Parasites Give You Nothing.
"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone." - Frédéric Bastiat
[graphic by FEE / The Foundation for Economic Freedom]
The Moral Rot At The Heart Of Civilization.
by Nate Bear
This civilization is letting a genocide happen.
Israel and the west are to blame for the genocide but not one country, bar Yemen, has come to the material aid of the Palestinians.
Not one government in the entire world has done anything.
Shout-out to Hezbollah and a few militant groups in Iraq. Well done South Africa for bringing the ICC case against Netanyahu and his fellow Zionazis.
But no government on Earth used its state capacity, used its navy or its air force or its army to do anything to help the Palestinians.
A military mission to stop Israel would have been nice. No-fly zones and the like, with the threat of force. But in the absence of that, many of us would have settled for a humanitarian mission, a country or countries sending a fleet of ships and planes to deliver aid, come what may.
These vehicles could have been unarmed. The country or countries could have made it very clear to Israel this was solely a humanitarian mission, it would have called their bluff and created a stark binary choice: bomb unarmed aid ships of a nation state, effectively a declaration of war, or let them through.
But no, nothing. Looking at a list of the roughly two hundred countries in the world, well over half would have the capacity to send aid via air force or navy assets.
On the ladder of complicity in genocide, the western states supplying Israel with the military equipment and political cover for genocide sit on the top rung, but the countries with the greatest capacity to have done something, to have carried out a humanitarian mission, must sit on the next rung down.
In the end it has just been empty words of condemnation and a few symbolic gestures on trade.
In the end it has come down to a handful of activists on a crowdfunded sailing boat to be the moral conscience of the world and do something not one single country in the world did.
It’s hard to get your head around.
This inaction and apathy in the face of an actual genocide, in response to twenty months of 4k videos of children being shredded, blown up, ripped apart, beheaded, burnt alive and starved, signals a deeper moral rot at the heart of our societies.
A moral rot that cannot be separated from neo-liberalism and how money and profit have come to dominate our brains, dominate our political systems and dominate our world.
When it comes to a unifying vision for society, the only thing most of us ever hear from our governments is one word: growth.
Growth is the spiritual center around which the entirety of our politics is orientated. And it doesn’t mean anything at all! We can’t be richer. We have all the food and technology and money we could possibly need. We have never lived in more abundant times. The richest people are richer than countries. Footballers and tennis players are billionaires. The idea that if we just had another one, five, ten percent of economic growth we could create that extra bit more we need and solve all the problems is actually a comical insult to our intelligence.
Yet this is the myth and the legend that underpins all of modern politics. This is the story that so many people fall for and buy in to. Growth is the secular religion for an areligious age. And as such, it must be worshiped. Anything that creates growth is to be lauded and encouraged, and anything that hampers it is to be rejected. To speak out against growth is a crime against the religion.
Even a genocide must be no obstacle to growth.
Which is why, just a few days after the UK’s defense secretary David Lammy said the country had suspended trade talks with Israel (because even the genocide enablers in the British government couldn’t justify starving children), the UK’s trade envoy to Israel was live tweeting from Tel Aviv about his trade mission to the country.
The moral cesspit of neo-liberalism looks at a genocide on the one hand, and a percentage point of growth on the other, and chooses growth every time.
A few weeks ago I revealed that the son of the attorney general for the Conservative Party in the UK, (Lord) David Wolfson, who was a minister in Boris Johnson’s government, is a soldier in the IDF. Sam Wolfson went to Israel to join the IDF in 2022, participated in the genocide, and only returned to London earlier this year. He’s now working at the right-wing neo-liberal think tank Policy Exchange, because killing civilians and doing a new holocaust, rather than being an obstacle to a career path, is a valued skill. The more death you create, the more doors you open and the richer and more powerful you can be.
Neo-liberalism enthusiastically rewards death-eating immorality.
Just look around!
From Donald Trump to Elon Musk to Tony Blair to Joe Biden to Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Jeff Bezos to the bank bosses to the arms company bosses to the fossil fuel CEOs. Boringly the list goes on and on and on and on. Some of quite literally the worst people in the history of the world with the most blood on their hands are the richest people with the most power.
Neo-liberal economics has created a moral cesspit of a civilization in which there’s no financial upside in stopping a genocide.
On the contrary, the financial upside is in genocide.
From the American mercenaries running the sham aid distributions centers in Gaza, to the software being provided by Google, Microsoft and Meta to smooth the genocide, to the AI being provided by Palantir to track the Palestinians, to the missiles being provided by Lockheed Martin to liquify them.
The money is in the killing, not the saving.
The money is in the enabling, not the stopping.
The money is in the trade deals and the good relations.
Morality is all downside.
This is why I cannot stand to look at the faux moral posturing over Ukraine by the west. The truth? The money is in keeping that war going, funding Ukraine, rearming Europe. Latest estimates are that the war has caused 1.4 million casualties. These are absolutely horrifying numbers. Wanting more dead young men isn’t moral. Supporting Ukraine has nothing to do with good or bad, right or wrong. It’s only about blood money, resources and strategic interests.
And this moral cesspit of a civilization is one in which we all swim, whether we like it or not.
How many times have you said to someone “X should happen because it would be good” or “Y shouldn’t happen because it’s bad” and their sincere response, hollowed of all morality, has been along the lines of: but who would pay for it/there’s no money in it.
Our brains and value systems have been rewired to think about the world only in terms of money and profit.
This is why the foundations of our existence as biological beings - the air, the soil, the water - are being demolished. The money is in death, not in life. Good or bad and right or wrong don’t enter the calculation.
It’s hard to look at this civilization, a civilization tearing down the pillars of our own existence, a civilization that allowed a genocide to happen in such a visible way, and see any redeeming features.
People are worth saving. Beauty is worth saving. The animals and the rivers and the seas and the ecology are worth saving. But from the political to the economic to the legal, institutionally there’s nothing worth saving.
The liberals and the centrists have had their shot at reforming this mess. But the contradictions at the heart of their ideology (capitalists, but good ones!) couldn’t be resolved, and they’ve only ended up perpetuating the horrors of the system.
I’ve said it before but I’ve never felt it more keenly than after watching the west collaborate on genocide and the rest of the world do nothing to stop it: the future will be radically pro-social and anti-capitalist or there won’t be a future at all.
[republished by permission of Nate Bear / 'Do Not Panic' on Substack]
Never Forget Their Excuses for Lockdowns.
story by John Tamney / image by Alexandra Koch
The worst arguments against the lockdowns inspired by the coronavirus were medical and statistical. To see why, it’s worth remembering that as humans we’ve evolved to protect ourselves from death and disease. The taking of freedom to protect us is always and everywhere excess.
The above statement of the obvious requires mention as free thinkers and free-thinking organizations continue to either ignore how they sat out the lockdowns, or worse, excuse their inaction amid a massive bludgeoning of freedom back in 2020. Let’s start with those trying to excuse their inaction.
The not-infrequently offered excuse is that since most organizations and individuals in the libertarian space either weren’t staffed by medical doctors or weren’t medical doctors themselves, how could they have made credible cases against the lockdowns? Instead, and rather than take a stand, they adopted “wait and see” approaches so that medical verdicts could be rendered. About those verdicts, some libertarian types are now saying that those who were publicly against the lockdowns back in 2020 were correct, but they made their cases obnoxiously and blindly given their lack of medical knowledge. The only response to this kind of dissembling is nonsense, utter nonsense. See this write-up’s introductory paragraph to see why.
Just as the worst arguments against the lockdowns were medical and statistical, the medical and statistical arguments made in favor of lockdowns were, if possible, even worse. As stated above, no one requires force to avoid sickness or death. About this point, more on it in a bit.
For now, it should just be said that even if the medical consensus had been correct, that millions and millions of Americans would die absent being forced out of work and into their homes, then any lockdown orders foisted on us by nail-biting politicians would have read as tame relative to the precautions taken by free people. The more threatening anything is, the more superfluous is any kind of policy reaction to the threat.
The simple, overwhelming truth is that people should never have their individual freedom to protect themselves taken from them, period. End of story.
Applying the previous assertion to organizations like Cato, Students for Liberty, and others that seemingly took a “wait and see” approach to the lockdowns, their stances were wrongheaded. Lest they or readers forget, the organizations mentioned were founded on the notion of individual freedom as the foremost ideal. In which case a “wait and see what the science or medical establishment says” is dangerously wrong.
It is simply because, as Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker has pointed out, politicians at the local, state, and national levels did not take a “wait and see” approach. That they didn’t calls into serious question organizations and individuals sitting on their hands. How could they? Since we know government will never wait and see on anything, what an odd excuse or piece of internal reasoning to explain away a lack of action. It implies that freedom should always be the loser in times of uncertainty, or when politicians are feeling particularly hysterical.
At which point it should be said that freedom is easily the best way to turn the unknowns and uncertainty into true knowledge. So, while libertarian groups and individuals who sat out the lockdowns should reflexively defend freedom every time government is in the process of taking it, it’s useful to add that free people crucially produce information.
Which brings us back to the earlier assertion in this write-up that people don’t need to be forced to avoid sickness or death. Some no doubt responded as they read the latter that some people would in fact have lived, worked, and run their businesses without regard to a spreading virus. To which the answer here can only be precisely.
Precisely because free people will respond in all manner of ways (including disdain) to fears driven by unknowns, we need them to be free. Without millions of different responses, or realistically hundreds of millions of different responses in the US, people (including “experts”) will be blinded to the truth about whatever it is that threatens us, or not. Since free people once again produce information, the only answer to uncertainty about what we don’t know is freedom.
It’s just something to keep in mind in the here and now. Four years ago this month, over 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and hundreds of millions around the world found themselves hurtling toward starvation amid a global panic among politicians. Shamefully and tragically, some of the foremost organizations and individuals devoted to liberty sat out the tragedy and seemingly defend their inaction to this day by hiding behind medicine, science, and a lack of information. The excuses and internal justifications are wholly insufficient. Freedom is its own always and everywhere virtue, period.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Source: The Brownstone Institute / RealClearMarkets.com
David Icke Describes The Two Types Of People Who Allow Fascism To Happen.
"We must not just talk about freedom. We must live it, and live it by ceasing to cooperate with that which is by the hour now destroying freedom. There are three types of people. Two of the groups are responsible for every tyranny in history. And the third group is responsible for ending every tyranny in history. Group number one: those who mindlessly accept anything authority tells them without question, and they will just do whatever they're told and think whatever they're told to think. Then there is group number two: those who don't want to do what authority tells them, but they're terrified of not doing so because they fear the consequences. Those two groups together have been responsible for every tyranny in history.
Fascism is not imposed by fascists; there's never enough of them. Fascism is imposed by the population acquiescing to fascism. See Nazi Germany. So if anyone says "well what can we do?". Well you can get off your bloody ass, stiffen your backbone, and stop being a bloody wimp - there's a start! Look your children and grandchildren in the eye and tell them what you were doing when fascism was introduced. "Oh I was keeping my mouth shut". And then there's group number three, that has ended every tyranny in history, the true renegades of this human family. Those who see they're being lied to, who see where this is going, and refuse to cooperate. The people who understand the most powerful word in the English language: no, no, no. English language or any other language: no, no, no. Not doing it. Not cooperating.
So, what can we do? There is everything we can do. Stop giving your power to authority, and then you'll see authority never had power in the first place because it was always yours."
--David Icke
[see more at DavidIcke.com]
An Unjust Parasitic Entity.
"Without voluntary association, no matter how seemingly pure the system of governance, no matter how many checks and balances, the people are basing the entirety of their desires and dreams on faith in the benevolence and infallibility of the state - an inherently immoral and unjust parasitic entity which exists, and is completely dependent on, forcefully and coercively extorting funds from its populace." -- Karl K. Wuckert
[See more on his Substack page, The Liberated Man.]
