BC WORLD
Saved by @Alex1Powell

Around the world, very much including the Western world, real power is measured by the ability to silence criticism.

The highest reaches of power are measured by the ability to force people to speak in politically-approved ways.

 The ability to silence criticism is a signifier of power. It's how truly powerful groups and regimes recognize each other. If free people can challenge your ideals or mock you without fear, you aren't TRULY powerful, no matter how much authority you might nominally possess.
And if you can force people to speak, force them to use your preferred language, penalize them socially or legally for failing to signal their support for your agenda, then you've entered the winner's circle. Your government or movement has taken a seat at the highest table.
This is one of the reasons people with authoritarian or totalitarian inclinations are constantly screaming that opponents are trying to silence them, even when it's manifestly untrue. It's a means of signaling their contempt for the opposition, of diminishing its stature.
These people would cheerfully allow themselves to be silenced by a regime or movement they truly respected. They pretend to be victims of oppression as a means of signaling the illegitimacy of leaders they despise.
The growing authoritarian consensus across the "free" world is that a core of powerful leaders, parties, and ideological movements must be shielded against criticism in order for government and society to function properly.
The rest of speech can be more-or-less "free," as long as certain quarters of speech are tightly controlled. It's part of the "Great Reset", like reserving part of a computer's memory for the protected operating system. The OS of "free" nations must be an authoritarian core.
The core must not only wield vast compulsive power, but it must be protected INTELLECTUALLY, shielded against challenge or criticism. The designers of this authoritarian system are very well aware of the power of subversive thought. It's how THEY gained power a generation ago.
Various groups and ideologies are now jockeying to become part of the authoritarian core. They signal their candidacy by controlling speech through social pressure, with online swarms and cancel culture. It's how they claim a seat at the table of Great Resetters.
You can tell an ideological group has achieved REAL power, has become part of the authoritarian core, when its agenda becomes part of public school curricula. That's the height of power: moving beyond merely silencing critics and forcing people to say things.
Speech and thought control are vitally important because we retain the vestiges of democracy, even though a great deal of true power has been safely transferred to unelected bureaucracies that can even fight back effectively against renegade elected presidents.
The people can still turn against powerful groups and diminish them if they are allowed to criticize the leadership and agenda of those groups - or, Stalin forbid, make fun of them. Respect must become a learned behavior. It can be extracted by force, much like tax money.
If you force people to respect something - punish them for criticizing it, force them to mouth its pieties - they will eventually come to see it as sacred, as respectable, even if they quietly grumble disagreement to themselves. Critics begin to feel isolated and marginalized.
How do radicals and extremists gain real power, becoming part of the authoritarian core? By making everyone who disagrees feel like THEY are the fringe. You can trace the outlines of real power by asking: "Could I show disrespect for this and still be considered mainstream?" /end

More from John Hayward

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Excellent analysis! One of our biggest problems is that people think "democracy," all by itself, is a sufficient check on power. I frankly don't understand how anyone can still believe that, but of course they probably won't be taught otherwise in school.


The disturbing flip side of thinking democracy is a magic talisman against tyranny is the belief that democracy sanctifies power - the essence of majoritarianism. "They can't be dictators if we can vote them out of office!" is one of the most dangerous ideas in the world.

The restraints placed on power are MORE important than the process of choosing who gets to wield it. You would be more free under a tightly restrained hereditary monarch than in a "democracy" with totalitarian centralized power.

The human race learned, fairly recently, that elected government is the approach most likely to maximize liberty and human rights, but where on Earth did we get the notion that it's perfect and sufficient all by itself? The world is full of tyrannies that hold elections.

"Democracy" would be the worst of all worlds - tyranny by mob rule, with the oppressors claiming their every fancy was fully and completely sanctified because they won a vote, and why should we let a stubborn minority thwart The Will of the People?
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Just as no amount of flat temperature data would dissuade the climate cult, so no amount of flat (or even negative!) data on mask effectiveness will shake the faith of the Church of Covid. Beautiful Theories cannot be disproven by mere information.

The "Covid emergency" will never be over. It will mutate and seek out new missions when this particular virus threat abates, repurposing its funding and clinging to its power. They're already talking up the "next pandemic" and how we must forever remain at DEFCON 2 to be ready.

Masks are now a visible and tangible symbol of an entire agenda. Its champions will use every means possible to force you to wear them forever, including corporate pressure, their new favorite tool. Expect commercial mask requirements to linger, especially big corporations.

True believers, meanwhile, will wear their masks with grim determination and scowl ostentatiously at everyone who refuses to join them. It's a new virtue signal that will not go away any time soon. Mask scolding is a quick, easy, heady power rush.

All the while, studies will keep rolling out that masks don't help, and might even hurt. That was fairly common medical knowledge before the pandemic began, but it was aggressively suppressed when masks became a political symbol, and a totem for people desperate to DO SOMETHING.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
For most of my lifetime, people on the Left focused on the perils of Big Business while ignoring, or actively embracing, the menace of Big Government. A great deal of the Right did the reverse. Both Bigs are perilous, especially when they fuse into a combined threat to liberty.

The growth of both government and corporate titans was inevitable, especially after a century of industrial and technological revolutions. Technology makes it possible to have larger endeavors, both public and private. Economies of scale bring enormous benefits.

Industrial advancements meant government had to get bigger to handle even its most basic responsibilities, like national defense. The World Wars erased the model of a tiny central government handling a few key elements of defense. Every war became a clash of industrial titans.

After the wars, people - not just voracious political opportunists, but many average voters and nearly all of the intelligentsia - fell in love with the notion of using the power of industrialized warfare to address domestic issues. Every crisis became "equivalent" to war.

People expected more of government, so it grew - and then it exploded. Meanwhile, Big Business was growing too, and it delivers tangible benefits that would be impossible to achieve with only small, decentralized local companies. There is an inescapable logic to corporate growth.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
The worldwide movement toward "limited authoritarianism," already well under way but dramatically accelerated by the coronavirus, is driven by the elite consensus that ordinary people cannot be trusted with so much freedom.

"Limited authoritarianism" is the best phrase for what the elite have in mind. They have decided that a growing list of topics are simply off the table. Consensus has been reached, and no further input from voters will be permitted on those topics.

This is a natural consequence of the progressive ideology, which is inherently authoritarian, although it peddles itself in the early stage with lots of jibber-jabber freedom and liberty. Progressives by definition believe that the growth of the State can never be reversed.

Every time the State grows - taking more money from the private sector, issuing regulations, criminalizing activities that used to be free - it is declaring that the people can no longer be trusted to make certain decisions. This is the inescapable logic of statism.

You can't be trusted to spend that dollar wisely, so the State will take it from you. You can't be trusted to make those decisions about your health care, so the State will make them for you. You can't be trusted to sell your own labor, so the State will control employment.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
The liberty and mobility granted to average people by cheap gasoline and home energy is absolutely infuriating to socialist central planners. They need you people to stop moving around so much. You keep scuttling their glorious five-year plans.
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Heshmat Alavi
Heshmat Alavi
@HeshmatAlavi
THREAD

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“Iranian Arms, Fighters Bolster Maduro Government in Venezuela, U.S. Says”

#Iran has a long history of meddling in #Venezuela with the U.S. in its crosshairs.

And Obama facilitated the mullahs’

2)
Iran has sent arms & dispatched paramilitary operatives to help Maduro remain in power.

“We see a growing Iranian influence in there,” said Adm. Craig Faller, head of the U.S. Southern Command, citing the “alarming & concerning” presence of IRGC Quds Force military personnel.


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“We’re concerned about what we see…It’s not just oil shipments, it’s arms shipments as well,” Adm. Craig Faller said. “We saw an uptick in that this year. We are watching the rate of change very carefully.”

More on Iran's malign role in South

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More on Iran's gaining a dangerous foothold in the

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“Iran’s Mahan Air, an airline sanctioned by the U.S. for transporting men, money & arms for the terror-designated IRGC, has also restarted flights between the two
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Gulay Turkmen
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Watch the entire discussion if you have the time to do so. But if not, please make sure to watch Edhem Eldem summarizing ~150 years of democracy in Turkey in 6 minutes (starting on 57'). And if you can't watch it, fear not; I've transcribed it for you (as public service). Thread:


"Let me start by saying that I am a historian, I see dead people. But more seriously, I am constantly torn between the temptation to see patterns developing over time, and the fear of hasty generalizations and anachronistic comparisons. 1/n

"Nevertheless, the present situation forces me to explore the possible historical dimensions of the problem we're facing today. 2/n

"(...)I intend to go further back in time and widen the angle in order to focus on the confusion I  believe exists between the notions of 'state', 'government', and 'public institutions' in Turkey. 3/n

"In the summer of 1876, that's a historical quote, as Midhat Pasa was trying to draft a constitution, Edhem Pasa wrote to Saffet Pasa, and I quote in Turkish, 'Bize Konstitusyon degil enstitusyon lazim' ('It is not a constitution we need but institutions'). 4/n
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Bad China Takes
Bad China Takes
@BadChinaTake
I'll bite, Mr. Gray. We can even play by your rather finicky rules.

Let's begin with some of the things you have said about Xinjiang, notably absent from your more recent media appearances, but still present in your blog about your 2014 biking trip.


The following is taken from an ongoing list I keep of people who have been to Xinjiang and written/spoken about their experiences. It is separate from the testimony of detainees and their relatives I also keep. Jerry is on this

Jerry, your article for CGTN, as well as your various Medium pieces, belabor themselves to emphasize the smoothness of your time in Xinjiang. Why did you leave out so many details from your log of your 2014 trip? They seem relevant.

For example, would CGTN not let you speak about Shanshan, the town that evidently disturbed you so much?


Why, pray tell, after noting how kind and hospitable Xinjiang police were to you in 2019 for CGTN—and how you were never told where you could or could not go—would you omit these details?
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Tom Elliott
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@tomselliott
Hilarious Rush Limbaugh moment from his 2009 CPAC address -->
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Presidency Nigeria
Presidency Nigeria
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Today Vice President @ProfOsinbajo presided over a meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC), to critically review the security situation in the country. Council recommitted to the following principles:

#NECBrief
#AsoVillaToday
#Thread


The Council recommitted to the following principles:

1. The protection of all residents of all States, including non-indigenous communities and religious and ethnic minorities within State jurisdictions;

2. The arrest and prosecution of all perpetrators of crime;

3. In collaboration with federal authorities, the reconstruction of destroyed homes and payment of compensation where appropriate by State authorities for damage to property and livelihoods sustained during targeted attacks on communities within their jurisdictions;

4. Ensuring that deceased victims of such violence are duly accorded dignified burial rites;

5. The immediate public and unequivocal condemnation of all manifestations of hatred, targeted violence, and other hate crimes against ethnic, religious, and minority groups;

6. Ensuring that local security initiatives—whether State Govt law enforcement agencies/local vigilante groups/ @PoliceNG Community Policing programme—are inclusive & composed with due consideration given to adequate representation of non-indigenous/minority resident communities;
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