Lately there as been a lot of concern about the increasingly visible decline of the west, notably Peter Thiel on “The End of the Futureâ€:
Category: liberty
No democratic solution
Doctor Zero has a carefully thought out proposal to get 50% of the voters plus one behind the measures necessary to save America, behind measures that are carefully pruned to be the minimum possible measures that could save the country, measures that are as “moderate†as possible, which is not very moderate at all.
No way Jose. Democracy is doomed, or the country is doomed, or, quite likely, both.
The past is always changing
We have always been at war with Eastasia
Someone in Academia received an order like that given to Comrade Winston Smith, and all of Academia fell into line, and remains in line to this day, a thousand megaphones attached to one microphone.
Mission accomplished
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010. But has everything goes to hell in a handbasket, it will all be blamed on free markets, despite …
Natural law and natural rights
Doc Zero attributes the modern idea of natural law to Hobbes. This is backwards. Hobbes originated the modern idea of facism. It was John Locke that originated the modern idea of natural rights deriving from natural law.
How many CRA loans, how much affirmative action payout?
From 2000 to 2007, blacks and hispanics received six hundred and thirteen billion dollars more in home purchase mortgages than they would have received had they received the same proportion of the money that they received in 1999 – a figure that strikingly resembles the total cost of the bailout. In 1999, people warned that CRA loans, affirmative action loans, racial quota loans, began to endanger the financial system Fannie …
Court appointed lawyers
Texas Child Protective Services wishes to “protect†Teresa Jeffs from being sexually abused – which “protection†has a curious resemblance to charging her with practicing polygamy while white. The courts have appointed Natalie Malonis to supposedly represent her and two other polygamist “childrenâ€, which lawyer has been conducting trial by media against her supposed client: “I believe that [Teresa Jeffs] was avoiding service because of coercion and improper influence from …
Hatred of softly influential groups
Wherever a group has disproportionate economic or cultural success that does not rest upon political power, does not involve the ability to kill people and break things, does not depend upon hard power, for example Jews, Americans, Indonesian Chinese, Indian Fijians, Indians in Africa, the Ibo in Africa, the same hatred occurs, the same accusations, the same fantasies, the same excessive and disproportionate attention, the same concoction of utterly trivial …
A better ID card
Digital Identity Forum has a better solution for ID. Instead of an ID card that tells any purported authority everything about you, an ID smart card that verifies what authority the authority actually possesses, and reveals the minimum information that that authority is authorized to know, for example that you are over 18, to be read by cell phone with nfc cardreader.
Europe can’t stop anything
The military weakness and incapacity of Europe in Serbia startled the Serbs, even more than America’s capacity stunned them.