Search Results for: totalitarian

Why Is the Supreme Court Disregarding Individual Rights?

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The justices on the Supreme Court (and lots of elected officials) claim that they could not possibly decide weighty scientific matters and then they punt to people who know even less than them (corrupt bureaucrats or Special Masters) — entirely bypassing the system set up by our founders — ordinary citizens, on juries, using common sense and reason. 

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The Dragnet in Lombardy: Patient Zero of Lockdowns

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By way of one Health Minister Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21, 2020, the first lockdown in the modern western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9. By April 2020, more than half the world’s population—some 3.9 billion people—had been placed under lockdown.

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How Big Tech Spawned Surveillance Capitalism

How Big Tech Spawned Surveillance Capitalism

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Leading corporations employing the surveillance capitalism business model include Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Surveillance capitalism has now fused with the science of psychology, marketing, and algorithmic manipulation of online information that go far beyond the predictions of Huxley and Orwell.

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The Battle for Control of Your Mind

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These new digital surveillance and control mechanisms will be no less oppressive for being virtual rather than physical. Contact tracing apps, for example, have proliferated with at least 120 different apps in used in 71 different states, and 60 other digital contact-tracing measures have been used across 38 countries. There is currently no evidence that contact tracing apps or other methods of digital surveillance have helped to slow the spread of covid; but as with so many of our pandemic policies, this does not seem to have deterred their use.

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The Illusion of Republicanism

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The open society is also dependent on a positive narrative of freedom and self-determination. As an open society, however, it must be open in terms of how – and thus by which values – this narrative is justified. That is to say, it has to accommodate a pluralism of narratives which agree in the conclusion of implementing in society the moral obligation for every person to respect the right to self-determination of every other person.

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Mises on Intellectual Obligation in Times of Crisis

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We are not atomistic. We do not live in isolation. We live as a decentralized network of free people, cooperating together out of choice and to our mutual betterment. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to fight for the right to continue to do so, and to beat back any and every attempt to take that right away.

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How the Shanghai Lockdown Serves the CCP

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China’s leaders visit as much hardship on their people as they want, whenever they want. The global COVID containment system, like the global communist system, is itself propaganda; though the brutality is real, individual human beings are mere set pieces in service to a narrative with a goal that was never obtainable.

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Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State?

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Just as the state cannot trust the weighty job of parenting to parents, it cannot trust the job of childcare to childcare providers. They will therefore have to be subjected to strict protocols, as befits a good bureaucracy. And those protocols will be designed by experts who have scientifically determined which conditioning techniques lead to the best adapted little New Citizen.

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Anatomy of the Administrative State: The HHS 

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Across two administrations led by presidents who have championed very different worldviews, HHS COVID policies have continued with little or no change; one administration seemingly flowing directly into the next with hardly a hiccough. If anything, under Biden the HHS arm of the US administrative state became more authoritarian, more unaccountable, and more decoupled from any need to consider the general social and economic consequences of their actions. As this has progressed, the HHS bureaucracy has become increasingly obsequious and deferential to the economic interests of the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex. 

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