Category: Policy Issues
Watch “The Candace Owens Show: Zuhdi Jasser” on YouTube
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim, speaks to Candace Owens about the dangers of political/theocratic Islam and its incompatibility with the Constitutional Representative Republic form of government in the USA. He discusses the ideological roots of theocratic Islam and it’s alliance with social collectivism and separtist/fascist movements of the 20th Century. He contends that disruption, by speaking truth to power, within the Muslim communities will be the only force effective enough to bring about reforms compatible with western democracy.
How to Choose a True Leader in the 2020 Election | Intellectual Takeout | Larry Brownstein
While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris go on and on about leadership we should look back to leadership lessons from Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address.
Harris says she wants a mandate, yet Jefferson understood the country was a republic, not a democracy. In the Constitution, there are no provisions for claiming a governing mandate; claiming to have a mandate based on a majority vote, Jefferson would say violates a “sacred principle” and makes you an oppressive tyrant:
“Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”
Many have pointed out that today’s progressives behave like “Medieval Inquisitors.” Jefferson pointed to political intolerance as “despotic” and as “wicked” as religious intolerance:
Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.
So, what should government do? Jefferson was clear:
A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
In his address, Jefferson didn’t promise a single new program, but he explored the principles by which he would lead:
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies…
Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance – Imprimis
The coronavirus lockdowns demonstrated our leaders’ ignorance of economic interdependence. After the riots, that ignorance has been shown to run far deeper. It is an ignorance about government’s most fundamental obligation: to safeguard life, liberty, and property. It is an ignorance about human nature and human striving.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/four-months-unprecedented-government-malfeasance/
Watch “How Social Distancing Rules Are Created” on YouTube
Lots of truth in JP’s sardonic wit.
Watch “If We Lose John Locke, We Lose America” on YouTube
The surgical mask is a bad fit for risk reduction|Shane Neilson, MD | CMAJ.JAMC
As represented by our cinema and other media, Western society expects too much of masks. In the public’s mind, the still-legitimate use of masks for source control has gone off-label; masks are thought to prevent infection. From here, another problem arises: because surgical masks are thought to protect against infection in the community setting, people wearing masks for legitimate purposes (those who have a cough in a hospital, say) form part of the larger misperception and act to reinforce it. Even this proper use of surgical masks is incorporated into a larger improper use in the era of pandemic fear, especially in Asia, where such fear is high.1 The widespread misconception about the use of surgical masks — that wearing a mask protects against the transmission of virus — is a problem of the kind theorized by German sociologist Ulrich Beck.
The surgical mask communicates risk. For most, risk is perceived as the potential loss of something of value, but there is another side to risk, memorably formulated by Beck in his Risk Society.2 Beck states that risk society is “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself.”2 For Beck, risk occurs not only in the form of threat and possible loss, but also in society’s organized management and response to these risks, which create a forwarding of present risk into the future. Furthermore, Beck writes of the “symptoms and symbols of risks” that combine in populations to create a “cosmetics of risk.” He suggests that people living in the present moment conceive of risk in terms of the physical tools used to mitigate risk while still “maintaining the source of the filth.”
Why George Orwell’s Quote on ‘Self-Censorship’ Is More Relevant Than Ever – Foundation for Economic Education
Welcome to Friday’s Philosophical Foray beyond Healthcare!
Government bureaus are not needed for mass censorship. You only need people in authority willing to acquiesce to the intimidation tactics of an idea-censoring, anti-free speech mob wielding their social & professional weaponry like pitchforks.
Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.
“The above is a quotation from George Orwell’s preface to Animal Farm, titled “The Freedom of the Press,” where he discussed the chilling effect the Soviet Union’s influence had on global publishing and debate far beyond the reach of its official censorship laws.
Wait, no it isn’t. The quote is actually an excerpt from the resignation letter of New York Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, penned this week, where she blows the whistle on the hostility toward intellectual diversity that now reigns supreme at the country’s most prominent newspaper.”
https://fee.org/articles/why-george-orwells-warning-on-self-censorship-is-more-relevant-than-ever/
