellow man in truth, maintain situational awareness, and decide on your plans. Part of which should involve aiding the legacy of a broader teshuvah within the Jewish nation, as well as the American one. Our current state did not happen by accident.
You're not your grandparents, you're you. You're "from" the US.
Most of the so called Christians who think they own this country, are also grandkids or great grandkids of immigrants, and on average aren't a any more from the US. TBH it is their cohort who should be deported, for having a bad attitude to their Amerindian or Mestizo neighbors who generally work hard, generally live the conservative family values espoused by the former group that wants them out, and generally don't complain either despite being treated unkindly by asshat Anglo's
Unless Mexican-Americans are distinctly different from Mexicans, you’ve romanticized a large group of people.
My dual-citizen wife and I have lived in rural, central Mexico for seven years. My neighbors have work habits that are identical to those of gringos (they work hard when held accountable, not so hard when unsupervised) and are decidedly unfaithful to the mother/father of their children.
Because divorce is complex in a country with Catholic roots, it is uncommon—because many couples don’t marry! Bastards are the norm and no one looks askance at that reality. (Our new priest has scolded the congregation of the necessity of marriage, saying that after having four children together, maybe it’s time!)
Perhaps we should admit that ethics and morality are personal and do not dwell in this group or that group?
Obviously painting with an overly broad brush, that's the conversation I'm responding into. I'll take your point about marriage etc, maybe will leave it to someone else to compare the values espoused by the culture as a whole. To be honest that isn't even what bothers me, it's just I think is a false point of comparison sometimes made by modern day US "nativists" to justify the rest of the shaky argument they're making.
On the subject of work habits, I think usually you really are going to find a difference between immigrants/emigrants. From everywhere. You're talking about a population, self selected, who just up and left much of the family and social connections they had before. Whether it was for the money, or to get away from something, if they're staying, it means to they're now building a new life. This typically means making an extra effort.
I live in a neighborhood that’s demographically skewed towards women and children because many men have gone to the USA to work—a second order effect of migration.
Working hard because of their taskmasters?
Building a new life with a second family? Or making plans to return home with a nest egg?
I can see you’re obsessed with hitting the piñata of “nativists”. Are you virtue signaling or do you really care about Mexico and the rest of Latin America? I sense the former.
(Please describe your life in Latin America and/or your sources of information.)
Yes I was talking very much about the nativists as you can see. I'm talking specifically about people in the US who moved there at various times or their descendants.
So that's the idea. Stick it to the gays and the immigrants. Gee what an intellectual tour de force, never heard that before. So sad, it really is, because the descriptions of societal collapse (though partial and carefully chosen to set up the deeply banal conclusions and proffered remedies) were well drawn.
The gays are an indicator of degeneracy - especially the guys peeing on each other in a pool. That it happens at all means people don't control their urges - they don't have virtue.
Immigrants see the degeneracy and think to themselves "there's no way these people are going to last, better to run in there and claim the best spots for when they eventually dissolve". So they are like jackals shadowing the dying animal - again an indicator of degeneracy and decay. Actually, it's worse since they don't just wait for the animal to die, but sometimes nibble on it's ankles to hasten the demise - like corporate guards disrespecting this or that amendment of the US Constitution. This slowly, at first, imposes a new law of the land.
Oh THAT's an indicator of 'degeneracy'. Not climate vandalism, global ecocide, the direct facilitation of genocide, grotesque inequalities, widespread corruption, reckless and inept imperialism, institutionalised racism, state sponsored torture bases, the global surveillance system, warmongering and the largest prison population in the world. Nah - just lock up the gays and the muslims and all will be well. Your comment is a superb indicator of the downward spiral from democracy to tyranny.
> Nah - just lock up the gays and the muslims and all will be well. Your comment is a superb indicator of the downward spiral from democracy to tyranny.
And it is at this point I start suspecting you're a troll.
Answering the part of the comment before what I quoted, yes, that is an indicator of degeneracy. And for some people it's the first indicator they'll start paying attention. There are grades of indicators. Some are more obvious and in-your-face than other. This is one of the more obvious ones.
The sexual deviants are unwitting tools of those in power to divide and rule the people. The illegal immigrants perform a similar role. In due course, the homosexuals will return to their closets and the unassimilable to their own societies. The Jews who choose to remain will represent no more power than the 2% of the population that they are.
America is already dead. The free moral people are a shrinking minority and there is no prospect of them becoming ascendant once more.
Their great white hope - Donald Trump - is a plastic mannequin constructed in a mall basement by a team of retards who stumbled across a random selection of spare parts.
The only hope for heritage Americans is to assemble in some defensible position and survive the ongoing disintegration with their moral heritage intact. Multicultural empires always dis-integrate into monocultural nations.
Birds of a feather flock together for mutual benefit. I hope that the good people of America have enough sense, enough insight, and enough fortitude, to do the same.
But nobody, no system, no political campaign, no man on a white horse, no substack philosopher nor commenter, can do it for them.
They will. But there is a lot of rough water ahead. The thing to remember is that moral corruption is death. The people who imbibe it won't leave descendants. The sad part is that they will take many good people down with them.
I'm not going to bother listing all the things that are wrong with this country and why. It's too divided, the government is too big and too corrupt, and I really feel the only answer is to give all the power back to the individual states. Dissolve the union. The constitution that was signed to form the union has been broken.
Oh my. I was with you right up until you skewered early American history. So let's dive into that.
1) The Puritans - literally from day 1, the Puritans' biggest problem was that so many of their members were RUNNING AWAY to join other communities, initially those of the Native Americans and then later other European-origin ones in (what was to become) the United States. That's why the Puritans don't exist anymore - because people got sick of their lifestyle. There are plenty of diaries from the Mayflower era, complaining about how people in Puritan communities refused to do their fair share of (agricultural) work, gambled, played sports, etc.
2) This quote needs to be taken behind the barn and shot: "... the Articles of Confederation saw a far more limited federal government that effectively had almost no power, which the founding fathers themselves quickly realized simply did not work"
No, no, and no. The Articles of Confederation are what all those patriots fought and died for. The problem for the feds was that they financed the war through the stupidest way possible - by borrowing staggering amounts of money (see Haym Salomon for much more on this). And the FEDS couldn't pay that money back precisely because the Articles of Confederation limited their income exclusively to a few things like import tariffs.
The event that lead to the complete dismantling of the US government (officially now known as the Constitutional Convention of 1787) was billed to the public as a meeting to reform/revise the Articles of Confederation. But the reps then sealed the doors shut, MET IN SECRET (and every rep had to sign an NDA in modern terminology), and came up with a brand-new form of gov't, aka the Constitution, with the vote on passing it also made a classified secret.
In other words, something nobody (publicly) voted for and implemented without the consent of the people. And it was DEEPLY unpopular at the time (the Amendments, now so beloved, were added later only to disarm the opposition).
Keep in mind that the war started in 1775, and the articles of Confederation passed in 1781. So America was a free country for just a few years before those elitist cabal mfers took over.
And the second that the US Constitution became the new iron law, George Washington led the biggest army of his entire life (bigger than the one in the Revolutionary War) to crush the American people (the so-called Whiskey Rebellion) while simultaneously founding a new nobility class (Sons of Cincinnati) with himself as the leader (complete with statues of him in the form of an ancient Roman god).
Unfortunately, US history has been retconned, so now everyone thinks that the original patriots fought and died so they could be led by a repressive totalitarian central gov't that blatantly ignores its own Constitution (e.g. the privately owned Federal Reserve, the president declaring war w/o Congress' approval, etc).
This was new to me so I checked on Wikipedia. Wikipedia claims that in American Revolutionary War, the Army + Millitia of USA totalled ~40,000. Wikipedia further claims that in the Whiskey Rebellion, the US Goverment forces amounted to ~13,000 people. Maybe there are more details I don't know about?
When government does anything for people who should be doing it for themselves. When we send any amount of money to any country that should be spent here. Meddling in other countries business. Welfare, free lunches and all that bullshit. When it starts it all goes awry. Progressivism is evil
I think you got that a bit wrong Patti. The government is supposed to represent the interests of its people. It all goes awry when it stops representing them, and represents the interests of corporations and lobbyists that are based on tax havens and give nothing back. This is where money is sent to foreign countries and wars, home infrastructure crumbles, industry dies, and the local population finds themselves disenfranchised, unemployed, homeless and in need of welfare. You don't want SMALL government, you want GOOD government. Your issues are with corporatism not progressivism.
Well I don’t think it was a big problem of corporate interest In the 60s but the welfare state ramped up hard and the all the other lunatic policies followed. One progressive policy after another and here we are…the biggest government and employees who think we work for them and not the other way around!
I think you got this one wrong as well Patti. Corporate interest has always been trying to dictate policies. Welfare and workers rights were far stronger during the 60s, 70s, and up until the USSR fell. While it existed the West had to maintain welfare policies to keep the western populations placated. They had to look better, you see. Since then, the welfare state has been progressively demolished, in favour of corporations interests, who demand hunger wages, no workers rights, no local industry, and our taxes going not where WE need them to go, but to fund whatever makes them richer, like wars etc. They had to convince us that degrading people's lives is good for "the economy" which is to say their own pockets. People not as fortunate as you had to pay the price. They're not the reason your life is harder, because they get handed out lunches, there's enough money to help everyone live a decent life. But the corporations need people unemployed and desperate, so as to keep wages at starvation levels, and people terrified that they'll end up homeless if they lose their jobs, don't even think of joining a union. That's why you need GOOD government, to protect you from the vultures, and help you live decently. And a small government can't do that, it needs to be big and strong.
Understanding what the Whiskey Rebellion was all about goes a long towards explaining the shit-show we're mired in today. Taxation without representation. New bosses, same as the old bosses. WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?! ABSOLUTELY MIC PROFITS!
The fact that America was never a utopia of freedom doesn’t invalidate the author’s main argument. Out of the mishmash of those who came to these shores, rich and poor, we fashioned something like an ethos that everyone understood. Individual freedom was a big part of that, but within a context of civic virtue. Yes, freedom meant you could cheat and steal, but that put you firmly outside mainstream society. I think our author argues that no one subscribes to the need for civic virtue anymore, much less enforces it. Yes, the rot starts at the top and goes way back. But the idealism of America’s first elites was real, and they led community wide efforts to improve conditions for everyone. Today’s elite class feels no responsibility at all for the peasants they despise.
Love me some Charles H Smith❤️🐈⬛The flip flops, the way of being, just being in the whorl. I read his works and often give a wee chuckle. Between then and the now…all~ways learn something from my pal Charles. The bright bulbs. Well, onto…the next quark. Or, thought that drifts by. Your prose keeps my heart beating; waiting, watching… learning from the best. Meow, my pal. Gratitude, as well❤️🐈⬛ Carry on, the love revolution and the spitrual awakening commences 💙💦🌎💚
It may sound too simplistic but I fear the current debt burden so high that the mental and time dimensions to rectify this with civic behaviour is limited.
Perhaps for now we must Mock the system to endure this phase
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mmAhPm8deMs&pp=ygUfbW9jayB0aGUgc2V0IHVwIHRodW1ibmFpbCBncmVlbg%3D%3D
Of a piece from the serious side. https://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/and-forgive-them-their-debts/
It’s how the Persians dealt with it a long time ago.
Forgiving everyone’s debts would be a part of fixing the current crisis.
See David Graeber, "Debt:the first 5000 years". That's only the start you have to put the oligarchy under control or the process just re-starts. Putin has spent over twenty years fixing Russia's oligarchs and reducing corruption and ironically the West's sanctions greatly helped the process. I don't see such hope for the west.
Russia has Oligarchs too. And they and Putin are tight.
I know of ‘Debt:the first 5000 years’ have downloaded it in the past. But have never got around to reading it.
Well if you read it you'll find out the term tyrant was inverted in meaning by oligarchs. The burdens induced by the rentier class kill every empire.
Putin's reform process took a long time of getting Russia's oligarchs "under control", just today Scott Ritter did a good job explaining some of this, https://youtu.be/CwiyIRm0DX8?si=3OMgrfPjlPQavdrN&t=189
In short I don't see Putin as a servant of the oligarchs, he's the leader of the Russian Federation working demonstrably for the betterment of the nation.
I was in Russia late May and early June and before that in March for a few weeks each time. Nobody there thinks that they have the power to change anything. People are pretty circumspect about critiquing the power structures there but when they do they’ve not terribly kind about them.
So why was Russia in bed with Astra Zeneca forcing the toxic sludge on its population? lol
With any luck it would ruin some of the world's nastiest people too.
Hammurabi
Sixth king of Babylon (r. 1792–1750 BC)
He also had a great plan.
Debt drives those holding it mad. It is not the debt, but the fear, the fever, the nausea, the terror, that someday those holding the debt will come to collect what is owed.
I have lived debt free since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Crash of 2008-09. I believed the whole system was about to go to zero. It did. They lied to us. I recommend living debt free highly. Being debt free is better than sex. Truly. Nothing beats being debt free. It clears the mind. And the soul. I swear this to be true.
From 1913 to 2007, the value of the USD had fallen 98-percent. Common knowledge. The GFC took the last 2-percent. That is why everything since 2010 seems so unreal, so insane. It is. Eventually, ultimately, inevitably, we will arrive at that moment, our last moment of "full faith in credit." To quote a great movie, Margin Call: "This is it! I'm telling you! This is it!"
No one should struggle their whole lives to have the money they have saved be worth nothing when they need it the most -- in their old age. This is where we are.
Can't you see it?
I agree. I owe around $30,000 on 10 acres with house I built and complete off-grid infrastructure-tanks timber etc.
I can’t tell you how bad I want that last bit paid off.
Pay the note off. At once. Go to friends or family. Better to owe them than some nameless stranger that sees a prepper refuge (No offense. I envy you.) as "the next big thing."
We are in a debt spiral. Local, state, federal, and corporate oligarchs (all of them) are desperate for money. Your money. Your assets. And the figures are all lies.
". . . [R]esearch showed that the average new-vehicle retail transaction price has fallen compared to a year ago. In June 2023, the average new car buyer paid $46,229, but that price declined to $44,857 in June 2024, a 3% drop."
That's a lie. The price keeps going up. The value is what you are willing pay to not travel on foot, or at the mercy of some transit company that demands to know your vaccination status.
The house I bought new in 2000 for $156,000 and sold in 2010 for $320,000 just went on the market in 2021 -- for $615,000. Something is seriously f*cked up. This is what I mean by we are in a debt spiral.
My parents bought the house I grew up in, the picture-perfect little Cape Cod Colonial, in what was, back in 1962, the sweetest little suburb you could imagine, just outside of Philadelphia, for $23,000. They sold it in 1974 for $55,000. The house sold again in 2006 for $354,000.
What are we doing to ourselves?
https://youtu.be/Hhy7JUinlu0
That’s exactly the rate of inflation. 55k in 1974 is $355,428 now
https://www.calculateme.com/inflation/55000-dollars/from-1974/to-now
The end result is your money is worth nothing. Why?
Because the of rate of inflation destroys the value of your money, along with the purchasing power of that money.
So, we have inflation, even when we are not supposed to have any inflation. We have money printing (another, even more pernicious form of inflation), when the printing of money was supposed to have stopped. And, QE never goes away.
I could go on. I am sure you could, too.
I agree debt is a form of slavery and anyone who values freedom understands that it can’t be obtained by being shackled by debt.
Throughout History Seventy-Two Empires Have Been Engineered to Fail in the Same Way.
The crash of civilisations does not happen by accident. The crash of civilisations does not happen all at once. The crash of civilisations takes a lot of planning over a long time.
Seventy-Two Empires have been recorded and every one of them has failed in the same way. The facts have been recorded that a totalitarian and satanic elite infil-traitored and took over all these Empires and that 72 once free, flourishing and rich republics were destroyed from within by Satanic Ritual - read Toynbee. The Satanic Wanker Banker Banksters are crashing the Financial System. Satanism is gradually being instituted as the New World Religion defined by Satanic Ritual.
What I am saying is that the crash of civilisations does not happen by accident. What I am saying is that the crash of civilisations does not happen all at once. What I am saying is that the crash of civilisations takes a lot of planning over a long time to bring down a civilisation once the trigger has been pulled.
“What is important to hold in mind is that through this entire post 1971 process, capitalism itself was thus slowly turned into a time bomb which could do nothing but collapse. This means that it is fatally wrong to consider the abuses of globalization or the collapse now underway as errors, but rather as the intended consequence of the system’s design itself.”
https://satchidanand.substack.com/p/throughout-history-seventy-two-empires
So, is it 72 empires or 72 republics? Never mind. You’re insane. Please stop writing.
When you can't attack the information, always attack the author, please! Do it more because when you are over the target, the flack is always more intense.
You caught us. We're just semi-closeted Satanists and you got too close to the target.
Doesn’t matter if he’s insane or not, it’s still engineered.
Its no more engineered than the rise and fall of fox and rabbit populations (in a closed system, obviously). It is human nature to repeat the same cycles over and over. Eventually we may break out of it, just as finches evolved to eat seeds, but evolution takes many thousands of years. I read a quote once, by who I can't remember - "we are but evolution made aware of itself". It doesn't matter what we do, we cannot escape from our nature, or from evolution.
A good (and necessarily lugubrious) diagnosis. What spoke to me most was the paragraph ending "...work toward eliminating the most damaging ones, then let flower what may. Uproot the diseased weeds and give some time for the soil to regain health—it may then surprise you in finding its own more natural path forward."
I think this means abandoning urban settings and college towns as much as possible, quietly working out parallel structures largely out of view. (The fish always rots from the head. Staying away from the head is a good idea.)
This idea reminded me serendipitously of this recent post by Chris Bray:
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/blue-highways-natalism
It was encouraging to read that there are pockets of health and sanity, just off the beaten track. No top-down solution is going to work in this country-- it's going to have to emerge spontaneously.
All I can say about the current state of the US is this...I grew up in the '50s and '60s in a village of about 30.000, and we had tremendous community...Everyone would go out of their way to help neighbors, classmates, and even total strangers...And it was pretty much the same all over the country , even in the '70s and early '80s...which my brother and I explored thoroughly. on long automobile trips..even the big city....Then politicians decided that whipping up racial turmoil, and giving blacks special privileges and promotions was good for their careers...(BTW, I worked with many fine black folk, and also had them as clients, and many of them were a troubled by the use of race as a criterion for anything.). Now we have massive distrust in a fragmented society, which is starting to fall apart...
This is a minor quibble and question - no need to jump down my neck if I'm just misinformed. but...Wait, Louis CK is a leftist? I am not denying he is because I know next to nothing about him other than his former (and still?) habit of whippin out his member and jerkin it in front of uncomfortable younger women. He was temporarily canceled for it. But he's fabulously wealthy and I've heard his routines - nothing political at all.
It's an interesting question, because the guy has been really influential through comedy. Maybe nihilist is a better descriptor, and nihilism seems to be the major ailment afflicting our society, either as a symptom of a deeper disease or the disease itself through an absence of spiritualism or relationship with God.
What happened to the hoi polloi ? Maybe our/their brains aren't functioning naturally:
Dr. Michael Nehls
"The Indoctrinated Brain ''
Nehls wrote in his 2016 paper-- Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease, @ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27429752/ -- and alluded to in his book, that we have experienced an epidemic of Alzheimer's disease. The book is essentially a presentation of our covid experience as a case study of the effort to divest us of our humanity and our individuality via the weaponization of a man-made and otherwise unremarkable virus. Nehls cites the agendas of Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World " as the templates for what is intended. And BTW, Nehls believes we can successfully resist this assault.
His paper and book struck me as the most insightful and sickening summary of what we have been going through for at least the last 25 years. The Carlson interview --which is in transcript form as well as audio, @ https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/98752696-- met and exceeded my expectations. I don't expect to provide a more succinct summary of his work than he presented in this interview.
I agree with you. I have listened to the audio version of that book. However, there is no such thing as a virus. It is all pure fiction. Mortality data worldwide shows that there was no pandemic. However, now people are dying all over from the toxic fake vaccines.
Nevertheless, the premise of the book is correct. Only the writer did not go far enough. It was all in the mind - from A to Z.
The mind virus is real and ideas both good and bad can be passed between people. Once installed, functioning within a carefully constructed framework (provided by the education system). ideas can corrupt the conscious mind and hack the bio-feedback loop causing actual physical change.
Correct. Anyone who thinks that the mind does not control EVERYTHING should watch this video:
𝗕𝗕𝗖 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 - 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗯𝗼 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗔𝘀 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗔𝘀 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗜𝗻 𝗞𝗻𝗲𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗶𝗻.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqGSeFOUsLI
I thought that book was about brain damage intentionally caused by propoganda induced fear, not covid. I haven’t read it, but I have listened to interviews with the author
As a whole it is a lost cause...take to the lifeboats if you will, yet know where you will abide.
The only cure here is spiritual.
Or nuclear
That argument is exactly the same as the abortionists who justify committing a major crime, murder, to cure a minor crime (e.g. promiscuity) ..
Everyone sooner or later comes to the conclusion that the root of the problem is morality, but no one wonders where that morality comes from? when someone talks about "natural" rights, how is it justified that they are "natural"? Neither morality nor the "naturalness" of "rights" can be justified by pure reason. But if pure reason is not enough, although necessary, then what else is there?
Now talking about liberty, and related to the previously stated. what is freedom and what justifies that definition? It remembers me the St. Anselm definition of freedom in "De Libertate Arbitrii"; there, it is defined as the "capacity for preserving rectitude of the will for its own sake". For St. Anselm a rational agent has freedom if the actions of this agent are self-initiated, free from external pressure, and, aimed at sustaining moral correctness.
That definition of S.t Anselm seems illogical at first glance, but what rational, and really free agent would "voluntarily" do something that harms him? one would have to ask then why acting immorally, assuming that we agreed on the origin and definition of morality, does harm, not only to others, but to the one who acts immorally, as we can see in our current civilization, despite all its alleged "sophistication" and "modernity"...
For the Greater Good: https://x.com/conmomma/status/1451253296132329499.
Matt Taibbi's ripper article https://www.racket.news/p/were-all-living-season-5-of-the-wire is primarily a criticism of the pile of lies which characterize Democrat politics this last decade or two, without claiming the other side is much better. However, he also notes that the real problem is deeper: "a basic paradox of democracy, i.e. truth-telling is good governance but tends also to lose elections."
With faith in Christianity evaporating, many of the best and brightest are searching for alternative sources of the meaning and purpose they (quite rightly) crave. Naomi Wolf reports https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/can-you-go-home-again-yales-40th on Christopher F. Rufo's interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrZDSy6SG4c with Dr Ethan Haim, a whistleblower from Texas Children’s Hospital, regarding "gender affirming care" - how many medical professionals adopted likely destructive and irreversible surgeries and drug treatments for adolescents who were convinced (often, in large part or wholly, due to woke promotion of transgenderism as a social contagion). Naomi Wolf writes:
". . . the medical industry, and especially doctors and administrators in academic medicine, adopted an ideology around these harsh, irreversible and dramatic procedures, unquestioningly. . . . Why did so many physicians latch onto this unproven, dramatic, dangerous set of interventions? Dr Haim responded that science has become ideological — the unproven interventions of COVID being obvious examples. Dr Haim also explained that a main reason the medical community embraced an ideology of dangerous gender reassignment interventions, has not been in exchange for money, but rather, in a search 'for meaning'."
That may be so, which in my mind makes their actions even more monstrous. No mercy for them.
". . . certain cultural cancers may have to be forcibly cut out." Simpicius considers paring back or ejecting the most obvious threats to whatever it is we (Americans, the West - I am in Australia) are hoping to create, or recover, or preserve, on the basis that an overly enthusiastic, insufficiently cautious, pursuit of "liberty" has created a society with an excessive number and extent of branches, sub-sets or whatever which are at odds with the real, core, purpose and needs of the legitimate (however judged) citizens.
Such pruning is difficult enough for a top-down authoritarian government and probably impossible in any cohesive way when it must come from an already diverse population, for the purposes of reducing intolerance of that which should be tolerated, and reducing tolerance for that which should not.
The majority of illegal immigrants are a clear first target - the arguments are pretty simple: we the citizens of this ship should choose, fussily, who comes on board.
However, clamping down on homosexuals / lesbians is trickier, since a small but significant - and generally productive - subset of any population develops with their brain structures set up to be same-sex attracted. Rejecting excessive in-your-face and in-schools promotion of homosexuality is practical and well worthwhile. The same is true of true of genuine transsexuals - such people have brains wired partly or fully for their sense of self being the opposite sex of their physical body. Rejecting the trans-activist shit fest would greatly reduce the massive social contagion in which huge numbers of disturbed, opportunistic or clueless people believe, or act as if they believe, they are "misgendered at birth". Then we could get back to normal programming with these relatively small subsets of people getting by without oppression or the current totally excessive levels of attention, especially with now only a small fraction of supposedly trans people actually being genuinely trans.
Matt Johnson faces a similar problem of a complex and fragmented birds of a feather group rejecting, or not, the claims made by some that the path forward entails (returning to) Christian faith, because it is argued to be the most important foundation of the kind of civilisation we like. https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-god-divide-within-the-heterodox He rejects this path and many commenters support him, including by pointing out that many aspects of the civilisation we birds value arose precisely from rejecting of crucial aspects of religion.
I commented https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-god-divide-within-the-heterodox/comment/60001941 that his aim of "Building a liberal society that can accommodate many religious traditions, cultures, political movements, and conceptions of the good life is difficult . . ." devolves into figuring out how to be intolerant of some subset of intolerances and beliefs. I don't know any simple guiding principle for success in such an endeavor, but it is certainly needed in some form or other.
You start by lamenting the loss of faith in Christianity.. and then go on to quote two Jews.
My "With faith in Christianity evaporating . . . " resembles lament, but I am not a Christian. I think there are some positive social and interpersonal relationship aspects of Christianity compared to other religions, but that the theology is 100% BS, like all other theologies. See my critique https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-god-divide-within-the-heterodox/comment/60105591 of someone who was promoting faith in a "kind and loving creator".
One positive aspect of Christian faith - and I guess other types of religious faith - is that it reduces the chance of the person searching for meaning in Wokism, New Age Wooism or whatever other crap system of belief, values and tribal allegiances which is doing the rounds. For instance, Republicans - who I assume are generally more Christian religious (and/or more Evangelical vs. Protestant/Catholic??) than Democrats - were and remain much less likely to fall for the deliberately whipped up COVID-19 hysteria which was intended to get everyone happy to accept mRNA and adenovirus so-called vaccines AND to pressure others into getting them, including by the use of federal government mandates backed up by imprisonment for those who refuse to take the shots: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/partner_surveys/jan_2022/covid_19_democratic_voters_support_harsh_measures_against_unvaccinated.
A common and pernicious set of false beliefs is the Inordinate faith in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and treatments posing as vaccines. (mRNA and adenovirus vector gene-therapies are not vaccines by prior and still reasonable definitions, since they program our cells to produce antigens, rather than introducing the antigens directly, which is what a vaccine does.) Those without religious faith are more susceptible to the lures of supposed meaning and purpose in joining the cult-like throngs of people who insist that vaccines and quasi-vaccines really are the ideal safe and effective means of protecting against infection and transmission of deadly diseases. The reality is that they are less effective and more dangerous than this. For instance, a large proportion of the population take flu vaccine injections every year. They probably believe that these would reduce the rates of hospitalisation and death from influenza in 65 year olds, but this is absolutely not the case, according to thorough research, by people who were expecting them to be protective: Anderson et al. 2020: The Effect of Influenza Vaccination for the Elderly on Hospitalization and Mortality - An Observational Study With a Regression Discontinuity Design, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2020-04-07 https://sci-hub.se/10.7326/M19-3075. See further research which supports this: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce.
So, for a significant proportion of the United States population, Christian faith protected them from being swept up in the vax-mania and so protected them from the injuries and death which resulted from the mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and adenovirus vector (J&J and, overseas, AstraZeneca) injections.
I cite or quote people if I think what they are writing or saying is of interest. I am not always aware of or interested in whether they are Jews or not. I like and agree with some of what Naomi Wolf writes but have no interest in her reading scripture, which some of her recent Substack posts consist of.
So you’re coming to the conclusion of Richard Dawkins. Cultural Christianity is good.
Thing is, there is no such thing. Cultural Christianity doesn’t exist. And when it does it is a temporary state that ultimately leads to atheistic materialism which leads to all the things you deplore.
There is only Christianity. Either one believes in it or not.
It is the orthodox belief in the Trinitarian God of the Christian and biblical Judaic faith (yes, I know it’s not common knowledge but look up Michael Heiser and his exposé on the Jewish text of “Two Powers in Heaven”) that lends credence to its moral and mental frameworks. Without that belief they are substitutable.
At the risk of quoting scripture, even God thinks Cultural Christianity doesn’t work.
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth" - Revelations 3:15,16
I would rather live in a society influenced by some positive (however judged) social influences from Christianity (there are plenty of negative ones, including excessive guilt, belief in the apocalypse and for *some*, focusing on the hereafter rather than life on Earth) than from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Voodoo, Scientology, Course in Miracles or any number of other religions. Likewise Wooism, such as this "Universe Manifest / Show Me!" stuff: https://www.tiktok.com/@the444agency/video/7311839695346879776.
This doesn't mean that I think Christian theology is any more true than others. Christianity, by any reasonable definition, absolutely is the belief in the divinity of Jesus and the validity of whatever he taught, or at least what is currently assumed to be what he taught, as interpreted by Paul and whoever wrote the gospels and formed the various rather divergent strands of current understanding of what Jesus taught.
I think it is a mistake to call oneself a Christian primarily due to belief in Christianity's foundational role in Western civilisation, rather than absolute belief in some version of what Jesus taught.
Myth / fiction can be good guidance for life. Some of it might be better than cold, hard facts. So I have no problem accepting that Christianity or in principle some other religion might be more socially helpful, according to some value system about ideal societies, than other religions or even other non-religious philosophies - even though I think the central, driving, core principles and true essence of Christianity are completely mistaken.
My best guess is that Jesus' focus on forgiveness, tolerance, support for others, and his message that each person is a unique individual with their own innate value makes a significant contribution to the positive social influence which tends to result from Christianity. This is much better than, for instance, Karma, in which a child born with profound mental and/or physical problems is assumed by its family to be a soul re-incarnated in this way because of something the child's soul did in a past life.
If I thought that the actual creator of the Universe (and so, truly, God) was asking or expecting people to believe in Him - and especially to worship Him as a "kind and loving creator" - I would be part of the resistance. In that situation, we would be His pets - and bitter experience shows numerous examples of extreme tragedy, suffering (much of which has nothing to do with human actions) and cruelty in which He did nothing to protect his pets from soul-crushing, life-destroying, love and relationship rupturing outcomes.
I think that arguments for the veracity of Christianity should be based on the gospels, not Revelations or anything earlier than the gospels, except perhaps those few pieces of Jewish scripture (Old Testament, to Christians) which Jesus specifically cited, quoted or supported.
You just repeated the same thing as before. You cannot divorce Jesus moral teachings from what he said about himself, and he clearly said he is God. What you are saying does NOT work.
Also, it’s clear that you don’t understand orthodox Christianity. What you are describing is at best pop Christianity and at worst Gnosticism. You need to know it as it is before you critique it.
Read “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis. It’s not enough but a decent start.
And again I repeat, without the belief in the Trinitarian God and Jesus the Christ following the orthodox faith, “Christianity” (as you describe it) does not exist.
If the creator of the Universe cared for humanity - to the point of loving humans individually or collectively as Christians claim - we would know all about it without needing to read scripture, works by CS Lewis, or arguments from people who believe one of the countless religious doctrines which have self-spawned and diverged over thousands of years.
Getting rid of the bad government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. More broadly, we need elite replacement and deportation of foreigners.
Even so, it will take a long time to recover at this point.
I agree with the analogies being drawn to Russian anti-LGBT legislation. On the other hand, I think we need to be careful with the Puritans. Americans won't like to hear it, but they (the Puritans) are the source of much of the problem with liberty in the first place -- the very notions of election and purity apart from tradition are unsustainable. They encourage people to draw all the worst kinds of lessons from the pioneer experience -- namely, that complete independence and limitless expansion are both our nature as Americans, and the very measures of good. This accounts for the odd paradox that moving away from failing America could be seen as the most "American" thing to do.
If this is truly the whole of our nature as a country and civilization, then we richly deserve to perish.
But I don't see it that way. And I don't think we need to continue to see it this way. If I might suggest one possible antidote to the Lockean-Smithian view, and also to the overreaction of Puritan austerity in morals... try Ferguson. The idea with him is that civic virtue is sustained by common activity, and especially by common struggle. This , he says, can't be commercial in nature, but must do with the overcoming of difficulties.
Our ancestors had plenty of difficulties, and built decent, working communities in response. We will have many such difficulties again; engaging them together rather than running and planting a new flag: here's where communal self-awareness will begin again.
Complete independence and limitless expansion are core American ideals, and are the very measures of good for most Americans. I don't think we necessarily deserve to die for it, but it is the past and current reality of American society, and we will have to change, willing or not. Respectfully, I believe there is a much greater possibility that said change will result in less communal self-awareness, as opposed to a renewal.
I'm not sure I understand the end of your comment. What change do you foresee?
Well, given your user name, if by "communal self-awareness" you meant further consous racial awareness and self selection of groups, you may have a good if unfortunate point. If you meant that American citizens or society as whole would begin to have more communal self-awareness, I still disagree. As for what change I forsee, I don't think I or anyone can predict specifics, and I'm certainly no expert, but you don't have to be an expert to see America is trending down, a trend exacerbated by our past and current idiotic and insane foreign wars and policy, to say nothing of our corrupt facsimile of capitalism at home and abroad.
When you said "have to change" I took you to mean "here's what will have to be done in order to survive." Further decay is easy enough to envision.
Yes, I think race would be a part of communal identification, but not the only part. Ethnogenesis is a tricky thing. Whether "American" can remain, or rather a patchwork of more regional identities will come to the fore, I'm not sure.
My point in bringing up limitless expansion and complete independence is that they are not workable ideals, long-term, for *any* group of people. They worked for a time only due to the special circumstances of a nearly-empty continent. But even them, they were not the only outlook on the situation. They persist in liberal politics, in "pragmatist" philosophy, and expansionist foreign policy -- all things that have to go in the bin.
This is where the Louis CK video above is interesting. He seems to think US aggression overseas is the product of excessive nationalism -- leftists, and especially leftist Jews, tend to think this way. But in fact the opposite is the case: it's the lack of positive, substantive identification that feeds empire and expansion. With "liberty!!!" the focus is outward, for money and gain (or messianic moral projects), rather than inward, toward helping one's fellows.
Hopefully you won't mind some quibbling before the substance, but no political ideals work in the long-term for anybody. All circumstances change. Also, to paraphrase, "liberal politics" is like porn, we all know it when we see it, it's defining it that's a problem. That said. I think you and I have different meanings of "pragmatist" philosophy. I take it to be realism in the vein of Mearsheimer, etc. which I both agree with and believe is intrinsically opposed to expansionism in the current situation. But perhaps you're meaning more along Ayn Rand/ utilitarian lines, in which case that is indeed something to trash along with expansionism. To your point that excessive nationalism and aggression aren't linked so much as the overall societal lack of a substantive, positive identity is dysfunctional and leads to dysfunctional results in foreign policy, I don't disagree, but also want to point out that lack of organic identity is at the center of the American experiment. If we cannot live together without ethnic, racial, or religious ties, what does than make us one nation? I was raised and taught to believe that what essentially holds us together is belief in the Constitutional order, rule of law, and belief that all men (people) are created equal in the sense that all have equal rights and justice under the law, and not mindless, destructive flailing in an attempt to prop up an inherently exploitative and corrupt oligarchy. An objective look at past and recent events in particular proves me wrong. As there are no politically productive actions possible under the current regime, the only solution I see is to call a Constitutional Convention. Whether or not the American people have the political will to do so remains to be seen. I suspect not, and believe that America's economic situation and world position will soon collapse. I doubt anything good will come out of that long-term for us in the US, but it's not technically impossible, quite probably better for the rest of the world, and honestly if we don't start a nuclear war, I'll call it a manageable result.
No, I meant pragmatism in the formal philosophical sense: James, Dewey, and their descendants. That is characteristic American philosophy (yankee, at least), and has an inherently expansionist ethos: America imposing its own restlessness on the rest of the world.
I don't see defining liberalism as a problem at all. You're voicing it here with the voluntarist arguments you're making for the American order. And yes, I see the exclusive use of such arguments as a deep problem.
We do have ethnic, religious, racial ties, and the founders presupposed them. The idea that the Declaration is the essential condition of the American nation is neoconservative retconning; read what Jay or Washington had to say about the American people. Read Franklin's Increase of Mankind essay. Read Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia. And consider that the first act of congress was the immigration act of 1790 ("free white persons"). No one believed there was a "lack of organic identity." Quite the contrary.
Exclusive reliance on Lockean abstractions IS the issue.
Political ideals can and do work in the long run if they are sufficiently modest. You are assuming that liberal ones are the only ones available to us. Even the most liberal of the founders didn't see it that way.
The west will fall and it can't happen soon enough.
Perhaps is they stop trashing and bashing the rest of the world they will find their way again.
What a dark soul.
Historically, moral decay is the phase before the collapse of the society / culture / empire / civilisation. The Christian West is too far gone. It will collapse before any rebuilding can take place. Don't be surprised at the terrible things that will happen before the aliens are sent back to their countries of origin - including the Jews.
I’m a Jewish 4th generation American. I’d like to know where I’m “from.” My great grandparents came from Poland, Austria and Russia. Where did your great grandparents come from?
That will depend on the policies of those who will get control when the Jews lose their grip on the media, politics, finance, Big Pharma, education, entertainment and much else of the West.
What is going to happen is not necessarily what I WANT to happen. I am 74. I will be gone before this all plays out. Martin Armstrong predicts that there will be an entirely different political system in the USA by 2032. And the USA will split into 4 parts. I suspect people like you will gravitate to what is today's California or New York.
I’m sorry? Ppl like me? Jews? Democrat walkaways? Substack readers? I already live in NYC, my family has been here for generations, but I no longer share the values of the locals
I was born into a Democrat cult. You would have me punished for leaving it and punished for staying, it seems
Also Jewish, "Ro". Hostility breeds hostility, and the results are rarely fair. If we can ask "is it good for the Jews?" they can ask "are Jews good for us?" And they are asking. And they will ask. How's that looking right now?
You've taken steps toward righteousness. Perhaps, like Lot, you'll get a hand from high places. Perhaps, like many other times in our history, you won't. So serve the Lord, serve your fellow man in truth, maintain situational awareness, and decide on your plans. Part of which should involve aiding the legacy of a broader teshuvah within the Jewish nation, as well as the American one. Our current state did not happen by accident.
You're not your grandparents, you're you. You're "from" the US.
Most of the so called Christians who think they own this country, are also grandkids or great grandkids of immigrants, and on average aren't a any more from the US. TBH it is their cohort who should be deported, for having a bad attitude to their Amerindian or Mestizo neighbors who generally work hard, generally live the conservative family values espoused by the former group that wants them out, and generally don't complain either despite being treated unkindly by asshat Anglo's
Unless Mexican-Americans are distinctly different from Mexicans, you’ve romanticized a large group of people.
My dual-citizen wife and I have lived in rural, central Mexico for seven years. My neighbors have work habits that are identical to those of gringos (they work hard when held accountable, not so hard when unsupervised) and are decidedly unfaithful to the mother/father of their children.
Because divorce is complex in a country with Catholic roots, it is uncommon—because many couples don’t marry! Bastards are the norm and no one looks askance at that reality. (Our new priest has scolded the congregation of the necessity of marriage, saying that after having four children together, maybe it’s time!)
Perhaps we should admit that ethics and morality are personal and do not dwell in this group or that group?
Obviously painting with an overly broad brush, that's the conversation I'm responding into. I'll take your point about marriage etc, maybe will leave it to someone else to compare the values espoused by the culture as a whole. To be honest that isn't even what bothers me, it's just I think is a false point of comparison sometimes made by modern day US "nativists" to justify the rest of the shaky argument they're making.
On the subject of work habits, I think usually you really are going to find a difference between immigrants/emigrants. From everywhere. You're talking about a population, self selected, who just up and left much of the family and social connections they had before. Whether it was for the money, or to get away from something, if they're staying, it means to they're now building a new life. This typically means making an extra effort.
I live in a neighborhood that’s demographically skewed towards women and children because many men have gone to the USA to work—a second order effect of migration.
Working hard because of their taskmasters?
Building a new life with a second family? Or making plans to return home with a nest egg?
I can see you’re obsessed with hitting the piñata of “nativists”. Are you virtue signaling or do you really care about Mexico and the rest of Latin America? I sense the former.
(Please describe your life in Latin America and/or your sources of information.)
Yes I was talking very much about the nativists as you can see. I'm talking specifically about people in the US who moved there at various times or their descendants.
So that's the idea. Stick it to the gays and the immigrants. Gee what an intellectual tour de force, never heard that before. So sad, it really is, because the descriptions of societal collapse (though partial and carefully chosen to set up the deeply banal conclusions and proffered remedies) were well drawn.
The gays are an indicator of degeneracy - especially the guys peeing on each other in a pool. That it happens at all means people don't control their urges - they don't have virtue.
Immigrants see the degeneracy and think to themselves "there's no way these people are going to last, better to run in there and claim the best spots for when they eventually dissolve". So they are like jackals shadowing the dying animal - again an indicator of degeneracy and decay. Actually, it's worse since they don't just wait for the animal to die, but sometimes nibble on it's ankles to hasten the demise - like corporate guards disrespecting this or that amendment of the US Constitution. This slowly, at first, imposes a new law of the land.
Oh THAT's an indicator of 'degeneracy'. Not climate vandalism, global ecocide, the direct facilitation of genocide, grotesque inequalities, widespread corruption, reckless and inept imperialism, institutionalised racism, state sponsored torture bases, the global surveillance system, warmongering and the largest prison population in the world. Nah - just lock up the gays and the muslims and all will be well. Your comment is a superb indicator of the downward spiral from democracy to tyranny.
> Nah - just lock up the gays and the muslims and all will be well. Your comment is a superb indicator of the downward spiral from democracy to tyranny.
And it is at this point I start suspecting you're a troll.
Answering the part of the comment before what I quoted, yes, that is an indicator of degeneracy. And for some people it's the first indicator they'll start paying attention. There are grades of indicators. Some are more obvious and in-your-face than other. This is one of the more obvious ones.
The sexual deviants are unwitting tools of those in power to divide and rule the people. The illegal immigrants perform a similar role. In due course, the homosexuals will return to their closets and the unassimilable to their own societies. The Jews who choose to remain will represent no more power than the 2% of the population that they are.
America is already dead. The free moral people are a shrinking minority and there is no prospect of them becoming ascendant once more.
Their great white hope - Donald Trump - is a plastic mannequin constructed in a mall basement by a team of retards who stumbled across a random selection of spare parts.
The only hope for heritage Americans is to assemble in some defensible position and survive the ongoing disintegration with their moral heritage intact. Multicultural empires always dis-integrate into monocultural nations.
Birds of a feather flock together for mutual benefit. I hope that the good people of America have enough sense, enough insight, and enough fortitude, to do the same.
But nobody, no system, no political campaign, no man on a white horse, no substack philosopher nor commenter, can do it for them.
They will. But there is a lot of rough water ahead. The thing to remember is that moral corruption is death. The people who imbibe it won't leave descendants. The sad part is that they will take many good people down with them.
Indeed.
Watched Hollywood westerns and Trump reminds me of the snake oil saleman in "Outlaw Josey Wales".
I'm not going to bother listing all the things that are wrong with this country and why. It's too divided, the government is too big and too corrupt, and I really feel the only answer is to give all the power back to the individual states. Dissolve the union. The constitution that was signed to form the union has been broken.
Oh my. I was with you right up until you skewered early American history. So let's dive into that.
1) The Puritans - literally from day 1, the Puritans' biggest problem was that so many of their members were RUNNING AWAY to join other communities, initially those of the Native Americans and then later other European-origin ones in (what was to become) the United States. That's why the Puritans don't exist anymore - because people got sick of their lifestyle. There are plenty of diaries from the Mayflower era, complaining about how people in Puritan communities refused to do their fair share of (agricultural) work, gambled, played sports, etc.
2) This quote needs to be taken behind the barn and shot: "... the Articles of Confederation saw a far more limited federal government that effectively had almost no power, which the founding fathers themselves quickly realized simply did not work"
No, no, and no. The Articles of Confederation are what all those patriots fought and died for. The problem for the feds was that they financed the war through the stupidest way possible - by borrowing staggering amounts of money (see Haym Salomon for much more on this). And the FEDS couldn't pay that money back precisely because the Articles of Confederation limited their income exclusively to a few things like import tariffs.
The event that lead to the complete dismantling of the US government (officially now known as the Constitutional Convention of 1787) was billed to the public as a meeting to reform/revise the Articles of Confederation. But the reps then sealed the doors shut, MET IN SECRET (and every rep had to sign an NDA in modern terminology), and came up with a brand-new form of gov't, aka the Constitution, with the vote on passing it also made a classified secret.
In other words, something nobody (publicly) voted for and implemented without the consent of the people. And it was DEEPLY unpopular at the time (the Amendments, now so beloved, were added later only to disarm the opposition).
Keep in mind that the war started in 1775, and the articles of Confederation passed in 1781. So America was a free country for just a few years before those elitist cabal mfers took over.
And the second that the US Constitution became the new iron law, George Washington led the biggest army of his entire life (bigger than the one in the Revolutionary War) to crush the American people (the so-called Whiskey Rebellion) while simultaneously founding a new nobility class (Sons of Cincinnati) with himself as the leader (complete with statues of him in the form of an ancient Roman god).
Unfortunately, US history has been retconned, so now everyone thinks that the original patriots fought and died so they could be led by a repressive totalitarian central gov't that blatantly ignores its own Constitution (e.g. the privately owned Federal Reserve, the president declaring war w/o Congress' approval, etc).
And we wonder why America has lost its way? Shit!
This was new to me so I checked on Wikipedia. Wikipedia claims that in American Revolutionary War, the Army + Millitia of USA totalled ~40,000. Wikipedia further claims that in the Whiskey Rebellion, the US Goverment forces amounted to ~13,000 people. Maybe there are more details I don't know about?
I don’t know enough to comment on American history.
What I DO know is to NOT check Wikipedia for anything slightly controversial. You’ll get they want you to “know” of the approved narrative.
Big government is the problem!
What does big government mean to you?
When government does anything for people who should be doing it for themselves. When we send any amount of money to any country that should be spent here. Meddling in other countries business. Welfare, free lunches and all that bullshit. When it starts it all goes awry. Progressivism is evil
I think you got that a bit wrong Patti. The government is supposed to represent the interests of its people. It all goes awry when it stops representing them, and represents the interests of corporations and lobbyists that are based on tax havens and give nothing back. This is where money is sent to foreign countries and wars, home infrastructure crumbles, industry dies, and the local population finds themselves disenfranchised, unemployed, homeless and in need of welfare. You don't want SMALL government, you want GOOD government. Your issues are with corporatism not progressivism.
Well I don’t think it was a big problem of corporate interest In the 60s but the welfare state ramped up hard and the all the other lunatic policies followed. One progressive policy after another and here we are…the biggest government and employees who think we work for them and not the other way around!
I think you got this one wrong as well Patti. Corporate interest has always been trying to dictate policies. Welfare and workers rights were far stronger during the 60s, 70s, and up until the USSR fell. While it existed the West had to maintain welfare policies to keep the western populations placated. They had to look better, you see. Since then, the welfare state has been progressively demolished, in favour of corporations interests, who demand hunger wages, no workers rights, no local industry, and our taxes going not where WE need them to go, but to fund whatever makes them richer, like wars etc. They had to convince us that degrading people's lives is good for "the economy" which is to say their own pockets. People not as fortunate as you had to pay the price. They're not the reason your life is harder, because they get handed out lunches, there's enough money to help everyone live a decent life. But the corporations need people unemployed and desperate, so as to keep wages at starvation levels, and people terrified that they'll end up homeless if they lose their jobs, don't even think of joining a union. That's why you need GOOD government, to protect you from the vultures, and help you live decently. And a small government can't do that, it needs to be big and strong.
Understanding what the Whiskey Rebellion was all about goes a long towards explaining the shit-show we're mired in today. Taxation without representation. New bosses, same as the old bosses. WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?! ABSOLUTELY MIC PROFITS!
The fact that America was never a utopia of freedom doesn’t invalidate the author’s main argument. Out of the mishmash of those who came to these shores, rich and poor, we fashioned something like an ethos that everyone understood. Individual freedom was a big part of that, but within a context of civic virtue. Yes, freedom meant you could cheat and steal, but that put you firmly outside mainstream society. I think our author argues that no one subscribes to the need for civic virtue anymore, much less enforces it. Yes, the rot starts at the top and goes way back. But the idealism of America’s first elites was real, and they led community wide efforts to improve conditions for everyone. Today’s elite class feels no responsibility at all for the peasants they despise.
Love me some Charles H Smith❤️🐈⬛The flip flops, the way of being, just being in the whorl. I read his works and often give a wee chuckle. Between then and the now…all~ways learn something from my pal Charles. The bright bulbs. Well, onto…the next quark. Or, thought that drifts by. Your prose keeps my heart beating; waiting, watching… learning from the best. Meow, my pal. Gratitude, as well❤️🐈⬛ Carry on, the love revolution and the spitrual awakening commences 💙💦🌎💚