You can add Gab to the list of dissident outfits that have been shut down by concerted efforts by Leftist tech monopolies. This time the oligarchs’ flimsy cover story involved hyperventilating over the recent mass shooting in Philadelphia. The shooter happened to have a Gab account, so our betters sunsetted Gab for giving him a platform. How they were expected to foresee that this particular user would turn out to be a mass shooter is left unsaid.
Gab isn’t really the point–at least not the whole point. They’re just the latest alternate information channel to be banished from the web for the capital crime of not being Facebook or Twitter. Big tech firms teaming up to take down competitors is monopolistic behavior, and everyone knows it. The Left is celebrating it.
The refusal of Republican lawmakers to act against the systematic censoring of their constituents in the name of the free market has become a tired meme. Likewise facile boilerplate from Libertarians admonishing us to build our own multinational trillion-dollar tech companies. Elsewhere, political actors less paralyzed by Liberalism are responding quite differently to Leftist shenanigans.
More than 200 schools had planned to take part in “Rainbow Friday,” an anti-discrimination event that a civic rights group, the Campaign Against Homophobia, had promoted in hopes of building greater acceptance for LGBT students.
Private broadcaster TVN reported that some schools pulled out of the event following an outcry. The education minister of Poland’s conservative government, Anna Zalewska, had warned ahead of time that any principals who allowed such events to take place could face negative consequences. She also asked parents to report any such activities to authorities, reported Associated Press.
The Polish government didn’t tell parents to build their own schools if they didn’t want their children brainwashed by perverts. A government official used the power of her office to quash this abomination. Unlike the free market approach, the state’s threat of consequences made school principals rethink their decision to help corrupt kids. Probably because such threats are ultimately backed up by thousands of guys with guns.
Speaking of which, here’s a recent case of government stepping in to correct a free market misstep.
ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s far-right League party intervened on Sunday to block efforts by a Muslim association to turn a former hospital chapel into a mosque.
The Muslim group last week made the highest offer for the chapel in the northern city of Bergamo at an auction organized by a local hospital, outbidding the Romanian Orthodox Church which had been using the building for its religious services.
But the project proved short-lived, with League leaders in the wealthy Lombardy region, which includes Bergamo, announcing they would halt the sale by using a 2004 law that enables them to intervene and safeguard cultural sites.
“I would never put a Church on sale and I am amazed that the hospital management did not realize what a sensitive issue this is,” Lombardy President Attilio Fontana, a League politician, wrote on Twitter.
“However, we will exercise our right of first refusal (for the sale) and there will be no space for any appeal,” he added.
From my mid-teens until very recently, I always considered myself a libertarian. Molyneux's videos and general libertarian ideas (no borders, no rulers, no theft of taxes, etc) greatly appealed to me and still do in some way.
However, seeing globalism and the Left has brought me to reality. Libertarianism is something of a pipe dream akin to Communism. I won't say it wouldn't EVER work, but with our world the way it is, it would amount to suicide. Interestingly, Molyneux appears to have come to the same conclusion.
My views on race are also making something of a change. But I'm still ruminating on that.
Most of the guys in the new Right got there by one of two paths. Either they were libertarians who realized that the Left would turn a libertarian utopia into Mordor on day two, or they were conservatives who got sick of principles that require taking a dive in the culture wars.
The key point Stef makes is that pedestalizing individual liberty when the average IQ is poised to dip below 90 leads to a living nightmare.
Nations have the right to define themselves and maintain their integrity. A limited, liberty-based government can work just fine with pre-1965 US demographics. Job one should be figuring out if and how America can get back to that.
You can't have freedom without a State and borders. I have trouble with the idea of Libertarianism formulated as "no states or borders"; that's anarchy; and further it could be likened to maximizing your potential for intelligence by blowing your own brains out. Sure, there's no possibility of cognitive bias after that, but….. uh…
Moorcock was wrong when he wrote that the triumph of order would be just as incompatible with life as the triumph of chaos. Life needs a consistent system of rules to flourish–and exist, for that matter.
What we have now isn't even chaos. It'd dis-order, which is far more destructive.
Gonna miss gab to be honest. In the last few months it instituted a group system which made it a hybrid of a forum board, it was nice a much better alternative to Twitter's outdated design. It was nice not being bombarded by corporate accounts and fake celeb spam.
While I do not count out Torba yet it's frustrating I now have to rely on a site that hates my very existence.
One day, your kids will be staring at you, wide-eyed, as you regale them with tales from the internet's Wild West days. "You could post anonymously and openly disagree with people without getting banned from Facebook, Google, Netflix, your bank, and the water company."
Remember that the next time some bow tie-bedecked clown scolds you about muh free market.
This is also why I'm no longer a Libertarian, free market doesn't exist in a world with monopolies and MegaCorporations.
I know in other places I've commented that it's not so much the size of the government as the scope of power over our lives. Every choice they have that they take from us puts more power in the hands of psychopaths. And no man can make "universal" decisions for everyone in all matters. So there is an upper bound to power to be granted as the scope expands to more and more people.
Yet, anarchy is unworkable. And those private "contract dispute" organizations, if they are to have any teeth for enforcement, must be governments in deed if not name.
But even a government that deals strictly in enforcing contracts and external matters/defence/resources for antifragile resiliency and survival, can abuse that power, or use it well. Abusing it renders it immoral and invalid, as our founders have pointed out.
Democracy isn't necessarily a form of government. When a king enacts a law that the people favor, the result is no less democratic than when popularly elected officials do it.
Getting over their laser focus on forms is one of the major challenges facing the Right.
Yup. Democracy is just a mechanic. One of many, some better? Many far worse. As you point out, monarchy isn’t necessarily all it’s been put down to be either, even if it has some fairly well known flaws.
We're never going to find the perfect form of government. Instead we should be looking for the best system of government for the current time, place, and circumstances.
How do you find it? Ask what kind of government is best equipped to foster the common good.
There is no one perfect form because even the same people, even without external changes, change over time and need different things governed.
Ok. Need to write a post on all this. With the caveat that there are upper and lower bounds to power where either more harm/evil than good are done (size,scope) I think you’re right.
Looking forward to it. Please send me a link when your post is live.
Got around to it
https://thelastredoubt.com/virtue-and-the-state/
I dig it. Thanks!
Libertarians are perhaps the biggest buncha fucking circle jerking retards around, right next to atheists. Though there tends to be considerable overlap between the two anyways
Both are now completely irrelevant. Libertarianism is as hopelessly utopian as Communism. Atheists have a few choices:
1) Repent, accept Christ Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and join a church.
2) If you can't honestly worship Christ, then you can spend an hour each Sunday LARPing at church for the good of the West.
3) If you can neither follow Christ nor at least go through the motions for the sake of civic cohesion, then sit down, shut the fuck up, and get out of the way while we try to save civilization.
4) If you can't do any of the above, then you're just a fifth columnist, and you have to go back.
Is there no room for loyal opposition?
A house divided against itself cannot stand, and no man can serve two masters.
Not when loyal opposition is just a cover story for the proper label of the enemy, dissembling psychopaths.
Big tech is exporting the chicom's social credit system to the world and be compelled to embracelebrate it enthusiastically. the Uigher open air gulag for the unrepentant and recalcitrant will follow.
The fight is between real human agency vs NPC behaviour
xavier
“REEEEEEE! The same tactics will he used against you when the left takes power so don’t do it now and they won’t do it to us! REEEEE! What would St. Reagan say about this? REEEEEE! Muh founding fathers!”
Did I hit all the Conservative Inc. talking points?
All but one: "That's not who we are!"
As a free market (what Vox Day calls "capitalism") lovin' dude, I find it pretty bizarre when people say
"We have to let the free market subvert the political process and establish state-backed monopolies, because FREEDOM!"
It seems on a par with "well, democracy is good, so when the Left votes for a unitary absolute State with no further use for elections, we have to let them have it, because democracy!"
If companies want to play the legislative capture game, people who love trade, capitalism, and property rights, ABSOLUTELY MUST support punishing that by any means available; legislative capture is the absolute #1 cause of market breakdowns.
You've found the unholy intersection of "Leftists Turning Utopia into the Fifth Circle of Hell" and "Principles that Require Perpetual Surrender". Strong work!