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Mars_B4_Moon,
Yes, Vice Media has had a very eclectic group of funders and managers over the years. I liken Vice Media to Howard Stern. It's a visual media equivalent of a "shock jock" radio station. I'm not sure what their ultimate aim is, even after listening to a video where they described their intent / purpose, but they're definitely trying to "turn heads". There may be some value to "shining a spotlight" on the various ugly realities of this world, or maybe not, but they do get plenty of views.
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Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dies
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65878077
Silvio Berlusconi rule is finally over. Italy has sat on a vast fortune of history sites, farm resource, stable seas and constant tourism, not Fascism today and Not Communist but sometimes it was utterly corrupted, a Neo-Democrat Media of Controlled Information and Disinfo, a Nu Ministry of Truth, Epistemology mixed with elements of Oligarch, Technocratic government and Kleptocracy type government A Charming performer and singer raised in a middle-class family, family of a bank employee, he studied the legal aspects of advertising. Gets linked with construction and Thousands of residential apartments, then a small cable television company, TeleMilano, to service units built on his Segrate properties. Married an actress Bettino Craxi, a former prime minister and leader of the Italian Socialist Party. Berlusconi was ordered to pay his ex-wife Veronica Lario $48 million a year in a divorce settlement that was filed on Christmas Day, but could keep the $100 million house they lived in with their three children. There was no real left or right there was Silvio Berlusconi tv and Berlusconi created the first and only Italian commercial TV empire. He accused Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Christine Lagarde and Giorgio Napolitano, along with other global economic and financial powers, to have plotted against him and forced him to resign, because he refused to accept a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which according to him, would have sold the country to the IMF. Berlusconi in office, became a solid ally of the United States due to his support for the war in Afghanistan and the Iraq War following the 2003 invasion of Iraq during the 'War on Terror', he supported Turkey joining the EU and the Russian gas pipeline, socialist roots but often also described as a populist or a conservative. Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud by the court of final instance, the Supreme Court of Cassation, which confirmed his four-year prison sentence, of which three years are automatically pardoned, along with a public office ban for two years. As his age exceeded 70 years, he was exempted from direct imprisonment; he served his sentence by doing unpaid social community work. His leadership was also undermined by sex scandals, was accused and initially formally convicted of paying 17-year-old Moroccan Karima El Mahroug, also known by the stage name Ruby Rubacuori in Italian for "Ruby the Heartstealer", for sexual services .
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Vice Media no longer exists, so whatever their goals were, they failed financially.
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Not Left or Right but Artificial Chatbot A.I writing your news?
'Gizmodo and Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Move to AI Content'
https://futurism.com/gizmodo-kotaku-sta … ai-content
‘World’s first radio station with an AI DJ’: Oregon’s Live 95.5 uses cloned human voice to host segments
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united- … difference
Listeners to Live 95.5, a radio station in Portland, Oregon, can now tune in to hear a part-time AI DJ hosting for five hours every day
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The New York Times actually has the nerve to support calls for genocide! If ever there was a time to cancel that publication, it is now.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1687520435825745920
' You can read their articles for free anyway using removepaywall.com '
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Former reporter suing CNN for unfair dismissal and racial discrimination
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/ … rimination
A former Fox executive now argues Murdoch is unfit to own TV stations
https://www.ijpr.org/npr-news/npr-news/ … v-stations
US Senate Approves Former VOA Chief to Head US Global Broadcasting
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-senate-app … 58822.html
The Washington Center Announces Funded Fellowship for Students Seeking Career Advancement in Broadcast Media
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-rele … Media.html
United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), known until 2018 as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)
https://web.archive.org/web/20141101173 … _governors
"The BBG is the most worthless organization in the federal government," Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, told The Cable in an interview. "It's full of people who know nothing about media or foreign policy. All they are doing is spending money and somebody's got to look into it."
The BBG, an independent federal agency with a budget of more than $750 million, is tasked with overseeing U.S. government information services including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia.
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-08-09 10:56:51)
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Biden aides are sure Republicans will be blamed for a possible government shutdown
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/30/poli … index.html
Sec. Buttigieg on looming shutdown: ‘The sky may not fall, but it will get more chaotic’
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6338075585112
Brock University deleted their own article?
The Overton window on media criticism is not as wide as it needs to be
https://web.archive.org/web/20230314215 … eds-to-be/
Understanding The Hegelian Dialectic – What it is and what it isn't
https://modernenquirer.substack.com/p/u … -dialectic
The Humanities Are in the Midst of a Historic Paradigm Shift
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hi … digm-shift
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The Congress of the United States hasn't passed a budget since 1997. They have spent public money based upon "continuing resolution" since that time, because they cannot work with each other to the degree required to pass an actual budget. 26 years is enough time to realize that unless the issue is forced by principled people, which does not describe most Democrats and Republican politicians, it will never be addressed. Strangely, even Alexandria Occasio-Cortez realizes this is actually a good thing for the people. If a self-styled socialist and conservatives like Matt Gaetz can both agree that Congress is not spending money the way the law says Congress is supposed to make appropriations, maybe that should tell everyone else that what they're doing isn't what was intended, and to stop being so lazy when it comes to spending money.
A literal handful of Republicans are insisting that we do two things:
1. Pass an actual budget, rather than another continuing resolution
2. Write spending bills that are limited to a single issue or subject which will receive funding from the overall budget. Vote up or down on these individual issues.
As a voting block, Democrat politicians are the largest group of "true believers" in "trickle-down economics" the world has ever seen. As a voting block, the vast majority of Republican politicians are the second largest group of supporters of "trickle-down economics".
Here's what they actually do:
Every year, Democrats and Republicans spend more money on the same programs, with inflation increases accounted for, because they refuse to pass a budget. Every year, they create new government programs which spend more public money. Every year, their constituents become poorer, because they keep voting for the same insanity.
If I told you that I intended to reduce the purchasing power of every dollar you earn, by making your money worth LESS, through the act of printing more money (a claim on your labor / materials / purchases and sales of goods and services, before any agreement to buy or sell occurs), would you ever vote for that?
Look at what actually happens to the money supply:
Regardless of how much money I give to any one person, as they spend that money on things they need or want, it accumulates in the hands of the few people who own the means of production. I could print $1M for every man / woman / child in America, and distribute it equally amongst the general public, but within a year or two almost all of it would end up in the hands of the people who already own the means of production.
At the end of that pointless exercise, most of the people will be poor again, despite all of them receiving a million dollars. The claim on the debt may be realized by transfer of goods and services, but the vast majority of people will not be wealthy, they will be poorer.
How do I "know" that will happen?
Look at what happens right now. Tell me I'm wrong. Don't tell me how you feel about it. I know most of us are dismayed by it. Tell me about what actually happens.
Why?
The prices charged for all goods and services will increase, to account for the fact that everyone is a millionaire. This is the "inflation" that comes with printing more money by making claims on goods and services which don't exist. It's as artificial a system as communism, which has never been practiced by any people claiming to be communists, according to people who believe themselves to be "real communists".
You know what won't change?
It seems an utter impossibility to me that everyone who knows nothing of economics suddenly comes to the realization that OWNING the means of production is the only long-term viable way to generate and retain personal wealth into perpetuity. You can't surrender that to other capitalists or fake communists, none of whom have an actual vested interest in your long-term wealth and well-being. The total number of altruistic people who own the means of production is almost nonexistent. If you're not producing and selling something, then eventually someone else accumulates all the money you create through your labor. It's as simple as that. It's always been that simple. I'm flabbergasted that almost nobody understands and accepts that.
This is also why capitalists and communists or governments are always at-odds with each other. Government creates nothing of value through its existence. Even the most polite forms of actual governance involve the state taking things of value from productive people, with the implicit threat of violence if the thing of tangible value being taken is not surrendered to the government, which will then be given to third party beneficiaries. By the definition of what actually transpired there, the government is a parasite that feeds off the productivity of its people. Communists are pseudo-governmental parasites that seize power from legitimate governments, which they never seek to emulate (who needs the consent of the governed when you can just murder them after you seize power), and then they use their undeserved power to feed off the productivity of the people.
If government wanted to be more productive and less adversarial towards the people it governs, then it would set boundaries for its activities and rigidly adhere to the boundaries it set for itself. Legitimate government would not attempt to inject itself into every aspect of life, unless that's what people truly wanted, and to a person, nobody outside of government actually wants that. When and where they come to that realization depends entirely upon what issue they object to government attempting to "control" or "dictate" to them.
For example, there is no privatized national defense apparatus that actually works. Since no workable civil or private defense apparatus exists outside of government, or has ever existed at the level and to the degree required to provide a competent and capable defense for hundreds of millions of people, exercising authority over military forces is a "more legitimate than most" place for government to exist, even as it does so with the implicit threat of force. Most 6 year olds and 60 year olds are not going to become competent and capable soldiers. You can put a rifle in their hands, but that doesn't make them competent and capable. That is why government takes resources from their people, for this specific purpose, because if they don't then someone else will come along who is even less agreeable, who will force that "taking of wealth" upon their people in a far less diplomatic way. If you want to know what privatized / communal defense forces look like, then observe the activities of the various "warlords" in Africa, and then ask yourself if you wish to become beholden to the capricious dictates of those cretins.
Tying this back to economics and spending on government, we've been at an impasse on the degree and kinds of spending exercised by our government for 26 years. One group of politicians thinks there should be no limit to government inserting itself in the lives of the people and the other group can't articulate the alternative well enough to move the pendulum back towards the center. We see-saw between extremes, every 4 to 8 years, and the wasteful spending is a result of pleasing donors. What the people actually want isn't even a consideration for either Democrats or Republicans. That is how we ended up with Presidents Trump and Biden.
All I see from both Democrats and Republicans is more pointless wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine), extreme excesses of spending (on military and welfare programs), and no good faith attempts to put the general welfare of our own people above special interests. If government keeps spending more and more money, then you get more and more poor people. It may take decades for that to happen in a nation as wealth as America, but eventually everyone becomes poor. You cannot spend your way out of a spending problem. Thinking otherwise is wrong. Spending our way to prosperity clearly hasn't happened, despite spending more money than any other country on the planet. Maybe it's time to realign priorities, set realistic objectives, and then pursue realistic solutions.
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The doomer Green leftist vs doomer Conservative right, they both are Pessimism Mental attitudes and position that dwells on the dark or gloomy
Tucker Carlson warns that America is on the 'brink of collapse'
https://www.rebelnews.com/tucker_carlso … rica_brink
'When every person, 350 million Americans, everyone regardless of political affiliation can feel that something bad’s coming.
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So many were calling the Argentina guy the new Mussolini, a Peronist type like Juan Perona, Leopoldo Galtieri, Jorge Rafael Videla, new 'Next Hitler'
Whatever he turns out to be can it truly be much worse than previous idiots who have helped destroy the culture and economics of Argentina?
In the USA and Europe people complain about inflation, a price increase of 5% or at 10% for goods or service, 20% or 15% but in Argentina it can be as much as one hundred and ten percent or a hundred and fifty percent, and the last statistics showed it as high as 124 %
the currency begins to lose meaning and when you buy something in the morning by the afternoon its price it could have changed higher once more.
hyperinflation
Argentina's President-Elect, Javier Milei, To Visit The U.S. And Israel Before Taking Office
https://www.latintimes.com/argentinas-p … ice-549032
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-11-24 06:30:29)
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The false claims seen on the media platforms
Residents in some states getting tax rebate, not an IRS stimulus check | Fact check
seems music is taking stage against Trump
Green Day's MAGA Message Sparks Fury From Donald Trump Supporters
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Mars_B4_Moon,
When radical leftists have no more arguments that voters find persuasive, they resort to calling their opponents Hitler or using violence. I find that especially funny, considering that Hitler was a socialist, and a "very different kind of socialist", in Hitler's own words. I think leftists generally count on everyone else being as painfully ignorant as they are. Leftists don't understand the real key difference between "left" and "right" politics, because they don't understand their side of the argument, let alone anyone else's side. This is also why they don't attempt to engage in a debate that doesn't involve emotion and name calling. The leftists who are truly intelligent and rational / logical, not merely indoctrinated, recognize that they only have a naked will to power to exert influence over the lives of others, for the express purpose of doing what they think is best, regardless of what anyone else thinks. When you corner their logic and what they're really after, most rational / logical people, which implies a truly educated rather than indoctrinated electorate, will run away from their ideas as fast as they can, because it always leads to a very dark place that involves lots of pointless death and suffering. Every so often, though, the right becomes so complacent that the radical left takes over and destroys the very society they think they're "saving from itself".
Radical leftism involves the use of socialism / communism / collectivism / suppression of individual liberties and violence to achieve political / ideological goals. Both Hitler and Stalin were radical leftists. Hitler was a radical leftists who believed in the superiority of German national communism over, say, Russian national communism. Stalin believed in global communism, with little distinction made between peoples or nations, so long as they were all communists and all supportive of Soviet influence. Stalin managed to mass murder more of his fellow countrymen than Hitler, but apart from the body count there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them. Both groups of communists had numerous pogroms that lead to mass murder of Jews and other ethnic minorities, such as Ukrainians, who they claimed were "exerting foreign influence", by their highly contorted definitions of such, which always involved race and religion. Democrats are no different, in that regard. In recent times, they've convinced many of their own pigmentally-challenged dullards to hate themselves, but race / skin color / other meaningless superficial physical characteristics are always top-of-mind for Democrats and leftists in general.
Extreme rightism, by definition, is anti-authoritarian to the point of anarchy. In practice, the radical left uses anarchy to make communism seem appealing to their fellow morons. Anarchists are frequently associated with the left because they're fake anarchists / real communists who are only pretending to be anarchists to foment a communist takeover. I would call them useless idiots, for society anyway, but the radical left finds them useful for implementing communism. Most are garden variety street thugs, which is what all communists are. The real anarchists quickly discover what communists are all about, and that's why you never see any real anarchists associated with the radical left. Basically, if they were real anarchists you would never see them making common cause with either their fellow anarchists, let alone authoritarian communists, who represent total state control.
Now that we've accurately defined the actual differences between radical left and radical right, which are both polar opposites in their view on government control exerted over the general public, we can now accurately define what the center or moderate right truly represents. In short, you cannot actually "be on the right", if you support any form of dictatorship. This is how we know that Hitler had everything to do with the radical left and communism, and nothing to do with the right or Republicanism. Democrats want arbitrary dictatorial control over everyone, so they label others as "Hitler" to avert attention away from the fact that today's average Democrat wants genocide Jewish people, which is the dictionary definition of what Hitler actually did in nazi Germany, they want to exert total control over education, media, entertainment, and use Gestapo (secret Police actions) to "control" what you're allowed to see / think / say / do.
Presidents Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump are all moderate conservatives / Republicans who think the government doesn't have the right to control every aspect of your life, dislike war but aren't afraid to engage in war if our enemies close the door to peaceful resolutions, and think that nobody is ever allowed to "own" the labor of another human being. While Presidents Lincoln and Eisenhower were both true Republicans, Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump all arrived at their moderate conservative / Republican viewpoints from witnessing the excesses of Democrats and their obsession with race and other superficial physical differences, which they continue to this very day. The Democrats said every imaginable nasty thing about all of them, because to this day Democrats want total control over every aspect of life, if not outright ownership of other human beings. All of the Democrat policies during my lifetime amounted to, "someone else does real work while I benefit, despite contributing little to nothing". Well, that only "flies" under a dictatorship or when one is a "slave" to someone else. Republicans abolished slavery because it was so intolerable as a way of life.
President Trump represents a clear and present danger to the Democrat Party's unstated but ever-present goal of transporting America backwards in time to tyranny and slavery. All the groundwork they laid for eventual takeover to foment dictatorship and slavery was torn asunder by one principled man, who was a Democrat for his entire adult life until he saw all of the crap that President Obama and the new radical left was engaged in, despite his numerous personal failings. That end goal of tyranny and slavery is what true Democrat Party politicians are fixated on, because their political ideology remain stuck in time, at the point where they lost the war they started with my fellow Republicans over their perceived "right" to own other people. After my fellow Republicans took their slaves away from them and forced them to pay people or pick their own cotton, they've done nothing but throw a multi-generational tantrum ever since. Wokeism is merely a mutated manifestation of keeping our useless idiots fixated on superficial nonsense that Democrats have concocted while their political party loots the country and creates a framework for enslavement of dictatorial government control.
Our radical left continually goes through identity crises, in their vain attempt to avert attention away from their actions, because when your politics is based upon fundamentally abhorrent ideas and lies, selling that to a general public which is predominantly composed of people of good moral character, rapidly becomes an untenable position. Democrats have a will to power, but no plausible pathway to get there because their beliefs are at odds with their fellow Americans who don't think ownership of other people is morally acceptable, hence the generational campaign to brainwash our children and to remove every trace of our Christian heritage from society, in order to convince ordinary Americans that they're evil or received some unearned special privileges over others, that they took something they were not even alive to take, and why they always seem to side with America's self-declared enemies over our own people and culture, which is very special and unique, because it emphasizes freedom and personal liberties over using violence to ensure that everyone thinks or does something in only one very specific way.
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Here’s what Trump’s GOP 2024 rivals think about Maine blocking him from ballot
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-gop-2024-r … 31221.html
Vivek Ramaswamy has challenged the other candidates to withdraw from the ballot in states where Donald Trump is disqualified
RFK Jr.’s daunting task: How he’s relying on volunteers to get him on SC’s ballot
https://news.yahoo.com/rfk-jr-daunting- … 00039.html
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Democrats are not self-aware enough to realize that their candidates can also be removed from the ballot by simple declaration of those presently in charge, without due process of law. That is profoundly undemocratic and evil. The Democrat Party has become a weapon for evil degenerates to use against those with anything approximating a functional moral compass. Democrats don't have a working moral compass, so they can justify anything to themselves. Actual evidence is not required, mere belief is sufficient, exactly like the Christian and Jewish religions they hate so much, because it competes with their political religion for sway over the moral fabric of our nation. The Democrat Party platform is now so unattractive to the average voter, that they feel the need to prevent their opponents from running for office by using baseless declarations to remove them from the ballot. Democrats must first destroy America from within to implement totalitarianism, because America's very existence is a complete refutation of their entire totalitarian worldview.
For anyone who thinks January 6th was an insurrection, consider this- nearly all Republicans have guns. The only people who had guns on January 6th were the Capitol Police and our military. If there was an actual insurrection, then there would've been at least one armed Republican in Washington DC that the media would endlessly trot out as their shining example of armed insurrection. Since there were precisely zero armed Republicans present at the Capitol building during January 6th, that should clue you in on the fact that almost nobody who showed up had any intention of overthrowing our government or interfering with the elections process.
Democrats made false claims of Russian collusion for 4 insufferable years because their evil incarnate candidate, Hillary Clinton, colluded with the Russians and FBI to undermine the Presidency of President Trump. 4 separate investigations found that nobody from President Trump's 2016 Presidential Election Campaign, nor President Trump himself, colluded with the Russians to do anything at all. President Trump and his supporters incorrectly believed, given literal mountains of evidence of Democrats' prior malfeasance in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, that the Democrats somehow manipulated the 2020 election results to elect Weekend at Bernies, aka President Biden. In reality, Democrats used pure unadulterated BS to convince enough stupid people to behave stupidly. President Trump badly miscalculated how many weak and stupid Americans existed for Democrats to manipulate into destroying themselves for a very temporary Democrat Party political advantage. President Trump was a Democrat for his entire life until 2015, so he should've known better, but he's also a textbook narcissist like President Obama. In other words, his character flaw wouldn't permit him to acquiesce to evil cretins and then run again to once again wrest power from these psychotic petty tyrants we lovingly call "Democrats".
Of all the people who actually entered the US Capitol building on January 6th, none of them were present at President Trump's speech where he instructed his supporters to remain peaceful and respect the instructions of the Capitol Police. We know this because President Trump's speech was shown live, on-air, at the time that those people entered the Capitol building. That means none of those people came to listen to and heed what their President had to say. As far as I'm concerned, they had zero affiliation with President Trump, regardless of who they voted for.
Democrat Mayor Ted Wheeler, a duly elected Mayor of Portland, Oregon, was threatened with his life by his fellow Democrats and chased through the streets by an armed mob who verbally threatened to enter his home and kill him. That is what an actual insurrection looks like. His fellow Democrats in Oregon firebombed the federal courthouse there, repeatedly, while court was in-session. Those are both examples of what an actual insurrection looks like. Contrast that with granny being given a guided tour of the Capitol by her Police escort, and the difference couldn't be anymore clear. January 6th was a mostly peaceful protest against the election of a brain-dead moron who proudly stated on national television that he was soliciting bribes from Ukrainians and communist Chinese, with the normal assortment of FBI-sponsored terrorists like Ray Epps and whacka-doodle-do leftists mixed into the crowd.
I know that Democrats like to pervert the use of language to suit their political goals, but actual insurrection involves physically violent acts against duly elected officials. Nobody on January 6th was chasing elected officials around the Capitol building or anywhere else. Democrat government service members recorded themselves on their Zoom call threatening to firebomb the White House if President Trump won, are real insurrectionists. One of them even went on national television to state that he was planning on burning down the White House if President Trump was elected. If Democrats think that's acceptable behavior on their part, then Republicans showing up to protest a vote they think was manipulated by those same people who have no issue with chasing their fellow Democrat officials through the streets or firebombing federal courthouses, is well within the bounds of acceptable political behavior.
For all of our Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who read this forum, Robert F. Kennedy Jr was also removed from the ballot in Colorado. Robert F. Kennedy Jr was a Democrat, has never been a Republican, never voted for any Republican so far as we know, and is now running as an Independent candidate. He had no involvement whatsoever with anything related to our Democrat's imaginary insurrection claims against President Trump. No explanation was given for why his name has also been removed from the ballot, despite qualifying in all respects to appear on the ballot as a candidate for President of the United States.
Mind you, President Trump has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, an attempt at insurrection. For a nation professing to stand for law and order and democracy, then if it wishes to remain lawful and orderly, there must be a trial by a court (a trier of fact, not a political circus pretending to care about the law), to resolve a legal matter. An insurrection has a legal definition under US Codified Law and is a federal crime which can and should be prosecuted in a court of law if there is sufficient evidence to bring a case. The simple explanation is that no evidence exists to suggest that President Trump intended to overthrow our government. All else being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one, even when it disagrees with the internal monologue in someone's head about people they don't like, for their own personal reasons.
If both Independents and Republicans, who were formerly lifelong Democrats, are such a threat to democracy that their names can't appear on the ballot, then maybe the problem is not with them, but with the people who have removed their names from the ballot.
President Trump was a Democrat until 2015.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr was a Democrat until 2023.
When some of your most well-known Democrats are leaving the party, that should be a "teachable moment", as President Obama would say.
Democrat Governor Newsom has publicly stated that his fellow Democrats are taking the wrong approach, and should focus instead on winning the next election for President, rather than trying to prevent their political opponents from running for elected office. This is just speculation, but maybe, just maybe, modern day Democrats are the source of America's current social and political problems, same as they were during the 1860s when they were making preposterous claims that black people weren't humans, or their fellow Americans, and could be "owned" by Democrats as if they were cattle.
My advice to Democrats is to stop clutching at your pearls, and to stop believing your own BS. The last actual attempt to overthrow the US federal government happened during the 1860s, when Democrats subsequently burned down almost all of Washington DC in 1864. They showed up with muskets and cannons and torches, not flag poles and signs. Democrats were upset that my fellow Republican, President Abraham Lincoln, preventing them from using violence to force their fellow human beings and fellow Americans to work as slaves on their cotton plantations, merely because they were black.
Democrats often claim special affiliation with or admiration for President Lincoln. This is humorous since President Lincoln thought all men were created equal, unlike Democrats who think certain groups of people are special or "more equal" than others. No freedom is even possible if we don't value each other as humans with independent thought and agency as free men and women. Democrats attempted to assert that people with different skin color were not human, and therefore could be treated like property. Republicans disagreed. The entire world knows how that disagreement ended, but Democrats don't learn from history, because they're willfully ignorant of history and plainly observable objective reality.
Fast forward to today, and Democrats are claiming that they're saving "our democracy" by removing the choice to vote for their fellow former Democrat Party members. When you play stupid games with the power of government, there are only stupid prizes waiting for you. The people cheering this on are the first ones who will have their degeneracy used against them. All totalitarianism, as Professor Jordan Petersen has pointed out, is "the grip of the lie". The only way a totalitarian system can exist is when everyone is willing to lie about everything all of the time. Totalitarian governance never withstands the test of time, but always leaves widespread destruction and suffering in its wake.
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Bari Weiss: Why DEI Must End For Good
Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals
...
Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. The fall from grace of the German universities was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel. He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945.
Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain “the German catastrophe” by arguing that excessive technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller. As a result, they had been unable to resist Hitler’s “mass Machiavellianism.”
The novelist Thomas Mann—who, unlike Meinecke, chose exile over complicity—was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in “Brother Hitler,” the German educated elite possessed a monstrous younger sibling, whose role was to articulate and authorize their darkest aspirations.
The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, “speech crossed into conduct.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.
The Holocaust remains an exceptional historical crime—distinct from other acts of organized lethal violence directed against other minorities—precisely because it was perpetrated by a highly sophisticated nation-state that had within its borders the world’s finest universities. That is why American universities cannot regard antisemitism as just another expression of “hate,” no different from, say, Islamophobia—a neologism that should not be mentioned in the same breath. That is why Claudine Gay’s double standards—with their implication that African Americans are somehow more deserving of protection than Jews—are so indefensible.
That is why rational minds recoil from her argument that antisemitism on the Harvard campus is tolerable so long as genocide is not being perpetrated.
Well, the backlash against our contemporary treason of the intellectuals has finally arrived.
Donors such as the chief executive of Apollo, Marc Rowan (a Penn graduate), Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman (Harvard), and Stone Ridge founder Ross Stevens (Penn) have each made clear that their support will no longer be forthcoming for institutions run in this fashion.
On Saturday, Penn president Liz Magill stepped down, along with the chair of the Penn board of trustees, Scott Bok. Perhaps others will follow.
Yet it will take a lot more than a few high-profile resignations to reform the culture of America’s elite universities. It is much too entrenched in multiple departments, all dominated by a tenured faculty, to say nothing of the armies of DEI and Title IX officers who seem, at some colleges, now to outnumber the undergraduates.
In La trahison des clercs, Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions. . . owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.
Only if the once-great American universities can reestablish—throughout their fabric—the separation of Wissenschaft from Politik can they be sure of avoiding the fate of Marburg and Königsberg.
Niall Ferguson is a trustee of the University of Austin, as well as Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of, among many works, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (Penguin).
Penn State University's Motto:
The motto of the University, Leges Sine Moribus Vanae, means "Laws without morals are useless (in vain)." It comes from the longer quotation from Horace, "Quid leges sine moribus vanae proficient" the sense of which is "of what avail are empty laws without (good) morals."
I wonder what Quintus Horatius Flaccus would make of 2020s America.
Where are those morals and ethics that a liberal university is supposedly capable of instilling into young and impressionable Americans that they're supposed to prepare for the world?
This is the problem with modern day Democrats. They've sworn off Christianity and Judaism, but what they've replaced it with has no features approximating consistent morality that the majority of people would deem acceptable. They think anything can be justified if the person they're doing it to is labeled as an oppressor, or some other label that simply means, "I don't like you and I have no logical arguments against you, so I'm simply going to behave like a small child throwing a tantrum, except I'm a fully grown adult". That is not morality of any kind that would be congruent with the Golden Rule, merely an implicit but unstated "anything goes" when you don't like someone. If there's no consistent application of morality, then there is no morality.
There are lots of people I don't personally like, but if I'm going to accuse them of something criminal, I still require ironclad evidence of wrongdoing. This is a feature of morality and equal application of justice that's conspicuously absent from leftism.
President Biden's son is being prosecuted for nonsense like gun charges and tax evasion. I do not give a crap that he did drugs, or had a gun, or hired hookers. What he did on his own time is his own business. I want to know if he and his father sold out America to the highest bidder. The rest of this is meaningless political crap. Selling out your own country is worthy of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. Hiring a hooker is about as meaningful to the highest ideals of America as farting with your butt pointed one way versus the other. Both political parties should be interested in this, but that presumes they care about the character of our nation's leadership. It's clear that they don't.
I don't want our government to control who gets to sleep with who. It's not their business. They should stay in their own lane. If government wants to reward stable marriages that produce or care for children, the next generation of people who comprise the nation, then that's their business. Not all relationships will qualify for benefits or rewards, nor should they. Rewards should be the result of sociable behavior, not a political or judicial tool to punish or entrap.
I don't want our government to tell people what drugs they can or cannot take. I want society to take care of the addicted, even if that means society ultimately has to discard some people because they're more loyal to their addiction than their own well-being. Some people, by their proclivities or character, are only good for serving as warning orders to others, and nothing more.
So... What has modern leftism replaced traditional morality with? The current en-vogue sexual and cultural deviancy?
Don't like organized religion? Me, neither. I'm an atheist. Welcome to the club, bubba.
Now... What should we replace traditional religion with that doesn't devolve into degeneracy?
If you don't have a good answer, then you're not ready to be a moral and ethical leader.
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