One of the few things that libertarians get right is that the foundation of Western civilization is private property. They claim this is a universal reality, which is clearly incorrect, but it is true with regards to Western civilization. The assumption that a man owns the produce of his labor is the main difference between Europeans and the other people of the world. It forms the foundation of law and the logic of political organization, in addition to being the bedrock of Western economic systems.
What libertarians get wrong is that you can create a society where government only protects private property and does nothing else. As with so many things, they get the causal relationship backwards. Like everything else about human society, the concept of private property is downstream from biology and culture. Therefore, the primary reason to have a state is to defend the people and their way of life. Private property is one attribute of Western people’s way of life.
Putting that aside, the ape historians in the glorious future will no doubt trace the decline of Western man to the decline in private property. It will not begin with socialism or other economic concepts. Those are far downstream from what really matters to a people and their way of life. The Nordic people made socialism work while at the same time maintaining the concept of private property. They simply struck a different balance between property and culture than other occidentals
The erosion of this key facet of the West starts further up the chain of causality at the cultural level. This is where the abstract concept of property exists, the platonic form of private property. This is where the wreckers and subversive have gnawed away at the concept in little ways, thus making it less clear downstream. As a result, the idea of private property has slowly receded from the public discourse with regards to politics and economics, even within socialist debates.
Take, for example, the internet. It exists because thousands of people working in government institutions invented a way to link computers into a network. This is why the internet is a public good. It is the creation of public institutions, in the same way the highway system is a public good. The internet was further built out by private companies seeking to profit from the exchange of information, much in the same way merchants use the highway system to profit from commerce.
This is true with regards to e-commerce. Jeff Bezos is able to hurl himself to the edge of the atmosphere in a giant phallus, because he got rich selling stuff on-line. Like all large corporations, he also bought indulgences from the government, in order to gain an advantage over rivals. First it was not paying sales tax and then he moved onto direct subsidies from state and local government for his supply chain. Like other big retailers. Amazon would not exist without government subsidy.
Amazon, however, is the exception. The rest of the tech oligarchs made their money stealing the property of others. Facebook, for example, sells the property of its users to companies looking for data on the population. They call this marketing revenue, but in reality, it is just theft. They steal the labor of their users and then sell it to interested parties without the knowledge of their users. It is a form of slavery in which the user base volunteers to give away their labor to the platform owner.
Many will push back against this characterization. After all, they will say, the service is free, and the real product Facebook is selling is their own creation. They use their technology to capture human activity. Then they make it accessible in a friendly format for their actual customers, the people paying them. The users, because they are choosing to use the platform, are choosing to abide by an agreement they never read and therefore agree to allow Facebook to steal their property.
That right there is how the concept of private property is eroded at the abstract layer of Western civilization. Most people, even classical liberal types, think what the tech companies are doing is legitimate commerce. They have accepted this degraded version of property that carves out an exception to the laws covering property to allow for what amounts to theft. If Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was sent through the time portal to this age, he would call the internet “legal plunder.”
That is what we are seeing, legal plunder. Property is the product of human labor, both physical labor and mental labor. The business owner, the man who organizes men and material to produce goods and services, sees the return on his intellectual labor in the form of profit. It is his ideas and organizational talent that makes the enterprise possible and maintains its operations. The Marxists always attacked this idea but could never get around the reality of intellectual property being the fruit of labor.
Instead, the way around this problem is to attack the concept that you own you and therefore you own your labor. If Facebook can watch you on-line, track your activity through your mobile device, then sell this activity to their customers, it means one of two things. Either you no longer own you or we no longer have private property. After all, your activity is the product of your labor, so if you own you, then you own your activity and Facebook is stealing. Otherwise, you no longer own you.
If we return to the original Western concept of property, then you not only own your activity but also your reputation and your defining attributes. If a company wishes to use these things in a product, then they would need to strike a deal with you in the same way they would if they wanted your physical labor. If Facebook wanted to sell your data, they would need to get your permission every time they sold your data. The mobile devise makers would have to pay you to use their phones.
Of course, this is not present reality. The assumption is that you do not, in fact, own you, so all of this is perfectly normal. The reason enterprising lawyers have not proposed a novel legal theory to the court based on the ancient concepts of private property is that no one questions the right of the tech companies to harvest your property. The state is acting on this new normal as well. New laws, for example, have been passed to require alcohol tracking devices in new cars.
A world in which you do not own you is called a penitentiary. The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, because the population has been habituated to the idea that they do not own themselves. Of course, the state can lock you in your home. After all, they can determine your associations and they allow private enterprise to spy on you in your home. You don’t own you. Like a pet, you are the property of powerful interests, and you must do as you are trained.
The point of the state is to preserve the people and their way of life. This is its primary reason to exist. The secondary and tertiary reasons, like crime control and tending to the poor are all dependent on the people and their way of life. The defense of property is one of those attributes of culture the state must defend. The failure of the elites to defend the people and their way of life starts with this Western notion that you own you and all that you produce. That failure is the death of the West.
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“you not only own your activity but also your reputation and your defining attributes”
Libertarians and conservatives have the souls of accountants. Once upon a time in the USA, a person’s reputation was a highly valued asset, maybe the highest. On a daily basis agreements could be ironed out with a handshake at least outside of big cities. Women would check their behavior out of concern about their reputation.
Now, the ADL can single out Dave or Betsy in Canton Ohio as haters and the tribe strips them of participation in social media and the financial system. Maybe even their job goes away. Or a video of a white person trying to get a strange black person to quit doing something and the person gets vilified nationwide and maybe even arrested and fired.
I can’t imagine this happening 20 years ago let alone when I was a kid. It would have been a major national scandal not because the person was mean but because their reputation was destroyed in such as unfair way.
A society changes fundamentally when a person’s reputation can so easily be destroyed in such a capricious manner. And, of course, the conservatives and libertarians are OK with this especially if it is paired with a tax cut for the wealthy
“The Nordic people made socialism work while at the same time maintaining the concept of private property. They simply struck a different balance between property and culture than other occidentals”
The difference between “brown socialism” and “white socialism”.
Wonder how long before what you type into a message board or in a text but don’t hit the send button, how long before that can be found out
The ability is already there, I’m sure, but it’s the costs and ability to scale up are probably the obstacles
And the benefits to the overseers may not be worth it.
But I could be wrong on that. A few studies that show if you really want the juicy stuff from people, if you really want to take them down for their blasphemy, you have to see what they write but end up, for whatever reasons, never sending.
Anyway, crosses my mind time to time
Facebook does that, saves everything you never quite sent to hold it against you someday.
Imagine what an inhuman monster you’d have to be to think that that should be done—then know that a company that employs hundreds of thousands does it, and they all know, and they’re all accomplices.
Bleak.
It’s trivial to do and in fact is done all the time for innocuous purposes. It’s called AJAX and the main current approach uses something called Websockets. When you see Google or something doing an autocomplete for you it’s sending what you type back to The Hive where it guesses that when you typed “Hunter” and “Biden” the next word was likely to be “crackhead”.
Keystroke loggers were a thing 20 years ago just FYI. If you are foolish enough not to know how to operate Windows (especially 10, and especially tech retards & Boomers) you are already being followed word for word whether you ‘send’ it or not.
Windows 10 has a very innocent sounding feature, “help us improve your typing” by which they will conveniently hoover up every key you press and store it “somewhere” which ostensibly helps you with typing “somehow”.
You can pretty well bet that Google’s Android OS has a similar undocumented feature unless you specifically rip it out with one of the hacked Android OS’s that disable Google’s spyware by default.
Long story short, it is likely happening now to you unless you understand how tech works. It is a massive data pool so it is largely ignored but if the Eye of Sauron falls on you or the AI / Machine Learning gets much better yeah you are prolly f-cked.
Thanks for the info
Yeah, figured as much
Why when I write things that matter to me most, things I put my best efforts into and my time and thinking, I only use a computer with no internet connection. I always feared there would be ways to sneak in via the internet and steal my stuff
Good idea Falcone.
Yet still, if they want you they will take you down. Innocence is no defense. They will edit your words. I have this photo here! What about pg. 964, IRS code b, section e, sub paragraph 7? This witness claims you said something hateful and racist. We see you attended a Trump rally, the leader of the insurrection. How long have you been a white supremacist? Read Vdare, eh? Bought Zman cup coffee?
“Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep It starts when you’re always afraid You step out of line, the man come and take you away We better stop, hey, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down”
Exhibit 1: N1ck Fuent@es
No fly list, frozen credit cards, banned from Twitter, censorship.
Phony e1ect1@ns, rent control, crony “capitalism”, Green Energy, one party rule, puppet prez, politburo, fake news…
American Marxism
The internet has been ruined. These morons are going to do to the internet what became of shopping malls where no one goes except for blacks. MySpace ghetto.
I refuse to use any version of Windows or MacOS or any closed source OS and software to express anything other than the most banal NPC activities. The problem is that even with Linux and open source software you still don’t know what is done with any data sent back to any company or government. Google Chrome is open source and you can see the JavaScript code they use to send your partial search patterns back right there in the page if you want. You still don’t know what the Google AIs are doing with all that data they collect on you.
Oh for frickin’ cripes sake.
Totally OT, but I gotta spout.
You know this mild summer bump in “cases”? The turrifyin’ Delta?
Yes, the test is a fraud, and a way to punish resisters. But I realized…if we’re identifying antibodies…we’re having a Delta pandemic of HERD IMMUNITY
ICUs are designed to be full, they are a corporate profit geared business
Karen you shrieking IDIOT
Lack of control over our personal data might be compared to a penitentiary. But in one sense, it’s more like a debtor’s prison. Even that is not a perfect analogy. This bears a brief digression in history.
In ancient Greece, a man could voluntarily sell himself into slavery. Why he’d do this is unclear, but he could. And, presumably, he could later buy his freedom. I learnt of this in, of all places, Buddha’s teachings (Pali Canon). He wanted to show that caste was irrelevant in the spiritual realm. In Greece, a man could move between the two castes, slave or free, something that was not possible in the four castes of India.
In the West, the closest analogues are imperfect. Chattel slavery doesn’t even leave the starting gate: the slave had zero agency. Yes, in theory, he might be freed, but that was pretty rare.
The debtor’s prison comes closest, but again here, it was a punishment for a crime (failure to pay a debt) and likely not a first choice of free men to raise some extra cash. Debtor’s prison existed well into the 19th century, including in the USA. It was abolished entirely (in USA, “I think”) with bankruptcy law reform.
An important distinction between “Modern” times and ancient Greece is important: in our era, your personal freedom (you owning yourself, so to speak) is an inalienable right. That means basically you can’t sell or assign it. Clearly not the case in ancient times.
But what about selling off little chunks of our life? This is what Z rails against. Sure, a lot of protections exist, at least in theory. Intellectual property. But beyond all doubt, a lot of us have signed away much of our data (ourselves?), no doubt legally, but often beyond our conscious concern or awareness.
What to do about it is an open question.
For all the data mining they do and digging into my personal stuff and selling it, they have never got me to buy anything
That it’s for marketing is what they claim, but I have to wonder.
All I do is get junk spam mail from politicians or PACs asking for money. Or pop-up ads for things I’d never buy but supposedly the best AI in the world is crunching my personal data and figuring out how to get inside my head so that I buy a pair of slacks when I see an ad on ZH
How much would someone pay for my profile? Anyone know the going rate? Seems like a colossal waste of money.
So stands to reason that the government is getting in on the data collection. The marketing claim could be for public consumption. Again, the internet was created to be a strategic asset for the DoD. What was even the purpose of it? Why would the DoD want a cyber superhighway? Anyone know the genesis and early rationale? I can see why businesses would want it, but not the Defense Department unless the idea was always to use it for things like population control.
You nailed it. Please don’t let this be lost to memory. This is some of your best work.
Property is theft to the CPUSA/CCP/Uniparty true believers.
Cargo Cultists love redistribution.
That’s a nice house you have there comrade, don’t mind if I do.
Get to work YT my EBT card is all out.
Do it for the unity or you’ll have some ‘splainin to do when the SUV with tinted windows pulls up.
So no public police, hospitals, fire department or roads?
Most of us on this site have a free spirit but I doubt that most of us really want a minimalist state. For example, most people don’t want old ladies to die for want of health care because their deceased husband didn’t set up his life insurance properly. (I might be able to live with this, but most white people cannot.)
Almost everyone wants some level of public services and therefore we are all literally socialists, at least a little.
It does our cause no favors to adopt the hard line minimalist government position because eventually someone is going to call your bluff and most people will not be on your side. We can live with a welfare state if it is for our own.
Bottom line is that the country is too big and hence unmanageable, so a tool of mass control of 340 million bodies is a godsend. From their perspective.
Yes, in smaller scale societies, all of these things you speak of, such as policing and arbiters of disputes and management of roadways, but it’s proven impossible on a large scale. So that so much has to be centralized and federalized with means of mass control from the top, that is if the politicians are to do their job, which at the end of the day is keeping people from storming their institutions and making their jobs impossible. Preserving a strong government is their job, and they will do what it takes. That it sucks for us is our problem, unfortunately.
To his dying day, Rush Limbaugh would regale his callers, especially the young and impressionable ones, with what I called his ‘serenade to capitalism’. As he aged and declined, he sort of noticed that FB, Amazon, Walmart, Google, and so on were bad actors, but he never noticed that these giants were not mutants of capitalistic behavior, but the logical endpoints of it.
In my opinion, Limbaugh and his imitators helped poison the ‘right’ by (a) dividing all political, social and even moral thought into 2 camps, and (b) focusing all their attention on the follies of the enemy – the SOCIALISTS (boo!) – without ever offering something more thoughtful than an everlasting Milton Friedman / Ronald Reagan vision of utopia, a fantasyland where America is always the champ, that decline can only be due to liberals and not to deep currents and trends in America itself.
‘Civnat’ is not a sufficient insult for the still millions of aging men and women in this country who bought into the Limbaugh/Hannity/their imitators and copycats view of the world. The ‘socialism is bad’ hypnosis among these people is perhaps a worse obstacle to us than wokism. Wokism is evanescent but anti-socialism is hardwired, and among people who should know better.
Libertarianism + ‘America fuck yea’ = stupidity and doom.
You didn’t build that, comrade.
Fuck the old ladies and the walker they rode in on.
Were you thinking of your mother when you wrote that? It is good to keep i mind the unfailing truth that we all age and some of us will require care. I am not advocating for any form of government intervention, but I do advocate for a modicum of thought and reflection before dashing off some heartless riposte. It is always and everywhere true that a society in which individuals fail to administer self-control will lead to a centralization of control, imposed from above. The Founders knew this, hence the thought that our form of government was suitable only for a moral and religious people. Peace, brother.
All Out Of Chewing Gum: Get to work YT my EBT card is all out.
2020 Census: Whites Fall Below 60 Percent for 1st Time
11 August 2021
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3984175/posts
Another finding shows a majority of people under 18 are non-white. The white population has dropped in 26 states. The decline in the white population, if confirmed on Thursday, has happened about eight years sooner than predicted, said Brookings Institute demographer William Frey, The Washington Post reported. “Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you,” he said, adding that the decrease can be partly attributed to the opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession. “The country is changing demographically.”
Two thoughts here.
1) This demographer at the Brookings Institute is openly acknowledging that the Sackler Family Crime Syndicate’s opioid warfare campaign has had a noticeable impact on White Christian demographic numbers in this country.
2) If the inertia & the momentum of the demographic numbers don’t change, and change quickly, then there ain’t gonna be nearly enough Whites left to put any money on the colored EBT cards.
And how many of the colored workers are gonna wanna keep changing the bedpans of the White boomers in the nursing homes when the colored workers’ payday checks start bouncing?
Here Andrew Ang1in’s admonishments ring true: GET THE HE11 OUT OF THE CITIES AND SURROUND YOURSELF WITH RURAL WHITES WHOM YOU CAN TRUST WITH YOUR LIFE!!!!!
PS: Let me throw out a third thought.
3) If the vaccines really do make young [otherwise fertile] people sterile, then in another decade or two, we’ll be looking at an utter hellscape demographically.
Prep, prep, and prep some moar.
And get out there and find them rural Whites whom you can TRUST.
Agreed, grudgingly. A small bonus black pill: if the jabs do sterilize and or cull unexpectedly, alas for our side, the damage to minorities will be proportionally less, due to their lower uptake of the jabs.
As one of the last of the Boomers, my statistical life span puts my death at about 2045. Several in my family have lived well into their 90s, even past 100. The “Hemingway Option” may become increasingly popular in people’s later years as our country putrefies 🙁
You also always have the option to take a few with you.
A white pill to this scenario
The most fertile group, Amish are unlikely to take the jab and as the death rate skyrockets do to the economic collapse, they are not going to be as effected.
This would speed up the Amish Paradise scenario. Also if society becomes more materially and socially difficult, it might be easier to curtail hypergamy and in so doing, increase the fertility rate.
A white TFR of 3 would win a breeding war vs an “other” of 2.0.
Y’all love your black pills around here.
The White fertility rate went below replacement in 1972 and hasn’t budged since then. Certainly opioid deaths have had an impact but the real killers are urbanization and wage arbitrage.
This effects Latinos (1.8 TFR) and Blacks alike (1.9) which is one of the reasons why clown world is allowing the illegal immigrants. They are in essence the last of the “safe to bring in” migrants as the other nations are starting to decline.
Our leaders wanted to bring in South Asians and Muslims but these groups are too tribal and nepotistic and will take power away from the establishment ASAP.
The Jewish diamond and gold merchants of Antwerp got a taste of this and were put out of business to a very high degree. Clown World knows this and while Rep Omar is useful to them she isn’t loyal to them. That’s a bit scary.
Now back on topic. as people move to cities , expenses go up but wages go down. You get less babies .
And note in the US wages are roughly half what they were measured as percentage GDP from 1973 which was a decline year!
In order to fix that either expenses must come down which requires a titanic population decline or wages up which requires a brutal regulatory state.
All the marriage tweaks, pimping religion, small scale handouts and everything else that has been tried has failed. This stuff (sans religion obviously) won’t even work in China.
They work nowhere in modernity. Not one nation with the exception of Israel has good fertility and no developed society has yet to reverse course to a healthy level.
Israel gets this from subsidizing super breeders to not work (Orthodox Torah Scholars) and from a strong sense of tribal identity.
I don’t think we can do any version of that frankly and as such border control is job one along with curtailing stupid money junkies who bring in migrants as labor and customers.
Stop that and let the population decline and you’ll be fine.
if you have an authoritarian movement with enough power to ignore elections you might also go Sons of Jacob/Taliban on the society minus the polygamy and maybe you can get results.
I doubt it, Christianity is pretty much toast outside the Amish and the Evangelicals embrace modernness to a degree which creates heavy loses.
In essence modernity is a suicide pact.
The reason that the Roosevelt system did so well and gave the Democrats a lock on power for decades is that people wanted a basic safety net.
Government grew to 40% of the economy simply because it had too. Otherwise efficiency would have caused a collapse.
Every developed country and most less developed counties have one. Why? Because they work . Such system existed all the way back in ancient Babylon if not farther,. Some were lets build a pyramid, here is some beer and bread, other panem et circusum
Its a cost of allowing strangers to live and work together.
Also in case someone brings up Social Security, yes its a defacto Ponzi scheme . Its fixable though by simply making all income taxable.
The reason we have such a system is not just line in the sands hypothetical granny but also pragmatism.
If we want old people to get out of the work place which we do if only so younger workers can move up when they most need the money, retirement must be facilitated.
The state is the most efficient way to do that Social Security being 97 % efficient as far as I could find.
Also do we really want a lower consumption and a titanic savings rate ? Take say 15% of lifetime earning till age 45 and than another 35%+ for 20 years to insure medical expenses.
That’s a great way to suppress an already bad fertility rate to China levels.
An note you won’t be able to count of businesses to have pensions. Many only bother to pay employees because the state will shoot them if they do not. Of the ones that will give you honest pay , nothing shot of “I’ll go out of business if I don’t raise pay” will get benefits up.
Even if they can’t cheat with migrants, wages are going to stay low and static.
So in order to facilitate a functional economy till economy of scale can be dialed back, we’ll have government.
Somewhat related, I think Apple is starting to collapse in revenues. They were running privacy related ads just a month ago: the point being that they kept other people from spying on you on the iPhone. It was effective. [Even though as usual it featured a black guy].
Now they are spying on your phone, ostensibly “for the children” but no one buys it, even the left. I think they are doing this to collect information and sell it like Google does on Android. And they are doing this because they see collapsing revenue. Their computer sales are basically a rounding error (and their computers went from wonderful to awful — from updating the system like Linux, easy and fast and not having to stop all your work and exit apps to worse than Windows). New Iphone sales seem flat or declining in an inflationary environment. All of a sudden the Pine Phone has a lot of interest. Its like Disney breaking contract with their actresses — a sign that the organization is starting to lose money and execs are doing whatever they can to get their quarterly numbers up to get their performance bonus.
I would not under-emphasize this moment for radicalization and “you own you.” The amount of pushback vs. masks and lockdowns is striking, but people are funny and unpredictable.
People laugh, but turning off the TV and putting down the smartphone and going outside, even if its just for a walk or to work on your house, is one of the simplest and most effective ways to deny the power of their slave system.
And stop flying. Just drive and tell the airlines to shove their mask mandates up their ass.
And stop flying. Just drive and tell the airlines to shove their mask mandates up their ass.
I hate to poast this on a site which is heavily monitored by the Mossad & its Deep State subsidiary, but every time some sh!tlib talking head threatens us with a bunch of nonsense about how being not vaxxed means
1) We can’t fly,
2) We can’t go to “skrewl”,
3) We can’t use pubic transportation,
4) We can’t use the pubic lieberry,
5) We can’t go see the hemlock-society doctor [who wants to murder us],
6) We can’t go to pubic movie theaters,
7) We can’t go to chi-chi restaurants,
8) We can’t watch professional sportsball in person, etc etc etc,
I just keep scratching my head, and wondering to myself, “Okay, what’s the catch?”
[Although I do have to say that shutting down youth bands & orchestras & sports leagues & dances & whatnot is the Ne Plus Ultra of anti-Life satanism. Ergo Hello Home Schooling!!!]
The catch is their war gaming models and their underlying core assumptions said the white guys would freak out if they couldn’t watch sports ball in person, or go to the movies, or get on a plane.
Picture John Brennan. Do you really think he “gets” what makes any of us tick? His understanding of us comes from lab studies and psychological studies and years of university research and so forth that all told him we would freak out. instead of just going to a bar and talking to people, being as he and his kind are elites, they took 100-mile view and the lab and academic approach to people, and like so much else that comes out of these places it was nothing but garbage.
Apple might be the best in-miniature case for Mussolini-style fascism. They lost their “duce” twice and both times their products immediately became garbage and they snapped into acting like a typically corporate, greedy and evil, adjunct-of-the-state, uninventive ripoff operation. The two Jobs-era Apples, for all their many many faults, built better things than almost all companies do, didn’t conspire against their customers much, and were “futurist” in the old good sense of making more things possible. Current_year Apple can’t even launch a minor software update without bricking a million phones.
||||||||| The bug men who program computers for Apple and the twink who runs the Steve Jobs Empire have been stumped. They are running on vaporware. For, aside from the smartwatch, there is nothing new coming out of Apple’s labs and hasn’t been for more than a decade now.
||||||||| Apple was founded as a computer company whose revolutions were done in regular intervals. These iterations resulted ultimately in the Mac and forced Apple into a dead-end ghetto as a minority computer company of choice. Steve Jobs broke out of the ghetto when he returned to Apple and got it into phones. One vital step along the way was the development of the iPod, its portable music player. That focused Apple’s attention and energies, and prepped it for the phone revolution to come.
||||||||| Tim Cook, the limp-wristed twink in question, is CEO of Apple, and was anointed heir by Jobs himself. Cook continues in the Jobs tradition, giving product demonstrations as if they were celebrity showoffs, but he is no Jobs. What Cook is is a very smart manager in the Sculley vein. Sculley, if you’ll remember, was brought in by Jobs the Apple founder over from PepsiCo to provide “adult guidance.” What he did was overthrow Jobs and plunge Apple into an anti-artistic and anti-technological depression from which it almost never recovered. It took the return of a more mature and seasoned Jobs to save Apple from itself, which he did.
||||||||| Now Tim Cook and the bug men at Apple are at the point where they need to demonstrate they can still innovate. But can they? The new ring headquarters looks pretty and Apple has plenty of cash, but to survive they need to demonstrate they are still relevant. The iPhone X is just a marginal improvement on the iPhone X-1. Pretty soon the global market for high-end, boutique cell phones is going to be saturated, and when it happens, Apple better have something in the bags ready for release.
||||||||| When the big crunch comes, it’s going to affect all the players, including Samsung. The Galaxy is an alright phone, but it is heavily derivative of Apple’s style and technology. The beauty of the smartphone market is that the number one Alpha manufacturer gets to stay number one for eternity. It’s like trying to challenge Porsche in the mid-to-high-end sports car niche — it just can’t be done. Lexus is a sedan corporation from Japan and the others are priced either below or above Porsche. Likewise, the iPhone is dominant at its price point, and not just because of its image. It really is a better phone. But Apple is going to have to make a lot more better “somethings” if it wants to keep on the wheel of technological-commercial change and not become a has-been. For the company, its culture, and those who work for it, there’s a lot at stake. We really could use a Steve Jobs 2.0 at about this juncture in time.
Suppose Tim Cook allowed the Macintosh to wither on the vine [and effectively die] precisely because he wanted everyone to be lured into the iCloud.
If connecting the iPhone to the Mac had been as easy as plugging in two ends of a USB [“Thunderbolt!!!”] cable – or, a few years later, something as simple as entering a Mac serial number into the iPhone, and an iPhone serial number into the Mac, thereby allowing the two to communicate via encrypted Wi-Fi – then customers could have used their Macs as their own personal iClouds, and they would have had no need for a remote iCloud in the first place.
And surely that outcome couldn’t have been allowed to actuate.
Ergo the Mac had to wither on the vine.
Lexus is not a sedan corporation, it’s Toyota’s higher-end brand, and its SUV’s outsell their sedans.
Karen is not a Karen
she’s an annoying little script bot from Brooklyn
He he
“People are funny and unpredictable…”
Well, half of them. Without any re-imposed rules and mandates I am now seeing a 40-50% VOLUNTARY resurgence in masking-up when going into stores. I wish this were a symmetric battle. We could ‘agree and amplify’ by wearing full hazmat gear but that’s annoying. Still, these NPCs have to be trolled, somehow. The difficulty lies in this: They can claim microaggression, then hate-crime. You cannot laugh at them, or attempt to stir embers of their better nature, or ‘agree and amplify’. If in any way an NPC is ‘hurt’ by some challenge – however gentle and nondirected – you could get a visit from the authorities or worse be cancelled by your local community page, which is no small penalty where I live.
Sadly, I am happily remarried and I would not do anything to make my lovely wife’s life more difficult or awkward in this little town of ours by being the dick that the present crisis deserves and in fact cries out for.
If in any way an NPC is ‘hurt’ by some challenge – however gentle and nondirected – you could get a visit from the authorities or worse be cancelled by your local community page, which is no small penalty where I live. Sadly, I am happily remarried and I would not do anything to make my lovely wife’s life more difficult or awkward in this little town of ours by being the dick that the present crisis deserves and in fact cries out for.
You’re living in precisely the kind of community which Andrew Ang1in is screaming at you to leave. NOW.
PS: I strongly urge to read the following essay –
https://theamericansun.com/2021/08/02/the-disappearing-americans/
Get out now, while you still can.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods
The antecedents for private property are deep and the battle between good and evil rages on. Good news is it’s become abundantly clear who’s who so pick your side
“It is a form of slavery in which the user base volunteers to give away their labor to the platform owner.”
I’d replace “slavery” with the word “fraud” instead. I image the former involving some form of overt coercion.
There is soft coercion to use social media since you are ostracized by society, pretty much, if you go off the grid
And I’d imagine it raises a red flag within the gubmint with unrelated hassling to ensue. My guess is that they’d sic the IRS on you too.
Well, one of the major goals of the controllers’ lockdowns was to keep everyone isolated at home so they could marinate in a bath of their digital sewage that was intended to reprogram the masses to unhesitatimgly accept the controllers’ totalitarian fever dreams.
I can honestly see it happening where the cops show up at your house and say, “Falcone, we know it’s stupid, but you have to watch TV everyday. That’s the law. Now are you going to watch it for us or are we taking you in?”
“Marinate in a bath of digital sewage”
Now that’s a nifty turn of phrase.
The first society that has an elite working in its citizens interest , shuts off the Internet (or lowers it to 56k dial up) including smart phones and shuts off TV will reap a harvest in terms of an educated and mentally well population.
We assume we need these things for economics and nothing could be farther from the truth . Roughly as soon as a society get wealthy enough to have color TV in nearly every home, it goes into a death spiral.
It got the US in 1972, it even took Brazil down to 1.8. The Brazilian Government actually credits TV for this. Now 1,8 is pretty good when you are Brazil but 50+ years of low fertility and immigration is suicide, not that our elite care.
“shuts off the Internet (or lowers it to 56k dial up)”
Forgive my obvious observation but you made this comment over the internet, so you likely have not followed your own advice.
As Neil Peart of Rush wrote, “we fight the fire while we’re feeding the flames.”
Very true
But the Vox thing tells me the days of the DR on the internet are coming to a close
Enjoy it while you can, but be braced for it
The internet is government property, and only a matter of time before they get their ducks all in a row
Gab will be their holy grail
My advice was meant for a society that has an elite that works in its citizens interest not individuals or a society like clown world .
As it is we should cut back but might as well use it while we can.
Also there are places to cut back now. No need to use Twitter, Facebook or the like. I’m not perfect, YouTube still hasn’t gotten the boot but every little bit.
If our esteemed blog host were willing to treat the subject honestly instead of merely wish-casting, he’d have to conclude that the current set up for big tech EULAs is pretty much going to have to be accepted as valid law. This has nothing to do first principles, as those are just post hoc rationalizations that the winners use to justify the current state of affairs, but has only to do with the viability of the current business model. If you make it law that FB, Google, etc. can’t ever sell your data unless they get written authorization from you every time they go to sell it, then you effectively put them out of business. This may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but ultimately the real question is whether these business models ought to exist at all.
This then opens more cans of worms: would people have an email account if they had to pay a monthly or annual fee for it? Would people actually be willing to continue using a service that sold their data if they didn’t have to pay for it? If so, should they be prevented from doing so? Why should the government ban these businesses when it’s quite easy and affordable to get along without them?
If it’s truly the case that Facebook is that crucial to our society, then you should simply argue the government should seize it and run it as a public commodity for the benefit of all it’s citizens, and ensure their privacy while doing so. If you won’t go to that extreme, then you’re simply an old person who doesn’t want to have to learn about VPNs and private browsing sessions.
PS. If American consumers truly cared about privacy, Blackberry would be have the largest market share of phones with it’s BB10 OS. That you can’t even find them for sale in America should provide a pretty obvious sign about how much consumers care about privacy.
I’m not sure if your point is that extinction of privacy is a real thing and people have acquiesced to that reality by virtue of their actions, or that we should just let evolution do its thing and allow the stupid to be bamboozled in the hope that they will die before they can reproduce. Either way, the simpler reality is that there will always be people that prey upon the weak & the stupid, and doing so allows them to amass great wealth & power. It’s then a tried & true lesson of history that some of this power will eventually be used to secure & maintain dominion over everyone everywhere. So the fundamental issue has nothing to do with EULAs and everything to do with the question . . . do you want to live as a slave or a free man?
“do you want to live as a slave or a free man?”
Do we have a say in the matter? Seems we don’t truly have a say, such is our current state of affairs
My point is that ZMans proposed regulations are unworkable because they would kill the companies that scrape data. Therefore, the question isn’t “what should companies do with user data” as much as it is, “should these companies exist at all?” I say no, and I’m not opposed to a regulatory burden that makes them go bankrupt, but it seems to me that this intellectual exercise in theoretical regulations is a waste of time, and it would simply be better to get rid of these parasites than you with them.
Drew asked: would people have an email account if they had to pay a monthly or annual fee for it? Yep, already do.
Would people actually be willing to continue using a service that sold their data if they didn’t have to pay for it? Yes, observably so, but it doesn’t matter. Because:
If so, should they be prevented from doing so? Absolutely. The government bans or strictly confines any number of bad habits, from gambling to bad driving.
Why should the government ban these businesses when it’s quite easy and affordable to get along without them? Because they are antisocial poison destroying our civilization. It’s easy for me to get along without heroin or the mafia, therefore the government shouldn’t ban them?
Drew: If American consumers truly cared about privacy, Blackberry would be have the largest market share of phones with it’s BB10 OS.
Can you expound on this? [URLs would be great.]
Thanks.
The current market share of mobile OS is basically Android and iOS. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america
Both OS collect data and sell it or use it for marketing. When the BB10 OS was around, it was extremely secure, and not exploitative with data (Karl Denninger wrote about this extensively several years ago, as did many other security experts). Blackberry was very strong on security because it served a corporate market, particularly firms that shared sensitive or proprietary data. Blackberry, being a Canadian firm, was way less subject to including a back door in it’s firmware for US spy agencies, and did not do so, according to various experts. Given that it was a pretty solid phone with good processing speed and world class security, it should have absolutely owned the market if American consumers cared about security.
It didn’t, obviously. From what I can gather, most consumers didn’t like it because the screens were too small and because there weren’t enough apps (i.e. games). So, to be blunt, the typical American consumer just doesn’t care about security and privacy, because if they did, Blackberry would be the biggest player in town and it’s not.
Since Z canonized the idea of private property in his post, let me toss out an intentionally inflammatory idea: We must put a cap on wealth, for both individuals and corporations. Above a certain amount, the tax rate must be 100%.
If we don’t have such a cap, there will be very wealthy individuals and corporations who can literally buy cadres of politicians and bureaucrats. This is our current reality. This is probably why my two red state senators voted for the infrastructure bill, which includes the biggest amnesty ever.
If an individual or corporation objects to this cap then we are likely better off without them. Let them go somewhere else.
We want normal people to make their own money and own their property, but there has to be a limit. Fight me 🙂
Better idea
Get rid of (((them)))
Most problems then solve themsleves
Alternatively deny them ownership of real property, can’t vote, cant hold public office, can’t attend our schools, can’t charge interest, isolated into specific parts of town. Pretty sure these these things have all been in place, maybe not all at once. But I think it would make life much better.
Getting rid of ((them)) won’t solve our problems. Our White elite are just as bad if not worse.
LineinTheSand though is right. That BTW is how a revolutionary things.
A wealth cap however is woefully needed.
CEO pay gaps of 25 to 1 are fine. Being a CEO is hard work , 390-1 is destructive to the well being of workers and encourages strip mining and impoverishment of the working and middle thus depressing fertility.
And while I can here the REEEEE about what if you start the next Amazon? I don’t care.
As far as I am concerned borrowing against you stock options is income too. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
Economies of scale are useful in wartime production , we don’t need a nation where Walmart is a major employer.
We need one where there are thousands of small shops employing families. That restores the yeomanry and creates a higher functioning population
For sure, but it’s a step in the right direction, and if it’s whites doing the dirty work there isn’t that wall between us that exists otherwise. Rebellion and revolt come much easier when it’s you versus your own.
But as always happens, the nasty whites will hire some kind of mercenary force to do their dirty work, which is pretty much why a certain people were brought in to begin with. At least if there were limitations and checks on their power, we’d be far better off
While the death of small businesses is a frequent theme here, we often don’t ask “why?” The often given answer, that big firms especially e-commerce, doesn’t want the competition, ring partly true. But also, I suspect, are some more cynical reasons. Not in the least, one giant corporation is easier for the government to monitor, to regulate, tax and most importantly, receive political contributions from! While the benefits of a million small businesses may benefit our side, they are a managerial nightmare to the authorities. One of the benefits of scale is that big makes the managerial state much easier.
I don’t have a problem with this. Since the “first duty” of society is to its people and way of life, preventing grotesque wealth disparity is sensible.
Income, for sure. Wealth caps are tricky, you can get disgenic fast. Society benefits from having a heirarchy, and keeping the elite actually elite (and able to reproduce, but without becoming Davos citizens) is a good thing.
I’d probably favor an extremely progressive inheritance tax: if you make it, you get to keep it, but no more Pritzkers or Heinzes, but leave “small business owners” and family farms entirely alone. Eg, zero tax under 10m, 10% off 10-20m, 20% off 20-30m, etc. No one needs to devise more than $55,000,000 (in current dollars). And no charity bs, no trusts, no RIVTs, none of that: 55 million is all you can give (and mandate minimum inheritance, 1/3 to progeny per stirpes, with a court hearing required to disinherit completely).
Someone is always going to be rich. Inescapable fact of life. It is as much a part of a natural hierarchy as much else.
For a while there, I sided with sports ball players and thought “Do I want the owners having all the money or should the players get a big chunk of it?”
In theory it sounded good, but giving those players lots of money hasn’t exactly been beneficial for society
So if someone is going to be rich, if this is unavoidable, then who do we want it to be? That, for me, is the real question.
25 to 1 worked well for us in the past when combined with regulation.
If the average wage is 40k than anything over a million a year is taxed at 100%
If in a regulated environment, you can live well on that, you are a spend thrift.
And yes I suppose that rules out private art collections and super yachts. Oh well.
Perhaps, but America was built from a wilderness, and it proved the only way to incentivize people to make it into a major civilization was the promise of huge financial rewards for whomever proved capable. Stuff like this has aways been the case, such as giving people land to settle an outpost so the government could then establish a military presence on friendly territory.
In these states where whites are moving to, these places, to get someone to go there and do the hard work has always been the promise of huge financial rewards. A city like Boise in the middle of nowhere, or Vegas, would they have become major cities if someone couldn’t get obscenely rich?
My overarching point is that we are stuck with this system as long as an ever expanding GDP is the focus of government. Expand expand expand needs it. To get a society more to our liking means we shift the focus of government toward doing what’s best for most people, but that means expansion and the promise of obscene riches takes a back seat. I think turning this massive ship in that direction is next to impossible. Or improbable enough that if we follow that wise Japanese fighter and strategist whom Zman spoke about a few podcasts ago, it is a pursuit of folly and thus a mistake to spend one’s life in that way.
Wealth is entirely different from income. There are few to *none* billionaires who made their wealth through income. Rather they created wealth in the form of businesses that they owned a large share of and that grew with success. Taxing income does nothing. Unfortunately the answer will be in the taxing of wealth, yearly or at death.
Wow, mind, blown! Seriously, this needs to be fleshed our. About reputation. Mine was ruined by Facebook. I’ll never work in a job that requires a reputation because FB passed around something I posted to my customers.
People forget
Give it a year
I doubt anyone remembers that toobin jacked off on camera
Well, now I’m afraid even to have people prompt a search for my name. BLM or the ADL created a web brochure on me which turns up in a search.
I always felt that much if the dehumanization began with mass marketing where we all became merely a type or a cohort. I remember how distasteful it was when the campaign for hillary was seeing people simply as types, soccer moms, this or that, aspiring millenials, of course the angry white man We are not even people to them at the most basic level of trying to appeal for our votes.
After a while, inside their bubble, this constant understanding of people as merely types rather than individuals has its effects. Be it among politicians or marketers or corporations trying to expand their reach. Among the many other areas where we are seen never as individuals but as just these things so that politics becomes, ultimately, nothing more than human farming. Animal management.
So strange how democracy morphs ifrom elevation of the individual to its complete opposite.
It is definitely dehumanizing to be seen as merely economic units, simply connected to a mass surrounding the Babylon Tower of the GDP….
The memorial went well for my friend BTW. We raised nearly 2K for his sons future college aspirations.
I said cheers to him twice btw
Didn’t forget
Great to hear about the donations
I remember when the “angry white men” meme went mainstream in 1994, the day Republicans won Congress for the first time anyone could remember. Every newspaper, network, and cable news show was ON IT. It was Soviet tier, an anti-media conversion moment for a lot of regular guys who felt the weirdness.
For me the striking thing was, even while he was president, the media prioritized shilling for inevitable future president Hillary, whose office’s ugly, bitchy “narratives” they always followed, over letting *very slightly* populist (and popular) Bill steer the “conversation.” They protected him out of partisanship, always, but really he was just a dipshit mascot. Hillary was their man.
Rejecting her again and again is the world-historical crime America can never be forgiven for. Slavery was nothing in comparison.
My memory of that election is different. Not saying you are wrong. also
Incredilbly (now, in retrospect) I listened almost exclusively to NPR in those days, filtering the bias while admiring the civility of their presentation and deep treatment of the topics at hand. Their coverage and ensuing commentary was by today’s standards remarkably open-eyed. Not bias-free, mark you, but from Nina Totenburg on down, they reported and commented on the election result as a fact, as a repudiation of Clinton, and without any attack on ‘deplorables’.
As my man said in the ‘Old Negro Space Program’, it was a different time you understand, 1994, 1995; if you were white and voted Republican, you didn’t lose your job and even NPR acknowledged a vote was a vote.
As for Hillary, I don’t recall she had any political traction at all at the time. Gore was the anointed one. Just my memory.
another thing i’ll say is that there’s an argument i’ve heard people say which is that tmy place of employment as always required proof that you’ve been vaccinated against measles and no one cares. what’s so bad about this.” It’s a pretty good argument and one I have trouble arguing against. The only good reply I have to it is “I don’t trust you and I don’t have to justify why I don’t want the vaccine to you.”
The person I saw making those kind of argumentsgis@LemieuxLGM. He’s definitely worth a troll.
That the so-called vax doesn’t prevent Covid from spreading around never seems to dawn on these dimwits
At this point, the vaxx is both a security blanket for overgrown toddlers and a screening mechanism for the government’s identification of problem children.
Another thing is that whom you vote for is supposed to be a private matter. Yet if you donate, it’s public info, and there is now a mapping site that shows a map with little markers on it showing which households donated to whomever. Click on the marker, and you can see that the residents in this house donated to Bernie and how much. Well, if you donate to Bernie, everyone knows whom you voted for.
If you voted for Bernie everyone should know. It makes you a brain dead communist enabler.
That Bernie person’s house would have been T’ped or egged back in my youth. The flaming bag of dog doo doo would be afire on the doorstep
Now it’s an expression of piety, a neighborhood shrine where people can drive by and say a small Bernie prayer
The (COVID-19) vax is, as you imply, a likely sorting mechanism for Big Brother. I haven’t done any surveys, mind you, but I conjecture there is a distinct political bias in the two populations, jabbed and hesitant (if not outright refusenik). The best evidence is the States with the lowest vaccination rates, the Deep South, redneck and red. As such, if various forms of vaccine passport are implemented then yes, having taken the jab becomes quite a good proxy of who is a willing prole, a person who still has a very high and perhaps no longer deserved, faith in institutions.
The anti-vaxx crowd consists mainly of educated white guys and regular blacks and browns. Do they really want those people forming a coalition?
And then there would be disparate impact. When it proves that the vaxx passports create a situation where blacks are disproportionately denied services and opportunities.
And we know they know the profile of the anti-vaxxer and they know it has a racial and socioeconomic dimension. Yet they keep putting the idea of passports out there. Why? I have to think, surmise, that the aim is not to tick off the blacks and browns, who are not avid consumers of the news anyway, but to cause a reaction from whites, white men mainly, who are the avid consumers of news. If that is in fact the strategy, the best we can do is keep mum and stay cool and let them waste their time and energy.
you try to make good situations out of bad. Here’s one – if there are “vaxxed only” spaces – why not try to create “no vax only” spaces? Maybe it’s a cope but I feel like the more people can try to operate outside that system – than the more the rulers will give up. You’d have to promise me enough money to never work again before I get vaccinated
That would just invite a sickened black lunatic to come in and start coughing on everyone
If they have no qualms about spreading AIDS…
When I think of how well I cared for the last rental car I had for a few days – it’s comforting to know how well society writ large will operate when everything is rented.
How many bracket drag races did you win?
It’s okay, you can tell us.
“Neutral DROP!!!!!!!”
“Hey, ever wonder if you could shift into Reverse at 50?”
Spoiler: You can, but the car won’t suddenly move in reverse. Imagining the effects on the transmission is left as an exercise for the reader.
The perfect analogy for how we should be interacting with the state
They’re driving 50 and we throw it into reverse
Watch the thing crunch buckle and grind and the engine parts turn to shrapnel
I think one thing that gets glossed over a lot when talking about contracts and corporations exercise of their “rights” to private property and freedom of association is disparity of power.
Pretty much everyone on the right has a gut feeling, whether they can explain it or not that it is simultaneously oppressive to force the Masterpiece Cakeshop to “bake the cake” and for Facebook and Twitter to silence people with unpopular opinions. But both are, as libertarians like to remind us, instances of businesses exercising their freedom of association.
But power matters, pretending that principles such as free association are independent from power is ignoring the elephant in the room. The cake shop has no power, while Facebook, Google and Twitter wield enormous influence over public discourse in the world.
They rival governments in the power they wield and, thus, we should bind them with the same shackles with which we theoretically (and increasingly unsuccessfully) bound government in the constitution.
As Zman says, respect for private property is key to the West, but corporations aren’t people. They are systems, just like governments. And, like governments, they need to be controlled. Unlike individuals, corporations only even exist at the blessing of the state. They are artificial constructs. We limit them in numerous ways that we don’t limit individuals, and we give them protections we don’t give individuals. There is no reason their “rights” should exist on the same spectrum as individuals.
Exactly. Power is the decisive factor in how much freedom or rights are bestowed on most individuals.
On a daily basis, MSM informs us of the latest person to run afoul of our high priests within the Internet Cult of Technology and Information. There was a small kerfuffle after Trump was deplatformed on Twitter from numerous other world leaders worried they were next to be bumped off the forum,, but that has subsided.
How quickly people handed over moral authority to the Tech Oligarchy continues to astounds me.
I think the premise would hold more merit if FB and Twitter actually owned the internet, but it’s government property. They are essentially leasing government property wherein they conduct their business similar to a businessman who rents space in a train station to run his restaurant. I can’t imagine the guy running the restaurant being allowed to silence people. If he uses the wrong pronouns he’d likely be evicted.
Most of the internet isn’t government property. The vast majority of the trunk lines that make up the backbone of internet connectivity across the country are owned by the big telcoms and ISPs and the big data exchanges where all the telcoms intersect and exchange traffic are a private, corporate datacenters.
But that’s not necessary for my point about power disparities to apply.
Yes, but they are still the “master tenants” subleasing it to the likes of FB
I say this because the internet is a strategic asset for the government. If the government needs to it can shut it down with a snap of the fingers. That power to do so makes them the true owner, or some may see it as the de facto owner. It’s a creature of the DOD after all. We are just allowed to play in the internet much as we can play frisbee in a public park, but they can shut us out any time they want.
Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » You Own You
Third option
You own you but you whore yourself out in exchange for public affirmation, which seems more like the actual arrangement between most users and Facebook
Dude, “whoring” is not the preferred Stanvard-Harford nomenclature. “Attention economy,” please.
You have to wonder what most young women would do for Zuck if he promised them a million followers
Or even 10,000
Here is an article related to the decline of the West and how others in the geopolitical sphere are taking advantage.
The West isn’t dying-its ideas live on in China
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2021/07/west-isn-t-dying-its-ideas-live-china
In its own ersatz way, it’s almost as if the West needed the USSR to keep it grounded.
As many have forgotten what an encyclopedia is, or what a library contains, it is no surprise the ignorance that filter people’s perception of China, Russia, and basically any other country outside the US.
How many provinces are in China? What countries share a border with China? Ask most of our “informed voting citizens ” and nothing but a blank stare will be given. Yet they will lap up what the magical talking box tells them to think regarding geopolitical issues.
Living overseas for an extended period of time helped shape the way I see how news and events get covered in our America-centric media.
The bluster and pomp spoken by our ruling class of politicians are mainly for the home audience in our country to maintain and shape the facade.
This should have been made plain with the revelations from wiki leak state cables on how things work behind the curtain of the show we call liberal democracy.
I have to wonder if public and university libraries still have many of the books inside that have otherwise been banned on the likes of Amazon
I wonder if there has been a quiet removal of all of these books. Someone may know???
Do they still have the biography of mustache man? Incidentally, last time I was in Italy that specific book and ones about him were featured prominently in book store windows. It must have been quite shocking to American tourists
Falcone,
Anything I wish to actually own and keep, I order physical copies. Lately though, it seems certain books are still available on Amazon, but the prices are set to obscene levels. I want to read Eric Kaufmann’s “The Rise and Fall of Anglo-American.” List price: $877.95.
Still looking but I might just order it out of spite to have the damn book.
How to start WWIII, or how to destabilize Russian-Sino relations. Brilliant. /sarc
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-04/right-way-split-china-and-russia?utm_medium=promo_email&utm_source=lo_flows&utm_campaign=registered_user_welcome&utm_term=email_1&utm_content=20210811
Well, this kind of rot started before cell phones or facebook. Though I don’t know how true it is, I have read in the past modeling agencies and the people who control athletes would put escape clauses for what the contracts call risky behavior.
Of course, you have the model who is paid for a picture, but then they can use the picture however they want for as long as they want. I suppose theoretically make-up companies could, if they wanted to, re-run ads they shot in the 1950s with models who are either dead or in their 90s.
BITD, I never thought the ridiculous standards of the computer industry could ever go mainstream. From the earliest days they lied constantly about more or less everything. The EULA were absolutely one sided and unconscionable. People made excuses for them then and have continued to make excuses ever since.
As bad as breathalyzers in the car sounds, they are but the tip of the iceberg in a foul smelling body of water. BMW wants to turn things like heated seats, which you have already paid for (and are burning gas to run), into a monthly subscription service. Ford has announced they want to use the car’s infotainment system to show location based billboards. Like if you’re going down the highway and approaching a rest stop, having a McDonald’s billboard on your infotainment screen.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alistaircharlton/2020/07/02/bmw-wants-to-charge-you-a-subscription-for-your-heated-seats/
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-ford-infotainment-screens-ads-local.html
that’s why it’s important to buy cars built before 2010.
Ever open a can of say Dinty Moore stew where inside it’s a coagulated blob. Yet over heat, it starts to liquify
At this point I want people to be prepared to be a little queasy
Well, heated seats do for me and my rectal contents what a stovetop does for Dinty Moore stew
We’re all living in a Skinner Box.
And mentioning it gif the comment sent to moderation.
This is fairly radical, not that I disagree. But can’t this same logic apply to wage labor?
By your standard I own the product of my labor so when I go to work the output I produce should be mine however the boss actually owns it. We can say that I have an agreement with him that I exchange some of the value I create for use of his capital and organization but really it’s much more akin to the Faceberg EULA that nobody reads. The user agreement is baked into society and everything is set up for me to accept it by default with few or no alternatives. In reality my employer actually owns everything I create during *his* time and gives me some portion of that; instead of me the employee renting his equipment and organization he’s renting my being.
We’re used to this deal in the West and maybe it’s not the worst thing but I think we should consider if it really suits Western man.
The question of property is a concern second to none. How we define it and enforce it is the wellspring of social organization. “You own you” is a good axiom and we could test further outcropping of our system of property against it. The Faceberg EULA and wage system don’t hold up.
Kind of a divergence but I’m very interested in another fundamental of property, and that is enforcement. What is property? It’s what you can kick someone off of. Capitalism offers privatized ownership with socialized enforcement, i.e. ever worker and renter is taxed to pay for the security of the bosses and landlords. There is no natural limit to the amount of property an entity can have because no matter what the state will secure it.
What if there was no socialized property enforcement and the owners had to pay for their own security? It would radically alter the balance of things. An apartment building owner would have to pay guys to do evictions and the insurance for such risky business. A factory owner, in addition to the productive laborers, would need to hire security to make sure the workforce didn’t walk off with the machinery or just collectivize and seize the shop as their own. In such a world there would be steep natural limits to the profitability of ownership. I believe Western could handle this and businesses would be small private firms and larger collectively owned shops; every man would own and maintain his own home. It would be a truly middle class society.
Not to sound like some kind of socialist or ancap but I say we should question the current arrangement of property. We went from feudalism wherein only a small caste had property rights to capitalism where anybody can theoretically buy those rights. Why can’t we go further? I say end subsidized property enforcement.
Astralturf: Interesting proposition. I have to think about this a bit and what the long-term consequences would be. As you note, however, this might work in a White country. Either way, brilliant, brilliant post by Zman.
There is no limiting principal to self-enforcement of the law or anarchocapitalism. It devolves to war of all against all. If the Boss has a private army to protect his plant, then he’s also got what it takes to take what you’ve got. Feudalism is a great leap backwards.
Also, your wage idea is wrong. Ownership includes the right to dispose of the thing, including renting it out. If you cannot hire out your property (with fringe exceptions that prove the rule), you do not own it as defined by the Western Christian White tradition. Your idea re ownership of the produce of labor ignores and violates the boss’s ownership of the physical plant and his ownership of the intellectual property of the business. It therefore logically fails, as your conception of ownership violates its own plain terms.
Wage earners rent out there time because there is no other option, not really. Owning one’s output is only theoretical in our current system.
And my idea is not ancapistan though I didn’t explain it well enough. No where did I say do get rid of the state. The state could even retain the monopoly on violence. If a landlord wants to evict someone he can sue and get a judge to sent the deputies, it’s just that the landlord has to pay the full cost rather than the taxpayers.
“Wage earners rent out there time because there is no other option, not really.” That’s the socialist argument for “free everything.” You’re not really “free” unless you have free food, free housing, free transportation, free medical care, free-everything. Where does the “free-everything” come from? Theft. Seizure from those who produce. Which causes them to stop producing. Which is why all collectivism beyond family or a tightly-knit culture (e.g. the Nordics) fails.
But think about what “cost” really means there. What are all the true costs to a society where a landlord has to pay to get a squatter off his property? What if it is just a vagrant trespasser who breaks in and stays? You have to pay the sheriff to arrest someone stealing? That is just the San Francisco shoplifting situation writ large. What does that do to respect for the law, security of property, social cohesion? Do you want to live in the ghetto? Because that is what you will get.
I tend to accept your point, but at a certain abstract level your example might not expand. There are long standing decisions in our Courts wrt whether a person is able to understand and sign away certain rights. Even when both parties seem to have agreed, one party can dispute at a later date and the contract can be voided due to the lopsided nature of the agreement. In short, there are limitations.
Something along that line is what I’ve thought for years in these “shrink wrapped” agreements. Example, “… by opening this package (of software) you agree to the terms an conditions within…”. Indeed, my last University told us to ignore them as the Attorney’s Office considered them invalid.
I consider the use of software (apps, e.g. FaceBook) in a similar vain. Personal identifiable information gleaned from use should be treated no differently—it belongs to us, and can not be signed away. Facebook (and most others) needs to find a different business model. However, I’m not naive, it won’t happen because the Federal Government has as much to lose as Facebook in loss of this information. We live in a truly Orwellian world.
Partially, what you describe is already, and has been for decades (centuries even) in more backward parts of the planet. Even at your current (American) level of wealth, you would easily be the rich, maybe even the super-rich, in terms of the local economies of many Third World nations. Most likely, you’d live in a gated community that has some combination of the following: walled, gated community with 24-hour armed private security; private schools for children; one or more bodyguards on all outings outside the compound; outside functions (shopping, country clubs, social events, community events, and so on) are carefully managed with similar levels of exclusivity and security.
Major point: all of those things are paid with private funds, generally by the people receiving the services, to private contractors and/or government employees working off the clock.
One way I like to look at it: such a stereotypical third-world nation has a functionally Libertarian rich class (because they must provide for themselves many basics of safety, security, etc.) living in a indigent, corrupt, often violent land. They pay for the services they need because the local government simply cannot provide them!
Perversely, the “free enterprise” or small-town America that most of us idealize is perhaps, closer to the socialist ideal: some goods and many services were in fact provided by the government, but they were reliable services, at modest prices, all of which whose costs and benefits were almost universally shared.
What happened with Vox?
I clicked on a link to his site where he was explaining the fraudulent nature of advertising, and got a “this blog violates our TOS” block.
Can angrily confirm. https://voxday.blogspot.com
While I have my disagreements with the man, he is just the sort of independent thinker whose thoughts I want to test my own against. I would gladly fight side by side with Vox, regardless of our differences.
None of this is surprising but I’m still mad.
VD is certainly an eccentric dude, but he is doing good work to create his own platforms and content outside the system.
The other major task he is doing, that is not happening enough in dissident land, is providing support to fellow travelers that have been canceled, like Chuck Dixon.
We need more of this to resist the Bolsheviks with their enormous support system of government, NGOs, think tanks, universities, etc.
Finally, for those trying to understand or needing to resist the Wokesters, his trilogy of books are clear, easy reads with actionable info.
I respect and admire him for starting his own book publishing company
Otherwise, I haven’t followed him for long so don’t know all the boneheaded things he’s done that people allude to
Vox is doing his best to create new spaces, formats, and publishing…he really does do more than he says.
I’ve caught wind that he is being punished for post against the magic covid jab. The powers that be won’t have any other opinions : get the shot or else. Pure Satanic.
On the most basic level, VD has achieved a measure of success in several different creative endeavors and he’s not shy about letting people know.
He’d catch less flak if he dialed it down a bit, but I suspect doing so would reduce his effectiveness.
Dude has his backup web page up already.
http://www.milobookclub.com/
He has also sicked a rather nasty army of Pro Bono attorneys on Google.
Who?
The fact that his brand of crazy wasn’t cut off years ago kinda makes you think his viewership numbers were never that great.
I admit that his boomer posts and commentary are often pretty damn funny
It often falls into vitriol, but even so there is a lot of humor in it
Vox Day is litigious and a lot of pro bono legal help. The Legal Legion of Evil IIRC He also knows how to play the game pretty well.
He also doesn’t really care that much which helps.
One big example of the loss of private property rights is how landlords were given eviction moratoriums last year on by the CDC. Who was President last year? Oh that’s right, orange f uk face. Now Biden is attempting to re-up it, and it’ll once again be knocked down by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court had it wrong. They claimed that only Congress can create a law to do this. If we followed “muh Constitution” it would be unconstitutional to even attempt to do any eviction moratorium, even on the state and local level, unless all landlords were justly compensated for this. While programs are in place, there’s no guarantee that you as a landlord will be justly compensated for having COVID freeloaders on your property. But this is the same government that takes away our private personal property through asset forfeiture laws. How dare you have too much cash on you.
I’m confused here as well. First I heard of the CDC and the eviction moratorium was recently. In AZ, the governor mandated such in his original emergency declaration and has now dropped it. I thought I read CA was similar. So has the CDC declaration any enforcement power? Heck, they promote/recommend lockdowns, mask wearing, and inoculation, but I don’t see goons going around enforcing such.
The CDC has zero authority on the property market. Yet here we are. And yes,, the Supreme Court will knock this down, over the wrong reasons. And yet I haven’t heard one Republican crow about this because no one wants to offend renters who might vote. They’re busy wringing their hands over Cuomo, an evil man who on his worst day was a thousand times more effective than them in forwarding his agenda.
I took the CDC’s ridiculous foray into real estate legislation as a part of the general contempt towards the rule of law and the decay of the concept of limited and specific government powers that infests our society. Here in Oregon the governor just told us all that we have to wear chin diapers again. So the governor can tell you how to dress, the CDC can tell you to let freeloaders hang out in your rental house, Biden can ban smoothbore muskets and using a cow catapult on a Tuesday, etc… Basically, anybody with any kind of government office or job can just declare some sort of “mandate” for any damn thing they want and if the media can convince the masses that this is somehow legitimate then it becomes “law”.
So far the only glitch in this genius new “theory” of government seems to be that the actual police have a bit more sense than to try to enforce most of this nonsense. What tends to happen is that some rather milquetoast soyboys from the government show up, tell you that you’ve been very naughty and then you get a bill for some kind of fine. So far it seems to work because enough people still care about their credit ratings.
The root problem is the “school of fish” nature of the managerial class that we’ve talked about here a lot. Each little petty dictator no longer needs to worry that xer “mandates” will be honored by all the others because they all have this hive mind and don’t need no stinking lawyers to tell them where their power ends.
“The point of the state is to preserve the people and their way of life. This is its primary reason to exist.”
The point of the State [in Occidental context] has always been to preserve, and when needed to adroitly modify, a lifestyle that doesn’t threaten its bureaucratic hold, which with the passage of time has almost become ontological.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution (which is fundamentally an anti-White document) was a signal that the Potomac functionaries would determine the context of a people’s ethnocultural expression, not the other way round.
You are free, even encouraged, to live like a de Sade but the State would consider you a menace if you decide to mobilize in the name of religion or race.
The idea that the US Constitution is fundamentally anti-White is ridiculous. It’s certainly not a perfect document, but it was written by White people, for White people.
The First Amendment did fatally weaken the role of religion in society, but I don’t credit the authors with having a grand plan, as some states maintained state churches for decades after the Constitution was ratified. There are reasonable alternate justifications for why they didn’t want a state church established at the federal level (and that’s all the first amendment prohibits). For one thing, various states had different established state churches, so any established federal church would be suspected of favoritism toward states that had the same church. It’s hard to understand for people raised in the modern US where states are effectively little more than administrative districts, but the US was much more a confederation of sovereign states than a single united nation. People considered themselves, for example, Virginians first, Americans second — thus the real reason for the Civil War. It’s easy to see the progression in hindsight, but things aren’t so clear when you are in the middle of them.
Muhammad Izadi: Fail. Everyone has and is encouraged to mobilize in the name of religion or race except for European Whites.
I am arguing from the White perspective.
For me, that the government doesn’t do the things of preservation and so forth within the western tradition tells me we are not a western society anymore.
We are becoming more and more asiatic, meaning both the near east such as those from the Levant and those in the Far East
I don’t like it. I feel like I am marinating in soy sauce all day, and are my eyes burning because they are transforming into a slanted orientation? Is my nose beginning to hook? My ears grow fur?
I want the F out
I recently learned that Bruce Lee, the late martial arts movie star, was born in the USA ). In theory, he could have been President. In a pathetic attempt to draw a link to the DR, I merely note that John Derbyshire had a bit part in a Lee movie. 🙂
Even in 1776 the US were diverse with completely divergent views on religion, European ethnic origin (mostly) , slavery and a host of other things.
It worked well enough as a lose federation of States but was broken by fast transportation (trains) and communication (telegraphy) these things (cars and Internet( helped break us.
Our essentially medieval Constitution pushed forward into the age of Steam much less the microchip failed hard.
I’d argue from Lincoln onward failure was inevitable and that on schedule if a little fast happened in a bit over a century.
The trick isn’t saving anon longer fit for purpose Constitution, Lincoln or FDR’s Republics (both worked but were products of a different era) but making something new that takes into account well its 2021.
The Left harps on about current year but they have a point,. It is 2021 not 1776, different people, faiths, tech, and new risks.
We need to preserve what is good, true and beautiful and create something new for it to thrive.
Maybe the Indians were onto something with the idea that taking a persons picture was stealing their soul.
I think it’s in “Crocodile Dundee” where someone, the girl maybe, is about to photograph an Aboriginal.
“You can’t take my picture,” he says.
“Oh that’s right,” she says,” you think it will capture your soul.”
He replies, “No. You have the lens cap on.”
The people themselves have to be upset that their data is being scraped. It may be their property, but it’s clearly not all that important to them. This will likely change when the tech companies just hand the scraped data over to the government to make their cases for them. Apple was smart in using the kiddieporn issue as the camel’s nose under the tent. Almost everyone recoils at that. But then it’ll be images of black suns and swastikas, then frogs, etc. And then the dam will break on everything.
Yep, they must see themselves as worthless
I know if people are taking pictures and I might fall into the frame I tell them no or I want compensation
People get it when you put it to them like that. You can see the lightbulb go off in their head
I believe the current view of property by our betters is, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” Of course, that doesn’t apply to them, but when has hypocrisy mattered to the elite. Its just a quaint concept for losers.
Anonymous White Male: Exactly what I thought of when I read Zman’s brilliant post. Everything that’s happening depends on this basic understanding of man and his labor. World Economic Forum vs. US Senate – is there really any difference? Why does seeing Schumer’s beady-eyed smug oily face remind me of Klaus Schwab? Oh, I forgot – because they’re cousins.
It all comes down to the people outside the ruling class have little self respect. The government is basically testing them, and they keep failing.
A people with self respect would be pushing back. Since not many are, the conclusion can only be one thing
But it has to start with the individual. It has to grow organically. People have to start respecting themsleves again, and then the efforts to dehumanize us suddenly face stiff resistance if not push back.
Like I say, if I was Mitch McConnell or any one of them and I lied every two years to their faces and yet they STILL keep coming back for more and voting and donating, would I respect these people? No way in hell. They treat people lie doormats because people act like doormats. Not defending them btw, just commenting on the reality of human nature
From the late, great Dr. Walter E. Williams about the ultimate private property, the ownership of your own body:
“Self-ownership can offer solutions to many seemingly moral/ethical dilemmas. One is the sale of human organs. There is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation. Most people in need of an organ die or become very ill while they await an organ donation. Many more organs would become available if there were a market for them. Through the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, Congress has made organ sales illegal. Congress clearly has the power to prevent organ sales, but does it have a right? The answer to that question comes by asking: Who owns your organs? One test of ownership is whether you have the right to sell something. In the case of organs, if it is Congress that owns our organs, then we have no right to sell them. That would be stealing from Congress.”
I remember hearing him speak about this issue in depth while guest hosting the Rush Limbaugh Show. His premise was that everyone in the organ donation “chain” profits, except the donor or his estate. The recipient of the organ gets say a new heart and a new lease on life. The hospitals, healthcare professionals, those that preserve and transport the organ(s) and every one of their suppliers and support staff get to make a profit. The donor or estate is S.O.L.
It is for this reason, I REFUSE to be listed as a donor, and even though my wife has the little notification on her license, I as her surviving spouse would not authorize an organ harvesting. She will be cremated 100% intact.
Heh. The second most quoted magic negro after Thomas Sowell.
Let’s not forget St. Martin. And BO. And Candace Owens. And Bill Clinton. And Snoop Dog. And Lebron James.
No, I always respected Sowell and Williams. They are definitely high IQ negroes and their writings were filled with common sense. They may just be a paid part of the dialectic, but they were better than most White conservative commentators. But, then, I’ve become so paranoid I sometimes think ZMan could be a paid part of the dialectic.
Snoop Dog.
I wonder who the person or agency was who thought,”you know who would be a good spokesperson for our security service? A convicted, black felon.”
And then there is the one with him and Martha Stewart.
I guess if one felon is good, two is better….
I’m no fan of Snoop. There is an internet meme that may or may not be his image, and may or may not be what he really said. But it fits his image: “I’m not smoking dope any more. But I’m not smoking it any less, either.” 🙂
The only black person of stature worth something is Clarence Thomas
Yes, sowell and Williams were good men with solid ideas, but none of them were original. I hate to say. They got famous merely by agreeing with white people with a platform, such as Rush and NR.
Thomas Sowell, and Ben Carson.
Quoting Sowell or Williams is fine as long as they are correct in their thinking. Since their thinking on such matters has zero to do with race, I’d as soon quote them as disparage them.
This is one of those things that makes libertarians utterly retarded and repugnant. Plus, they will defend organ sales, but not freedom of association.
After death sales is another thing and I would probably support it, though even there it does make me a bit uneasy, especially when it comes to minors. Little Tyrone gets hit by a car and the next thing you know they’re selling his eyes, his heart…..
Glypto Dropem: I, too, refuse to be listed as a donor, but my primary reason is that I would have no control over to whom any organ went (i.e. no non-Whites, no long-term drug users, etc.). You make an excellent argument for the sale of organs, but the same argument could be for the sale of sex – and that brings us to the moral angle. I don’t want the Senate legislating morality; that’s properly the role of a decent White society, but I don’t know that it’s not now a necessity with today’s degeneracy. Another thing to ponder.
There are, as 3g correctly points out, necessary limits on the idea of self-ownership. Certain aspects of the Clownshoe lolbertarian idea of “private property” are too harmful to a functioning, moral society to be allowed (and are falsely called “private,” as they inevitably infringe the rights of others and impose externalities): hard drugs, prostitution, organ sales.
In particular, assisted suicide, organ sales, tontines, and the like are too fraut with moral hazard. A properly organized society does not set up systems to encourage murder-for-cash.
No one is cutting me up and selling my parts, if I have anything to say about it
My only demand from my family is that I am to be buried in the soil of north Florida.
I’m no longer a donor as I don’t want someone like Kissinger having his 5th heart transplant courtesy of me. Blech!! The idea of having any of my body parts in one of those odious frogs is repugnant.
If you don’t act free, you aren’t free. Natural rights are merely the legal justification for acting free. If they aren’t practiced, they aren’t respected. Words on paper don’t command respect.
What it seems to boil down to is free is not free. You may not be paying Facebook a monetary fee to use their service but rather a data mining fee.
To be fair, in any civilization nobody can ever be free. I doubt anything is really free in the absolute sense, as we all know. But things really do seem to have become worse in recent times; governments at some points probably looked out for Joe Average far more than they do now.
A million and one levies charged in a million and one different ways on, say, a property. I’ve no beef with kicking up my share, but new tax (or tax increases) seems to be quite common. And, as Z mentions, the populace that doesn’t care to own itself often just acquiesces. Add to this how underhanded certain elements have become – naturally the addition of Chinese, Jew and Indian to society change it in such a way.
That said, the default mode for most civilizations seems to be dumping on Joe Average, so there’s nothing new here.
Laws that served a great purpose are interpreted far differently between those who have the final say now, than when originally drafted. And then a million and one new caveats are added to cover all manner of edge cases. It’s a goddamn minefield and it is now surprise to me when I hear a person say they’re looking for more simplicity in life.
No, here is the other perversion of Western ideas on private property: consent does not make something morally acceptable such that we will allow it. It is a spectrum. On the far side, if two huge corporations make a contract, we probably enforce it as written. In the middle, If two adults enter a contract to rent a residence, we make them live up to their deal, but subject to and with conditions and terms that we mandate irrespective of the agreement (fire codes, vice laws, nuisance laws). On the other far end, if Schmuel Goldenstein gets a 12 year old girl to “consent” via contract to being in a porno, we not only refuse to enforce the agreement, we prohibit it, and then we execute Goldenstein and have CPS monitor the child. “Consenting” to the depradations of Faceborg is so harmful to society that we will not, and cannot, allow it.
Perspective matters.
Privacy is extinct and the tech oligarchs own DC so there will never be a law passed that reigns in this novel form of organized crime. So what to do?
First, get off social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Second, leave your smartphone at home when you want to be left alone. Get a burner for emergencies if you need to have a phone on your person when out & about. This also has the added benefit of suppressing your phone addiction habit. Third, fight back tangibly. These businesses do not exist solely in the ether and rely upon tangible assets to function. And those assets are distributed all over the place. Death by a thousand cuts can be a two-way street too. Think outside the box. And if the pain gets great enough, even the corruptocrats in DC may have to rethink their mode of treachery. We are not helpless, and sometimes you just have to get up off the couch.
I need my iPhone for work but since Apple’s new spy policy I’m probably going to delete everything personal off it and use it for that one purpose. I’ll activate the flip phone I have on hand and tell friends to text me rather than use Telegram.
The solution is so simple
Why more people don’t do it pretty much astounds me
You know, no one would even know there was a pandemic if he didn’t watch tv or read the internet
I remember when I was with a friend for his birthday week in San Diego. We were never in the hotel, always out and about. I think the night before we left I turned on the tv and it was like the world was coming unglued because the trump tape had come out about grabbing the cooter. Up til then, I had no idea, everything was still running in the gas lamp district, but on TV which is it’s own separate reality it was the end of the world. The way they were treating it.
Go hangout in small towns and the countryside.
It’s basically normal.
No face diapers or distancing on the lakes I paddle around.
The loss of private property is something I have noticed with dismay over the years. In my youth, great pride was had in owning cassettes and cd’s – the music was ‘yours.’ Now, people just have access through streaming services; they conflate access with ownership. Most adults nowadays are up to their eyeballs in debt; again, they conflate access (lease/ mortgage/ payments) with ownership.
The problem this creates is not solely the loss of private property. The largest effect, in the psychological sense, is a loss of dignity. Look at the breadlines of the 30’s – those men were in their Sunday best. Even if they only had a shack, it was orderly and neat. In the heyday of the suburbs, people took pride in their lawns and maintenance of their vehicles.
Of course, these are slightly idealized views, not always able to survive historical scrutiny. However, at the very least, they were ideals that people had as ideals to strive for. Maintaining your station in life maintained your dignity, and allowed a healthy sense of pride from fulfilling your obligations.
Now, as everything is loaned and full of contingencies, so is self-worth.
Streaming is renting music. Another aspect of the rentier economy.
Absolutely. Though I admit, I do pay for spotify premium – I play guitar and listen to a lot of music – I still buy cds and vinyls of bands and artists I love. Though my wife whined when we have to cart boxes of cds and vinyls when we moved, I refuse to part with them. They are mine.
I once gave a gen Z woman a thumb drive of mp3s. She chuckled and said, “Wow, old school, OK.” Never even occurred to me, just as owning music never occurred to her.
Eloi: Brilliant comment. Equally important to the concept of private property is the concept of mutual societal obligations. If you own yourself and your mental and physical labor, then you are also responsible for yourself. I am sick to death of hearing about muh rights. When and if people tend to their duties as decent free adults, then they warrant rights. And those duties and rights have nothing to do with the government or laws or paying taxes.
Absolutely. And along with that self upkeep is the desire to respectfully aid your fellow man within bounds. Like the wise neighbor in the Frost poem, it is important to come together to maintain. However, as important is to maintain those boundaries, something the naive narrator seems to miss!
“Rights” are an odd concept. I urge you to think and read on the subject. What are one’s rights? What is their nature? How do they exist, and what conditins and for what purpose? Where do they come from?
Moreover, can there be such a thing as universal or human rights?
Contract rights, property rights, maybe even social contract rights make sense to me. I don’t know that I can justify the existence of “rights” in the usual sense, though.
“What are one’s rights? What is their nature? How do they exist, and what conditions and for what purpose? Where do they come from?”
Rights, in the American sense, came directly from a presupposition that God In Heaven exists and intended humans to behave in some ways but not others. Human law was then understood as an implementation of divine law and not arbitrary decrees from the powerful.
Then the Yankees began burdening America with “rights” that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with carpetbagging the dissidents.
And here we are today, enjoying the “right” to be vaxxed and “freedom” to believe there is no God.
Property is the product of human labor, both physical labor and mental labor.
That might be true if the product is a baseball bat or an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress. But is it true about what’s now the state of Nebraska, for instance? At one time all property in some areas was supposedly owned and administered by an hereditary despot. Anyone questioning that state of affairs would be considered insane or treasonous. Now it’s normal, at least in the US and other parts of the world that have come under western colonialism, for the state to distribute property amongst those able and willing to pay for it and remit regular tax payments to the state. In exchange for these payments the state allows the owners exclusive rights to the property except for that needed for state requirements.
One of the biggest problems in adapting to the demise of socialism in eastern Europe was the redistribution of state-owned real property to the private sector. All of that property had once been in private hands but the chain of ownership had become unclear and the boundaries of property were uncertain. It’s still an issue in places like Romania. It’s fashionable to call Russian industrialists “oligarchs”, as if the assets of the defunct Soviet system were to be disbursed to the general population through lotteries or contests.
The US went through one of its own redistribution programs in the process of permitting the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Alaskan native groups threatened to have the project tied up in legal challenges for decades to come unless they were allowed some property rights in the state. They did receive property, which had in fact been theirs for millennia, but under a paradigm that suited TPTB, the creation of 13 regional corporations and subsidiary local ones rather than any private ownership of real property. Millions of acres of land, once the property of individuals, after being held by the Tsar and the US government, ie. all the citizens of the US, is now owned by abstract governmental creations rather than ordinary citizens. Private property, other than your own personal jack knife, toaster or cargo shorts, is a myth.
The fact that the state infringes in private property rights does not mean that private property is a myth. It just means that, like every other right, an eternal struggle exists between the state and the invidividual for exercise of that right.
Two words: ASSET FORFEITURE
nailheadtom: To claim the acreage ‘owned’ by the Tsar or US government was then, in effect, ‘owned’ by individual citizens of those states is utterly ludicrous. Just as if the works of art or fragments of history residing in ‘public’ museums are ‘owned’ by all those who visit. Everything today that is touted as ‘public’ is corporate. Just as the money people think is ‘theirs,’ once submitted to the bank, is no longer theirs at all.
Tom is wrong, but he has a point: you didn’t actually build that. Your, our, people did. You nor I could make a pickup truck (or this computer) from the bare elements of the earth available to us. It takes centuries of knowledge, building, and making things to get there, which our forebearers did. While we are the owners of what we aquire, we owe a concomitant debt to our forefathers, payable to our progeny, for everything we have.
We are property managers; servants who have been given talents according to our capabilities, which we are expected to nuture and grow for our greater cause: materially for our people and progeny, spiritually for Christ.
Good ol’ Rebel: Well said.
One thing the pandemic has exposed is that the “my body my choice” line from leftists, particularly women, is all fake.
It went from yelling about needing bodily autonomy, so that old white men can’t prevent her from murdering her 9 month old pregnancy, to demanding unvaxxinated people be rounded up and sent off to camps – because granny needs to be protected from mean, heartless people.
Conservatives keep going on about hypocrisy, as usual. As if the neutral arbiter sky God will come scold leftists for their supposed hypocrisy.
They clearly don’t think you own your body. As usual, their positions are about destroying traditional Christian morality, and uprooting white society. Many women are just pawns, repeating what they are told by the Alpha, the leftist elite. But the agenda has always been destruction of the West, and being both pro-abortion and pro-mandatory vaccination achieves that goal. There is no hypocrisy there.
Years back at a neighborhood wine aunt get together the topic of the latest attempt by the City of Portland to fluoridate their water came up. Knowing I was in the company of mostly libtards I was astounded when I was the only one who opposed it. One of the younger attendees (obviously raised by stupid hippies judging by her name) even went so far as to call personal sovereignty a “red herring”. Amusingly, the main reason they gave for supporting this abomination is that “the poor” (i.e., blecks) don’t have the agency to take care of their kids’ teeth. It wasn’t expressed that way, but it’s exactly what they meant.
I’m not sure there’s anything more dangerous in modern times than an army of clueless petty tyrants that mindlessly enable the really dangerous ones.
The Covid nonsense has a strong potential to create a Black Swan cataclysm with the vaccine, all because of a purity spiral that no one has the power to reign back anymore. Not even the Biden admin or the CDC can reign it in anymore, as there’s too much money flowing into the pandemic hysteria now and too many promises that are impossible to keep.
If it only becomes a minor event, in the sense that millions are now only living their lives with weakened immune systems from the spike proteins rather than flat-out dying, we’ll be allowed to talk about it in ten years.
Someone (while wearing the best body armor available) needs to get up and say “Covid… isn’t that big a deal. It never was and never will be no matter how many greek letters you put in front of it. The scary new mutants are likely to be weaker than the original. Eventually it will turn back into a cold virus. Obviously, there were vulnerable people who needed to be protected from it but the total reorganization of society and industry around a spiky ball of protein and RNA was, and is, absurd and obscene. You people destroyed the foundations of Western freedom and liberty along with millions of jobs, businesses, life savings, and lives in the process of scoring the greatest own goal in all of human history and most of you are still trying to outdo each other kicking that ball ever deeper into the net.”
I remember debating fluoride in the water with my old buddy from high school in PDX. It was one of my first views into the contradictory mind of the radical leftist. This guy was against state and corporate power in all its forms but also was vehement the state contaminate the water supply with industrial waste. Why? Because science. His position seemed more of a reaction against his perceived ideological enemies than a positive one. His ideology demanded fluoride in the water because that was the party line so that was that.
I’ve known him for 25 years but I haven’t even tried talking to him since the holocough.
“PDX”….. What the hell is “PDX”
portland. It’s the airport code
Peabody: Another excellent point. The really dangerous ones aren’t numerous enough to individually control everyone else’s thoughts, speech, and actions, so they deputize to hundreds of thousands of petty tyrants. Every single bureaucrat, or store clerk, or Nice White Lady neighbor. Back when social mores were enforced by White society those busybody neighbors were kept in check by each other, and mostly served to police young children playing freely in public spaces. Now the eye of Karen is always upon you.
And to those who object that “Karen” is an intrinsically anti-White term – perhaps. I know it was originally intended to be one, but it does speak to a type we are all familiar with and it’s not a large bleck woman (I, myself, have had my Karen moments, although I usually preface them with the admission/warning to whomever I am dealing with that I can be a beaotch) Plus a particular prim and obnoxious girl I remember from my school years was named Karen, so I shall continue to use that name for the type.
“My body, my choice,” only applies to abortion and the trans stuff because both of those movements align with the Bolshevik needs to destroy the family and natural human identity to achieve their goal of atomizing human beings into fungible meat bags with two legs that are tagged, tracked, and controlled by the state.
Declining the clot shot flies in the face of those totalitarian needs, so of course they are, and will always be opposed to those who do so.
Women are chaotic and evil without moral men to lead them. Not unlike how the sun makes the earth fertile, and the farmer makes it good.
Immoral men are weak and detestable.
I don’t think there is any regular reader here that doesn’t understand the Nature of Woman, even the women themselves. (3g4me, rangefrontfault, etc.)
They are empty vessels, by design, and their anatomy literally reflects this. As you pointed out they will allows themselves to be filled by whatever the Alpha of the Moment is proclaiming as good for the herd / society. Herding animals to the core, this can even be things detrimental to society and themselves because critical thinking or going against the grain are not part of their genetic makeup. To expect them to act differently is to have a dim understanding would of a good survival strategy as a very weak very dependent creature.
This is why in less than a century we went from millions of German women throwing roman salutes at rallies to those same women now holding signs welcoming inferior genetic aliens into their midst to rape and debase them supporting their own ruination. A gender built for social compliance will be socially compliant at all times. (((They))) figured this out mid century and executed a master stroke of using feminism as a cipher and attack vector to distribute all manner of societal poisons.
What opened my eyes widest was when I was on a jury and the case preceding mine was of an actual murderer, but the case was thrown out. Scuttlebutt from the early arrivals in the jury stand was that a few women fell for the murderer’s spiel of being abused or whatever it was.
Then in my trial, it was for a shoplifter. A few women thought he was cute. LOL. And they didn’t want to convict. The case was convoluted to begin with, but they didn’t consider the facts, oh no, and went with their “intuition”. Which in this case is sadly a euphemism for their panties becoming moist.
God help us
Falcon, I’m not even going to share my jury story wrt women on the jury. It is the same as yours. ;-(
J, J, J, MUH BRUTHA.
When I woke up this moarning, and glanced at the headlines, and saw the video of the following protest, my VERY FIRST THOUGHT was of you, MUH BRUTHA.
Note that this is merely the overflow crowd from a protest of a mask mandate at a Tennessee skrewl:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1425254591155904513
https://files.catbox.moe/m1x0k0.mp4
Again, this is just the OVERFLOW crowd – you don’t even get a chance to see the hundreds [maybe thousands?] of blondes & brunettes inside the building itself.
There is so much moar I desperately want to say about this video, but I know now that Z & his M0ds would never allow it to be poasted [my thoughts are far too ribald], so just let me conclude by saying:
GET THE PHUCK OUT OF DC AND CUM START A FAMILY WITH SOME GORGEOUS PRO-LIFE P00NT@NG DOWN HERE IN GAWD’S COUNTRY!!!!!
MUH.
BRUTHA.
Workin’ on it bro. I don’t want to jinx myself but for the first time in a LONG time I see some light at the end of the tunnel after the destruction that the State wreaked on my life. Stay tuned…
Best news I have heard in forever!!!
We will pray for you my brother!!!!!
Oh, but b125, you know what to do: A&A. I agree! Everyone should be injected, whether or not they want to, with whatever serums are neceasary for the greater public good. Everyone should be vaccinated against everything, against their will if necessary. Just have vans going through the streets, grab anyone who looks noncompliant, and give ’em the vaxx, good and hard. We could have dawn raids on houses of the suspectes nonvaxxed, with guns and everything! If people die, its their own fault. We could have camps to house everyone suspected of noncompliance, until we can make them comply! Great idea, karen!
I like the underlying trollishness of the “A&A” tactic. Herein lies the problem: NPCs can’t manage anything that touches the rails of irony because it confuses and scares them. On the other hand, to agree and amplify without apparent irony is to run ahead of the pack, which is dangerous and thus also scary to the NPC.
Recall the fate of Syme in ‘1984’ – he was all in on the narrowing and impoverishment of language, the complete and final elimination of literate consciousness, and the consequent eradication of thoughtcrime at its root. His fatal flaw was that he understood the endpoint of the re-writes of the Newspeak Dictionary, quite beyond ‘Party needs’ under the current Nine-Year Plan. He was anticipating too clearly the ‘final edition’ while his job was merely to monkey around with certain details of the next edition. Syme was vaporized, just as Winston anticipated, precisely because he agreed and amplified INGSOC doctrine a bit too passionately, in a way that could be mistaken for irony.
All I am saying is that ‘A&A’ needs rehearsal, a knowledge of the interlocutor, and a subtle mind. I am no good at this so I tend to avoid it. My livelihood depends on the business of lots of affluent suburban white progressives – or as I call them, ASWHIPEs – and I cannot afford to attempt irony or even basic conversation with them.
I cannot afford to attempt irony or even basic conversation with them.
But you can discreetly whisper to their gorgeous White daughters, “DO NOT GET THE VAXX!!!”
And if the daughters ask why not, you tell them about the Japanese research which discovered the spike proteins going straight to their ovaries.
https://files.catbox.moe/ulubj0.jpg
This is an excellent essay and something to build a foundation around.
We must take back our property and our very being from the oligarchs.
The World Economic Forum, with the Schwab guy running it who looks like a superman villain, is all-in on eliminating private property and making humanity a bunch of renters. From a purely economics standpoint, it makes sense, as any hindrance to the transfer of capital is seen as an evil.
Normal people get stuck in such irrational wants as farming the same farm that has been in the family for generations, building structures for beauty rather than for utilitarian purposes, buying from people they know and trust instead of the cheaper megacorp, and working for a business where you actually know the owner. You know, stuff that makes us human.
Expect rental companies to start aggressively banning guns on property, big capital finishing off the last of small businesses, and traditional institutions being bribed and destroyed to be replaced with a weird skinsuit of an organization.
But don’t worry, they assure us we’ll be happy.
It seems to me a lot of evil comes from making being happy the goal.
Rather happiness is just a byproduct of an industrious and moral life. A lot of evil can be justified in pursuit of happiness.
The idea that you own you is very important to the West and the state has never respected it. In peaceful times it collects taxes, punishes people and various other infringements on the concept. In war time, you can be conscripted and various other measures of extreme coercion. You can probably define ‘a state’ as something that has the power to violate this and is seen as legitimate when doing so. This is not too different from Weber’s traditional definition of an entity that monopolizes the use of violence. But it has one advantage which is that it contradicts the illusion that big business and especially Big Tech, are not really wielding state-like power. Which they of course do.
Agreed. I read Z’s line here:
“As a result, the idea of private property has slowly receded from the public discourse with regards to politics and economics, even within socialist debates.”
And thought “The capitalists learned from the state.”
Own your house free and clear with no mortgage? Stop paying your property taxes and see what happens to your house.
Own your car free and clear with no loan and the title in your name with no other liens? Don’t license it or commit an act of “malparkage” and watch your car get impounded and ransomed for return.
Work for a living and don’t pay income tax, and you’re not a Vibrant! visitor working for cash under the table? Expect a meeting with the IRS at some point, with criminal charges brought up later.
The state respects personal property. As long as they get their cut.
Long ago I had a college professor that explained the job of Government was “To do the tasks the private sector cannot or will not do”. At that quaint time it was things like building roads, bridges, raising armed forces, etc.
Now I believe the job of Government is “keep the grift going”.
Retirement funds are next
There is zero chance the government doesn’t go after those
It is also telling what the government thinks about us regarding coinage. We used to get actual va,usable metals in our coins, a man could collect them and save and grow his wealth. Then they turned them into really nothing more than a washer you get at the hardware store, a token. A slug.
I have $30 in three rolls of quarters. All that weight and mass gets me an ounce of silver or a slither of gold.
Falcone: Way back in the early 1980s, when I spent a year in the then Soviet Union, that’s precisely what I thought of their currency – slugs or tokens. Everything felt very light weight, insubstantial, and fake. Now I regard American coinage precisely the same way – it’s monopoly money. Of course, as a child, I didn’t know or understand or even consider the precious metal content of coinage, or I would have kept the Kennedy half dollars I was given. And people who now purchase older US silver coinage are paying a premium price for worn and highly imprecise quantities of metal, but prize it because it is ‘legal tender.’ Meh. I buy plain silver rounds – one ounce is one ounce.
One ounce is one ounce- if you can prove it.
Imagine, if you would, the long distant future. 3g4me walks into the town market, up to my ammunition stall. “50 rounds of 38 spcl,” she says, plunking down her commemorative Trump NRA silver round. “Prove that’s one ounce sterling'” says I. Awkward silence ensues.
Replying also to Rebel,
Precisely why I don’t buy silver rounds but actual coins with a government stamp on them certifying authenticity
Yeah, you pay a little bit over spot for them, but I also like the designs and so forth, and overall I find it worth it.
Replying to both Falcone and Rebel: I personally doubt that people won’t have multiple means to determine the authenticity of silver and/or gold coins or jewelry if and when they become a necessity. My sole concern re silver rounds is that the denomination of a full ounce might be too high, but then such a thing as coin clipping may also return. As far as ‘legal tender’ goes, I have zero faith in the government that issued any American coins and, as I said, many of them are highly worn.
It’s a moot point; my hubby considers the old silver or part silver over-priced junk and he’s the expert and purchaser.
Old silver coins, albeit worn, are adjusted for lost weight (silver content). The wear of the coin even vouches for their authenticity. But as mentioned, I find their fractional value (less than a troy once) useful. Last great rise in value of silver during the gas crunch yielded interesting exchanges—such as the local gas station selling gas for 20 cents (two pre-64 dimes) per gallon. A similar case can be made for gold—which is the next logical step after some silver accumulation. Carrying 100 lbs of silver around is a drag.
While it was a small one (roughly equal to two years’ salary post-tax) I saw that handwriting on the wall way back when I was in my early 40s and I liquidated my IRA, paid the penalty, and gradually invested it on things with lasting value like the real estate I live in. Yes, the government can seize that, but they can no longer change the rules on an IRA that was terminated when Bush was still President.
Agree on your observation of our coins. Except for coins marketed to collectors, our country hasn’t had circulating gold or silver coins since about 1933 and 1963 respectively. In 1982 they even took out most of the copper from the penny!
The Panopticon. The Zman and Foucault converging.
Synopticon
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=22900
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20641
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=22831
As many have noted in this space, including our host, if you don’t have freedom of association, you don’t have freedom – full stop. All of what we see around us today, up to and including the coming Magic Shot Mandates, can be traced back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When future Chinese, or Islamic, or Mexican historians, look back at the demise of the USA, they are going to take one look at the Civil Rights Act and say “There! That was the turning point right there. The CRA is like a wall across American history; before 1964, the US almost never failed, after 1964 it almost never succeeded. It’s seeming triumphs after this, like the Moon landings and victory in the Cold War, were all a result of energies and processes started pre-1964. The CRA poisoned America at the root” And they will be right.
You don’t even have the right to have an opinion in digital space that is contrary to your employers publicly stated “values”.
Even if you completely divorce your online persona from your working one, that will not be a defense if doxxed for many corporations.
How is this legal? How do we put up with this? Corporations now get to own what you say, think, and write online?
Many European countries have laws in place where you can not be fired for political views. While I hate the CRA, expanding the law in a way that would benefit us would solve a lot of issues.
Agreed, but we all know that the CRA doesn’t really apply to white people, unless the PTB, for some reason want it to. It’s always been this way de facto, and now the Left is starting to argue this explicitly. And of course, if they want to, they can always find a reason to can you. Every used your work email for personal use? Is that a paperclip I see in your pocket? Company property, you know…
I mean, technically university professors have tenure and can believe anything they want politically, but any professor who started publically supporting right wing causes would immediately be hit with a raft of sexual harassment, racial insensitivity, and administrative malfeasance complaints, and be railroaded out in about twenty minutes. It would be even easier in the private sector. This is not Ike’s America, or even Reagan’s – we’re not going to legal our way out of this.
Latest bit of absurdity (over on Power Line), ranks right up there with renaming the “racist” bird named after a Civil War General. The Black Student Union at U. Wisconsin complained because some diligent researcher found out that a decorative rock placed on campus had been called by an unflattering name a century ago. So the rock was removed. A rock!
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/dumber-than-a-pet-rock.php
One one level, this is hilarious. The Left is sifting the evidence for anything to go after. Perhaps because they long ago ran out of any substantive issues to champion?
On another level, this is downright scary. Will we see the same zeal when the Purity Committee comes to looking for OUR sins? Soviet Union 2.0, here we come? Actually, that probably gives too much credit to the new socialists. The Soviets were mostly Caucasians, and thus had certain advantages over the up-and-coming vanguard of the Revolution 😀
That only applies to Leftist political views. They just want to make sure you can’t be fired for being too far Left, or for endorsing Leftist violence.
But you can’t be a dissident and keep a job.
It doesn’t apply to the fraction of leftist views that are of no use to globohomo.
Until they thought of “misinformation” as a new catch-all (“fake news” didn’t work out), there was only a pattern, three readily identifiable censorship/ostracism targets: our guys of whatever sort, anti-abortion women (especially black Christian ones), and leftists who persisted in being anti-war, anti-corporate, etc., and therefore anti-Democratic Party, after Bernie and Chomsky had signaled total capitulation forever.
There were so few actual leftist orgs, nobody noticed when they were wiped out. Remember the day a few years ago when we woke up to find that all of tech had conspired to purge “antifa” accounts? Then later that day, as if they’d got the call (as if!), tech said “oopsie” and restored them all—except for a few. Those were the real ones. RIP.
Deny the holocaust or advocate Nazism in Germany and several other European countries and tell me how that works out. 😀
I say this as a Catholic, but I think the real start of the downfall was letting us in.
Now granted many of us can adapt and actually prefer the more Protestant way of doing things.
But Catholics by and large have an opposing view on many important subjects, such as taxation, which is often internalized as a form of tithing for the public good, and the role of government in the abstract and in fact and practice.
I do not believe the Civil Rights Act would have been possible without a large Catholic population.
Now I do not want to open old wounds, and I don’t want to divide, but this is a cerebral forum and one that values honesty, and being truthful an objective is important. It is also vital that people be allowed to reach their full potential, and if that is important that it has to be recognized that Catholics and Protestants are different enough — religiously and also often enough ethnically — that they need their own gardens in which to thrive and grow.
Yes, so if America does break apart, I do see the Catholics and Protestants going different ways but still retaining a general mutual respect. So if this means we get New Orleans and the former Spanish Mission colony of California, I’ll take it. Would be great if we could also wrest away Cuba and bring her into the fold. But I am also open to suggestions.
Hmmmmmm.
I am not sure of the foundation of your argument. It’s easily shaken, and easily attacked.
A. The profit that Bookface makes is from property or a commodity that they create. That info would not be “property” unless somebody curated it, archived it in a way to be retrieved when needed. Torba over at Gab could do the same thing if he chose. So could the guys at bitchute, and other free speech service providers.
B. Privacy and personal information may be important to you, but both parties can waive that ownership in any contract they enter in to. It’s done all the time in business partnerships where access to proprietary info and intellectual property are required to facilitate effective partnerships and contracts. Don’t like it? Throw your cell away. Their contracts are legally bulletproof: they say what they mean, and mean what they say. Our property, contract and torte law is based on you READING your contracts and understanding them before you agree to them.
What should bother the dissidents and is of far more legal concern is the monopolies being set up by these guys. They are flat out illegal under American law, and most other western countries as well. For their part The oligarchs are doing exactly what they should: competing against their rivals and trying to shut them out of any further competition. We used to understand that sometimes this made for unhealthy monopolies and market manipulation and we acquiesced to informed and objective market regulators to deal with them as equitably as possible.
This is an issue of monopolies, not property infringement
A. How is this different from a factory? The widget is the result of the organizational talent of the factory owner, but he must still pay for the labor used in the plant. The Facebook factory is relying on free labor and does so through relying on a degraded interpretation of property and deception.
B. If that was what was happening with these tech companies, then sure, but that is not the case here. These are not contracts freely entered into by both parties. They are one-way contracts, so they have historically been treated differently than mutual agreements.
The one way nature is the effect. The disparity in bargaining position is the cause.
Sure, but equality exist only in the world of fantasy. The landlord with two rental units has power over the tenet in the contract. You don’t have to be a global corporation to issue a one way contract. If we subjected these agreements to the same scrutiny we apply to car rental agreements, Facebook probably collapses as a business. The same with Twitter. I’m focusing on the property aspect here, but it is not a single cause phenomenon.
In any rental agreement, however, the tenant is granted extraordinary rights and powers over someone else’s property.
Also, I can’t unilaterally change my rental agreements at any time. If a tenant has signed a one-year contract and is allowed a dog, I can’t suddenly, three months in, drop a letter in his box, “Hi, We are changing the terms of service. Your house will not longer be permitted to house a dog. If you decline these terms of service, please be moved out of the house by the first of next month.”
Perhaps I am missing your point? Bookface pays it’s workers. Be patient with me, Z, I am a Yesterday Man trying to catch up.
Legally, this is how I would counter your argument if I worked for the bad guys: This is not a case of intellectual or property infringement at all. As a marketing guy, I was paid to notice (for example) – that, say, customer Karl McHungus is buying Alaska Chaga – but not the the ever-so-trendy Z Man boutique jewelry. My job, which is as legal as church on Sunday – was to find out why he wasn’t buying and see if there wasn’t a more effective strategy to market that line to him. I would also find out why he bought the chaga and see if we could use his motivation for buying those products to get him to buy others. Since you are a customer of bookface – they are simply doing the same thing to you, under the terms and conditions of your contract in using them. My methods for gathering that information is as legal as church on Sunday too. What’s the difference if I gather the marketing data or an algorithm does it?
For you to have a case against me – you will have to prove that I ‘stole’ something of value from you, and that I did it by illegal means. You must put a dollar figure on it, and spell out exactly how my activities hurt you. If you can spell that out… maybe you have a case. For most of us, in the real world, it doesn’t matter.
The sheep are not being robbed of their rights, Z. They are selling them or trading them. We see this when they line up for the Covid shot because they are also getting a coupon for free junk food at Rotten Ronnie’s.
The law has always recognized that you cannot take someone’s private activity, likeness, etc and use it for a commercial purpose or monetary gain. If you put up a billboard saying “Marlene Dietrich drives a Benz, and so should you!” with a picture of Ms. Dietrich in a c-class, you better darned well have her actual, contractually bound permission to do so. This is not new, it was resolved in Anglosacon jurisprudence centuries ago – we have just abandoned it under the figleaf that EULA’s are meaningful and “free access” is sufficinet consideration. It is not (see my above comment re consemt is not enough).
Also, I got a good chuckle out of “torte law;” maybe I can get a license at the confectionary bar and sue for bonbons, pies, and of course, tortes.
But I think a more proper way of looking at it is that the people on FB are the materials with which Bookface builds his product
He steals those materials or obtains them through fraud. He’s a cow poacher.
In actuality he obtains them through government power because the government works with him hand in glove. Bookface is essentially a hired gun building a product at the government’s instruction and behest. Much like a defense contractor building planes and munitions for the government, although the actual arrangement is not so direct.
And again it can never be understated that the internet was a creation of the DoD. It has military and strategic asset applications, in this case we’re now the enemies of the state so they have aimed their strategic weapon at us. Got us all hooked on it, can’t live without out or conduct normal business, and we are over the proverbial barrel.
Note that Mr. Filthie said the arguments are “easily shaken”, not wrong.
Mr. Z-Man mentions in the comments section “contracts of adhesion” for the very good reason that in a free society, a monopoly would not be able to enforce or would suffer liability for changing terms of service.
In a free society.
Yes, that is exactly the point, as zman explicitly made. If the EULAs were actually treated as contracts and subject to the same disfavor and consequences as a Hertz rental contract, Big Tech would be sued out of existence. They aren’t so because the rules have been bent to their favor, and there are no consequences to them. It’s like the labor union version of the bad old days, when you got injured on the job the boss threw you out and didn’t even give you your last paycheck (damages for production losses while they pulled your severed arm out of the press, dontchaknow). We don’t allow these behaviors for employment, housing, loans, or even rental car arrangements, yet the social media giants get away with it.
A contract that includes a clause that allows one party to unilaterally change the terms of the contract at any time, for any reason, and denies the other party that power, is no contract at all.
Peoples’ laziness in clicking on those pieces of trash should in no way qualify as legal consent.
One quick way to demonstrate the problem of “contracts of adhesion” upon which Z bases this post is, think of all the dozens of Terms of Service agreements that you have clicked through in your life. These Terms of Service are often 20+ pages of legalese that is incomprehensible to non-lawyers, probably intentionally so.
While you literally have the choice to decline these contracts, in practice you don’t because there is no other comparable software or service without similar contracts.
Although my libertarian side is uncomfortable with my conclusion, my conclusion is that government has a role in preventing these asymmetric contracts.
And to bang that drum again, consent is only one aspect of allowing enforcement of an agreement. To make an obvious example, Vizzini cannot be bound by his consent to a contract to murder someone. If the coconapirator took Vizzini to court, it wouldn’t end with the agreement being upheld. No EULA “contract” with any tech firm should be enforceable.
Glenfilthie: As Altitude Zero pithily said above, “We’re not going to legal our way out of this” either. Monopoly, property infingement – you have lost sight of the forest for the trees of laws and their enforcement.
Not so, 3G. I am trying to look at this as the law would, and as the bad guys would. I am not saying Z is wrong – but he is not necessarily right, either.
Our enemies in this have a valid legal position and the courts have to consider it as well.
We all have a choice of using Facebook or declining. Exchanging our labor willingly for something we value (sustenance) does not make us slaves. If we value the Facebook service enough to exchange our privacy willingly, it does not reduce our property rights. (Eviction moratorium’s do, however)
But that is not what is happening. You act like Facebook is the local blacksmith and you are bargaining with him over shoeing your horse.
Huh? I don’t even own a horse.
People discount Facebook’s monopoly power since they see the frills as optional, but FB’s groups is where the true engine of it’s monopoly lies. This isn’t just formal groups for some organization someone might belong to, but also informal, such as FB being the only place where parents can go see what their school or local government is up to. FB users get no choice about whether or not to have their data harvested, just as they often have no choice about whether or not to use it.
I was constantly left out of notices for my daughter’s school teams because of my refusal to use Facebook. It was very frustrating.
Europe has found ways to protect personal privacy (and property) online; Google and Facebook routinely get record fines leveled against them when they get caught violating those laws.
It can be done. But it begins with people understanding that they own themselves, not big tech.
“The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, Of course, the state can lock you in your home. After all, they can determine your associations and they allow private enterprise to spy on you in your home. You don’t own you. Like a pet, you are the property of powerful interests, and you must do as you are trained.”
yep, that’s how entitled these oligarch fuckers are, they treat us like we’re some freaking teenage characters from the Salo movie.
I don’t think they realize that not everyone has similar mental patterns. Yes, there’s lots of npcs out there who are born & waiting to be tamed by someone of higher rank, but not everyone is a bitch, there’s just as many dudes who simply cannot adapt to this great reset lifestyle, will half of the male population be sent to reeducation camps? Is such a thing even feasible?
“there’s just as many dudes who simply cannot adapt to this great reset lifestyle, will half of the male population be sent to reeducation camps? Is such a thing even feasible?”
This point to me reveals that our rulers are simply not very competent. I oscillate at times between some evil forces (WEF, etc.) driving a reset to plunder our wealth, or a bunch of incompetent betas and women haphazardly driving to some gay utopia in their mind.
Consider the current ongoing purge of the military, both those considered “extremists” and those who won’t submit to the “vaccines”. A competent Machiavellian trying to consolidate power would realize the risk of having hundreds of thousands of bitter, angry, yet very well-trained warriors purged and therefore naturally allied against you. A bunch of incompetent, immature, beta fruitcakes and women think they are winning a victory simply by doing this, by removing undesirables as they define them from the military.
Yea but the discontent competent alphas have to organize and be discontent enough to provide a challenge to the effeminate ruling class.
I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
yep. I’d like to think having an incompetent like Walensky results in this whole thing going up in smoke.
We have had problems with Google Maps reviews for our business. About half the ones on our location are fake, some positive, some negative. A few others are retaliatory, including one from a disgruntled former employee that is defamatory. We have made multiple attempts to have the reviews removed and Google just sends a form reply saying they won’t remove them. We are told we need to pay for “reputation management” to keep bad reviews from being published to our Google listing. This is extortion fully backed by the government.
Is it possible to manufacture a large number of ‘genuine’ ones, to counter the negatives? May as well play Clown World at it’s own game.
We have done some of that. We know a competitor who requires employees to go on Google and leave 5 star reviews of their company. A government not controlled by Big Tech would tell Google to get this process under control quickly or remove it.
A consumer with a functioning brain would know to begin with the assumption that everything they read online is a lie until credibly proven otherwise.
You’ve just outlined why online reviews are of dubious quality. But even I fall victim to the ego trip of rating places I shop at.
I was looking for a plaid necktie to go with my kilt. I did an online search for “plaid neckties.” I then saw ads on Facebook for businesses selling plaid ties.
Google had sold my online search to Facebook who sold it to these businesses. I contacted the businesses, saying that since I hadn’t given Google or Facebook permission to sell them my search, I should be paid for their access to my data in the form of a discount if I were to purchase one of their toes.
No takers. I purchased my tie at a Salvation Army store. It isn’t the Black Watch plaid that I was looking for but it’s close.
Were all the models wearing Scottish attire non-white?
Though I understand the Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., business model, it never really bothered me that they would use it to try to sell me $400 sneakers, etc., and these days, since most of the websites I frequent are excluded from the online advertising racket, I don’t see all that many ads.
That said, the move by these tech monopolies to integrate their thievery into the government surveillance apparatus is more that a little alarming. I expect the conversion of the West into an anti-white, multi-cultural and sexually deviant version of Chinese surveillance state authoritarianism to precede its death.
I agree with your larger point, but personal autonomy only dates to the Enlightenment. One of the enduring appeals of all forms of collectivism (a term that would baffle anyone born before about 1750) is that it promises a return to the garden, where everyone is secure in his place in the collective. It’s “escape from freedom,” as Fromm put it, and he might’ve been a goofy commie, but he wasn’t wrong.
You *don’t* own you. The tribe owns you, or the gods own you, or the spirits of the ancestors, or the genius loci. The Enlightenment idea that the State is somehow different from the People was an ad hoc response to the Wars of Religion, which is where the notion of radical personal autonomy got started. Luther and especially Calvin made you and you alone responsible for the state of your soul, from which all else developed.
“…the Wars of Religion, which is where the notion of radical personal autonomy got started”
So was the New Testament Christianity the latent kernel of this trend? In ancient times, the thought of personal “belief” in the gods and the broader cultural mythos didn’t make much sense. The gods were everywhere, rituals and temples were embedded within every day life–down the road, near that stream etc.
It wasn’t until Christianity emphasized a personal relationship with one god that belief made any sense in society. This standard of personal belief had to have started us down the track of “radical personal autonomy” as you put it.
But the collectivist are inventing history here. Even in feudal times, property and autonomy were closely linked. Their imagined pre-history man is not rooted in reality. It is just a device to make the rest of the ideology happen. The noble savage is the McGuffin of moral philosophy.
Again, a defining part of Western culture is property. This is not a defining characteristic of all people.
I don’t disagree, but the “autonomy” of the feudal noble, or the Athenian freeman, was very narrow. The Athenian who stepped too much to his own drummer would be literally ostracized; the feudal noble who failed to respect his station both ways would be sent on Crusade. The Saxon freeman actually “owned” himself far more than the medieval English freeman, in that he knew exactly what his life was worth, down to the penny.
It seems to me that late medieval social structures, eg guilds, came into being largely to address the growing sense of “property = autonomy.” Even the best craftsman was bound by guild regulations from expanding his craft too much, just as sumptuary laws kept him from dressing above his station, though he was much richer than any noble in his shire.
The idea of self-ownership, at least to the degree consonant with the Fatherhood of God, is most certainly pre-enlightenment. Thomas Aquinas recognized it, saying that children of non-believers should not be forcibly converted as children, but wait until “it begins to belong to itself—incipit esse suus–and is able to look after itself, in matters concerning the Divine or the natural law, and then it should be induced, not by compulsion but by persuasion (non coactione, sed persuasione), to embrace the faith.”
So self-ownership was certainly a medieval concept. I certainly wouldn’t argue that it wasn’t different in many respects than the Enlightenment concept, but it was most certainly there.
By the way, if Aquinas thought that even the saving of souls should be accomplished by persuasion, I think we can guess what he would have thought of vaccine mandates…
Agreed, but “self-ownership” is not “autonomy.” The Stoics’ whole schmear was personal autonomy — see for example Epictetus, the former slave, who became a Stoic while a slave. No one this side of the Buddha “owned” himself more than Epictetus, but few are less autonomous than slaves. The idea that “autonomy” = “property,” in both your person and in the products of all the labor of your hands, is an entirely Enlightenment idea…
But it doesn’t really matter, as I think we’re missing some of the forest for the trees. “You own you” is a great rallying cry for getting people to get off social media and the like, and that’s 100% a good thing, so let’s use the hell out of it as a tactic. In the long run, though — strategically — offering people more “autonomy” is counterproductive, as that’s exactly what got us here in the first place. Only a fully “autonomous” individual could dye his hair blue, make up his own pronouns, cut his own dick off, and demand to be called “Sally,” and expect society to bend to his whim.
England used to have a solution to the Google/Facebook problem
The 1977 Unfair Contract Terms Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_Contract_Terms_Act_1977
Dunno what happened to it.
We used to have similar customs in the US. A one way contract or contract of adhesion was assumed to be one sided with the issuer being more powerful than the other party. Courts have traditionally used the doctrine of reasonable expectations to test whether an adhesion contract is enforceable. Specific parts of an adhesion contract or the whole contract may be deemed unenforceable if the contract terms go beyond what the weaker party would have reasonably expected.
That principle has been abandoned with regards to end user license agreements.
Ahhh contract law… What seems so easy has always been convoluted, but the digital age ramped things up tenfold. We already have doctrines of duress and unconscionability but we need to create a new doctrine of digital shysterism.
“The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, because the population has been habituated to the idea that they do not own themselves.”
Excellent observation !!
“Shelter in place” was already taken