What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be or reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one… Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance… In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
Category: Libertarianism
Link Time!
In case you haven’t heard, Facebook has been having a rough couple of weeks thanks to a whistleblower. Reason wonders if breaking up the company is necessary as it crumbles.
A bill in California will open up its databases on gun owners to researchers. This just begs to be abused.
CCRKBA sent out an article that according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports armed citizens killed more bad guys than the police in 2020. Have to wonder how much of that was police pullback and the riots following the Floyd incident.
The local fish wrapper uses a crazy headline about Florida not applying for more federal funds for schools. Honestly, considering all of the strings that usually come with federal money, I’m happy when the states tell them to fuck off.
Lastly, Ammoman’s great article on the best flashlights.
Friday Quote- Frederick Douglass
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
Friday Quote – Aldous Huxley
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
Friday Quote – Thomas Paine
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins… Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Links, Links, and More Links
First, I heard about this on the Assorted Calibers podcast. Essentially, a gun Prohibitionist group tricked John Lott and another gun rights activist to speak to a field of three thousand empty chairs. Let’s see, you lied about (and made a fake website for) a commencement for a fake university. Yet, I’m supposed to believe that you’re telling the truth about your gun death statistics?
Next the President signed an executive order to “promote competition.” Reason has a response of yeah, not so much. Much like the original infrastructure bill, there’s a bunch of stuff in there that has no bearing and/or hurts our ability to compete.
Cuba is seeing mass protests. This could get interesting. Assuming that the Cuban government doesn’t go all Tiammenen Square on them.
And now for some lighter fare. Looks like someone is trying to reboot the Silverhawks. Considering the trend to take old cartoons and worsen the animation, I’m not hopeful. And yeah, I didn’t watch the show that much when I was a kid. That being said, I fucking loved the intro theme:
Friday Quote – John Stuart Mills
But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Friday Quote – Spike Cohen
Statism is the very paradoxical idea that people are inherently greedy and self-interested and therefore we should pick a handful of them and give them all the power.
Friday Quote – Greg Lukianoff
Words are supposed to hurt. That’s considered a legitimate way of fighting things out. And what did it replace in the historical scene? It replaced actual violence. Words are supposed to be free so we CAN actually fight things out, in the battleplace of ideas, so we don’t end up fighting them out in civil wars. If we try to legitimately ban anything that can hurt someone’s feeling, everyone is reduce to silence.
Friday Quote- Thomas Jefferson
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.