MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Social Credit’

Doug Casey on De-Banking, Financial Censorship, and a Social Credit System

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2024

Doug Casey: The economy is mutating before our very eyes. The whole world is overfinancialized—which means there’s an overwhelming amount of trading and leverage in every kind of stock, bond, property, commodity, derivative, and bitcoin. Huge numbers of people are gambling, using options instead of roulette wheels.

Doug Casey: We already have our own unofficial variety of the Chinese social credit system. They’re called credit scores, computed by outfits like Equifax. Younger people actually like to compare their credit scores, seeing them as signs of approval from the society at large. I know it’s a shocking concept, but you don’t really need a credit score if you pay cash for everything. Stay off the debt treadmill. You don’t have to be a good “consumer.”

by Doug Casey

De-Banking, Financial Censorship

International Man: Since 2020, we’ve seen measures aimed at censoring and de-platforming voices that challenge the mainstream agenda.

Dr. Joseph Mercola has been targeted as a misinformation spreader and deplatformed. Nigel Farage has been de-banked because of his political views.

What’s your take on this trend of hyper-politicization of everything?

Doug Casey: It seems that most everything has been hyper-politicized. But it’s worse than that. There’s a more fundamental problem. The basic philosophical and psychological underpinnings of society have been so poisoned that everybody thinks in terms of politics—which is to say, they think the government should be used to coerce society.

You can’t easily cure the disease of hyper-politicization. The people who control academia, major corporations, the media, and the entertainment industry, among other things, actually hate the values of Western Civilization. Worse, these people control the apparatus of the State and use laws and regulations to enforce their views.

DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is just the most recent manifestation of the sickness infecting the West. Everybody is viewed as either the oppressor or the oppressed, an essentially Marxist view that amplifies the intrinsically corrosive nature of politics.

As long as the State exists, you’re either the ruler or the ruled. That’s why I “identify,” to use a currently fashionable word, as an AnCap or anarcho-capitalist.

Artificial concepts like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “microaggressions” have only come up in the last decade, but they’re now everywhere. They’re hard to wash away because they aren’t just pseudointellectual fads but signs of psychological derangement—or spiritual sickness. The syndrome can be termed “Wokism.”

Although the Wokesters are happy to pass laws, they’re finding laws aren’t really necessary to destroy their enemies. Just make it impossible for them to live normal lives. If they can’t use banks, can’t express themselves, or gain employment, they can be transformed into nonpersons.

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Smile! TSA has yet another boondoggle to make traveling more painful

Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022

But what harm could there be in permitting TSA to scrutinize people’s faces? TSA already spent a billion dollars on behavior detection officers who furtively circulated in airports to detect travelers who were sweating, hand-wringing, yawning, staring too intently, or avoiding eye contact. The inspector general said the program was a complete waste of money and never caught any terrorists.

https://nypost.com/2022/12/08/smile-tsa-has-yet-another-boondoggle-to-make-traveling-more-painful/

By 

James Bovard

Why would any law-abiding American balk at permitting the feds to vacuum up his biometric data at the airport? The Transportation Security Administration is running a pilot program in which travelers stand in photo kiosks that compare their faces with a federal database of photos from passport applications, driver’s licenses, and other sources. TSA promises its new airport regime, which could vastly expand next year, will respect Americans’ privacy.

If you believe that, I can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn really cheap.

TSA has long been one of the most intrusive and inept federal agencies. For 20 years, every TSA boondoggle has been shielded by a bodyguard of bureaucratic lies.

“Trust us” is the TSA mantra for the new program. “TSA hasn’t actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches,” the Washington Post notes. TSA will be relying on photo-identification systems that have a misidentification error rate up to 100 times higher for blacks and Hispanics.

Some view TSA as being the most intrusive federal agency as it has been in service for over 20 years.
Some view TSA as being the most intrusive federal agency as it has been in service for over 20 years.
A TSA agent loads passengers baggage in to a bomb detection X-ray unit.
“TSA hasn’t actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches,” according to the Washington Post.

TSA has had plenty of profiling debacles, including targeting black males with backward baseball caps in Boston. At Newark Liberty Airport, TSA agents fabricated false charges against Hispanics to boost the program’s arrest numbers.

The TSA scanning system could be a big step toward a Chinese-style “social credit” system that could restrict travel by people the government doesn’t like. Actually, TSA has already been caught doing that. In 2018, the New York Times exposed a secret watchlist for anyone TSA labels “publicly notorious.” TSA critics to the end of the line — forever?

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Dark Clouds: Biden Pushes China-Style ‘Social Credit’ System

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2021

In televised remarks yesterday, President Biden urged private businesses and universities to institute a China-style “social credit” system whereby some individuals are denied basic rights and privileges if they hold “wrong” views on matters such as health and medicine. How far will this go? Also today, NIH Director urges parents to wear masks in front of their children…in the home! And, major European newspaper editor apologized to readers over his publications of hysterical Covid coverage.

“You can’t let things get too good so people can take care of themselves.”

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