Society ⋆ Page 29 of 62 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Safe, Smart, Special

Sinead Murphy / October 5, 2023 / Government, Society / 11 minute read

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The effect of this conflation of safety and health, and of the attendant mass submission to technical solutions to identified health threats, is that our well-being is nurtured at the level of cohorts and not of individuals. When any one of us stays safe we increasingly acquiesce in the sacrifice of our individual welfare at the altar of one or other computer-modelled universal benefit, of which we can at best merely partake but which is fundamentally indifferent to our flourishing.

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The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War

Emily Burns / October 4, 2023 / Censorship, Law, Society / 9 minute read

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Government censorship reduces our society to just two groups of people: the censors and the censored. While it remains in place, the ranks of the censored will be ever-expanding as the censors require ever more censorship to ensure people continue to disbelieve their lying eyes.

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Truth-speaking and the Technocratic Cabal

Bert Olivier / October 2, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 9 minute read

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Truth-telling, or in ancient Greek, parrhesia, is something different. It is what one does when you tell or speak the truth exactly as you experience or perceive it, with no punches pulled. You don’t have to call the proverbial spade a shovel (unless this is what it takes to get through to your interlocutor), but you have to speak truthfully without holding back. This is particularly relevant for speaking (or writing) in public, where you run the risk of exposing yourself to harsh criticism.

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The Social Meaning of Hortatory Yard Signs

Thomas Harrington / October 2, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 7 minute read

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Growing up in a nice suburb and studying at a brand-name university one can really come to believe that life is inherently well-ordered, and that “doing well” within it is mostly about getting in with the right people and following the right rules and processes.

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Why Did People Comply?

Maximilien Lacour / October 1, 2023 / Government, Society / 9 minute read

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The threat of voluntary lockdowns should lead lockdown sceptics to cast their net beyond the institutions of the State and bring them to confront the harder-to-limn, bottom-up drivers of lockdown like parental socialism. They need to find ways of addressing our collective self-infantilisation and to reemphasize the value and importance of free agency.

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The Great Demoralization

Jeffrey A. Tucker / September 23, 2023 / History, Public Health, Society / 8 minute read

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History provides many cases of a beaten down, demoralized, and increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged, and yet tiny ruling class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as something of a taboo in public life.

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The Covid Narrative Flunked the Critical Thinking Test

Bruce W. Davidson / September 22, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 8 minute read

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The essential problem has never been about one’s IQ. Many highly intelligent people (in an academic sense) swallowed a very dubious narrative, while others less academically gifted did not. The real divider was the ability and inclination to think critically about it.

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Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman

Ramesh Thakur / September 21, 2023 / Law, Policy, Society / 14 minute read

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Price is a threat to the city-based power structures because she rejects the moral foundations on which the existing Aboriginal industry has been created. She is prepared to articulate an alternative moral framework as the pathway to genuine reconciliation and eventual union. This is why veteran Australian journalist Paul Kelly’s takeaway from the NPC address was: “Australia’s elites are in the process of being administered a huge shock.”

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Feminism and Its Betrayal

Jennifer Sey / September 18, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 12 minute read

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During lockdowns, I opposed prolonged public school closures (and lost my job over it), it was not just children and their right to an education I was standing up for. It was women too. Women who disproportionately are primary caregivers for their children, even while they work full-time. And it was women who dropped out of the workforce in droves during covid, out of sheer necessity in order to educate their children when Zoom school proved useless.

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How Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults

Ann Bauer / September 16, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 9 minute read

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Post-Covid, the crusades of our polarized country continue to play out in the area of children’s literature. Why? Because adults have co-opted the art that used to be a sanctuary for the readers and seekers and thinkers of a new generation. By using school libraries as a battering ram for their political positions, grown people continue stealing from the experiences of children. There is no privacy, or autonomy, for teens in America. Their stories are nothing but cannon fodder for the culture wars.

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Never Again

John Tamny / September 11, 2023 / Government, Policy, Society / 3 minute read

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During what government deems crisis, it’s those most willing and eager to flout convention and expert opinion who produce crucial information for the rest of us. If living freely results in sickness and death, then we all know what not to do. But if as was the case with the coronavirus that living freely wasn’t much of a risk at all except for the already very old and already very sick, then those who didn’t flout convention and expert opinion have the information necessary to alter their lifestyles with the information created by the rebellious.

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Whatever Happened to Informed Consent?

Stella Paul / September 9, 2023 / Law, Public Health, Society / 5 minute read

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Every American is a sovereign individual with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not a sack of meat to be treated as a profit opportunity. Informed consent must be revived from the grave if Americans are to have a fighting chance against powerful financial interests allied against them.

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