Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Assorted

     Just a few squibs before I go back to cleaning and oiling the guns.


1. “Far-right social media”

     By way of NC Renegade comes this new attempt to turn law enforcement against the Right.

     The federally funded Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center sent an email alert last week to California law enforcement agencies warning them about the growth of alternative social media sites Parler, MeWe and Gab that cater to conservative Americans.

     The Orange County center quoted from a recent USA Today article critical of Parler, MeWe and Gab for allowing conservatives to communicate and organize on their platforms free of censorship.

     In the very same week that the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee was holding hearings to investigate the unfair censorship tactics that Facebook, Google and Twitter wield against conservative voices, elements within the federal law-enforcement bureaucracy were showing they are more worried about the growth of conservative social-media competition from sites like Parler, which honors users’ First Amendment rights.

     The article is frightening and should be read in its entirety. The Left is straining to tighten the clamps on freedom of expression. Its attempt to mobilize law enforcement against Gab, Parler, et alii might be a longshot, but it’s indicative nevertheless. Remember that Biden and his ilk have already announced their preference for “curated information” over freedom of speech. If federal authorities can harness local ones to put the screws to the users of no-censorship alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, the vise will have two powerful jaws in which to squeeze us.

     Whatever happened to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s explanation that freedom of speech and thought means freedom for the thought we hate?


2. “Stop struggling!”

     Much of the effort of the Left has gone into rhetorical sallies designed to get its intended victims to accept defeat...even while the battle rages and the ultimate outcome remains unclear. A passage from Atlas Shrugged comes to mind:

     The title on the book’s jacket was Why Do You Think You Think?.....
     “So you think you’re sure of your opinions? You cannot be sure of anything. Are you going to endanger the harmony of your community, your fellowship with your neighbors, your standing, reputation, good name and financial security—for the sake of an illusion? For the sake of the mirage of thinking that you think? Are you going to run risks and court disasters—at a precarious time like ours—by opposing the existing social order in the name of those imaginary notions of yours which you call your convictions? You say that you’re sure you’re right? Nobody is right, or ever can be. You feel that the world around you is wrong? You have no means to know it. Everything is wrong in human eyes—so why fight it? Don’t argue. Accept. Adjust yourself. Obey.”

     Yes, Atlas Shrugged is fiction...at least, it was. But the concerted, relentless efforts of the mass media to browbeat us out of seeing the clear signs of a stolen election suggest that the time is nearing when we will regard it as prophecy. Apropos of which, remember when we in the Right warned that the acceptance of euthanasia meant that a day would come when it would be involuntary?

     The Left really does want us to stop struggling.


3. The anti-space-explorationists inside NASA.

     I wrote about this a few days ago. Today, our favorite Graybeard adds some significant observations:

     The video makes some points I've never heard of, including that the Viking missions in 1976 was the last Mars mission with experiments on it to search for life because of the actions of this group under the name of the Planetary Protection Office. A strange name because it implies protection of this planet and they apparently have nothing to do with that. Exobiologists are not allowed to search for life on another planet until they can prove there is no life there. Excuse me? How is that even remotely logical?

     No missions to planets that might have microbes on them - think Mars because it might harm microbial life on the planet. What about a sterile body like Earth's moon? Can't go there either because it might harm microbes that could eventually evolve! (I'm not making this up) Can't mine asteroids, also sterile bodies, because that's extractive capitalism. Can't do anything.

     Freezing us in place is the point. Indeed, this is a special case of the Left’s enveloping strategy, which is summed up by the three last of Graybeard’s words above: Can’t do anything.

     As I’ve written in the past, every cause has more than one effect, and it is guaranteed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics that at least one of those effects will be deemed undesirable. The impossibility of avoiding all undesired consequences – to say nothing of the unintended and unexpected ones – when added to the enviro-Nazis’ beloved Precautionary Principle, is its argument for sitting perfectly still, breathing shallowly (if at all), and waiting passively for death. It’s a prescription they won’t take for themselves, but that won’t keep them from hectoring the rest of us.


4. A Time For Rebellion.

     You may have read about the group of inland New York businesses who told the COVID compliance enforcers to go sit on a railroad spike. I thrilled to the news...and I wondered whether their rear-up-on-your-hind-legs attitude would ever reach Long Island. It hasn’t yet.

     The time is here for massive civil disobedience. There can be no further delay. The measures imposed on us to separate us, limit our interactions, and impede our commerce have already brought much of America to the brink of social and economic collapse. To tolerate it any longer would be to normalize it – in effect, to create enduring assumptions that staying away from others, going perpetually masked, and arranging our affairs to prioritize the prevention of infection has become our default condition. It would lead to the belief that to do otherwise is unacceptable – possibly legally actionable.

     Once more, with feeling:

     “When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When he believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons….After dreams that were too long, true nightmares…we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which we always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons….It is medicine that has come to replace both religion and politics in our time.” – Adolfo Bioy Casares

     Take off the face diaper. Shake people’s hands and refuse to “sanitize,” before or after. Tell the COVIDiots to go get a warrant. And have a nice American day.

7 comments:

SWVAguy said...

Aye Aye Francis. It's going to be interesting to se how "curated information" will be implemented. Will the NSA monitor every computer and smartphone in the country? Difficult task that.
Regardless of the outcome of this election, we, and Trump, aren't going anywhere. The left has to keep in mind that there are 70 plus million of us who won't stand for the yoke they want to put on us. We've already seen pockets of disobedience. With good reason, what with Gavin Newsome's gettogether at a high end French restaurant, and Phil Murphy munching down maskless with his family. Eff us you say? Eff you back jackasses.
A good way to solve alot of the current problems is for them to leave us alone. Too bad they're not capable of doing so.

NITZAKHON said...

Might like what we're trying in NH.

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/11/reminder-get-your-face-mask-covering-medical-exemption-card-today

SimonJester said...

It's time to read (or re-read) Claire Wolfe's books.

RJL said...

Re: A Time for Rebellion

I hope in the future we remember this from Solzhenitsyn:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Andy Texan said...

Defend the constitution. Down with traitors.

Andy Texan said...

Alex Jones is doing yeoman's work. Today he interviewed Patrick Byrne ex of Overstock.com He and his team have reverse engineered the computer scam and explained it in terms even an old lawyer on the supreme court can understand. Find the interviews at banned.video.

robins111 said...

So in Canada, we have the RCMP showing up to talk to you about online comments. We're a lot closer to full blown commie than you are.
https://www.facebook.com/westphaliantimes/videos/1506821153039116/