Passive Citizenship
Posted by coaldigger 3 years, 3 months ago to Culture
I have always argued for maximum freedom for everyone and one of the basic differences between libertarians and objectivists that I had to do the most thinking on was the role of government. I am constantly reminded of how brilliant Ayn Rand was and as I have discovered her approach is the most rational. In order to have a modern society with maximum individual freedom, a government to protect their individual rights is absolutely critical. It remains to be seen if a government will ever be satisfied to stay within those guidelines but we, in America, came the closest to doing so.
I thought that Objectivism would take hold and preserve what we had begun but it has not. I understood that ultimately altruism would have to be eliminated in public policy and that it was born of and fed by religion but I thought that that could be eroded gradually and people would see that not only was the welfare state not necessary it was evil. I argued with some objectivist scholars that we needed to stop being so demanding of a purity of approach and gradually win them over and they said it would never work. After much struggle I came to the same conclusion and unfortunately there is zero chance of our winning the battle as long as they have producers that refuse to stop producing against all odds. In other words Atlas Shrugged is real. No individual or number of individuals with similar beliefs will form into a force large enough without a John Galt and he does not exist. We are INDIVIDUALS and as such will not form a tribe, a collective, a party or any kind of group. We are strong, rational, intellectual, ambitious, productive, energetic but we are loners, individuals and we meet every obstacle as a power of one. We will not join together and go on strike.
I have now concluded that there is a silver lining and that is that mankind is a collection of traits that we are born with in different proportions. Men of the mind will not die out. Their offspring will carry on the traits to be born over and over. When the inevitable dark ages return they will slowly return to lead a renaissance. The ancient Greeks had steam engines but the knowledge was lost until the 1800's. Sadly, in 3,000 years some Marconi might be broadcasting lyre music on vacuum tube transmitters.
I am too old to worry about it any longer. Collectivism is like the tide and you can't keep it from covering the beach by bailing with a bucket.
I thought that Objectivism would take hold and preserve what we had begun but it has not. I understood that ultimately altruism would have to be eliminated in public policy and that it was born of and fed by religion but I thought that that could be eroded gradually and people would see that not only was the welfare state not necessary it was evil. I argued with some objectivist scholars that we needed to stop being so demanding of a purity of approach and gradually win them over and they said it would never work. After much struggle I came to the same conclusion and unfortunately there is zero chance of our winning the battle as long as they have producers that refuse to stop producing against all odds. In other words Atlas Shrugged is real. No individual or number of individuals with similar beliefs will form into a force large enough without a John Galt and he does not exist. We are INDIVIDUALS and as such will not form a tribe, a collective, a party or any kind of group. We are strong, rational, intellectual, ambitious, productive, energetic but we are loners, individuals and we meet every obstacle as a power of one. We will not join together and go on strike.
I have now concluded that there is a silver lining and that is that mankind is a collection of traits that we are born with in different proportions. Men of the mind will not die out. Their offspring will carry on the traits to be born over and over. When the inevitable dark ages return they will slowly return to lead a renaissance. The ancient Greeks had steam engines but the knowledge was lost until the 1800's. Sadly, in 3,000 years some Marconi might be broadcasting lyre music on vacuum tube transmitters.
I am too old to worry about it any longer. Collectivism is like the tide and you can't keep it from covering the beach by bailing with a bucket.
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No, I don't remember seeing that. I am a professor at Florida Tech, a private university where I am in charge of the nanotechnology minor, teach chemical, biomedical, and materials engineering, teach students how to make things, and have even started my own company. If you remember Quentin Daniels from Atlas Shrugged, that pretty much describes me. It is not a conflict of interest for me to talk about this in the Gulch, as that is precisely why I have the shopping cart next to the jbrenner. For more info, e-mail me at jbrenner@fit.edu.
Florida Tech does accept Bright Futures scholarships like the public/government universities. The student gets the same money, but we aren't subsidized by the state.
By the way, I used to be in many different aspects of the energy industry, including coal, but I shrugged from those when my clients who wanted to absolve their environmentalist guilt but provide me value-for-value exchange left to take the Solyndra freebies from then candidate Obama. Thus, my faculty position is my "shrug job", and my "cover" is sufficiently deep that no one at my university realizes that it is a "shrug job" except for those who belong here in the Gulch (and there are a few).
FAU is pretty big, too. I have several colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast in their biomedical engineering program. They are implementing some of the things there that I developed at Florida Tech (also called FIT). What does your grandchild want to do?
Have your granddaughter e-mail me at jbrenner@fit.edu.
I might add: and as such we struggle to survive against a sea of lazy, mindless sheep.
Accept that without a rational society some things are just not “on the menu” anymore. It’s not your fault. Unless you want to go around cracking skulls until people see things “the right way”. That’s the route that a certain “idea” that dresses all in black is taking.
Some here seem to advocate beating up the purple haired kid down the street because he held a BLM sign during the 4th of July parade. But that really doesn’t accomplish anything beyond feeding the fire.
If we were to truly stop waiting for, or coercing, everyone else to “Go Galt” and just do it for ourselves the individual would see instant benefits. Who cares what happens to the greater world. Leave them to it. Time and sanity is what matters. Not this green fiat. And I think that’s going to become very apparent in the next decade.
Altruism on the other hand was always an individual choice and rationally could only be expressed once the individuals needs were satisfied.
Ayn Rand used the phrase: Selfishness. I think this was a mistake to use a phrase that already projected an impression of something along the lines of hubris and greed.
She should have used the concept of: Cellfishness while explaining the nature of cells and how that undeniably referrers to the behavior of the individual if able and allowed to.
Each and every cell in the body of yourself is entirely responsible for the survival of self and once those conditions are met, excess value, (different for each individual) is passed on in the culture medium. In the body, that culture medium is the blood. In physical life that medium is the , family unit, the neighborhood, the community and so on.
This my friend is what the teachings are all about as observed by, nature, Rand, our constitution and the teachings of Christ and some eastern philosophy's.
The organizations of these teachings, religions and progressive governments use the concept of individual altruism to Control the individual instead of supporting that individual right given by our own nature.
Andrew Torba: I’m doing well, Peter. How are you?
PB: Terrible, awful! We could do with a revolution. Or. more accurately, a counter-revolution.
AT: Listen, I've been where you are right now. You will get through this. And you know, this is the reason that I started Gab back in 2016. I saw this stuff coming. I was living and working in Silicon Valley. I know these people very well. And I know what they're capable of. And I've seen it firsthand.
Just this past week alone, Peter, we see what's happened to you guys. We ourselves were blacklisted by Visa for “hate speech.” Gavin McInnes was banned from YouTube. E. Michael Jones has his books censored by Amazon. Katie Hopkins is banned by Twitter. Carpe Donktum was banned by Twitter. And of course, the President himself had his tweets censored.
So, my question is: where are our leaders? What are they doing? This is happening to U.S. citizens. This is happening to U.S. corporations. Where are our leaders? Why are they allowing this Tech Tyranny to happen?
And you know what? What I've realized over the past four years is that no one is coming to save us. Right? No one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves. And I believe the way to save ourselves is by building. And that's exactly what we've been doing at Gab.
We've built our own web browser. We've built our own hosting infrastructure. We've built our own payment processing infrastructure. Our own email infrastructure. You name it, we've been banned from it; and I've had to build it.
But that has made us very resilient to attacks. And we don't really have many dependencies on Third Party providers. We're only dependent on ourselves.
PB: For the benefit of the Boomers who are watching this, can you explain exactly what Gab is?
AT: Gab is a free speech social network. We welcome all people and we have millions of users from around the world of all different creeds, beliefs, backgrounds, etc. And you can say what you want, as long as it is protected by the First Amendment of the United States of America.
So you can't make threats of violence, you can't post illegal content like child pornography, common sense basic stuff, the way that the internet really has been for the past 20 or 30 years, this laissez faire kind of Wild West where the best ideas thrive.
An actual debate of ideas versus this controlled atmosphere that is artificial and props up some ideas while silencing other ideas (which is what we're seeing happen on Big Tech right now). I mean, just this week—and not a lot of people are talking about this—Project Veritas and James O'Keefe: they have a Facebook content moderator on camera—multiple people from Facebook's content moderation team that are saying things like, “If someone's wearing a MAGA hat, I'm going to delete their content, or I'm going to suspend them for terrorism.”
Right? So you know, these companies are loaded with far-Left lunatics who think that just wearing a MAGA makes you a terrorist. This is insanity
Link for full interview https://vdare.com/articles/gab-s-torb...
Check out this clip of how he is rejecting censorship. https://tv.gab.com/channel/a/view/the...
Plenty are rejecting masks and many videos of them standing up to the mask Nazis. Where are you getting your evidence? Twitter and Facebook exodus is also very frequently discussed.
"There are problems with objectivism. First it assumes a static universe, which isn’t true. The initial conditions are always in flux. That is especially true in human affairs as technology is rapidly changing. It is even a stretch to assume human nature is static as we continue to evolve.
The second is that it assumes reality can be known. It can be approximated, but no amount of observation is sufficient to know it.
Anyway, enough philosophizing. Welcome to Gab."
What a great "welcome"....
I wonder if limited government is possible when people move to the frontier. They’re far enough away to make it difficult to be intrusive but near enough to allow trade. In science fiction, space is the next frontier, but sci-fi absurdly downplays the costs of getting to space. It would be easier and cheaper to build a colony floating on the water or even submerged under the water. So for right now, living on land is the only option.
“I argued with some objectivist scholars that we needed to stop being so demanding of a purity of approach and gradually win them over”
I think some people prefer the empty calories of self-righteousness to liberty.
“We are strong, rational, intellectual, ambitious, productive, energetic but we are loners, individuals and we meet every obstacle as a power of one.”
Do not underestimate the power of one! When I got into electronics in the 80s, the RF spectrum was regulated by the government with users licensed to use certain frequencies in certain areas. So a system in one area would only interfere with users in other areas when rare conditions allowed the signals to travel farther than normal. They opened the ISM bands to all users in the 90s, and shortly thereafter you have frequency hoppers coexisting with high-throughput OFDM Wi-Fi signals. The bands became packed with everything from home/office Wi-Fi networks to signals controlling municipal water pumps over several-mile links. They coexist by collection avoidance. They listen before transmitting and if a transmission doesn’t get through, they wait a random delay and try again. In any populated area, you can hook an antenna up to a spectrum analyzer and see those free-for-all bands being packed with users getting effective service and with no need to think about the fact that anyone can transmit on the band without a license.
Something similar happened with Wikipedia, which is not perfect but is an amazing example of what many lone individuals can accomplish. We might be seeing it happen with blockchain, removing the ancient problem of needing central authorities for authentication.
I do not think the world will go backward in technology and productivity. It’s gone up so much in my lifetime. When I was a kid I felt like there were hopelessly poor areas of the world that couldn’t get agriculture working and would never industrialize. They’re able to trade services over the Internet now, and world poverty decreased. There is a huge problem of socialism, which I think may be due to technology hiding exchanges of value. Many of these people who claim to support socialism have a strong understanding that individuals should be free to travel and keep what they produce, without regard to race, sex, or other physical traits. It wasn’t long ago when most people thought rights flowed naturally from God, to kings, and then to subjects whom the kings granted rights. So I am far from giving up. I am hoping that cryptocurrencies allow people to trade independently of central authorities and tools that run on cryptocurrency will lay bare the exchanges of value that currently happen when subscription services charge their customers’ cards. I don’t know that will happen. We are far from the demon-haunted, impoverished world of most of human history and also far from a utopia of liberty.
While less than a tenth of the world’s population lives on less than $1.90 a day, close to a quarter of the world’s population lives below the $3.20 line and more than 40% of the world’s population – almost 3.3 billion people – live below the $5.50 line. Once again you spout out nonsense and feel good about yourself.
Each day, 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes.
Some 854 million people worldwide are estimated to be undernourished, and high food prices may drive another 100 million into poverty and hunger. You and your ilk want to get them all vaccinated , virtue signal that while you binge on Taco Bell.