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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Civilization Uncut (Updated)

Update

Proof has been uncovered the Left is still plotting the collapse of capitalism and the middle class. In the footage a former SCIU public sector union bozo is explaining how a private sector variety of the Cloward-Piven tactic will do the job:



More on The Blaze - update


The scenes around the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin this week are symbolic for the short lived upsurge in new found civility in political debate, as called for by President Obama himself after the ferocious attack on Congresswoman Gifford, which was hastely put at the feet of the Tea Party. Very civilized, that was!
Faster than Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker could say collective bargaining rights, Obama's army of unions and Organizers for America descended on the capitol, while the Democratic cohort of representatives went into hiding just over the border in Illinois. It had all the trappings of a comedy caper.

After having lost the battle, the union storm troopers lost all interest, went back to their respective states and left a cleaning up bill totalling 6-7,5 million dollars. The Xtreme Tea Party radicals had to clean up after them. Well, they do that very well, as we have seen.

Cutting the states' budgets has brought to the fore a problem with collective bargaining rights as well as the right to strike where civil servants are concerned. Collective bargaining is driving up the cost to the taxpayer to such an extent that the servant is earning more than his employer, the tax payer.

Furthermore, the matter has uncovered a political racket in a nexus between the Democrat Party and the unions: the channeling of money from the taxpayers who are funding civil servants, who pay dues to unions, who donate to the Democrat Party. Statists, being collectivists, are having no problem at all with these arrangements.


In fact, there's a global effort under way to crank up the level of violence and rhetoric a few notches or so. Having just lost the elections in Britain, UK Uncut is an effort by the Left to make up for that electoral loss. The Left is that democratic! Except when it comes to their bottom line!

We are at present facing battles with USA Uncut, Canada Uncut, Ireland Uncut, Australia Uncut, and no doubt soon also on the European continent, the entire civilization is being Uncut. Germany is mentioned, but that may be wishful thinking. Indymedia's Dutch language site - the Left's 'independent' bullhorn on the Interwebs - can hardly contain its enthusiasm.

When the financial crisis broke the Left for a while had images of a Marxist spring, a Socialist Renaissance, believing capitalism would be blamed for the financial and economic melt down. This didn't happen (how this convenient crisis was triggered, scroll down this file, specifically the entries with an exclamation mark in the margin). On the contrary. If anything, the reds have been losing elections in spates!

Their program of 'the moral high ground' being what it is, the democratic process must be somehow by-passed by - let's put it this way - irrational means of the will. The narrative: if corporations had paid enough taxes the crisis would have been averted and budget cuts would not be necessary. This is how an organized looting campaign is legitimized.

So how does Uncut operate? It mobilizes 'the poor and the disenfranchised' to gather at shops, singled out in advance for what the Left perceives to be politically incorrect behavior, or stores that have come into their cross hairs for some reason or other. These are in effect slur campaigns, smearing these businesses as 'tax dodgers' that have created 'a false economy' and 'tax injustice'. The pattern is of course the Left's usual  template.

Banks that have been bailed out are specifically targeted as 'double outrage'. Also public services, earmarked for budget cuts - libraries for instance - are being picketed and barricaded. Barclays Bank and Vodafone outlets (video) were targets of 'spontaneous' actions last year in the UK. Great care is taken to create the perception of grassroots actions.

Indymedia is especially proud of the paradigm shift, of the reframing they've attained here: the unwashed are no longer on the defense as looters and moochers, but go on the offense against the people who're "really behind the crisis", and who "caused the deficits by not paying enough taxes".

The self appointed champion of injustice (any variery), agit prop film maker Michael Moore meanwhile is actually calling for war.

Ayn Rand, the goddess of the markets, would have had a word or two to say about collective rights as a contradiction in terms.



Related

- Tax Justice Network
- Fight Back reader
Netroots conference
False economy
Nederland belastingparadijs voor multinationals

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

What's Next for the Ummah? Freedom or Socialism?

Humans in their primitive stages, had to survive in a wild and hostile natural world. Danger lurked under every stone and in each and any shrub. A sole individual, thrown back on his own devices, could hardly hope to live long enough to tell the tale. A lone existence was a constant existential threat. So humans sought security in numbers and shelter with each other, within the safety of the tribe.

Random individual acts, which could endanger the survival of the community as a whole were not just discouraged, but severely punished by exile, shunning and worse. Morality consisted in the common good, the well-being of the whole of the tribe; the single tribes man or woman, was dispensable.

Since the collective security is the tribe's entire reason of being, these were what we would term today, small totalitarian communities. Individuals were not supposed to have private lives, or undertake 'rogue' actions. Even today there are many peoples who do not even have a word for 'privacy', or for 'individual'.

Humanity has come a long way. In the Western world, with the onset of the Renaissance and the period of the Enlightenment, we discovered person-hood and what it means to be a man or woman. And that our prime instrument for survival in a cultivated world, are our own wits. Morality shifted from collective survival, to the survival of the individual.

It is not always appreciated how far this development has helped human progress. There are forces in the Western world today that prefer humans with tribal minds. They say, one person's wits aren't sufficient, that rationality can break down or can be fooled, or reason isn't relevant to a social being.

Some even say wits do not exist at all, and that humans live by instinct, or by synapses and secretions, or that they are steered by God, or by a fate determined in some parallel universe.

They say that in our hearts of heart we are still members of the tribe called humanity and we should share whatever we have, just as in olden days. Some say we should only share things which ensure common security, others advocate sharing the things with which we produce other things. And then there are the peddlers of ideas who come for people's souls. Their morality is altruism. They say, an individual's only use consists in his utility to be tribe.

Peoples in other parts of the world walked other historical paths. They quietly wandered off the reservations in droves, while other tribes held it together. Sometimes new ones were created based on common religion, Islam for example.

In Islam the whole of the faithful - the Ummah - is such a new tribe, replete with tribal justice - Sharia - to ensure its survival, and death for whoever dares to wander off, or pledges loyalty elsewhere. As the discovery of individualism took place in the Western context, this process from collective to individualization is often understood by Muslims as "Islam being besieged by the West".

The painful process we are witnessing before our very eyes in the Middle East and North Africa may be the death throes of the Muslim collective. Muslim men and women may find their person-hood, assuming the personal responsibility for their own body and soul - a thing impossible to achieve in a totalitarian group.

They may be fighting for the rights that a sole individual requires to survive: inalienable, universal, negative rights, leading to limited government, a public space not filled with the plasma of the tribe.

Liberties are negative rights that are inherent in human beings. It has two corollaries: free market capitalism and limited government, that is a government that protects the inalienable rights of the sovereign people.

For some, as we saw in "2001: Obama's Principles for a Socialist State (Analysis)" - these negative liberties are not enough; they cast them aside as "just the stuff that government cannot do to you", or - in our context - what the tribe cannot do to its members to prevent them from surviving on their own wits as free spirits.

The positive rights as advocated by President Obama, are the rights the tribe generously bestows upon its members, in lieu for their promise not to wander off the reservation on their own.

We see that the principles of negative and positive rights are markedly different in nature and in principle. They are opposites. Negative rights liberate individuals from the suffocating oppression of tribal existence. Obama's positive rights on the other hand, newly enslave individuals to the collectivism of the state.

We don't appreciate by half how rare and precious individual liberties really are. Wherever they exist, they are lone stars in oceans of collectives that seek to enslave free spirits to the suffocating risk-free safety of the tribes.

Each nation and each generation has its own battle with the tribes. Today, it is the Tunisians, the Egyptians, the Libyans and the Bahrainis rising up in rebellion. As Thomas Jefferson said, "From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."

The reform process which would ensure the continuation of Islam as a faith, would have to consist in practicing it as a collection of individuals, rather than as the oppressive 'living organism' of the Ummah.

We wish the defenders of liberty all the strength they need to win their battle with the religious collective and hope they have the wisdom to resist the temptation to foist upon themselves a Socialist government that bestows and retracts positive rights. In that case they haven't found freedom, but have mere substituted one totalitarian tribe for another.

Long Live Liberty!

Related

- NRO: "The OIC and the Caliphate", by Andrew McCarthy

Related dossiers


- "The Dystopia of Paradise"

 
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