https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-free-markets-and-greed/

Luis Rivera

By Walter E. Block

https://walterblock.substack.com/p/ruining-language?r=iw8dv&utm_medium=android

People should be free to ruin the English language if they wish to do so. Bell Hooks wrote in all lower-case letters, and had done so for years, even before the plague of wokesterism arose. She signed her name “bell hooks.”

Many people no longer refer to he or him as inclusive of both genders. They resort to “his or hers” or, if they really want to virtue signal, they employ only “she” or “her.” Nowadays, some transgendered folk insist upon the plural when referring to them, individually: we should refer to such people as them, theirs. The latest off this particular turnip truck is to capitalize the word “black” when denoting people, albeit not to colors of inanimate objects, such as cars or shoes. Some in this vein now want to capitalize “white,” also, again only when indicating people. But the radical elements in this movement insist that only black be capitalized, not white. Why? That is because capitalization implies greater respect and since whites are unfairly and systematically privileged, this evens up the score. Whoa, I shouldn’t have said “systematically.” That is no longer politically correct. A thousand pardons. I should have written “systemically.” Sorry, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

This is all so silly. The purpose of language, well, one of the main purposes people have when they speak or write, is – wait for it – to communicate. Each of these deviations from traditional language reduces the ability of this institution to help us verbally interconnect with each other. At the extreme, we will each have our own personal language and we will truly enter the “Tower of Babel” where no communication at all will be possible. Happily, we are nowhere near that point, yet, but we are definitely trending in that direction.

Another aspect of this silliness is that the proponents are very often hoist by their own petards. For example, take the word “woman” or the plural, “women.” These words are favored by feminists vis a vis “men” or “men and women,” or “ladies and gentlemen.” But notice their last syllables! They indicate the hated males of the species. I therefore suggest, in the interests of further screwing up language, “wo” instead of “woman,” and “wos” instead of “women.” Here is my suggestion for the supplantation of the evil word “person.” For the same reason, this should henceforth be replaced by “perdaughter.”

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The CIA is not your friend

Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division. Within a decade, the CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—gasp—interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.

Edward Snowden

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/americas-open-wound?r=iw8dv&utm_medium=android

“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

― Baruch Spinoza

It hasn’t been a month since President Biden mounted the steps of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, declaring it his duty to ensure each of us understands the central faction of his political opposition are extremists that “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Flanked by the uniformed icons of his military and standing atop a Leni Riefenstahl stage, the leader clenched his fists to illustrate seizing the future from the forces of “fear, division, and darkness.” The words falling from the teleprompter ran rich with the language of violence, a “dagger at the throat” emerging from the “shadow of lies.”

“What’s happening in our country,” the President said, “is not normal.”

Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise—the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry—is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden’s propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.

Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.

Are we right to think that?

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Admittedly, there is a catch. You actually have to do something about it—namely, get out of your comfort zone. It won’t be enough just to write know-it-all articles or comments in the online media or to participate in petitions and demonstrations. You have to create something new based on your own actions. That is exhausting.

https://mises.org/wire/parallel-structures-are-only-way-freedom

Titus Gebel

The battle for political supremacy in the West has been decided. The so-called progressives have won; conservatives and libertarians have lost. The “march through the institutions,” started by the misguided 1968 generation, has been successful, and their children and grandchildren are now at the helm. Eco-socialist, cultural Marxist, in short: bolshewoke ideas prevail in politics and culture, public administration, media, schools, universities, and increasingly even in business. At accelerating speed. If you have kept the same center-left viewpoint over the remaining twenty years, you are considered far right today.

In virtually all Democratic states, there is a tendency for larger organizations to drift to the left over time. This applies equally to television stations, newspapers, political parties, state authorities, universities, and other associations.

Why is this so? The explanation is twofold:

First, if you like to create things or projects on your own, or prefer to work for making a living and then enjoying private life with your family, you are probably less inclined to join any of these institutions. On the other hand, if you like to manipulate other people and control them, you are very much inclined to join these institutions.

The first position correlates rather with conservative positions, the second rather with progressive positions. And precisely because the most fundamental characteristic of Progressive ideas is that they do not work, Progressives concentrate in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. That is why Progressives are disproportionately found in professions where economically measurable results do not have to be achieved.

Thus, Progressives are often media people, teachers, professors, politicians, or otherwise employed in government service or tax-funded nongovernmental governmental organizations. This has the additional effect that they can then use this position to agitate and discredit permanently, while their victims are busy proving themselves on the market, earning their own living and also supporting their Progressive opponents through taxes.

Second, conservatives and libertarians tend to be more tolerant toward differing political positions. If someone is known as a leftie in their organization, mostly they would allow this person to stay. Not so with the Progressives: They want to missionize and force all nonprogressive fellow citizens, whom they consider either unenlightened or bribed, to a happiness defined by them. Progressives only give a position in an organization to those who have the same world view and kick out dissenters by all means.

And this is how it has been going on for decades in newsrooms, broadcasting stations, universities, and authorities. Whoever is not of their opinion is defamed, suppressed, slandered. As a result, most of these institutions have been irreparably destroyed and can no longer be reformed with reasonable effort.

If one can mobilize $50 billion like Elon Musk, then one can take over Twitter. But it will still be difficult to turn the platform into a beacon of freedom of speech as planned. That’s because virtually the entire workforce tends politically to the left (relation of donations of Twitter employees in the Biden-Trump presidential campaign: 98:2). Since the majority of these people are convinced they are in the right and fighting for a good cause, Musk’s attempts to allow dissent will be sabotaged. Musk will have to replace large parts of the workforce to change this in the long term.

Comparable things apply to newspapers, TV stations, administrations, including the leadership of the armed forces and police, the courts, and practically all educational institutions. Reforms in the sense of a freedom-oriented policy are not impossible but extremely difficult, and they will probably be watered down, because existing sensitivities have to be taken into account.

Not Forcing People to Be Happy

We have also to keep in mind that every new generation of students is released into the voting age even more tightly ideologized, thus producing more and more streamlined voters, who are no longer reachable by argumentation and who are not even willing to expose themselves to competing arguments. They learn that the state solves all their problems. Only a minority is able to break out of this framework by own efforts of thought.

Why force these people to be happy against their will? This only makes you unpopular and them angry. Rather, those who refuse for life to become adults, and thus self-responsible individuals, should bear the consequences themselves, And the consequences will be serious. One only has to reflect that almost everything that the woke mainstream claims and that is more or less absorbed by the people, is wrong and the politics based on it will therefore inevitably fail.

For example, take the idea that an industrialized country can be supplied with wind power and solar energy only, or the conviction that the world’s population can be fed with organic food without any fertilizers and pesticides, the idea that one can impose all kinds of planned economic requirements on the economy without any major loss of prosperity, or the idea that one can increase the money supply at will without triggering massive inflation sooner or later.

Or take the complete refusal to subject drastic measures to a harm-benefit analysis, for example measures against covid, against climate change, or against Russia. Take the idea that man and woman are social constructs and that there are more than two genders, or the conviction that all people are exactly the same and can perform all tasks equally well with the appropriate education, or the idea of preventing or sanctioning free speech for an alleged good cause, and so on. Errors accumulated over decades, now add up to a veritable delusion and inevitably to a downfall.

Learning through Pain

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