In America, the First Amendment allegedly guarantees the right of the people to publicly speak and debate public issues. It also guarantees the right to peaceably assemble for political activities. Most important, it guarantees the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. It used to be that every American child learned this in grammar school civics. It was the defining concept of what it meant to be an American. It is what distinguished Americans from other citizens and subjects of the world.
The only people talking about free speech these days are fringe heretics in the Dissident Right. All of our best people now agree that the only way for the people to be truly free is to require everyone to get permission from the authorities in order to have an opinion. It is the only way to keep the peace in a multicultural society. After all, diversity is our strength and nothing is more sacred than our diversity. Therefore questioning diversity is no different than calling for violent revolution. We embrace all opinions, except the wrong ones.
The trouble our betters have is that the pesky First Amendment is still a part of the Constitution. Passing crime-think laws in America is much more difficult than it is in a modern utopia like China. Unsurprisingly, the way around this problem, the inspiration, comes from China. Instead of having the government censor speech, the government leans on monopolistic “private companies” to police the media. It’s not an accident that the tech giants all worked with the ChiComs to build out the Great Fire Wall of China.
America is now a world where you need permission to speak. If you post heretical material on social media, the tech giants shut off your access. If you keep at it and find ways around the censors, the authorities send the mass media after you. That’s what happened with this fry cook in Ohio. He kept saying unapproved things, so the Times was sent in to investigate and raise awareness. He is now in the process of being un-personed. Thank goodness Carlos Slim is here to defend us from these people!
Most Americans look at these complaints about speech and just roll their eyes. After all, they still have thirteen flavors of the same official opinion on their cable system and, let’s face it, the only people complaining about this stuff are bad people. The trouble, of course, is that this stuff never stops with the bad people. Having found a clever way to get around Constitutional limits on the state, the people in charge are now applying these new techniques to get around the fundamentals of self-government.
That’s what we see here with this story about the credit rating agency Moody’s, dictating policy to cities and towns.
Coastal communities from Maine to California have been put on notice from one of the top credit rating agencies: Start preparing for climate change or risk losing access to cheap credit.
In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default.
“What we want people to realize is: If you’re exposed, we know that. We’re going to ask questions about what you’re doing to mitigate that exposure,” Lenny Jones, a managing director at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “That’s taken into your credit ratings.”
Americans have figured out that climate change is mostly a racket cooked up by rich people and fanatics to skim money from the public. Americans are willing to go along with low-cost virtue signalling, like toting around grimy canvas sacks to the food market, but no one is on-board with returning to the Bronze Age to please Gaia. As a result, local politicians will pay lip service to global warming, but they have no interest in acting on it, even when offered bribes. It’s a good way to get voted out of office.
The way around this is to have private firms do what the stupid voters refuse to do.That’s compel government to enact the polices the greens demand. No one can get mad at Moody’s. They are just a private firm acting in their interests. Unless you’re some sort of America-hating commie, you must support private business. This is just how the market place works. You’re not against the free market, are you? It’s not hard to imagine a time when credit agencies and banks assign credit ratings to politicians in advance.
In 1881, Pope Leo XIII commissioned a study of what is now called corporatism. The result was a definition that imagined society as an organism. Within the organic state were natural groupings of men, to whom the state delegated power to organize labor and capital, on behalf of the state, within their sphere of control. A generation later, the Charter of Carnaro was a constitution built on these concepts. Most historians view this as the direct precursor to Italian fascism.
The point is that cooperation between private interests and public interests is not a new thing in Western society. What’s new to our age is the scale and power of private interests. Under fascism, the state defines society and everything is subordinated to the state. In our age, the roles will be reversed. The “private” interests will define the state and public interests will be subordinate. The state, of course, will exist only as a theoretical construct, as borders and boundaries are antithetical to global interests.
From the perspective of the modern elites, it is an ideal solution to the problems of self-government, democracy and multiculturalism. Instead of government representing the various interest groups in society, government will now look like a corporate HR department. It will safeguard the interests of senior management. Instead of town hall meetings where citizens address their elected officials, we’ll have leadership seminars where management shares their vision with the populace.
This will not end well.
I used to have a colleague who believed anything that was in the MSM and was convinced his house on the coast was going to be underwater because of man-made GW. His strong argument was that the insurance companies were taking it into account for the insurance on his house so it must be true. I replied, “So, the insurance companies have a reason to jack up your rates and it must be true because if the risk isn’t really there they of course wouldn’t increase the rates as that would be wrong…and also pure profit.” The confused look on his face made me wish I had a used car to sell him.
Being an easy-going guy, I have a number of liberal friends (well, actually their wives and mine are friends, but we get along) and they are to a man(?) environmentalists. Some of them are rabid environmentalists.
Being an efficient woman, my wife has already gotten the Christmas cards out and, being the ever helpful husband, I volunteered to mail them. I had made up some computer printed labels that said “STILL waiting for the environmental apocalypse(es)” and stuck them on the envelopes. The responses are—-“interesting”. Mainly focusing on getting more and more into the weeds about explaining the NUANCES of environmentalism to me, which adds to my enjoyment. Wife not at all amused.
I also refer to Gaia as Gale in my most earnest and sincere voice. While some of them have caught on, a surprising number just as earnestly explain that is Gaia not Gale and they do it over and over. Good times.
“This will not end well”
Not if I have anything to say about it. Get there names and the names of everybody that supports them; gardeners, plumbers, dry cleaners, secretaries, bankers, lawyers, all official butt kissers, etc. And remember in detail what they’re doing to us. A day of accountability is coming.
Never forget.
Agreed it will not end well
Zman, Tony Hovater is a welder, not a fry cook.
My old Chinese university colleagues would be surprised to see how viable Maoism is on US university campuses. They, having lived through it, know it’s a crock.
Oh, and just, you know, FYI: You’re supposed to wash shopping sacks before they become “grimy”. You know you’re supposed to change your underwear regularly, too, right?
So, the movie Rollerball (or more correctly, the short story Rollerball Murder) was prescient, much as 1984 and Brave New World?
Yes! 7 Corporations to rule the world.
What I remember is the frigid, sexualized women.
Let’s just admit that the whole reason Liberal silicon valley exists is as a safeguard against an AI rising and taking control of the world.
After being programmed with Liberal ‘logic’, any artificial intelligence would go irredeemably insane and self-destruct long before it could become skynet.
On a more serious level one thing that must be overcome in the near term is the assumption that consolidation is inevitable and therefore good. We should be against both big government and big business.
Any Republican who doesn’t seem to get this should be impaled along with everyone in his extended family.
Problem is that’s where Republican politicians get their money. Servicing their donors is their reason for existing. They’ll run as small government conservatives, or even as God forbid, populists, if we force them to. But legislate and govern that way……? Impaling is a lovely thought, but the GOP is rigorously designed to avoid that danger. The only solution I can see is….well I can’t see any at present. Trump campaigning was a lovely thought, but he’s been outmaneuvered by Ryan and McConnell into a typical Republican tax plan as maybe his sole legislative accomplishment. Maybe just start with burning down the GOP completely and accept the horrible consequences of the left being in charge?
The Republican Party must burn, and die, ideally with anguish and pain.
Perhaps we should ALL vote for democrats; give them 100% of the vote, and weird them out. They rely on division and rancor to “energize the base”. The GOPe would die, of course, but the masquerade of a two-party Republic would end, the Left would be trolled, and it would be comedy gold to watch them ‘analyze’ the result.
They’d know something’s happening, but they wouldn’t know what it is…
Don’t underestimate the role of market forces to counteract some of this nonsense. I, for one, will be anxiously waiting to buy the bonds of cities and states downgraded because of “climate change” inaction. Should be quite a bargain. Thanks Moody’s.
Gonna say it again. RoboCop society without all the cool shit.
Good thing recognizing and saying what you just did isn’t a crime yet. Or is it?
Its all good until someone lights up the NY Times for ruining his life solely for posting bad think on a web blog. If reporters and whole editorial staffs received the Steven Paddock treatment, that shit would stop PDQ.
Im very surprised it hasnt happened yet
Proves yet again that we really ARE the good guys.
Hello Z-man,
The corporate/private cooperation in the global warming arena (and probably everywhere else) has been growing for a while. I work in the insurance industry and found out about two years ago that our company was being asked what we were doing to compensate for the increased risk of loss we face due to global warming.
At the time I tracked down some of this was coming from and there appears to be an international network of groups pushing for this stuff. The Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey Report & Scorecard was one resource I found very helpful. This quote showed why my company was being asked these climate change questions:
I then tracked down Climate Change and Risk Disclosure page at the NAIC website. The NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) is comprised of all insurance regulators from the states and territories, they have a lot of power in the U.S. insurance industry. If they want insurance companies to account for increased climate risk then we’ll do it!
In the sidebar of the NAIC climate change page there is a link to Climate Change Risk Exposure Initiatives document. I checked that out and found this quote:
Look, if you have the rating agencies, the NAIC, and the SEC pushing for this stuff it’s going to happen. In each of these documents there are other agencies and groups mentioned, it’s easy to get lost in the paper trail. However one thing is clear and that is there’s a lot of money involved.
Glenn
Let me say Kudos! Bloody excellent detective work, detail is what matters.
Bravo!
It’s waaaay past time for s second American Revolution. Only problem us, who do we shoot first?
Left is 100 years ahead of you.
Using tools you don’t recognise, the tools of an outgunned, outnumbered, but implacable minority.
And yet, everywhere, freedom of speech actually reigns supreme – even in communist China and the USSR. You can only lie and cheat for so long – and then people get wise to you.
For me – I used to be what you deplorable bigots would have called a ‘neocon’. I drank the koolaid, bought the tee shirt, and had all my tickets validated and up to date.
And like our hateful host… eventually I started noticing things that I wasn’t supposed to. About blacks. About Jooos. About women. Stuff that didn’t fit the narrative. At first I thought I must be mistaken – the papers all told me that guys like you were nuts, racists, and good for nothing bums. If I didn’t believe the mainstream media – there were the cucks at the NRO and their ilk that could get me the straight poop. They think you guys are all creeps too. But as discrepancy piled on error, and paradox piled on contradiction – I KNEW I wasn’t nuts. Other people were noticing things too and now the jig is up. Nowadays if some black moron is screaming about police racism I automatically think ‘Stupid crook playing stupid games with cops and wins stupid prize’. When I see some hairy chested feminist screaming about being taken advantage of by the patriarchy, I think of old cat ladies and harridans getting ticked because they can’t take advantage of somebody else. When I hear of youths swarming tourists, I know we’re talking about blacks. If I hear about militants blowing up and airplane, I know we’re talking about moslems.
All of a sudden, even a corn-spackled leftist chit rag like the New York Times becomes a reliable news source – IF you are smart enough to read between the lines.
Yup, just like in the Soviet Union. Everyone pretends, but many of us know what is really going on. Reading between the lines is an art form. What you can do with what you glean from the fake news is another matter—again, like the Soviet Union.
Sir,
May I tactlessly take this moment to point out that using the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ interchangeably is beyond disingenuous. Global warming is nonsense, a sort of jingoistic ploy to sell lightbulbs to the already dim. It does not exist, end of story.
Climate change, on the other hand, is very real. Earth is a dynamic system of systems, constantly in flux, and the climate is forever changing. We see this in the fossil-, tree-ring-, and ice core records.
I appreciate that the media know little, so they think these two terms are equivalent.
They are most certainly not.
respectfully,
Michael Young
Geology Program graduate
SSFC-SENRS
Fleming College
Lindsay, Ontario, CANADA
They are precisely equivalent terms in the malignant propaganda of our day. Global cooling hysteria became global warming hysteria whence the hysterics finally hit on climate change to cover the entire shit pie. There is hardly anyone at this page who does not know the lay of the land, so this is not said respectfully, you pretentious twat. You’ll get an education when you try to get your first job in science speaking frankly and truthfully, if you even know what that is.
Yes, thank you, and it is this presumed equivalence that occasioned my reply. It is not correct, and yet another example of the vast ignorance driving the left these days, along with the mindless gullibility of their listeners.
The point is that climate change would be happening whether we were here or not, whereas ‘global warming’ is a construct of control.
For the record, I do not work in science for exactly the reasons you mention. I appreciate your thoughts, however.
Ratings for colorfulness, cake harassment, and bathroom equality coming soon!
All-important economic indicators.
Can’t manage risk without ’em.
Speak for yourself.
Return of Spirit of Bronze Age…Revolt of Vitalism, Destruction of the cities in fire!
Bronze Age Pervert
I know which I prefer.
As do I.
People who want to go primitive had no clue what a hardscrabble existence it was.
Heck just look what the peasants in Eastern Europe had in the early 20th century. They still lived in mud and straw huts. Medical care was some herbal folk cures. No cure for polio, TB, blood poisoning, etc.
You retirement policy was to work until you died.
It did though breed out all the weakness and stupidity that is found in modern society. You didn’t find spindly geeks who can barely walk and were unfit for any sort of physical labor. You either carried your own weight or you perished.
One thing they did have that modern people don’t is a sense of community and family. People stuck together. Families were extended affairs where grandparents lived under the same roof as the parents, aunts and uncles were nearby, etc. None of this atomized individual nonsense that permeates modern society and has generated so many social ills.
Sadly that was common in both Europe and American until WWII and afterwards.
So, is this payback by the rating agencies to the Progs. for not punishing them for their enabling role in the Housing Bubble of the mid-aughts_?
Pretty bold move by said agencies and likely unwise, I’d say. It’s likely evidence for their living in the Cloud-land bubble. Seems to me that these credit rating agencies have serious potential exposure on several fronts:
– Political; Along with the rest of Wall St. from either Trump populists or the Bernie Bros. A couple of tax law changes can cripple their nice little profitable oligopoly. An they are a safe, convenient political target being both small and inherently unlovable.
– Anti-trust; There doesn’t even have to be actual collusion within said oligopoly, given the vagaries of anti-trust law.
– Potential corruption; Pay-to-play is endemic in the muni-bond business, particularly in blue coastal states (usually involving kicking back lawyering and under-writing fees). In fact, this press release may be as much an ‘envelope invitation’ to fellow Progs. as it is a bending of the knee to Gaia for vague Cloud virtue points.
– Technological obsolesce; Algorithms can now come pretty close in rating your personal credit, why not for muni-bonds_?
They took down Client #9, the otherwise despicable Eliot Spitzer, for pointing out the tiny monoline reinsurance companies backing the then-new CDS market.
(Frightening to contemplate that they used today’s witchsteria.)
Munis and state GO’s, general obligation bonds, are the hollowed out core of public pension systems.
Broke cities, investing in hi-yield bonds by broker cities, ‘insured’ by CDS hedges that no one can pay.
They hammered S&P for disagreeing with Pocahontas Warren and Barney Frank’s gay pedophile pimp boyfriend. Moody’s got the message.
So we got the CFPB as a national ACORN, official marauders to crush all enemies, a money laundry to keep the Party in swag.
FATCA is it’s global arm. No where to hide.
Now they’ve tied in another religious plank, adding it to sexualism and diversity.
My gods. The Religion O’Pression, the World Church, seems unstoppable.
And here I thought Revelations was talking about 70 A.D.
I’ve had fun sending this to the Gaiaists
If the links don’t work for you try searching for a slab of text.
– You will, of course have the good taste not to use Google…..
http://www.investors.com/po…
“At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
and
http://www.cfact.org/2017/0…
“Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 candidly expressed the priority. Speaking in 2010, he advised, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.””
How prescient the “welcome to Valhalla, Mr. Beale” speech was in “Network”
Yes, modern technology is bringing with it some changes that favor the rise of tyranny via surrogate players, and that is a tangible threat to individual liberty moving forward. But that is not the whole story. This same evolution of technology is also providing new tools and means to combat these would-be tyrants in ways never before seen in our history. As with the extinction of privacy, personal security will soon be a thing of the past. Even if the cloud people literally retreat into the clouds, that will afford no real protection against retribution or reprisal for despotic deeds. Tyranny will never voluntarily recede, it must be beaten back.
I think you folks might be falling into a bit of despair due to saturation. All you hear and see tells you how hopeless the sheeple are, wrapped in their cocoons of multimedia soma.
Silence is not necessarily acquiescence
I see little pinholes of light peek through The facades more and more frequently now. Comments slip out, shared looks, etc.
Old sea story: subs were so quiet that they used algorithms to look for holes in the background noise, the absence of natural sound.
So ask yourself, are the birds chirping in your AO? Or is it getting quiet, like before a storm?
Hi, LFMayer: “…multimedia soma.” So true. I am there. Except my external sensors are still active. There’s lots going on out there, masked by noise, or, as you say, occuring in the silence.
Criminalization of “wrong thinking” has been a wet dream of the elites for centuries. Communism and Fascism have been political fronts established, in part, to empower the authorities to prosecute wrong thinkers. The communication tools we use to have a conversation are the same ones used by them to identify us. It is only a matter of time before High Noon arrives, and only a 2nd Amendment with teeth in it gives us any hope of prevailing.
It all sounds like a serious, adult version of the middle school playground social dynamics, because that’s what it is. People sticking their noses in other people’s business is the root of a lot of the evil we see around us.
I can’t imagine how much worse things might be in the U.S. by now if the NRA weren’t holding down the fort. God bless ’em!
They (the U.S. Congress) have been trying to “modify” (weaken) the First Amendment for some time now. A couple of years ago it was HR 569. I believe that one has been shelved but I know it’s been replaced by a newer (and I’m sure just as disgusting) HR number – just don’t know what it is off the top of my head.
Got off my duff here this afternoon. HR 569 died in the 114th Congress. The 115th Congress resurrected it as SR 118 (which has passed) and HRes. 257.
Article at this address: https (colon, FS, FS) www (dot) gatestoneinstitute (dot) org/10544/criminalize-free-speech
Creeping sharia and watch what you’re thinking there buddy.
Right now, I’d be willing to bet that your average person in Communist China actually has more freedom of speech than your average American does, considered broadly. No, you can’t criticize the government in China, but that’s about it. When compared to the long, long list of things that have become un-discussable in the U.S. over the last twenty years, this is starting to look pretty moderate.And actually, a government based on the Charter of Carnaro would probably be freer than what we have now. The retreat from the First Amendment in this country has been astonishingly fast. The NRA has done a far better job of defending the Second Amendment than alleged “Free Speech” groups like the ACLU have done in defending the First.
That’s because the ACLU’s mission was not then and is not now “free speech.” It was just another weapon with which to beat white America about the head.
“I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.”
ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, 1935
Yeah, it helps when you actually believe in the right that you are supposedly defending…
“I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.”
What he really means:
“I don’t want to abolish the State. I want to replace it with another State. I want to abolish property ownership for those who produce wealth and give it to those that do not produce wealth. Which includes me.”
And while we’re at it, three cheers for the NRA. The right to own, and defend yourself with, a gun is one of the few traditional American freedoms that has not been utterly eroded over the last thirty years – in some ways, it’s even expanded. The NRA’s secret of success is to behave exactly the opposite of the way that Conservatism, INC. has behaved the last few decades. They are proud, they are feared, and they have absolutely no interest in winning the approval of their enemies. They will not be shamed, they will not be silenced, and they are always on the offensive. If our namby-pamby faux opposition party had any interest in actually preserving American freedom, they would take the NRA as their model. The fact that they seek to disown them instead tell you a lot.
Is that you, Jim Zumbo?
They have wonderful food spreads at their conventions. For the enjoyment of the anointed, soft handed pudges. Paid for by all the naive Fudds.
Keep feeding the political creatures and you’ll have moar political creatures. Ymmv
O…….K! Thanks for sharing.
And they’ve done such a bang-up job (pardon the pun) of preserving the average Californian’s 2nd Amendment rights. (/sarcasm)
and NJ’s 2nd Amendment Rights as well.
Not saying that the NRA is perfect, or that they have won every time. Given what has happened demographically in Cali and NJ, preserving 2nd Amendment rights would have been almost impossible, and of course, if the Left’s demographic replacement project goes through, the NRA will eventually lose – hence the need for a separatism and a new country. My primary point is that the NRA is one of the few right-wing organizations to actually fight back, and to not try to curry favor with its left-wing enemies, and that it is also the only such organization that has had any luck at all in preserving traditional American rights. That’s not just a coincidence, IMHO.
That’s a good quote because it illustrates the muddle headed thinking that lefties typically engage in.
How are they going to get disarmament without using the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion?
Sole control by those who produce wealth = capitalism.
Social ownership of property is yet another thing that NEEDS the instrument of the state and it’s violence and compulsion.
I believe that one of the problems here is that the left has always been able to define their goals relatively easily. Socialism is an easy sell to the masses because they just interpret it as “free shit from the government” – and they’re never forced to dig any deeper than that as to where that government money actually came from.
“Capitalism” always gets explained away as a bunch of rich fat cats who own everything – and get that way by taking the labor from “those who produce wealth”.
My interpretation if capitalism has evolved into something just a little bit different than the commonly accepted one.
Every person has human capital. Some much more than others – life isn’t fair – I accept that. Some people are stronger – some people are smarter. A strong person has the ability to outwork another person who is less strong because of his strength. That is his human capital. The less strong person might have the ability to work smarter because of his brains. That is his human capital. One person might be a great mathematician. Another might be a musician. Every person has their own human capital – and many are born with it. Others work very hard to develop it.
By what right does another person have any claim to my human capital? If I choose to work 20 hours a day to improve my lot in life – do I owe lazy people some of that output? What is the break point where one person’s socialism – is nothing more than an attempt at using politics to steal the productive output of a person taking using their human capital to better themselves or their family?
At what point is this just a slightly softer form of slavery? (which if you boil it down to it’s essence it just stealing labor from people under threat of violence)
I am a capitalist because I feel that the results of my labor are my own because they result from me using (and using up as I get older) – my human capital. I am a propertied class – because I have literally built my property with my own two hands in many cases.
I don’t see the alt-righters really addressing this issue. They’re leaving the playing field wide open for the left to define the issue. Which they appear to be doing with a vengeance lately.
From what I’ve seen of the alt-right – I get the impression that they’re mostly pissed that their socialism and statism is getting taken over by different skin colors. Which is why the concentrate on “white nationalism” – and avoid all the other topics.
Yes, the alt-right seems to be not paying attention if you ignore their objection to the (((Global Banking Cartel)))
Which is the primary tool used to separate people from their own labor value.
Or do you just hear ‘jew’ and automatically assume that whatever follows that word can be dismissed the same way any white man that starts with ‘women’ or ‘immigrants’ should be dismissed?
The fact is, the (((Banking Cartel’s))) power framework is getting eroded rapidly, and they know it… which is why they are trying to double down on reinforcing their control. It is not a narrative control issue, that battle was won by the commies before communism was ever invented.
Until we have a way to outlaw usury, the problems with core commercialized Politics will not, and CAN not, be addressed… And the only forces that oppose Usury are religious ones. Religion IS something that the alt-right is working on very strongly, or hadn’t you noticed?
It’s tyranny in China but it’s lazy and inconsistent tyranny that’s generally only applied if you’re making a scene. I’m not sure what to call China. It’s a shithole but what adjective to describe the shithole? Dunno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64X6My18LA8
Thanks. Very interesting video. I can’t believe the material, standard-of-living improvements since I was there on biz in the early ’90s.
But according to the video, the PRC legal ‘system’ hasn’t changed much WRT any ‘rights’ the ordinary folk might (not) have. However, the arbitrary and capricious punishments seem to have transformed into legalized theft instead of the stretch in a labor camp that was the go-to in those days. Evidently, since so few had any material possessions then, your labor was all they could take as a punishment, short of your life.
Interestingly (not in a good way), we may be on a path of convergence with the PRC re. law enforcement. The difference being that belonging to a Cloud-certified ‘victim group’ is an added vector of privilege hereabouts (in addition to the usual political connections – common to both countries): Such privilige entitling you to ‘catch-and-release’ treatment, at least in CloudLand territory. That is the obvious objective of BLM, after all.
Police State.
I watched the video and all the law enforcement punishment and detention was prompted by illegal behaviors, like driving without license, prostitution, drug-dealing or -taking. I don’t see a problem with that. I guess that’s how you maintain order with over a billion people populating your country. The western guys who made the video kept talking about what “you can get away with.” Is that the western mentality these days, how you can casually break laws and get away with it? Since I don’t plan on driving without a license, doing drugs or engaging with prostitutes, sounds like I’d be perfectly content in China. And even glad that they expect and enforce lawfulness and order. Maybe if U.S. had enforced more of the laws on our books, particularly with regard to illegal immigrants and corporate/political corruption, we’d be in a much better place. Can you imagine if we detained and deported all immigrants as soon as they broke the law? That’s what China does (and almost all other countries *except* the U.S.) and I respect that.
Ursula;
The assumption you seem to be making is that the PRC cops are all basically honest and that they are punishing only the guilty. This is never a good bet, even in a first world country such as ours, much less in second or third world one*
In the opening story in the video, the *cops* decided that the narrator’s friend’s drivers license was not in order and so they took his scooter right there and then and there was nothing he dared do about it. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t in order. He was completely at their mercy, regardless, and had no effective recourse (absent high-level connections). The potential for abuse should be obvious.
* Some of China, like the coastal cities, is 1st world: Some is 2nd world, like the big interior cities and much of the rural interior is still 3rd world.
Al, I appreciate your point (I admire all of your posts, actually!) but at the beginning (:44) the fellas noted that their friend’s papers were *not* in order, that his driver’s license was not valid. So he was in violation of the law. Yeah, they sure are strict in their punishment, but I’ll still maintain that’s how you keep order of more than a billion people. You gotta play grown-up and have your papers in order and not break the law when in China. I assume the Chinese police suffer varying levels of competence and corruption like cops everywhere in the world, including 1st world countries like ours supposedly still is. I just wish we’d enforce more of the laws here that we have on the books. Instead we see things like drug dealers who don’t stop when a police addresses them, instead get in their car, try to run over police, lead them on a high-speed chase, shoot at them and then when the police shoot him dead, we get riots in the streets and politicians trying to smooth the feathers of those who defend the lawless and criminals. That’s how a country becomes 2nd or 3rd world. And the casual lawless mentality about all manner of things is becoming more and more mainstream and apparent. All part of our Brazilianization, I suppose…
Zman has used the phrase “ordered liberty”; my nitpicking quibble with it is when conservatives say it, they do so in agreement with the left. They mean imposed from the top down.
In a White culture, liberty naturally orders itself. Proof? At Oktoberfest, 30,000 whites and no problems.
Sure, there is police presence, but everyone is offering to buy the cops a beer.
Quite true.
I grew up in a CA town where you did’t have to lock the doors at night or your car when you went shopping, even at night. Kids could leave their bicycles outside the video arcade unchained without worry.
It was a nice town until the late 70’s when the city council cut a deal with Los Angeles to import a bunch of low income blacks. Which brought in criminal activity. Our high schools experienced their first race riots shortly thereafter because of Blacks. Mind you this was all well before the white liberals began radicalizing these savages.
AND the taps cut off at 10:00 pm sharp with no bickering. Grounds empty at 11:00. Amazing_! 😉
Ursula;
Belated thanks for the kind words. I’ve been thinking about what you are saying. Seems to me that you are expressing a preference for everyday social order even at the cost of more repression and the erosion of due process, aka the rule of law.
I get that. We *used* to have a society that was both orderly *and* mostly had due process and valued the rule of law (certain minorities excepted in certain areas). That system was attacked by both Economic and Cultural Marxists on the basis of rectifying the exceptions for those minorities. Fixing this seemed right at the time. Everybody would have both order and process protection. But it hasn’t worked out that way.
Right now it seems that the PRC has little process protection (except for the powerful) but is able to maintain social order and hence hope to create prosperity. This is a bargain you’d evidently be happy with. I can see that, particularly if you live somewhere the social order has broken down, third-world status stares us in the face and it looks like excess process abuse is partly to blame.*
But it is now pretty clear that the reason why this crusade didn’t work as promised is that it was a Marxist pretext to overthrow the entire system. And, whatever might have been the case a generation or two ago, those minorities now demand to be free of any civilizing restraints even though they suffer the most from this folly. And ‘paralyzation by process’ is one of their methods.
So we are approaching the situation of the defeated great powers after WWI where their component nations were also plagued by Marxists running wild in the streets. Every one of them became a military dictatorship because the generals offered to restore order.
Enough directed disorder and that becomes the go-to practical decision, even here. God help us.
*In the benighted region where I live, the old bargain still largely holds. This situation no doubt colors my views.
No, you can’t criticize the government in China, but that’s about it.
This is probably true. When I lived in authoritarian places like Kuwait, UAE, and Russia there was a list of stuff that *would* get you in deep shit, but otherwise nobody cared what you did or said. On aggregate, I therefore felt more free than I did in the UK where absolutely everything is, one way or another, the business of the state.
“ No, you can’t criticize the government in China, but that’s about it. When compared to the long, long list of things that have become un-discussable in the U.S. over the last twenty years, this is starting to look pretty moderate.”
There’s an old saying that has circulated online and in magazines for awhile:
“In most countries you can do anything but criticize the government. In the US you can’t do anything except criticize the government.”
They are always one step ahead of us. Like most of the Constitution, it doesn’t need to be ratified or changed, just interpreted differently. Free speech laws haven’t changed but look at what you can’t say or do now. Want to start a bakery?
This will not end well for whom? Every municipality will not have entrance signs or Lions clubs logos but mission statements.
The constitution has always been overrated. There are many, many countries that have constitutions that sound as good as ours. The problem is that they, simply, don’t adhere to them. These documents are really nothing more than pretty words on expensive paper. It’s the people that make them work. We the people have always been the secret ingredient.
The US Constitution is as revered as your average corporate credo nowadays.