Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"This is 2018 and de-platforming popular content won’t make it go away. It’ll just shift it over into areas of the internet you can’t see, where it’ll fester and grow stronger over time in even more intense and radicalized echo chambers. You’ll think it’s gone from society because it’s been safely cleansed from your corporate-government Facebook timeline, but it may grow even stronger in the shadows. This is particularly the case in a nation dominated by an entrenched, corrupt and unaccountable elitist class. One that refuses to confront the reality of its monumental failures, and instead chooses to self-interestedly obsess over what are just symptoms of a decadent empire in decline."

Michael Krieger

"Like all statists, democratic socialists want to grow government to solve a problem created by government, and to do so under cover of mob rule (the vote).

Socialism is a philosophy of envy. When one sees something another has and decides he wants it,  rather than earn it on his own merits he wants the power of government to take it and either give it to him or redistribute it to the masses. Often the socialist doesn’t want that something for himself as much as he doesn’t want someone else to have it."

Bob Livingston

"Libertarianism is individualist. If one individual doesn’t respect or treat a libertarian as an individual the libertarian will typically move on until they find others who will. But collectivism won’t allow that because people belong in a class and will always treat people like a class. What people get from collectivism is never-ending class warfare."

Garry Reed

"Sure, state separation won’t solve all problems, but isn’t letting people be free to govern themselves at least preferable to one side feeling they must kill-off enough of the other side to get their way? This sort of calculation may even now be growing in the minds of some. Is our will to dominate the other side greater than our will to live in peace and freedom? Do we hate the thing we are against more than we love the thing we’re for? I hope not. Instead, we should accept the reality that we can live together better separately than we can through the perverse game of alternating governments, swapping out identities of subject and master, with society in perpetual arrested development. Let’s give peace and freedom a chance. Let’s separate, for the good of all."

Ryan Thorson

"The just society is not some game of chess where we can move around each person like they exist to carry out the will of 'the people.' We must not forget that in real life, these 'pawns' move with their own objectives. If we depart from the notion that each person is an individual with their own unique attributes and objectives, we can guarantee ourselves that only misery and despotism will quickly follow."

Aaron Banks

"As leftists worship the mob and government power, conservatives tend to worship heroes, some of them false prophets. Conservatives are always desperately searching for the man on the white horse to lead them to the promise land. They are always looking for another messiah.  And in this they make themselves weak.

What they should be emulating are their principles and heritage alone. Only ideals and truths matter, because they are eternal, and they do not lie. But let the right showman or mascot come along reciting the correct rhetoric in a rousing way, and many conservatives become putty in the hands of the political elites."

Brandon Smith

"In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the U.S. government’s policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the U.S. unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship."

Caitlin Johnstone

"Continuing refugee business as usual is a mistake; resettlement contractors profit, while the American communities where refugees are relocated struggle through difficult transition periods. The multi-millions in dollars the U.S. spends domestically on refugee programs would go 12 times as far if distributed in refugees’ home regions to provide for their shelter and care until they can safely return home. No nation including the U.S. can indefinitely accept the world’s displaced populations."

Joe Guzzzardi