necrovore

What happened to "Question with boldness even the existence of a God"? (Thomas Jefferson) You should be able to question anything. Why won't Democrats allow the question to be asked (or answered)? That's what I want to know. I mean, if they didn't cheat, surely an investigation would prove that, and then the question would be answered, and would go away. But they won't allow an investigation, and they are actively trying to silence people who bring up evidence or even "red flags." Intimidation of witnesses -- or pundits -- is not the kind of thing that innocent people do. What they and you are both saying is, "I'm evading the issue, and you'd better evade it, too -- or else."

Actually, the whole problem with not having a separation of state and economics is that you can't be sure a company is really a private company. You can't tell whether some aspect of the company's behavior is controlled by private interests alone or whether the government is quietly using a carrot and/or stick to obtain behavior it wouldn't otherwise be able to get. Further, the fact that it is hard to determine or prove whether the government is doing anything, is part of the point. Fascism isn't about ownership, anyway, it's about control. So just because a company is privately owned doesn't mean much in a Fascist system. In pure Fascism you might be able to have your name on a piece of property, but the government will control every aspect of what can be done with that property. Having your name on it only means that it's your fault if something goes wrong. The question is, who is really controlling it? Of course in a mixed economy you can have a mixture of people controlling something. You have a situation where a brilliant future billionaire can make deals with the government, and in that way the government allows his business to grow very big, and allows him to grow very rich, and he doesn't have to worry too much about competition or anything like that, he always gets the best deals from other regulated businesses such as banks, and so forth. But in return for this the government gets partial control, and the ability to exercise it behind the scenes, and on a scale as large as the business becomes. People in the government don't appear to be very rich, but if you were to count the value of what they control instead of just what property has their actual names on it, some of them would be far "richer" than any billionaire. This would not be the case if the government were limited to its proper role. So I don't think it's valid to say, "oh, well, all the heating oil companies joined together and boycotted these people and they all froze to death in the cold and died, but there's nothing we can say or do about it because they were all private companies and private companies are free to do business or not according to their own choice. And, hey, being boycotted isn't necessarily even a punishment, anyway. Maybe the dead victims liked being boycotted...." In a free society, the whole idea of people freezing to death because of being boycotted by the heating oil companies would be absurd. Even if the boycott took place, and even if all the heating oil companies joined in, the people would have too many alternatives, such as firewood or electric heat or what-not. Further, if they didn't have alternatives, the heating oil companies would probably realize this and would have a hard time condemning these people to death. If that were really a risk, I think one of the heating oil companies would break the boycott -- or maybe other private citizens would buy heating oil and sneak it over to the boycotted people to help them. Finally, if the heating oil companies did realize that they were condemning people to death, and decided to do so anyway -- why wouldn't that be murder? (Just like, if you're flying in an airplane with someone, and you decide you don't like their company anymore, even if it's your plane, you can't just make them get out...) A Fascist system can make sure the victims don't have any alternatives (and can set up such a situation far in advance). The Fascists, after all, are the types to exercise state power through entities that can claim, "Hey, we are private entities, we have rights!" That's one more way that the government can act by right while requiring everybody else to act by permission. The solution is not to pass a law to force the hands of these companies, but to pass a law to require that the government withdraw its hands.

On another note, I think banning Parler is shameful behavior on the part of AWS (even if it is legal). It means that AWS is much less reliable than they advertise themselves to be -- at least for certain people. I did not realize that Amy Peikoff was the Chief Policy Officer at Parler. I wonder if companies like Parler should start demanding a contractual guarantee that they won't have their service canceled for lawful conduct, no matter how controversial. Would providers be able to make such a guarantee? A provider that did make such a guarantee could take a lot of business away from providers that didn't make it, especially in these controversial times.

There's also the theory that since Senator McConnell fought the stimulus checks, that gave the opportunity to the Democrats to "buy votes" with those checks. If Senator McConnell had decided to side with Trump and hand out the checks, the Republicans would have been on a more even footing. Which is sad, really. Printing checks like that is a violation of the separation of state and economics (which we don't have, but we should want to have). It causes inflation, distorts incentives, and ruins the economy, too.

Maybe another false-flag operation? (Sort of like Cardinal Richelieu planned in The Three Musketeers.)

I suppose on the "speech has consequences" front, Glenn Greenwald has written a pretty good article citing a 1982 Supreme Court case which ruled that, if you speak, you can't automatically be held legally responsible for "inciting" the actions of people who commit violence, of their own will, as a result of your speech. The same legal reasoning would apply to Donald Trump. Even if some people were inspired to violence as a result of his speech, his speech is still protected under the First Amendment. The same reasoning applies to Stephen King, too, who has written (decades ago now) about how a very small number of his fans have turned out to be creepy serial killers and such. Even if such people find Stephen King inspiring, that is not Stephen King's fault. I'm sure he'd rather not have them as fans. But, importantly, he is not legally liable for their illegal actions, either. Luckily he wasn't dragged into court, the way the band Judas Priest was, when two of their fans committed suicide and it was alleged that their music "caused" the suicides. (The band won that case.) I'm sure that Donald Trump has had some fans that he'd rather not have.

Good point.

Really? You think that the near-100% support of the Left by businesses and publishers is all free and consensual? Let's assume for a minute that there was no election fraud and that Biden won. Even given that assumption, he didn't win by 95% to 5% or anything, it was more like 51% to 49%. If that is the case, why aren't the businesses and publishers also split 51% to 49%? That would make sense, right? Instead, there are a very few brave publishers on the Right side -- and they have to fight just to stay in business. If it's really 51% to 49% then the publishers on the Right should be doing almost as well as the ones on the Left, since they have nearly the same number of customers. But they are not. Why not? There is such a thing as "indirect coercion," and there's plenty of evidence that it is happening here.

p.s. I should add that threats to initiate force are not just speech, and self-defense is applicable there.

Speech itself isn't "dangerous." It doesn't infringe any rights. So self-defense isn't applicable to it. Self-defense is applicable when activities are dangerous to others. If you're a murderer, you can expect people to organize against you and throw you in jail. That's self-defense on their parts. You can also expect "aiding and abetting" to be illegal, so you won't be able to just find other people. It's wrong to conflate one with the other. Sure, murderers are "unpopular," but that doesn't mean that all unpopular people are murderers. As I've pointed out, there are a lot of "woke" leftists who conflate speech with violence. -- And, as I said, people are free not to deal with each other if they don't want to, for any reason. It is not a punishment against an individual -- as long as he is free to find other people to associate with. The problem is when people are coerced into participating in a boycott or shunning. Then the victim is not free to find other people.

There's no reason for an individual to fear a boycott or a shunning unless it's 100%. If it's not 100% then there's always some place the individual can continue to buy food or what-not, so the boycott or a shunning wouldn't be an effective "punishment." In order to be 100%, everybody else has to be coerced into participating in the boycott or shunning. That's not a free society.

In a free society, the only "consequence" of free speech is that some people might not agree. And that's fine. They don't have to agree. They don't have to publish or support or endorse stuff they disagree with, either. (However, they are free to publish stuff they disagree with if they want to. You can't assume a publisher agrees with everything they publish!) In a free society, you would not have to fear being "punished" for your opinion. You wouldn't have to worry that all the stores in the country would refuse to sell you food because of what you said. If you do have to worry about it, you don't really have free speech, or a free society. "In a civilized country, it is safe to be unpopular."

"You have the right to speak, and to pay the price" does away with the entire concept of rights. By that standard, you'd have all your rights in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, too, since you also have the right to speak there, and to "pay the price." You would also have a "right" to commit murder and to "pay the price" for it. The talk now is that they're going to require companies to fire any people who have anti-Leftist views. They will say that this is not infringing your rights, since even under Capitalism you do not have a "right" to a job, and the requirement to fire people applies to the companies and not to you. Then again, maybe it won't be a formal requirement; maybe it will simply be explained to the companies that, if they cooperate, they will have an easier time with the IRS and with regulators. Do you still have freedom of speech in such a case? The same thing applies when they make it illegal (or very unpleasant) for banks and other businesses to do business with anti-Leftists -- and they are already doing that to some extent. Even under Capitalism you don't have a "right" to a bank account. You don't have a "right" to food, so I guess they can prevent you from buying that, too. Physical cash will be illegalized and "digital cash" can be "turned off." They can say your "rights" are not being infringed, but that you have to face the "consequences" of your speech. Such consequences being, whatever the Left wishes to impose. I mean, the Constitution prevents them from throwing you in prison for speech as such, but they know there are other ways to get you into prison, or at least ruin your life. The "hate speech" laws increase the penalties on other crimes, if you have engaged in speech they don't like, so they can make "jaywalking" or "loitering" into 20-year prison sentences. All they have to do is cut you off from any legal form of trade -- which they can do, because it is not a "right" -- and wait for you to either commit a crime or die. Once you've lost your job and your home and everything, there are homeless encampments full of unsavory people, and they aren't exactly going to welcome you, either, and it's likely that if you get involved in a "dispute" in such a place, it'll be deemed to be your fault, because you're the one with the "hate speech" record. -- I am aware that the things I described above haven't happened yet, but they are certainly on the way. There is nothing to stop them -- except a good argument, not like "they aren't going to happen, that's just fantasy" but like "here's why those would actually be immoral infringements of people's rights." (Edit: Even better if it continues, "Here's the kind of law that would stop that sort of thing without infringing anybody's rights." Other than a Constitutional separation of state and economics, though, I'm not sure what to suggest here, myself.) You might say that I'm "storytelling" but there's a moral to this story and the moral is that the "speech has consequences" line of thinking has some serious consequences of its own, and they are not good. It's easy to foresee the problems of that approach and I think it's arbitrary to claim that, because these problems are foreseen, none of them will happen in reality. It is not improper to reason in the absence of complete information. You can't require omniscience. There is enough information to get a clear picture. Ayn Rand wasn't actually at the Berkeley student protests, but she was able to identify their philosophy and its consequences. That kind of thing can be done here, too. I think that ARI has done some real damage to people's understanding of epistemology and Objectivism by permitting Trump Derangement Syndrome to supersede valid epistemological requirements. I see people's reasoning ability breaking down; they're saying, "well... we can't prove that our government is Fascist... we can't prove that the election was stolen... we can't prove that the Democrats won't be voted out later... we can't prove that anything bad will happen, because it hasn't happened yet... the only thing we can do is... keep spreading Objectivism... even though Objectivism can't prove anything is wrong... there is nothing wrong... it's just stories being told by Trump supporters... because Trump is evil... Trump makes the same gestures as Hitler during speeches, so he must be evil... there's not enough evidence to prove anything bad about the Democrats..." However, maybe there is some good in this. As long as Objectivism can't solve anything, the Leftists will allow it. Until the wrong quote goes viral, I guess. If anybody tried to present Objectivism as a solution, in a legislature or a court for example, I'm sure a bunch of thugs would show up wearing Ayn Rand T-shirts and trash the place, and then of course Objectivism would be blamed for it, and everybody would agree that Ayn Rand "incites violence" and her works would be banned.

I don't support "tearing the system down" without having a good idea of what should replace it. Causing random mayhem is pointless (for the good guys, anyway). That's where philosophy and Ayn Rand in particular are absolutely necessary. It would be useless to replace a fascist system with another, or with something worse -- but if we have almost-fascism now, anything with more freedom would be better, and if free speech returns then Ayn Rand has a chance again. When the bad guys are making the laws, the idea that it will be possible to accomplish anything good "without breaking any laws" is absurd. The Leftists will make it illegal to oppose them. (This may be done by "creatively interpreting" existing laws as well as by making new laws.) While they break the Constitution whenever they want, on the one hand, they will claim that the same Constitution makes it illegal for anyone else to do anything about them. In order to say that any law is "wrong," you have to put morality "above the law." That's what Ayn Rand said was great about the Constitution, that it was a good attempt to do exactly that. Tearing a Fascist system down must be done without infringing the very rights that we are trying to protect, but you can be sure the Fascists will not allow it to be done "legally." The only legal option will be to submit to the fascism.

Don't know if you've been paying attention, but only the Left has broad free-speech protections anymore. If you're against the Left, anything you say might be used against you, and it doesn't matter what you actually meant when you said it, and the context doesn't matter either. President Trump is now an example of this, and if they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone. The Left also has broad recourse to "violence," and it is the norm for them, whereas people who oppose the Left don't even have a right to defend themselves, or to call the police. Fascism is already here. It's not total yet, which is why I can still post here, but it will only get worse.

That's an ad hominem.

Even more evidence... it just keeps coming...

p.s. some more evidence just showed up.

When I wrote, "If something is possible, it isn't arbitrary. Of course it isn't proven, either, but -- it's possible," I was not attempting to define any of those terms. I go with Peikoff's definitions. Given his definitions, what I said is correct. I provided my hunch, and I provided some evidence (in the original post) that is in favor of it. So I think "possible" is warranted. Dupin has provided even more evidence, which I didn't have, and as a result I'm even more sure of it than before, although I still cannot regard it as "proved." I didn't claim my hunch was a certainty, so I didn't say "X happened in the past, therefore X is the case now." What I said was, "X happened in the past, and some of the elements that were present when X occurred are present now, therefore, it could be happening again now," which does not appear fallacious to me at all. Events are still in progress, and evidence is still coming in, but the way the media are treating this event are making me believe it's far too convenient for the Democrats, and therefore is even more likely to be a false-flag operation. So now I'm moving from "possible" to "probable." In particular, the way the media are lying about Trump "inciting violence" when he did nothing of the kind. Anyone want to show me the parts of Trump's speeches where he invited people to commit acts of violence? I didn't hear any, and the media doesn't show excerpts from Trump's speeches which incite violence, either. The media must be using the "woke" conflation of speech with violence, where if someone says something offensive, that can be treated as if it were "violence" or as "inciting violence." Because apart from something like that, there's no incitement to violence. Is it really "incitement of violence" to observe that more people voted in a county than were registered to vote in that county? What about Trump's tweets, which he was banned from Twitter for? He said, "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!" He also posted a video saying that while he "felt" the "pain" of people, that they should still leave the Capitol. (I think he was struggling with the idea that his own supporters would do such a thing and he was stumbling through trying to think about what to tell them.) So what is the motivation of the rioters here? The media says that the rioters are motivated by Trump's "rhetoric," but when I look at Trump's actual rhetoric, I can see that that is a lie. I do not see any motivation for rioting from Trump's side, particularly while the votes are still being counted, and were being challenged -- I can't think even of a demented line of "reasoning" that would lead from one to the other -- there is no evidence that would lead to it. But I do see very clear motivation from the Left. Their fingerprints are all over this.

In response to Eiuol: If something is possible, it isn't arbitrary. Of course it isn't proven, either, but -- it's possible. If similar things have happened in the past, that is certainly evidence that they can happen again (although not proof that they have happened again.) In order for something to be arbitrary it has to be completely disconnected from reality -- and as Peikoff pointed out, the true exponent of the arbitrary will try to keep it disconnected! I don't advocate agnosticism about this (which is what an exponent of the arbitrary would do). My attitude here is "wait and see." The evidence will come out. There's also evidence outside my post... Ayn Rand said something like, the evidence that capitalism lifts people out of poverty is clear and abundant... but she never wrote out all that evidence... and there are still people who will read where she wrote that, and say she's evading or hiding something, even though the evidence really is clear and abundant... Also, the order in which I presented things in my post is not necessarily the same order in which the original thinking occurred. Sometimes I am considering a bunch of facts, and I see them fit together in a certain way, and my reaction is, "Aha! I have reached this conclusion! And the justification for it is this!" That may end up being how I write it, but the justification was actually there first. Two reasons among many I consider this to be false-flag: first, I have trouble believing that an authentic Trump supporter would decide to do something so stupid. This is hurting Trump badly, and it could have been foreseen to do so. Second, if it were genuinely stupid, it would be unimportant and could be ignored (apart from arresting and prosecuting those responsible), but the media and the Left regard it as tremendously important, as if all Trump supporters would do such a thing, as if it is the most logical thing for a Trump supporter to do. Now, that is clearly not the case, but who would want it to be? Zero Hedge is now reporting that the Republicans have apparently decided not to challenge the electoral votes of any more states. "Never examine a folly -- ask only what it accomplishes."

I have a hunch that this will turn out to be a false-flag operation done by Antifa people, sort of like the attempted kidnapping of that governor a while back. The press went on and on about that, remember? Until when the perpetrators were discovered to be associated with Antifa, at which point the press suddenly fell silent... This move was probably designed to intimidate Republicans out of objecting to the electoral votes of states where fraud turned the election. The Democrats are already giving the "shame on you Republicans" speeches, as if the invasion of the Capitol was caused by Republican objections. "See what kind of behavior your objections are encouraging?" they seem to be saying. Trump never asked for anyone to do anything like this. There is nothing to protest yet -- the process hasn't even played out yet and, without interference, could conceivably have come out Trump's way. There is no reason for Trump to have interfered with it, or to have encouraged anyone else to -- and there is every reason for the Democrats to have done so. And yet, we hear again that "Trump's rhetoric" is to blame. But Trump isn't the one who has been saying "Burn it all down"... Funny how calling out fraud and trying to investigate it allegedly destroys democracy and undermines the system -- but committing the fraud in the first place is apparently OK. Obviously the honorable thing for the Republicans to do is to drop all their objections and allow the Democrats to get away with it (sarcasm).

Tucker Carlson wants to see the evidence, too. Much has been said about our "cultural institutions" and whether we can trust them. They used to be more trustworthy, but they have been taken over by the left. This was not a sudden thing, either; it has been going on for long enough that Ayn Rand was aware of it. The way such institutions should earn trust is by reference to reality. That way, at least some people can independently verify what the institutions are saying (and also, such an institution has nothing to fear from free speech). When institutions stop making reference to reality, and start making reference to leftist theories instead, they lose their credibility, except with people on the left who believe those theories. But there are still some who rely on those institutions not because they agree with leftist theory but because there doesn't seem to be any alternative. Also, there are some organizations such as The New York Times which have been taken over by "woke" leftists but are still coasting on old reputations based on the good things they stopped doing years ago. Unfortunately, the right is not really in a position to create credible alternative cultural institutions. People on the right often don't reference reality, either; they're basically dominated by people who think that Noah's Ark was literally true and that the Earth is 6,000 years old. So all they create are churches and religious universities. Such people have long distrusted cultural institutions, but for the wrong reasons; by doing so, they created an opening that the left was able to exploit, and they are incapable of making trustworthy cultural institutions of their own. They have no credibility except among people who believe as they do. (The Objective Standard published something a while back to the effect that people on the right need to anchor their arguments in reality instead of faith, so that people who do not share their faith would be able to agree with them. However, I think the people on the right are unwilling to do that; they believe that certain kinds of questions should be the domain of faith alone, and that reason should be rejected for those questions even when it reaches the same conclusion, because if you start using reason instead of faith then you end up using reason more and more, and faith less and less, until you end up with something like... Ayn Rand!) Because of both right and left, I'm reluctant to trust someone merely because they are in a position of authority. I want to see their evidence. There is a "put up or shut up" aspect to it, which I think is what Tucker Carlson is saying, also. (However, I think that the UFOs Tucker Carlson mentions are long past that point and that they are really nothing but lens flare and radar echoes.) I just don't see what the point would be of creating doubt, if they don't have the evidence to maintain it. Without evidence the doubt will collapse.

It would be sufficient to read judges' rulings where they describe the evidence and their evaluation of it. My point is that this is what judges and courts are for. They can resolve all these endless doubts by looking at the evidence and writing a ruling based on it. I don't think the Dominion Voting thing has come up before a judge yet.

The word you are looking for is not "coup" but "putsch," although a putsch is a specific type of coup. Almost all of the media are unreliable at this point. They report judgments and opinions as if they were facts. They can't report anything Trump or his team says without calling them "lies," for example, and instead of proof that they are lies, they bring out the statements of other people who could just as easily be lying as Trump. Sometimes they don't bring out any proof at all, they just assert "lies." Giuliani and Powell have made a number of disturbing accusations (Zero Hedge again) and I think those allegations ought to be investigated. They've also taken the risk of being sued for defamation by Dominion, and I think they would have been aware of that risk. The prevailing opinion in the media seems to be that anybody disputing the integrity of the election should simply be silenced, and that actually doing any investigation would be wrong because investigation wrongfully increases the credibility of the accusers. However, such a policy would be a blank check for anybody who really does want an election, past or future, to be disrupted. (This is also the exact opposite of the policy toward Judge Kavanaugh, or toward the Steele dossier, which was that any accusation should be believed without being investigated. Seems like it's wrong to investigate anything anymore -- you're supposed to just decide on the basis of what you already believe.) I've seen something else disturbing, and that is the rise of ad hominem in the culture at large. It seems like people are saying that "before you consider whether a statement is true or false, you should consider its source," which is like requiring an appeal to authority, or an ad hominem. This is wrong. The truth or falsity of a statement should be determined by reference to reality and not by reference to the person making the statement, and not by reference to the personality or history of that person, or anything else about them. For a lot of people this election wasn't about the policies that would be brought into effect by the election of Trump or Biden -- it was a referendum on Trump's personality. Even there, I'm not so sure it was a referendum on his actual personality so much as his personality as portrayed by the press. But that's only one example of the ad hominem phenomenon I'm seeing. I cannot prove or disprove that the election was stolen away from Trump. I don't have access to the voting machines or the paper ballots, and I'm not sure I have the skill to make a determination, and I probably wouldn't have time to personally review all the evidence myself, anyway. Some of the evidence may no longer exist (e.g., if you update a count in a computer, the old count would be overwritten.) So I don't know. But this is why an impartial investigation has to be done. Judges should have a chance to look at the evidence and render a verdict, and they should explain on paper why they reached the verdict they did, and it should be based on evidence. I'd like to be able to read that verdict, where they'd describe the actual state of the evidence and the conclusions it led them to. If they are not allowed to do the necessary investigation, or if evidence is ignored, that makes me very suspicious. If they rely on experts, then those experts, in turn, should cite evidence, rather than just rendering their opinions.

I do think it would be better if they had a "weirdness" score.