“They aren’t here because they hate freedom, it is because we are over there interfering.”
The Ron Paul Liberty Report
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America Isn’t Located In The Middle East — American Troops Should Only Defend America!
Posted by M. C. on October 2, 2024
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Will Americans Pay for Israel’s Crimes Again?
Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2024
Still, instead of being punished with life imprisonment, the government officials responsible for the carnage managed to convince the American people – this author included – that they should punish us with a massive police state, effectively eviscerating our constitutional rights forever.
https://original.antiwar.com/Connor_Freeman/2024/09/29/will-americans-pay-for-israels-crimes-again
Originally appeared at The Libertarian Institute.
We should never forgetthat American civilians were blindsided twenty-three years ago this month when a small group of mostly Saudis and Egyptians hijacked our civilian airliners in a kamikaze mission that murdered thousands. Though none of them were Palestinian, the nineteen hijackers’ indefensible terrorist attack was motivated largely by Washington’s unconditional military, financial, and diplomatic support for Israel’s apartheid system, illegal occupations, and myriad atrocities in southern Lebanon as well as Palestine.
By design, that’s a crucial part of the story never included in the “never forget” file. Such a superficial catchphrase, bereft of any meaningful understanding of why the transformative attack took place beyond the usual “they hate us for our freedom” canard, is just cynical.
Our new national mantra was used to psychologically torment survivors, widows, orphans, and the broader public alike into reluctantly accepting or enthusiastically supporting inexcusable and largely predetermined government policies.
As with anything else in life, our affairs would drastically improve with an objective understanding of cause and effect. If we achieved a realistic worldview following that terrible day in September 2001, it would have been impossible for the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney to justify his ostensible solutions to the attack, which included the largest government crackdown on our inalienable rights and doubling down on the same murderous foreign policies that made our waking lives a nightmare.
On both sides of the aisle, our rulers systematically provoked the attacks, supported Al Qaeda fighters in various theaters throughout the 1990s, and failed their most basic obligation – given the regime’s monopoly on security services – to protect its citizens and their homeland.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Al Qaeda, Apartheid, Israel | 1 Comment »
Why the Family Is Not the Model for the State
Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2024
The state-family analogy fails in a number of ways, however. State power is permanent and bureaucratic while parental power—that is, “paternal” power—is temporary and personal.
In states, the corporate power of the state endures indefinitely over all subjects regardless of the age or economic capabilities of the subject. Becoming an adult or earning a living does not free any man from his obligation to pay taxes, submit to conscription, or otherwise obey all state laws. In contrast, in a family, it is considered the norm that a child is subject to parental power only temporarily.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-family-not-model-state
For centuries, advocates for greater state power have claimed that modern sovereign states are like families.
The value of the strategy is clear: most people view families as both necessary and natural. Even in our current age of widespread divorce and single parents, the idea of “family” (variously defined) remains enduringly popular. Thus, for a politician looking to increase the perceived legitimacy of the state, it only makes sense to attempt to show that the family is analogous to the state—that the state is a type of family writ large.
This comparison may seem, to some, as plausible on the surface. But any serious look at the methods used to govern families reveal that the two institutions are thoroughly dissimilar.
Because the family has long been regarded as both natural and popular, however, state builders have been unable to resist trying to use the family to build their political and ideological agendas.
This goes back to some of earliest theorists of the sovereign state and absolutism, such as Jean Bodin who described the family as the “true image of a Commonweal.” The absolutist king James I of England declared in 1609 that “Kings are compared to fathers in families: for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people.”
Thomas Hobbes, who differed with Bodin on the state’s ideal form, nonetheless employed a similar strategy of invoking the ancient and fundamental character of the family as a model of authoritarian state power. According to Hobbes: “the beginning of all dominion amongst men was in families. In which, first, the father of the family by the law of nature was absolute lord of his wife and children.”
Moreover, in Hobbes’s imagined state of nature, families are governed primarily by violence and fear. Fathers exercise “absolute power” to mete out life or death to their children. For Hobbes, it is the child’s fear of execution at the hands of his father that maintains order. In this view, the family is thus formed by a form of “conquest” over the children, and Hobbes declares the family to be “a little Monarchy.”
Later French defenders of the absolutist state argued along similar lines. In his attempt to show that monarchs are inviolable, Louis de Bonald began with the argument that divorce within families is intolerable. Then, in turn, he applied the same principles to the monarch, a type of “father” from whom the population can never be divorced.
Thus, we see how pro-state theorists can exploit the idea of family in two ways. The first is to free-ride on the assumed historical legitimacy and beneficence of the state. After all, if the family is accepted as good for society, we must then conclude that the state—which is just a big family, you see—is also good for society.
The second way these theorists exploit the family is by creating a caricature of the family that reflects the form and function of the state itself. That is, when men like Hobbes and Bodin invoke the family ideal, they invoke a dubious version of the family that is rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian. In this imagined family, the father’s role is to issue orders, and everyone else’s role is to meekly obey. Naturally, one can see how this simplistic image of the family is attractive to those who seek to promote more power for a monopolistic state.
Modern Sentimental Appeals to a National “Family”
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Is Freedom of Speech In Danger No Matter Who Wins The Presidential Election?
Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2024
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Supreme Court Unleashes Censors and Betrays Democracy
Posted by M. C. on September 30, 2024
Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”
But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?
by James Bovard
On the eve of the first presidential candidate debate, the Supreme Court gave a huge boost to Joe Biden to help him “fix” the 2024 election with maybe its worst decision of the year. It remains to be seen whether the court’s refusal to stop federal censorship will be a wooden stake in the credibility of American democracy.The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to hamstring would-be federal tyrants.
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The court ruled in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit brought by individuals censored on social media thanks to federal threats and machinations. Court decisions last year vividly chronicled a byzantine litany of anti–free speech interventions by multiple federal agencies and the White House. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A federal appeals court imposed injunctions on federal officials to prohibit them from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce … posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
State censorship
The decisions documented how the FBI, Biden White House, U.S. Surgeon General, and other federal agencies have sabotaged Americans’ freedom of speech. If you tried to complain about COVID lockdowns, or school shutdowns, or even about whether mail-in ballots caused fraud — your online comments could have been suppressed thanks to threats and string-pulling by the feds or by federal contractors. Conservatives were far more likely to be censored than liberals and leftists.
But the Supreme Court in late June decided to overlook all those abuses. There will be no injunction to stop the White House or federal agencies or federal contractors from suppressing criticism of Biden or his policies before the 2024 election. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court gave the benefit of the doubt to federal browbeating, arm-twisting, and jawboning, regardless of how many Americans are wrongfully muzzled.
The Biden censorship industrial complex triumphed because most Supreme Court justices could not be bothered to honestly examine the massive evidence of its abuses. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whined that “the record spans over 26,000 pages” and, quoting an earlier court decision, scoffed that “judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record.”
Will that line catch on with school kids? When asked whether they did their homework, they can quote Justice Barrett and tell their teachers that they are “not like pigs hunting for truffles buried in the record” of all their class assignments.
“Lack of standing” a total cop-out
Rather than swine groveling in the muck, the Supreme Court instead disposed of this landmark case on a quibble, putting their legal pinkies up in the air like a white-wine drinker at a cocktail reception. The court ruled that the plaintiffs — including two state governments and eminent scientists banned from social media — did not have “standing” because they had not proven to negligent justices (how many pages in the files did they actually read?) that federal intervention and string-pulling injured them.
Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”
But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?
Lack of standing was the same legal ploy the Supreme Court used in early 2013 to tacitly absolve the National Security Agency’s vast illegal surveillance regime. After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the Justices to dismiss the case, claiming it dealt with “state secrets.” A New York Times editorial labeled the administration’s position “a cynical Catch 22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.”
Cynical arguments sufficed for five of the justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the Court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” and fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards — such as the FISA Court — to protect Americans’ rights. “Lack of standing” didn’t prevent former NSA employee Edward Snowden from blowing the roof off the NSA.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Biden White House, Bill of Rights, censors, Democracy, FBI, State Censorship, Supreme Court, U.S. Surgeon General | Leave a Comment »
Zelensky’s Victory Plan: ‘Please Start WWIII For Me!’
Posted by M. C. on September 28, 2024
Ever notice it doesn’t matter who gets the most votes, the warparty always wins.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: warparty, WWIII, Zelensky | 1 Comment »
Media Worried That Constant Trump Assassination Attempts Might Distract From Plight Of Illegal Immigrants
Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2024
I mean, did you know that it takes an illegal immigrant as much as an hour and a half to get a driver’s license and registration to vote in American elections at the DMV? It’s absolutely disgraceful —
NEW YORK, NY — Sources within several major media and news networks recently confirmed that most legacy mainstream media head editors are now “pretty worried” that the news of the latest Trump assassination attempt might distract from the plight of illegal immigrants around the country.
According to sources at the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and the Economist, newspaper higher-ups are absolutely terrified that giving space to covering something as routine and commonplace as the Trump assassination might distract from how terrible life for illegal immigrants in the US is.
“Quite frankly, this is really concerning,” said CNN host Jake Tapper. “Just think — if people start reading about how there was yet another ordinary assassination attempt on Donald Trump, they’ll forget about all of the hoopla and racist bigotry that illegal immigrants have to endure day after day! I mean, did you know that it takes an illegal immigrant as much as an hour and a half to get a driver’s license and registration to vote in American elections at the DMV? It’s absolutely disgraceful — it’s only a third as long as legal US citizens’ wait times!”
News chiefs in writers’ bullpens across the country have committed to rectifying the possible wrong by posting as much as they possibly can on illegal immigrants’ struggles due to white cisgender powerstructures and also by ignoring assassination attempts, as long as they’re just on Trump.
At publishing time, all major mainstream news sources had finally agreed to cover Trump’s assassination, as long as they could be assured that it would happen.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: illegal immigrants, Media, Trump Assassination | Leave a Comment »
Political Silence on the Drug War
Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2024
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: drug war, Political Silence | Leave a Comment »
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