Sunday, February 4, 2018

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"To claim that these powerful new media corporations are just private companies practicing their freedom to determine what happens on their property is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the extent to which these digital super states are already inextricably interwoven with existing power structures. In a corporatist system of government, which America unquestionably has, corporate censorship is government censorship, of an even more pernicious strain than if Jeff Sessions were touring the country burning books. The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more adept these power structures will become at manipulating us."
Caitlin Johnstone

"Real libertarians – in contrast to left-libertarian fakes – must study and take account of real people and real human history in order to design a libertarian strategy of social change, and even the most cursory study in this regard – indeed, little more than common sense – yields results completely opposite from those proposed by libertarian fakes."
Hans-Herman Hoppe

"The way we're going to move forward in this world is not by finding a person who's good enough to make bad systems work, but by investing in systems that incentivize even the bad person to make himself or herself accountable to creating value for others. And I know of no other system like that than the free market."
T.K. Coleman

"Conservatives tend to be instinctive 'rule of law' sycophants who are a curious hybrid of Romans 13 idolaters and Constitutional fetishists who believe that no parchment can be indecorous enough to enable larger government. The history proves them violently wrong."
Bill Buppert

"'The people' – it sounds dreamy – have no 'will' – and are certainly not sovereign – because no such creature as 'the people' exists in fact; the term is a rhetorical device used  by lawyers to legitimate the trampling of the rights of individual people – who do exist and have rights. These must be respected – morally as well as legally – else they are merely conditional privileges subject to modification or outright revocation at the whim of any politician, or group of them – or court – which declares it is acting on behalf of 'the people.'
In fact, of course, these politicians and so on are acting on behalf of themselves. Or a clique. They cannot ever be acting on behalf of all, in which case the rights of some are  necessarily abused. And if is permissible to abuse the rights of some, then the rights of none are secure – are anything other than conditional privileges.
As intended."
Eric Peters

"To power seekers, the most attractive government is some form of collectivism. It can be any name, but it must be collectivism. Collectivism is ideal for government expansion at the expense of the people. Collectivism attracts hard-wired psychopaths who use the system for cronyism and their aggrandizement. They care not one whit about constitutional government and the rule of law. They only care about a political facade to hide their chicanery.
The result is the collectivist American system that has gradually adopted the 10 planks of communism without Americans even being aware of it."
Bob Livingston

"Even if the Russian government were directly or indirectly involved in trying to influence the U.S. elections, the answer is, 'Why not?'
U.S. elections influence the rest of the world. The Russians, the Europeans, Koreans, Chinese—everybody—have a huge stake in who the Kardashian-watching Walmart shoppers vote for in the quadrennial popularity contest. If the U.S. Government didn’t have hundreds of military bases around the world, and didn’t control the world’s financial system, they wouldn’t care nearly as much.
Not only that, the U.S. has a long history of actively, violently, and directly influencing the elections in foreign countries in every way possible, most recently in the Ukraine. And if that doesn’t work, fomenting a coup d’etat."
Doug Casey

"What makes those who pilot our empire think they have the right to intervene anywhere they please? They say that they do it for the good ends that they imagine are their noble inspirations. They say that they do it expecting good results. They invariably assure us that they are acting humanely and righteously. They assure us that this is for own security as well as to make a better world.
Our aspirations and expectations do not, however, confer rights on us to intervene in the affairs of others. If they did, then we’d have to accept and approve of the rights of others to intervene in our lives. Do we accept their rights to do so? Of course not. If they have no such rights to invade our property, our lands, our ways and our lives, then neither do we have rights to invade theirs. Will lives be led as a free-for-all in which everyone may invade anyone else, or will we adopt civilized behavior in which we follow rules that respect the ways of others by not intervening in their political systems?"
Michael Rozeff

"There is a Deep State. What are we saying when we talk about a Deep State? We're talking about the people who survive presidents. These are not political appointees who come and go in this office or that office. They're the people who are senior enough to influence policy, to shape the government's understanding of an issue... they cause harm, they violate rights, they make us the United States less safe as a nation. And they destabilize peace, not just here at home but around the world..."
Edward Snowden

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