Don't Newsletter on Me (12/7/20)
Articles from AIER, The Mises Institute, FEE, Tom Woods, FFF, Glenn Greenwald, The American Conservative, Axios, The Separatist Newsletter, Collective Evolution, The New York Times, a Foreign Policy.
These are in no particular order.
Had a good laugh at this one.
What’s Wrong With Communism?
The American Institute of Economic Research (AIER)
At a fundamental level, communist revolutions have not been about merely producing things more efficiently or ensuring that output is shared equitably. Communist experiments have been efforts to fundamentally re-engineer humanity. They have been projects of social transformation, and their brutality has sometimes been excused as an unfortunate historical necessity. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, for example, agreed without hesitation that millions of deaths would be an acceptable price to pay for a communist society. After all, Lenin famously said “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
How Socialist Dogma Replaces Real Science with "Settled Science"
The Mises Institute
One of the consequences of the collectivization of consciousness is that science is restructured from an institution of free thought and the generation of ideas into a servant to the ideological dogmas of the ruling regime. Socialism is very concerned with ideological purity and like-mindedness; therefore, science is used as a means of collectivizing consciousness, and is itself subjected to oppression by the coercive state apparatus. The exceptional features of science under socialism are the emergence of openly pseudoscientific trends and the accusation of dissenting thoughts as unscientific and harmful to society. The most striking examples of the transformation of science into an ideologically dependent and suppressed institution were provided by the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany.
Ivy League Study Shows How US Media Created a Climate of Fear Over COVID-19
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
The authors of the paper—Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook, who hail from Dartmouth College and Brown University—analyzed the tone of COVID-19 related news articles written since January 1 and found a striking difference in the way US media covered the pandemic compared to media in other countries.
“Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals,” the authors concluded.
I, Chaos: The Simple Anatomy of an Interventionist Snowball
The American Institute of Economic Research (AIER)
Of course, all of this requires more taxes, more rules, and more enforcement–more barriers, in short, to production and employment. It’s not too hard to see how helping dairy farmers creates an unintended vortex of intervention. The results threaten popular support for free markets because people see poverty and chaos and conclude (incorrectly) that it is an inevitable result of a blinkered “just leave it to the market” ideology even though the problems started when we decided not to just leave milk prices to the market. Intervention tends to beget intervention, which tends to beget still further intervention. In the long run, we are all worse off than we would have been had we just been able to avoid getting the government involved in the first place.
Progressive: we have a right to your live body parts
Tom Woods
I was reminded of this argument on Facebook the other day. Someone advanced the interesting suggestion that people who favor net neutrality would also have to oppose Fast Passes at Disneyworld and other theme parks.
To which a schoolteacher replied:
Top 20% Gets 6x More Benefits from Student Debt Cancellation than Bottom 20%, New Study Finds
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
And as far as favoritism is concerned, guess who votes overwhelmingly for progressive Democratic politicians? That’s right: Young people and the well-educated.
So, while it’s disheartening to see top Democrats seek to exploit the federal taxpayer to their wealthy constituents’ benefit, it’s not exactly surprising. The only way to prevent these kinds of abuses is to limit the power of government itself.
Don’t Confuse Free Markets with the Interventionist State
The Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF)
What all such films and shows are portraying are the intrigues and workings of the Interventionist State, not the nature and reality of a functioning free market economy in which governments actually are limited to the few functions of securing and protecting the individual rights of each person to their life, liberty and honestly acquired property. And a system of an impartial rule of law, under which there are the same equal individual rights for all, but privileges and favors for none.
Under such a true political-economic system of classical liberalism, politicians like Peter Laurence in “Roadkill” have no role to play because there are no special favors to give or take away.
The Strangely Unscientific Masking of America
The American Institute of Economic Research (AIER)
Perhaps none of this is particularly surprising in this hyper-political era. What is shocking is the scientific community’s participation in subverting evidence that does not comport with the consensus.
Biden Appointee Neera Tanden Spread the Conspiracy That Russian Hackers Changed Hillary's 2016 Votes to Trump
Glenn Greenwald
Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her accomplishments.
Who Funds The Statue-Topplers?
The American Conservative
The lesson here is not that there’s some massive, shady conspiracy behind the people who destroy our cities. It’s that no conspiracy is necessary. All that’s required is a seemingly innocent, and entirely unguided, process. Money falls into the wrong hands: the hands of the woke, or even the merely progressive. Sustained by the kind of mega-scale investment that now defines our economy, that money allows so-called community organizations to function without any real dependence on the community, and thus without accountability to it. The connection to such national networks also seems to muddy the mission of such organizations, folding them into a broad and ever accelerating progressive agenda.
Assassination in Iran sets stage for tense final 50 days of Trump
Axios
Iranian leaders are weighing their response to the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, known as the father of Iran’s military nuclear program, who was given a state funeral Monday in Tehran.
The big picture: Iran has accused Israel of carrying out Friday’s attack, but senior leaders have suggested that they’ll choose patience over an immediate escalation that could play into the hands of the Israelis and the outgoing Trump administration.
Democratically Oppressed: school illustration
The Separatist Newsletter
Now, perhaps you don’t even want to read my illustration as an advocacy of decentralization as far as the country goes and would rather read it as a criticism of the Department of Education and an endorsement of schooling being led at a more localized level. This is something that I’ll absolutely allow (you can read about my own own views on any kind of government schooling here). In any case, thank you so much for reading.
22 Scientists Publish Paper Claiming The PCR Test Is “Useless” For Detecting COVID-19 Cases
Collective Evolution
In light of our re-examination of the test protocol to identify SARS-CoV-2 described in the Corman-Drosten paper we have identified concerning errors and inherent fallacies which render the SARS-CoV-2 PCR test useless.
Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t
The New York Times
For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.
Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.
Beverly Hills and Louisville Revolt Against Dining Bans as Lockdown Defiance Continues to Spread Across America
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
The case for forced lockdowns was always dubious, especially in the absence of clear data on the mortality risk of COVID-19. But the fact that lockdowns are continuing today in light of the evidence we now have—which shows lockdowns are incredibly harmful and terribly ineffective at slowing the spread of a virus, which appears to have been in the US since 2019, according to new CDC research—is maddening.
The Beautiful, Dumb Dream of McDonald’s Peace Theory
Foreign Policy
For Americans who remember the lazily optimistic foreign-policy analysis their country produced in the 1990s, it was a poignant moment. A company once held up as a disincentive to war had become a participant in one. It’s another blow to the idea that economic globalization by itself can make war less likely—and instead, how the legacies left behind by imperial decline will give birth to a new wave of conflict.
How Socialists Tried to Breed out the Desire for Freedom
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
Nearly a century ago, a Soviet scientist attempted to crossbreed humans and chimpanzees. Among other things, he was trying to alter humans permanently, to get rid of “primitive” human traits, including competitiveness and the desire to own property.
Mike
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