All that talk of protecting democracy, from both sides! Democracy was supposed to mean rule by the people, but what we have ain't that. Forcing people to pick a team, especially when there are only two recognized teams, is the opposite of allowing "the people" to rule themselves.
True rule by the people means recognizing that there is no one "will of the people" because people are individuals, not a hive mind (even when the team forces them to act like a hive mind). It means getting command and control government out of the way and allowing people to vote with their actions--the choices individuals make.
It means having a free market in government services--the services that people think they need a government to provide. There is no reason for public goods to be provided by coercive, political government. That includes the public goods of rule-making and legal structures.
Free cities allow individuals to rule by giving them choices in the rules they want to live under. Some free cities will win more votes than others, but there is the potential for successful cities that cater to a minority of the people, who are therefore ruling themselves in a real sense.
Tell that to all the people screaming about "protecting our democracy," which isn't me, but does include the President of the USA and most of Congress. Majority rule is the problem, whether you call it a democracy, a republic, or a constitutional monarchy. My point was that free market rule-by-the-people means there are no winners and losers and the minorities as well as the majorities get what they want.
Well done. Thorough. I suspect many of us share this vast disconnect between many family member's beliefs and our own. Highly coordinated propaganda from mainstream news outlets seems like the lynch pin. It may also be the best target for attack vectors.
I've thought about this for quite a while over the past year or so about what truly differentiates both parties. And I think the resounding issue is that one is fast and stupid, while the other is slow and stupid.
Faster for the democrats is far from being better, but more along the lines of what you've just described, they're now showing who they really are. But the level of prolonged stupidity by republicans is also another form of evil. And at times it is hard to fathom how they keep on with this "we don't know", "we didn't know", "we're not in charge of that", or "gee-whiz-gosh, how come THAT keeps happening"? Garbage.
On a nearly one-to-one basis, count the number of times that when you find a point of criticism on one side, how often the other side is doing nearly the same thing? Needless to say, we're in for more of the same, unquestionably, even IF they (the republicans) should be so lucky to maintain or expand their majority in the House, while retaking the Senate and WH.
When you count the number of House races that are tight in the face of the worst administration (and Congress) in modern times, and they can't seem to get beyond a few percentage points, clearly there are no significant downsides to losing, because they know within a few years after they lose their majority, we'll be forced to come back to them again, and then the cycle repeats. And to demonstrate: If you knew in advance that your team won't be able to hold a sustainable majority for more than 2-4 years at a time, what would you do differently? Obviously, nothing. So it is a 100% racket, and they know it.
Next question: what kind of a candidate vetting system would weed out those who demonstrably don't belong there?
It is incredible, that 300 million people align largely with one of two main political choices. In the land of the free, where you are free to choose. And where a poor man could grow up to be president (or so were led to believe), it just comes down to red or blue. And if by some chance a third party would steal the election no doubt it would be blamed on populism! And here I thought democracy was about the freedom to choose the people best suited to govern. Seems we have the government we deserve somehow.
The issue with the United States political landscape is two-fold.
On one hand the two party solution isn't a two-party solution at all. What we have in the U.S. is the Uni-party. That's the ENTIRE point.
The Uni-party for years has managed to utilize the power of the federal government to fuel their gravy train for history's biggest and most profitable leading scam known as the GRIFT. It's that simple.
This is not complicated. If you're inside the D.C. establishment you're inside the lobby of getting your pockets lined and that's where your allegiance lies.
Therefore, there's no allegiance to a certain party's constituents, the citizens of the country, the constitution, or the country at large. There's no such thing as principle, personal accountability, ethics, or a moral compass. To these people there's no such thing as a country, borders, citizenship, rights, and individuality. The ONLY thing that matters to these people is the grift and the grift alone.
Therefore, when an outsider such as Donald Trump enters into the room and doesn't need to bow down to any of the grifting scum that have spent years selling the country out to the Chinese Communist Party then what are they left to do? The only thing left to do is to relentlessly attack the one man that serves to be the biggest threat to the one thing that matters to them the most...the Grift.
This is why I always scratch my head when people say Trump is a jerk, or a loud mouth. I know you mentioned this in the article and in the context I understand what you mean, however in reality the larger jerks and the bigger loud mouths in my view include everyone that already exists inside that room that serve those who grift off the American public. It's the Administrative State and that's what the Administrative State does.
In fact, they have a loud mouth propaganda arm for themselves with their own Administrative State Media (ASM) that labels everyone and anyone who goes against their narrative as racist, sexist, xenophopic, transphobic, and responsible for killing democracy. These jerks weaponize the justice system, label moms who speak out at school boards as domestic terrorists, censor (as you've already pointed out), and label white christians as the biggest threat to the country as if it were white christians who flew the planes into the world trade centers.
In my view THEY are the loud mouth jerks and when loud mouth jerks such as that want to throw you in prison, attack your family, and destroy everything you hold sacred then perhaps I'd be a jerk in return. After all, who wouldn't be?
The thing is for years people have screamed about how bad things need to be changed in D.C. and when a guy like Trump shows up to actually disrupt the system to the point it threatens actual change then everyone that screamed about it all the sudden acts like they don't want it because things get too bumpy.
I would say to these people that they never actually wanted the system to be disrupted and changed. I don't know what these people want other than to be heard. We don't have time for blowhards because this is a war over the existence of civilization. I always remind people who don't like hearing this that they are enemy combatants whether they like it or not.
We don't always get what we want, but we get what we allow ourselves to get.
Thanks for the write up. This is a great piece. Godspeed my friend.
The political quiz at iSideWith.com allows you to compare your political views to those of political parties and candidates. I'm an individualist libertarian and my views are substantially the same as they were in 2016 when I first took the quiz. At that time I agreed with Republicans on 80% of the issues and with Democrats on 55%. Now I agree with Republicans on just 74% of the issues, probably because Trumpism has replaced Reaganism. But, to my astonishment, I now agree with Democrats on only 21% of the issues--as compared to 29% agreement with Socialists! The ideological results show that I agree most with libertarians and least with collectivists. I conclude that the Republican Party has become somewhat more authoritarian but the Democratic Party now embraces authoritarian collectivism.
But what you provide, exact though it be, is all phenomenology, maya, superficies.
The heart of the problem is the state form of government itself. The essence of the state is the frenetic removal of all mediating institutions standing between its power and the individual citizen. There have been fundamentally only two players in the historical development of the state, each guided by a separate theological principle: The Left, guided by the assumption of man's nature as plastic and perfectible, and the Right, guided by the assumption of man's nature as fixed and fallen.
Clearly the Left is the evil party since it invests the state with the _duty_, the _right_, and the _power_ of shaping man's malleable nature into a future perfection, whether by taxation as a citizen of The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Klaus Schwab) or by brute force as The New Socialist Man (Lenin, et.al.). Thus there is no difference in kind between the bland socialist state of the Democrats and the gulag and killing fields of Stalin and Pol Pot – there is only a difference in degree, in the amount of force to be applied to shape the human being into the "perfected" daydream of those in power.
Thank you. We agree on most things, which means we need to be extra careful to keep challenging our own beliefs. (wink) Confirmation bias is a thing.
For those of us who believe in the importance of the sovereignty of the individual, open markets of goods and ideas, and a Promethean attitude towards innovation, there is good news. Humans tend to be inconsistent in their beliefs and often hold conflicting viewpoints. Their ideologies are filled with contradictions. I knew a hardcore libertarian who supported the building of baseball stadiums with tax dollars because of their love of the game. "But Pat, it's baseball!" they said, almost teary-eyed.
Ludwig Von Mises, the great Austrian economist, once said he thought the government should support state opera. (An anecdote confirmed by his student Murray Rothbard.)
Me? Although I have identified as libertarian for 45+ years, I have improperly fantasized of life sentences in Colorado's SuperMax for people who run puppy mills and warehouse the sick, the indigent, and frail elderly humans in rundown facilities to make a buck. Similar mindsets in my opinion. Let's not waste resources on jury trials and cripple the speed of sentencing with civil rights issues. Just lock them up. Okay, a little extreme, but I don't claim to be "pure."
So, when I'm talking to people whose political beliefs lean towards command and control, I seek out shared agreement on issues. For example, I have two friends who were public school teachers in different states; both vote the straight Democratic ticket. They both confessed to me that they retired early because of the oppressive nature of Federal rules in education. I have used that patch of commonality to discuss other professions that are held captive by morasses of laws and regulations. At this point, all I am asking is that they pause and consider before cheering on initiatives that destroy other people's freedoms. We have good conversations, and I am seeing and hearing less unthinking support for typical Democratic party positions.
And I cheer out loud when politicians, regardless of their affiliation, decriminalize an activity, give citizens the opportunity to invent and create more by canceling laws, and support free speech (which is different from supporting harrassment and physical assault on people and property).
And cheers to you for stepping back from using family and friends as you did in your first version.
Yes. It is possible to be outside of the red-blue paradigm…to believe that "democracy" is not the ultimate evolution in human social organization…to recognize that excessive labeling and pigeon-holing are counter productive…
And yet STILL recognize categories, discern between them, and assess their relative merits and threats.
Think it through. He is not a doctor or scientist so like all presidents he had to rely on the experts. Would you have done differently if it was your call in real time?
A deuce says you would have.
The reality is that Trump was overly trusting of shitbirds like Fraudci. Who would have ever thought that ayone would deliberately hurt their country just to spite a president they hated due to MSM-driven TDS?
As others have said, while Trump didn't clean out the swamp, he did expose just how deep it really is. For that we are eternally grateful.
I'm a lifelong Independent who started voting in the 1970s and usually pinched his nose on election day and voted for Democrats. Never again. The Pubs are almost as evil.
I'll go with Trump from hereon and his successors.
All that talk of protecting democracy, from both sides! Democracy was supposed to mean rule by the people, but what we have ain't that. Forcing people to pick a team, especially when there are only two recognized teams, is the opposite of allowing "the people" to rule themselves.
True rule by the people means recognizing that there is no one "will of the people" because people are individuals, not a hive mind (even when the team forces them to act like a hive mind). It means getting command and control government out of the way and allowing people to vote with their actions--the choices individuals make.
It means having a free market in government services--the services that people think they need a government to provide. There is no reason for public goods to be provided by coercive, political government. That includes the public goods of rule-making and legal structures.
Free cities allow individuals to rule by giving them choices in the rules they want to live under. Some free cities will win more votes than others, but there is the potential for successful cities that cater to a minority of the people, who are therefore ruling themselves in a real sense.
The USA is not a democracy.
Someone slept through their civics classes.
Tell that to all the people screaming about "protecting our democracy," which isn't me, but does include the President of the USA and most of Congress. Majority rule is the problem, whether you call it a democracy, a republic, or a constitutional monarchy. My point was that free market rule-by-the-people means there are no winners and losers and the minorities as well as the majorities get what they want.
Well done. Thorough. I suspect many of us share this vast disconnect between many family member's beliefs and our own. Highly coordinated propaganda from mainstream news outlets seems like the lynch pin. It may also be the best target for attack vectors.
Wow. Yay.
JFK was an unrepentant racist.
I've thought about this for quite a while over the past year or so about what truly differentiates both parties. And I think the resounding issue is that one is fast and stupid, while the other is slow and stupid.
Faster for the democrats is far from being better, but more along the lines of what you've just described, they're now showing who they really are. But the level of prolonged stupidity by republicans is also another form of evil. And at times it is hard to fathom how they keep on with this "we don't know", "we didn't know", "we're not in charge of that", or "gee-whiz-gosh, how come THAT keeps happening"? Garbage.
On a nearly one-to-one basis, count the number of times that when you find a point of criticism on one side, how often the other side is doing nearly the same thing? Needless to say, we're in for more of the same, unquestionably, even IF they (the republicans) should be so lucky to maintain or expand their majority in the House, while retaking the Senate and WH.
When you count the number of House races that are tight in the face of the worst administration (and Congress) in modern times, and they can't seem to get beyond a few percentage points, clearly there are no significant downsides to losing, because they know within a few years after they lose their majority, we'll be forced to come back to them again, and then the cycle repeats. And to demonstrate: If you knew in advance that your team won't be able to hold a sustainable majority for more than 2-4 years at a time, what would you do differently? Obviously, nothing. So it is a 100% racket, and they know it.
Next question: what kind of a candidate vetting system would weed out those who demonstrably don't belong there?
It is incredible, that 300 million people align largely with one of two main political choices. In the land of the free, where you are free to choose. And where a poor man could grow up to be president (or so were led to believe), it just comes down to red or blue. And if by some chance a third party would steal the election no doubt it would be blamed on populism! And here I thought democracy was about the freedom to choose the people best suited to govern. Seems we have the government we deserve somehow.
Team Blue cheats; team Red are transparently dumb. Don’t you love the duopoly?
Excellent, yes. The party of that much slaughter and dehumanization is always evil.
"whataboutism is for suckers and single-issue voters. "
It's the same damned party. It is not uniquely evil, it is just the game and they are currently playing the domestic villains
The issue with the United States political landscape is two-fold.
On one hand the two party solution isn't a two-party solution at all. What we have in the U.S. is the Uni-party. That's the ENTIRE point.
The Uni-party for years has managed to utilize the power of the federal government to fuel their gravy train for history's biggest and most profitable leading scam known as the GRIFT. It's that simple.
This is not complicated. If you're inside the D.C. establishment you're inside the lobby of getting your pockets lined and that's where your allegiance lies.
Therefore, there's no allegiance to a certain party's constituents, the citizens of the country, the constitution, or the country at large. There's no such thing as principle, personal accountability, ethics, or a moral compass. To these people there's no such thing as a country, borders, citizenship, rights, and individuality. The ONLY thing that matters to these people is the grift and the grift alone.
Therefore, when an outsider such as Donald Trump enters into the room and doesn't need to bow down to any of the grifting scum that have spent years selling the country out to the Chinese Communist Party then what are they left to do? The only thing left to do is to relentlessly attack the one man that serves to be the biggest threat to the one thing that matters to them the most...the Grift.
This is why I always scratch my head when people say Trump is a jerk, or a loud mouth. I know you mentioned this in the article and in the context I understand what you mean, however in reality the larger jerks and the bigger loud mouths in my view include everyone that already exists inside that room that serve those who grift off the American public. It's the Administrative State and that's what the Administrative State does.
In fact, they have a loud mouth propaganda arm for themselves with their own Administrative State Media (ASM) that labels everyone and anyone who goes against their narrative as racist, sexist, xenophopic, transphobic, and responsible for killing democracy. These jerks weaponize the justice system, label moms who speak out at school boards as domestic terrorists, censor (as you've already pointed out), and label white christians as the biggest threat to the country as if it were white christians who flew the planes into the world trade centers.
In my view THEY are the loud mouth jerks and when loud mouth jerks such as that want to throw you in prison, attack your family, and destroy everything you hold sacred then perhaps I'd be a jerk in return. After all, who wouldn't be?
The thing is for years people have screamed about how bad things need to be changed in D.C. and when a guy like Trump shows up to actually disrupt the system to the point it threatens actual change then everyone that screamed about it all the sudden acts like they don't want it because things get too bumpy.
I would say to these people that they never actually wanted the system to be disrupted and changed. I don't know what these people want other than to be heard. We don't have time for blowhards because this is a war over the existence of civilization. I always remind people who don't like hearing this that they are enemy combatants whether they like it or not.
We don't always get what we want, but we get what we allow ourselves to get.
Thanks for the write up. This is a great piece. Godspeed my friend.
The political quiz at iSideWith.com allows you to compare your political views to those of political parties and candidates. I'm an individualist libertarian and my views are substantially the same as they were in 2016 when I first took the quiz. At that time I agreed with Republicans on 80% of the issues and with Democrats on 55%. Now I agree with Republicans on just 74% of the issues, probably because Trumpism has replaced Reaganism. But, to my astonishment, I now agree with Democrats on only 21% of the issues--as compared to 29% agreement with Socialists! The ideological results show that I agree most with libertarians and least with collectivists. I conclude that the Republican Party has become somewhat more authoritarian but the Democratic Party now embraces authoritarian collectivism.
Max,
A true bill of indictment against the Democrats.
But what you provide, exact though it be, is all phenomenology, maya, superficies.
The heart of the problem is the state form of government itself. The essence of the state is the frenetic removal of all mediating institutions standing between its power and the individual citizen. There have been fundamentally only two players in the historical development of the state, each guided by a separate theological principle: The Left, guided by the assumption of man's nature as plastic and perfectible, and the Right, guided by the assumption of man's nature as fixed and fallen.
Clearly the Left is the evil party since it invests the state with the _duty_, the _right_, and the _power_ of shaping man's malleable nature into a future perfection, whether by taxation as a citizen of The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Klaus Schwab) or by brute force as The New Socialist Man (Lenin, et.al.). Thus there is no difference in kind between the bland socialist state of the Democrats and the gulag and killing fields of Stalin and Pol Pot – there is only a difference in degree, in the amount of force to be applied to shape the human being into the "perfected" daydream of those in power.
There is a psychological dimension that could be explored. Off the top I come up with:
Emotion over reason
Obedience over independence
Contention over cooperation
Fear over courage
Conformity and group-think over originality
Dogmatism over open-mindedness
Vitriol over respect
Thank you. We agree on most things, which means we need to be extra careful to keep challenging our own beliefs. (wink) Confirmation bias is a thing.
For those of us who believe in the importance of the sovereignty of the individual, open markets of goods and ideas, and a Promethean attitude towards innovation, there is good news. Humans tend to be inconsistent in their beliefs and often hold conflicting viewpoints. Their ideologies are filled with contradictions. I knew a hardcore libertarian who supported the building of baseball stadiums with tax dollars because of their love of the game. "But Pat, it's baseball!" they said, almost teary-eyed.
Ludwig Von Mises, the great Austrian economist, once said he thought the government should support state opera. (An anecdote confirmed by his student Murray Rothbard.)
Me? Although I have identified as libertarian for 45+ years, I have improperly fantasized of life sentences in Colorado's SuperMax for people who run puppy mills and warehouse the sick, the indigent, and frail elderly humans in rundown facilities to make a buck. Similar mindsets in my opinion. Let's not waste resources on jury trials and cripple the speed of sentencing with civil rights issues. Just lock them up. Okay, a little extreme, but I don't claim to be "pure."
So, when I'm talking to people whose political beliefs lean towards command and control, I seek out shared agreement on issues. For example, I have two friends who were public school teachers in different states; both vote the straight Democratic ticket. They both confessed to me that they retired early because of the oppressive nature of Federal rules in education. I have used that patch of commonality to discuss other professions that are held captive by morasses of laws and regulations. At this point, all I am asking is that they pause and consider before cheering on initiatives that destroy other people's freedoms. We have good conversations, and I am seeing and hearing less unthinking support for typical Democratic party positions.
And I cheer out loud when politicians, regardless of their affiliation, decriminalize an activity, give citizens the opportunity to invent and create more by canceling laws, and support free speech (which is different from supporting harrassment and physical assault on people and property).
And cheers to you for stepping back from using family and friends as you did in your first version.
Yes. It is possible to be outside of the red-blue paradigm…to believe that "democracy" is not the ultimate evolution in human social organization…to recognize that excessive labeling and pigeon-holing are counter productive…
And yet STILL recognize categories, discern between them, and assess their relative merits and threats.
Kudos for doing so.
Why blame the prick on Trump, ffs?
Think it through. He is not a doctor or scientist so like all presidents he had to rely on the experts. Would you have done differently if it was your call in real time?
A deuce says you would have.
The reality is that Trump was overly trusting of shitbirds like Fraudci. Who would have ever thought that ayone would deliberately hurt their country just to spite a president they hated due to MSM-driven TDS?
As others have said, while Trump didn't clean out the swamp, he did expose just how deep it really is. For that we are eternally grateful.
I'm a lifelong Independent who started voting in the 1970s and usually pinched his nose on election day and voted for Democrats. Never again. The Pubs are almost as evil.
I'll go with Trump from hereon and his successors.