Hey look! the FBI and NSA are data-mining and analyzing your data!

[Mittelwaechter]

It's all about control.
Due to the internet our true rulers and their puppets have lost the sole sovereignty over their subjects reality. Those who control the information, the talk of the day and its interpretation, control our perception and therefore our reality, our motivation to think, to act, to consume, to attack etc.

Free, unlimited, uncontroled information and communication leads to the loss of their rulership, because the subjects do realize the difference between the prethought or "proclaimed" reality and their actual live situation. They talk about this discrepancy and realize a multiple interpretation of the once only truth, traditionally provided by the church - replaced by the classic media today. Suddenly it's not the proclaimed reality - our controled common view of the world - that motivates the subjects, but a wide, uncontroled diversity of truth provided by thousands of reporters and commentators via blogs, youtube, facebook, wikileaks, twitter, comments and discussions directly under the online articles of our prethought information, or - in our case - wistleblowers. Hence the rulers and their puppets have to regain control over our motivation or the puppets are at risk to lose their status - to be observed in the arabic world.

So what is their choice of actions to regain and strengthen their control? One well tried, tested and trusted measure is "to divide", to discourage and to prevent solidarity amongst the subjects. Every day we stumble over polarizing information about male vs. female, the elder vs. the youth, left vs. right, sick vs. healthy, west vs. east, natives vs. non-natives, families vs. those without kids, rich vs. poor, fat vs. well shaped, pedestrians vs. drivers, unemployed vs. workers, chistians vs. muslims etc. - just to breed bad blood, to split the society. Divide and rule!

But with the internet they have to go some steps further. It's necessary to know "in due time" all about the intentions of your subjects. You have to collect as much information as possible about their networks, their friends, their online and offline behaviour, their political opinion, about their wishes and fears, about their whole lives. As a result of this collection you can sort them, observe "critical" groups, predict their behaviour and act accordingly to answer any slight "unwanted" deviance.
Additionally you may want to distract and desinform the society, use propaganda and censorship to control the information flow and consequently the motivation of your subjects. Discredit any free source of information that may endanger your intentions, that may uncover your wheelings and dealings.
Keep the people busy and show them their life is nice, fine and "above average". Let them work and make them consume - it's their single purpose.
Teach your own kids in some elite schools how to run the system itself and let the others learn how to work flawlessly within in the system to keep it going.

After work we shall passively watch other people singing, dancing, cooking, eating, talking, working, housekeeping, raising children, fighting criminals sucessfully etc. Strange, eh?
It's a constant group of only "150 people" that has the privilege to explain the world, the situation and the causal relations on TV, providing opinions, arguments and positions we may sympathize with. Why? Because they reflect the view of our true rulers. Instead of thinking and researching about the situation, about the sense of it, about who profits from it, we shall accept the given prethought concepts. The leaders opinion becomes the leading opinion.
Most people don't have an own opinion, based on collected facts and own creative thinking. They simply rethink - often only parrot - the "prethought" provided by those we chose to support.
It's all about control.

[Stealhead]

Originally Posted by MH

Its not that simple like mr Obama deciding out of the blue that mr stealhead is terrorist.

I did not say that I was referring to how the Patriot Act can be used in any way the government desires.It is a blank check.I never said that they just "target" people out of the blue I am not some paranoid nut case.What I was referring to is how they use the Patriot Act to violate civil liberties of any person.

I choose not to intrinsically trust any government to follow its laws regrading civil liberates.I am not saying that a drone is going to follow me around or that Obama is building a zombie Homeland security army or building death camps that all is utter nonsense.Please do not confuse with this type of person.

[Wolferz]

Looks like the American people are being awakened from the American dream and the brainwashing tactics are starting to unravel as more folks wake up and smell the stench of the BS coming out of DC.
I'm sure that the puppet masters are quite cross with their puppets for allowing this kind of leak.
It didn't take puppet Boehner long to brand Eddie Snowden a Traitor, did it?

The way I see it... It takes one to know one.

The instant rhetoric rolling down the hill about how much this revelation has damaged the state's ability to fight terrorism is the purest form of BS and a blatant effort to continue reinforcing the government fear campaign.
Scared sheeple will follow the shepherd, right? The talking heads on TV are all voicing the puppet master's opinion in an attempt to sway the thinking of the gullible.

What they don't seem to understand is, we're not that scared, at least, I'm not. What I am scared of is these elected morons paying a third party billions of dollars for intelligence collection. Like we can afford it! I wonder which reps hold stock in this Booz- Allen company? Everyone on the security committee maybe?

" Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere and applying all the wrong remedies"

GROUCHO MARX

[Ducimus]

Is this song applicable yet?

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Nah! Equaling the absence of government with the situation in Somalia is the same like people in the 80s were told to move to the Soviet Union when uttering the slightest left thought.

If you're interested in historical examples of anarchist societies, I can recommend you to read People without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy by Harold Barclay. Sorry that I also link to a book, but I am sure it is a much better read and much more based in the real world than the crazy pipe dreams by Hoppe who makes the word liberty sound like a swear word:
"There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society." (p.218, Hoppe 2001 - Democracy: The God That Failed.)
More of his thoughts can be found on the brilliant divided by zero blog: http://dbzer0.com/blog/oh-gawds-wat-...ertarian-ever/
That's all I have to say to Sky's new god - Hoppe's ideas are neither new, nor original, nor have the slightest to do with freedom. It's funny enough when European economic-liberal capitalists call themselves "libertarian".

[Ducimus]

[Skybird]

I'm done, Oberon, but must correct a biblical legion of typos, which I will do tomorrow. So tomorrow it is, I think. So far I counted six words not having a typo in them, and all six consisted of one or two letters.

I really should have the Max Planck institute checking my typing technique. Somewhere in there there's a problem, it seems.



I'm not used to this kind of thing anymore, I really feel the lacking practice. Or I just become old. Shouldn't have allowed the forum to civilize me.

[the_tyrant]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I'm done, Oberon, but must correct a biblical legion of typos, which I will do tomorrow. So tomorrow it is, I think. So far I counted six words not having a typo in them, and all six consisted of one or two letters.

I really should have the Max Planck institute checking my typing technique. Somewhere in there there's a problem, it seems.



I'm not used to this kind of thing anymore, I really feel the lacking practice. Or I just become old. Shouldn't have allowed the forum to civilize me.

Off topic: If you get a LOT of typos when you are typing, you might wanna consider a new keyboard. I made the switch to a mechanical keyboard, and I FEEL the change every day (its painful switching to my surface pro's type cover after using my desktop's mechanical keyboard)

[Skybird]

Ah, I simply type too damn fast, faster than I could speak those words. Cannot slow down those fingers, and when the steamroller once got rolling than I really get plowed under by the keyboard.

Typing once mislearned is difficult to correct.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Penguin

"There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society." (p.218, Hoppe 2001 - Democracy: The God That Failed.)

Now try again - and this time in context:

" The situation is very different, however, and rather more drastic measures might be required, once the spirit of moral relativism and egalitarianism has taken hold among adult members of society: among mothers, fathers, and heads of households and firms.

As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued conformity, exclude and ultimately dispel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance towards democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting life-styles incompatible with this goal. They - the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, indoviduakl hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism - will have to be physically removed from societ, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."

In that chapter (chapter 10: On Conservatism and Libertarianism), Hoppe is about the way how liberty, basing on natural law and thus the guarantee for private property, can and must be defended against attempts by the state, democracy, communism to soften up this right and to erode freedom by limiting people's options to decide and act freely when partially and then increasingly expropriating their rights to indeed use their property as they see fit, and have private law treaties between individuals regulating relations between people lending their property for use by others. I remind of the tolerance.-paradoxon by Popper again: when the tolerant tolerate even the intolerant, the intolerant will overthrow tolerance and destroy it and the tolerant as well. When it is about freedom and private property, there can be no tolerance for those arguing that the state shall have the right to claim part of that freedom and property for itself, or that expropriating private property is okay on behalf of whatever an idea to excuse that robbery. When somebody enters your home and starts to steal items of value and money, you do not tolerate that, do you. You throw him out. When you give a party, you have any right there is to decide who is welcomed and who is not and must stay out, and a guest misbehaving you have the right to show to the door. This may be against moral relativism saying that nobody should own anything or that everybody is valuable and nobody should get discriminated by selectively not inviting him. But that is BS. And that kind of BS unfortunately is omnipresent in the Western world today.

[August]

Any society that tries to live by Hoppes law will just become prey for the society that doesn't live by those rules.

[Stealhead]

Originally Posted by August

Any society that tries to live by Hoppes law will just become prey for the society that doesn't live by those rules.

Military power will always trump political philosophy.

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by August

Any society that tries to live by Hoppes law will just become prey for the society that doesn't live by those rules.

Hoppes law, not that again.....

Now try again - and this time in context:

Quote:

The full passage doen't make the fruitcakes writing any less nutty.
Hoppes dreamworld of enforced serfdom would make even Tsar Ivan the Insane blanche.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

Any society that tries to live by Hoppes law will just become prey for the society that doesn't live by those rules.

It is not "Hoppe'S law". It is what your own nation once has been founded upon in ideas and what people like you often quite naturally refer to in "American key qualities", that everybody is/should be strong enough to carry his own weight, live in a free society, is his own fortune's blacksmith, shall have the opportunity to become happy, and regulated and tyrannised by government but the government needing to fear the people.

And Hoppe did not invent this modern libertarianism. He bases much on Rothbard's ethics and principle who revived it, basing on what is called Austrian economics that had a renaissance in intellectual popularity after the Keynesian diasaster. The first economist winning the Nobel for economics after Keynes death, was Hayek, an Austrian school economist. The outcome of that disaster and the prediction that spending oneself out of debts never can work, has been predicted since before the 70s, and they have attacked Keynes and Friedman already before. Seeing where it all stands today, they were right.

What sets Hoppe apart is that he is more consistent in identifying even democracy to be a source of cultural decline, erosion of freedom and liberty and financial ruin of nations, where Hoppe, von Mises and Hayek accpeted to live with democracy, hoping to "reform" it. von Mises, short before he died, admitted, that he was wrong in supporting democracy, that he was naive.

A strong defense can be erected by free people as well. You do not need a centralised government for that, but the poeople agreeing to do so. You need competent defnse contrctors who makes it their business to provide that for a payment. We have had that, and we are shifting back to that. More and more intelligence services already get externalised (the current PRISM setup for example uses much spying and data analysis done by private companies like Snowden work for one), same with externalisation of combat power to private mercenary companies. The motives to do so are different, yes. Still it shows that it can be done and can be had. And in afghanistan, a military opponent formed by anything but a centralised government, has had your hightech operation stalled. Not the first time in history that local militias have exhausted a techncially and by paper-form superior enemy. European history is full of that. So is the history of the early United States, and your independence war.

This is all what"private law society" means: that the people living in a place negotiate amongst themselves and decide themselves what they do, and not getting decided by a government that has its own parasitic interest to live at their expense and defend that, and robbing them and demanding their submission. There is no service the goivernment an provide, that free people cannot decide all by themselves to establish it or not, and running it more efficient, most ecponomic and with better net effect. The government is the worst manager of all.

The status quo today is unsustainable in the medium and longer run. Finances bring us down, erosion of liberty brings us down, wellfare state bribery and socialism brings us down. We need to start thinking outside the box. The old familiar way brought us to where we are, if we stick to them, they will destroy us. As I repeatedly said in threads: we are already living in post-democratic era. Our own democratic government since quite a while now have started to destroy democracy, and the people assist them in that, and so the old prediction of democracy turning in ochlocracies* and tyrannies, becomes fulfilled once again. Do we never learn?


* Wikipedia: Ochlocracy (Greek: ὀχλοκρατία, okhlokratía; Latin: ochlocratia) or mob rule is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of legitimate authorities. As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it is akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the fickle crowd", from which the English term "mob" was originally derived in the 1680s.

Ochlocracy ("rule of the general populace") is democracy ("rule of the people") spoiled by demagoguery, "tyranny of the majority" and the rule of passion over reason, just like oligarchy ("rule of a few") is aristocracy ("rule of the best") spoiled by corruption, and tyranny is monarchy spoiled by lack of virtue. Ochlocracy is synonymous in meaning and usage to the modern, informal term "mobocracy," which emerged from a much more recent colloquial etymology.