A Generation's Time To Legislate A 21st Century Magna Carta
On June 19 1215, a new era dawned which would end up transforming the world. Archbishop Langton finalised a document of 63 clauses written in Latin to make peace between the King and a cartel of rebel English barons. It eventually grandfathered the English Bill of Rights, the modern justice system, the French Rights of Man, the US Declaration of Independence, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the UN's Declaration of Human Rights.
Four original copies still exist today: https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/magna-carta-english-translation#.
Why Was It Revolutionary?
The Great Charter did something extraordinary for its time. It declared the Monarch was not of a "divine" persona, and an ordinary person under the Law; then it documented the rights and liberties of free men.
Among the 63 clauses, the declaration of rights included:
- The freedom of the Church to elect its own officials;
- The arrest of unfair/abusive taxes, and consultation before levying new ones;
- The protection of property owned by women and children;
- Protection of all free men from government officers;
- Freedom of movement for merchant traders across national borders;
- Protection of widows from inheritance taxes or forced re-marriage;
- The formation of a Council to monitor the government.
And of course, it's famous clause 39 creating Due Process under Law:
"No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.”
The Great Charter arrested and limited the powers of the State (the King), which were being regularly abused. in favour of the liberties of the Individual. In doing so, it offset a national rebellious collapse, and designed the future of the free world for the next thousand years.
It was precipitated by all-powerful monarchs taking arbitrary decisions due to them being considered above the Law, rather than abiding by custom. A Charter of Liberties had been created a century before which had never been honoured. The situation deteriorated into war, and the King died the next year.
The Internet Century of Artificial Life
One weakness of living a temporal existence is no-one ever knows their place in history, because we simply can't look back on our own position, or see what is to come. We know the place of Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler, or Rosa Parks, as we can see them in hindsight.
It's hard to comprehend where we are right now.
In thirty years, the computing revolution has transformed human life to something completely unrecognisable to anyone who lived even fifty years ago. The Internet has linked and connected our species into a global organism. And our tool-making has extended to us creating synthetic life forms in laboratories, teaching robots to dance, and programming machines with self-determining and/or predictive abilities.
There are trillion-dollar companies operating, and individuals with wealth so obscene now, they are more powerful than governments and entire countries.
Facebook, on its own, has a population of 2.6 billion people, which is larger than the world's two densest countries combined.
The personal wealth of the single CEO of Amazon is larger the GDPs of Greece, Austria, Turkey, Argentina, Poland, or Israel. More than the entire Caribbean, and half of the African continent.
By 2025, Raconteur predicts we will generate 463 Exabytes of data a day. Every minute, 4.5 million videos are viewed on YouTube, Google is searched 3.5 million times, $1m+ is spent online, 200 million emails are sent, and 700,000 hours of Netflix videos are streamed. Google has 2.5 million servers; Amazon, which hosts the CIA, has 1.3 million; Microsoft, which hosts the Pentagon, has 3 million; and Apple alone is worth $2.3 trillion. They can sway elections and control the military.
Hollywood produces $504 billion to US GDP in its most generous forecast. A year ago, Big Tech was worth over 5 trillion.
There's nothing comparable in 12,000 years of human history. It's happened so fast, no-one has been able to grasp we are truly in a new era.
The problem we have is if it were a country, it looks a lot more like Stalin's USSR than Star Trek. These individuals are Kim Jung Un, not JFK. Our situation is perilous, and closer to 1215 than anyone knows.
The New 21st Century Freedoms
Principles stand forever, but abuse of them evolves and divides in an ever more sophisticated way to evade injunction. In many cases, traditional law and jurisprudence is enough.
Constitutional law typically has few purposes outside of defining how rights are reserved, i.e. what happens with things which aren't mentioned, and the law needs to be interpreted later. For example, if a new dispute occurs, the issue tends to be whether the court or authority has the ability or jurisdiction to grant or restrict something. The schema is of negative and positive rights: those which are implicit, versus those which are explicit.
We cannot legislate for idiotic assertions and/or affirmations like, for example, "love should always win" or "everyone should X". Law is about defining offences, defences, and restrictions. Laws need to be specific, targeted, narrow, definitive, and be something we can actually change in reality. Laws limit and protect, not enable and empower.
The other issue is of a law being enforceable. If it isn't, it's pointless.
Enforceability might entail:
- A judge granting relief (e.g. injunction) against an executive policy, or striking down legislation signed into law.
- Anyone being able to bring a complaint (lawsuit) as a plaintiff for adjudication and/or compensation against a government, organisation, or individual.
There are several issues we have now which need addressing urgently, and probably the one that looms the most is of companies and organisations routinely violating laws because of pressure from extremists on social media.
In 2020, the issue is no longer of free speech, it is of compelled, sabotaged, and/or censored speech. These are grotesque and sophisticated evasions. Left or Right wing politics is subordinate to local vs global politics.
We are not in a place where we should ever be debated whether free speech exists. Nor should our greatest minds be spinning their wheels on explaining the differences between boys and girls. Everyone's time is being utterly wasted by the resentful bottom 2% who have absolutely nothing to offer.
No constitutional author could have conceived of mass electronic surveillance, sentient artificial general intelligence, or digital files which last forever. There may be precedents in jurisprudence, but rarely in antecedent constitutional law.
1. Freedom of Uncompromised Sovereignty
No government, by means of its lawful authority, or any of its representatives, may make any agreement or treaty permitting the surrender or delegation of a nation's sovereignty or legislature to a supra-national organisation.
Example: politicians may not sign treaties to organisations like the EU which removes their accountability to local voters, or delegate health policy to the WHO which they would be accountable to their local voters for.
2. Freedom from Coercive Social Engineering
No government, organisation, or individual may force any person to participate in policies or practices which attempt to coerce adherence to a particular political or ideological or religious perspective, either through direct harassment, or indirect sufferance of material loss due to refusal.
Example: employers may not imply workers may lose their job if they don't agree to involuntary "unconscious bias" training from some spurious HR department.
3. Freedom from Enforced Outcome
No government or organisation may enact any law, policy, practice, or program, which has as its intent the quota, partiality, preference, favouritism, sympathetic treatment, discrimination, modified scoring, or other mechanism of enforcing a pre-determined outcome, of one or more of its participants.
Example: universities may not mark up black applicants' against Asians who score higher, because, muh diversity, nor may white employers create "whites-only" companies.
4. Freedom from Compelled Speech
No person shall be compelled to use words or expression they do not wish to utter or be imprinted; nor shall they be deprived of any right, liberty, privilege, or status, on account of their refusal to do so.
Example: you may not be fired from a job for not publicly confessing a socio-cultural crime, putting up a BLM poster, or someone's "preferred pronoun". Note the distinction from the 5th Amendment, which specifies testimony against oneself in the context of criminal proceedings.
5. Freedom of Obscurity
With the exception of the Public Interest, no person may be forced to involuntarily endure the permanence of their personal record or electronic likeness in public view or other personal ownership longer than five years from initial publication. No person shall be required to surrender their right to be forgotten, or to be voluntarily consigned to anonymous obscurity.
Example: Big Tech and your ex must permanently delete your data every 5 years like the tax department, and prove they've done it.
6. Freedom from Medical Coercion
With the exception of unusual circumstances of immediate lethality to others, no government or individual, by means of their lawful authority, or any of their representatives, may compel any person on a speculative or political basis, to undertake medical treatment or employ personal medical equipment against their will; nor may they delegate legislation to unelected academic consultants or make any law which compels the withdrawal of rights which would otherwise be unabridged without contingent circumstances.
Example: politicians may not prescribe "lockdowns" of populations for viruses with a 99.997% survival rate, but can stop an person with Ebola getting on the train.
7. Freedom of Biological Immutability
No person shall be deprived of due process, their accommodation under common law, or economic opportunity otherwise available, on the basis of possessing one or more involuntary, immutable biological characteristics, which have been established as a matter of objective scientific fact outside matters of political division, over which they have no reasonable control.
Example: politicians may not zone housing on the basis of melanin pigment or establish "categories" of humans. But hair color or made-up genders, no.
8. Freedom of Biological Separateness
No person shall be forced or compelled, by law or other means of direct or indirect coercion, to share changing or toiletry facilities with, nor be housed as a public charge with, nor compete in sporting competitions against, persons of the opposite biological sex, as determined by their chromosomal composition.
Example: male so-called "trans" athletes with XY chromosomes may not enter XX female boxing competitions or womens' prisons, regardless of "what" or "whom" they claim to be.
9. Freedom from History
No living person may be accused, presumed, held, or charged as individually culpable or liable for collective historical guilt alleged to have occurred, or advantage alleged to have been incurred, before their own birth, or before they possessed the individual means of responsibility to have reasonably affected.
Example: activists may not demand collective reparations from individuals who never offended them, via "black legends" .
10. Freedom from Malicious Commercialisation
No person shall offer for trade, sale, rental, exhibition, publicly-available usage, or other direct or indirect financial gain, any product or service built with the intent or technique of inducing covert involuntary dependence, compulsion, repetitive habituation, or irrational fixation.
Example: social media, gambling, advertising, or opoid pharma companies may not employ secretive "dark pattern" psychology hacks to deliberately addict people without warning them as tobacco companies are required to.
11. Freedom from Mass Surveillance
No government, organisation, or individual, may establish any system, electronic or otherwise, with intent or purpose or practical end use as the speculative and non-specific recording or monitoring of personal communication thereof; nor create or operate mechanisms designed to frustrate interception by such systems.
Example: GCHQ may not record internet browsing history or text messages, or prosecute people for encrypting them. But they may target specific, designated individuals or groups with hostile intent.
12. Freedom from Censorship
No government, public body, or organisation offering its property or electronic facilities as a public space, may remove, omit, modify, suppress, or prevent the publication of speech, images, or writing, which otherwise violate no criminal law. No person shall be prevented of the means of expression by deliberate sabotage or interference.
Example: if a social media site offers itself as a town square, it must abide by the rules of a town square, which means preventing "deplatforming" harassment. Note: this is specific to "public" spaces and exempts private companies and individuals, such as parents. Parents have every right to censor what their children are exposed to.
13. Freedom from Indoctrination
No teacher, professor, or other educational officer of a publicly-funded institution, may advocate adherence to or activism by students in consideration of a particular political philosophy or ideology; or display partiality to any such cause; or deliberately omit or otherwise distort the presentation of historical information to achieve the same thereof.
Example: teachers must be politically impartial.
14. Freedom from Serious Immigration Crime
Any naturalised citizen who, when found guilty of a serious moral offence in a court of law whilst holding more than one nationality, may be stripped of their naturalisation and rendered for deportation and exclusion.
Example: naturaliation should not be absolute in cases where rape or murder have been proved in a court.
15. Freedom from Automation
No government or organisation may finalize a decision determined solely on the conclusion of a computational algorithm; nor be indemnified against the malice or malpractice of an autonomous vehicle; nor may they enforce the employment of machinery against the citizenry in matters of law, or in preference over human labour where to do so would not precipitate severe material loss.
Example: companies may not replace humans with machines for the sake of it, make decisions solely by algorithms, get away with saying the drone did it, or use robots as police.
Fortification of Speech Protections
Speech is something which defines human beings from animals, and is pre-eminent. It is out of the jurisdiction of any government or organisation. That said, it's a wonderful thing until someone says something you don't like. There are elements which, of a right ought to be regulated.
There are eight categories of speech which typically are not protected under law:
- Obscenity & child pornography (appeals to the "prurient interest", depicting sexual content in an offensive way, and lacks value);
- Fighting words (words are those that, by the very act of being spoken, tend to incite the individual to whom they are addressed to respond violently and to do so immediately).
- Defamation (i.e. slander, libel, a false communication that harms an individual’s reputation, causes the general public to despise or disrespect them, or damages their business or employment)
- Perjury
- Blackmail
- Incitement ("directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action.”)
- True threats ("those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”)
- Solicitation to commit crimes
Lying is generally protected; as is offense; as are insults and disparagement; as is mockery and parody; even sedition. Obnoxious, disagreeable speech is the reason for speech protection itself.
Defamation has an interesting origin: famicide. The murder of association with one's family.
Speech is the only alternative to violence when it comes to resolving conflict. "On Liberty" prescribes its immense value as giving a better impression of truth, "produced by its collision with error".
The fragile enemies of free speech never, ever rest or tire; their simple wish is to not be criticised, hurt, offended, or angered.
There are many areas which desperately need strengthening due to the "chilling effect" of extreme left-view attacks.
Complete Reversal of "Hate Speech" Laws
So-called "hate speech" laws date back to the Soviets in the 1940s, who wanted to introduce these measures into the United Nations charter. Their ideas were rounded rejected because of their potential for abuse: they designated their ideological enemies as "hateful", and everyone else knew they'd use it as justification to persecute their own citizens who objected to their ideas.
The problem with so-called "hate speech" is "hate" is ephemeral, subjective, and impossible to define. And it has already been appallingly abused for the purposes of defamation and censorship, almost to the point of absurdity.
Hate speech is a Soviet invention designed to suppress the Soviets' enemies - which is everyone to the right of Lenin. The government has no basis, authority, or jurisdiction over people's feelings or beliefs; only their actions, or Actus Reas ("guilty act"). You cannot be prosecuted on the basis of Mens Rea ("guilty mind") alone.
Complete Reversal of "Glorification" Laws
In 2006, the UK - of course - defined the "glorification" of terrorism as:
"indirectly encouraging the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism or Convention offences include every statement which:
(a)glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) of such acts or offences; and....."
The measure was designed to get at Islamic "hate preachers", which could have easily been dealt with if the same government hadn't covertly eradicated sedition law in 2009 which was so helpful to its Marxist wing.
Complete Removal of the Public Order Act (Section 5)
There are few laws as disgraceful in the Western world - perhaps the US Patriot Act - as Section 5.
Harassment, alarm or distress.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses threatening [F1or abusive] words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening
within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.
The notion of "fear, alarm, or distress" is entirely subjective and relentlessly abused. And the description of the offence covers comedy, religious sermons, or just about anything else you could imagine someone could claim they felt "alarmed" or "distressed" by.
None of this is a bad as Scottish law, which tales Orwell's nightmare as a starting gun.
Complete Reform of Communications Laws
2 draconian laws desperately need repeal or reform:
The Communications Act 2003:
127. Improper use of public electronic communications network
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
(b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
(2)A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—
(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,
(b)causes such a message to be sent; or
(c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
The Malicious Communications Act 1988:
1. Offence of sending letters etc. with intent to cause distress or anxiety.
(1)Any person who sends to another person—
(a)a [F1letter, electronic communication or article of any description] which conveys—
(i)a message which is indecent or grossly offensive;
(ii)a threat; or
(iii)information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender; or
(b)any [F2article or electronic communication] which is, in whole or part, of an indecent or grossly offensive nature,
is guilty of an offence if his purpose, or one of his purposes, in sending it is that it should, so far as falling within paragraph (a) or (b) above, cause distress or anxiety to the recipient or to any other person to whom he intends that it or its contents or nature should be communicated.
There are genuine issues at stake in these which need to be addressed - such as cyberstalking - but both attempts are appalling thought out, and again, relentlessly subject to abuse. The offences are subjective, badly-defined, and open to anyone who claims they are upset to use vindictively.
Criminalisation of Compelled Speech/Behaviour
Jurisprudence in the US already condemns the practice of compelling others to specific speech - such as false confessions etc - on the basis of suffering material harm or loss. However, Canada's Bill C16, takes social constructivism to a new level in constitutional law:
"the bill adds "gender identity or expression" to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the list of characteristics of identifiable groups protected from hate propaganda in the Criminal Code. It also adds that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on a person's gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance for a court to consider when imposing a criminal sentence."
This is dangerous nonsense, similar to Virginia's appalling laws about discrimination against certain types of hair.
The implication is if you do not "respect" people's imaginary gender, you are committing a "hate crime".
This followed the UK's 2010 Equality Act, which is about as absurd a law as you can possibly imagine from a developed country, codifying nonsense like sexual "orientation" into law and attempting to make a 9-point "intersectionality" list of Orwellian "protected traits" (age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership and pregnancy and maternity),without anyone to enforce any of it.
Politicians write these laws out of vanity to placate Twitter and need to be restricted from going any further with this stupidity so they can focus on what actually matters - social mobility, infrastructure etc.
For those who are curious, there is absolutely no scientific basis for the idea of a sexual "orientation", nor of a "spectrum" in the aforesaid, or in regards to gender. They are entirely speculative "socio-cultural" descriptors derived from antipathic terms such as "disorientation" in psychiatry, which have become axioms in the last two decades. If scientists use them, it's groupthink and timidity.
Criminalisation of Censorship & "Deplatforming" (Suppressive Action)
Censorship has valid applications: parents are entitled to censor sexual imagery from their children who lack the maturity to process it; governments need to limit the publication of critical secrets or enemy propaganda. However, outside of these unusual scenarios, censorship has only got more sophisticated and lateral, thanks to China's growing global influence and their desire to destabilise their enemies with a new generation of keyboard "Red Guards":
- Denying speakers a "platform" to speak;
- Manufactured outcry as appeals for banning speakers;
- Cancelling invitations to speak;
- Inflating event "security" costs;
- Intimidation by harassment, violence, or "doxxing";
- Activists wrongly conflating speech with "harm" or "violence";
- Campaigns and boycotts on social media to increase corporate liability;
- Invocation of "hate speech" laws for "protection";
- Attempting to re-categorise people and words with defamatory labels;
- Prosecution of whistleblowers for "espionage";
The enemies of free speech never sleep. They call these things "direct action" and justify them by equating speech with violence, implying violence is deserved in return; or claim their sabotage is not denying speech itself, but the "platform" to speak. They didn't learn this on their own. They had help from radicalised professors and foreign adversaries specialised in crowd control.
"No-Platform" is an extremist tactic used since the 1970s by far-left groups to counter neo-nazi groups in UK universities. Now, it's fashionable in scared populations of middle-class champagne socialists, and lightweight with circles of far-left activists who believe they are justified in outright violence.
True, most of it could be fixed with backbone. But corporate HR departments are full of cowards and activists.
Is there any reason at this point not to criminalise censorship itself, if specific exceptions are made? Despite its difficulty in private situations and it being unbelievably averse to politicians who desperately crave it to avoid embarrassment?
And is there any reason not to criminalise the deliberate, wilful conflation of reasonable protected speech with actual violence as incitement, particularly if it precedes an act of violence in "response"?
Legal Establishment of the Public/Private "Town Square"
Social media companies are protected in the US by Section 230, which shields them from liability over what their users publish: they can't be prosecuted for Islamic extremists declaring that all Jews must die and Israel should be nuked.
The Internet is a perilous grey area which is not "situated" anywhere stable. These websites and their server hard drives are private property, which is also increasingly owned by Chinese shareholders like TenCent who have a zeal for "purifying" them of "incorrect" behaviour.
Twitter's infamous claim to being the "town square" is disingenuous at best, as it operates as private property and tends to get politicians re-elected if they pander to the crowd. All social media companies are terrified of the lunatics they house in their asylums, but their valuations depend on the numbers. These nutters know it, and they relentlessly cry out like infants about university-style "protection" in "safe spaces" to hall monitoring, 20-something graduate "moderators" who side with their abusive behaviour and insane ideas.
So-called "public" spaces held on private property need to conform to the laws about public spaces - particularly if they are offered freely. It may not be the sidewalk, but if you offer your private property as a public space, you don't inherit the right to determine what someone may or may not say. It's not a dinner party at your house when 200,000 people are there.
Yes, you can leave them, as you can change the channel. They go bust, and another one takes their place who behaves the same.
Criminalisation of Firing Staff Harassed by Extremists
A private company rarely has the absolute right to fire an employee; even in "at-will" states there are protections against malevolent practices or bad faith. The primary weapon used to create the "Chilling Effect" in Western society is the threat of economic disenfranchisement, or penury. In short, getting fired for holding the "incorrect" opinion or refusing to be "re-programmed" by "training" schemes about "ethics".
Being blackballed in a globalised world is close to an economic death sentence.
These "policies" (which used to be the refrain of governments), along with their foolish notions of "affirmative action" - based on Black Legends distributed by social science charlatans - have moved from discriminating against individuals with proven membership in a group with a white nationalist political goal, to individuals who supposedly harbour an unprovable, ethereal internal "belief" in racial "supremacy".
Which has now gone so far as to include anyone with a certain skin colour - again - who is part of an invisible "system" of religious sin with its demonic air, they must publicly confess. Religious fundamentalism has no place in the workplace; secular, or otherwise.
The enemies of free speech, who never sleep, haven't let it go unnoticed. Their puritan Red Guard zealotry now has, as its default, the Hecklers' Veto on steroids - retributive social media campaigns to "out" employees or their personal information ("doxxing") so their employer disowns them to get rid of the stigma by association.
They just keep going and getting worse. Left-wing extremism needs to be reined in. It always does.
It's a disgusting, vindictive, and lamentable social hysteria for which anonymous harassers pay no price.
The problem is worsened by employees internally complaining to idiotic HR departments they don't feel "safe", which scares executives into ever-present "concern" about being sued. Yet, they hire these idiots.
Companies need to be more scared of the price they will pay under the law for firing a victim of harassment, than the price they will pay in an imaginary future lawsuit from a liberal arts graduate who never got their safe space. Employees need a defense; a shield for their own conscience against extremism. Companies need the defense when firing known activist troublemakers which goes beyond defamation.
In the age of social media, it needs to be Illegal to fire someone who is the victim of an internal or external campaign to ruin them. The victim needs the ability to sue for loss of employment. It is not enough - not even close - to rely on companies to stand up to Twitter.
Restriction of Malevolent Editorial Practices
"Fake News" isn't a new idea. The press has been a disaster for hundreds of years, with Fleet Street leading the race to the bottom. It cannot be regulated, it will not self-regulate, and its entire existent is one of self-justification in the face of a track record so disturbing it defies belief.
What's new is it is dying.
Newspapers have never been under such pressure: thousands of new competitors; attention-deficit readers with new electronic preferences; under-skilled, radicalised graduates wanting to save the world and proselytize on a "platform" instead of journalism students; over-sensitive advertisers fighting Twitter boycotts. You name it, they are fighting it. And few have any sympathy, because they don't deserve it.
The press have been spinning, twisting, discrediting, defaming, lying, libelling, propagandizing, and laughing at their own malfeasance forever. It's not going to change. What's changed is we all found out.
However, the Press must be free. There can be no compromise, as there can be none with speech.
Labelling of Editorialisation
On of the biggest problems with the BBC has become its indulgence of editorial "magazine" content. Despite previously being the impartial messenger of fact through its World Service, its competition with commercial competitors now leads it to taking editorial positions which license-payers resent subsidising. There are too many to name.
US cable news is in a similar predicament: its nighttime anchors dispense sermons on events to infuriate viewers, as we engage more zealously with what outrages us.
This subject is tricky. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't address it. And it may involve cleverly-worded legislation tied to the publication of material, as opposed to the reporting of information.
The problem is journalists always subjectively interpret factual information. But that is the key: factual information is separate from our view of it, as we aspire to in legal proceedings. There are matters of fact, matters of opinion, and matters of hearsay.
Readers and viewers must be made aware when what is being said is not factual, but editorial. In the old days, it used to contained to the editor's column, the Op-Ed, and the "opinion" section. There has to be a wall of demarcation which also extends to the digital realm.
Identification of Unprivileged Sources
One of the most cynical tricks journalists employ is to cite anonymous "sources". Many times there are serious reasons not to name an actual source; their safety might be jeopardised, for example.
But in most cases, it's simply they don't exist.
"Experts say..." and "sources say..." are a verifiably risible method of begging the question and injecting activism into questionable content. More often than not, a bored, hungry hack wants to rant, has nothing to write, no expense budget, and a page to fill. The answer is to get on Twitter, follow a hashtag, and report on a non-event nobody cares about.
Two thirds down the page, 3 anonymous accounts are quoted making ridiculous claims as if they are high-profile celebrities discussing a serious social issue.
Or, of course, two radicalised social science professors who have authored obscure "journal" papers analyzing pornography or racism on Mars, are cited as authoritative sources reflecting mainstream views.
A functioning press is essential as a sense-making system, not just as a fourth estate whose goal is to torture politicians.
Newspaper need to be suffer consequences if they deliberately disguise political campaigning as factual information, or claim useless sources are mainstream authoritative opinion, if they want to occupy the position of our primary sense-making institutions. And that threat can only come from self-regulation (which hasn't worked in 300 years), or a lawsuit for conflation.
Protection of Children
Nothing inflames a discussion more than the mention of harm to children. It runs deep, as the last bulwark of decency. Children are vulnerable, and cowards target them in lieu of being too afraid of adults who can fight back.
But one alarming and unimpeachable fact remains: extremists like to groom and indoctrinate kids as young as they can get them. Religions and cults do it; abusers and predators do it; criminals and thugs do it; political activists do it; and sadly, increasingly, educators are doing it. Both Lenin and Mao were obsessed with "re-making" the "Soviet Man" and "Soviet Woman" from the ground up, as Joseph Kony is obsessed with child soldiers.
Fourth-class graduate degree sociology activists who are obsessed with social constructionism (i.e. nurture, or everything being learned, rather than nature) are logically and inevitably going to be obsessed with engineering what children learn, so they can save the world.
When they haven't read any history, the result is self-evident.
Children have been the unassailable, immiserated casualty of the fourth industrial revolution. They were also the casualties of all the others. They are impressionable, and now swamped in a world of chaos where one foolish photo damns them for life.
Reforming the "Right" to Kill Your Own Offspring
Abortion is a thorny topic, as it is really a proxy for the resentment of womens' lack of physical autonomy and the transformative effects of motherhood.
The debate over the "right" to feticide is defined on one line: when personhood begins. For the religious, it is conception, or before; for the secular, it is so-called "viability" outside the womb. No-one in their right mind would condone abortion the day before a birth at eight and a half months. If the feotus is a person, it's not "your" body.
The canards and strawmen of rape, incest, etc tend to make up no more than 5% of procedures; the vast majority are "unwanted" pregnancies under 12 weeks, in an age of unlimited, universally-available, 99%-effective contraception requiring no male input to acquire.
The 1967 Abortion Act in the UK carves out multiple scenarios in which a procedure may be made available on the consent of two doctors (of which one is always in a back room signing the form). The Act is extremely short, but it's main clauses are:
(a) that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family; or
(b)that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or....
Almost all abortions "on demand" are carried out under the "injury to mental health" provision. Why "any existing children" is mentioned is bizarre, to say the least. There are huge problems with this law and those which came after it.
What exactly is "mental injury"? How is it measured? What are the exact medical conditions implied here?
Depression? Sadness?
And why exactly does feticide relieve or avert it? How is a doctor in a place to decide whether the risk would be greater than if the pregnancy had not occurred?
Abortion is sadly a necessary evil in limited circumstances and absolutely no cause for celebration, or a cause of "emancipation". Rape, incest, lethality to the mother, and horrible abnormality are thankfully rare and unusual. The moral choice is arduous and traumatic to everyone involved.
After 50 years, the time has come to decide the limits of any supposed human "right" to kill your own offspring. We have decided the State may not take the life even of a murderer. Abortion has risen steadily, even against population rise and claims it has fallen over the decade: in 2018, 19.9 per 1000 women aged 30-34, and an all-time national high of 200,000 had been reached.
The issue is not whether abortion should be legally available. It is of its limits and permissibility.
The idea of responsibility-free sex was over in 1970.
And as a priority, the development of a male contraceptive medication needs to be fast-tracked.
Criminalising the Use of Gender-Changing Surgery & Medication
There is little debate over this when it comes to the vast majority of people. In the UK, the courts have ruled unequivocally children under 17 require a judge's approval to be administrated drugs which arrest pubescence. These compounds, gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists (e.g. leuprorelin), inhibit the production of sex hormones and are only used in children to deal with early-onset puberty and idiopathic stature irregularity.
Likewise, the butchery of sex-reassignment surgery (or its Orwellian name "gender confirmation surgery"), which rarely improves anyone's dysphoria, is so barbaric it almost defies description - breasts and penises cut off, the body treating the artificial vagina as a pus-soaked "wound" - no doctor with a conscience should perform these procedures on any adult, let alone children.
Why anyone thinks this kind of Mengele-esque experimentation has any basis in a modern society is beyond explanation. The insanity at work is so extreme it cannot be rationalised, and urgent action is necessary if we have parents naive and/or self-righteous enough to think they are being "compassionate".
There is little room for ambiguity here: these surgeries need to be entirely illegal and off-limits to children.
Restriction of Addictively-Designed Products
To walk into a casino, you must be 18, or in some cases, 21. Because gambling can be destructive and addictive. To buy cigarettes or alcohol, you must be the same, for the same reasons.
The same techniques which are used to addict players in casinos are used to build social media platforms. They are based on Skinner's Operant Conditioning Chamber ("Skinner's Box"), and were developed at Stanford in the 90s for use in keeping people as engaged as possible with technology. In the industry they are known as "dark patterns". Your Facebook notification icon is red, because red indicates a dangerous snake in the grass ahead; your "refresh" pull on Instagram down the screen is a gambling machine lever.
Silicon Valley doesn't just admit to this engineering, it glorifies and venerates itself for its genius in giving Facebook 2.6 billion users. As teenage girls bully each other in messages between fending off sexual predators and distorting their faces with "beauty" apps, just before an endless stream of anorexia-promoting videos on YouTube. They market addictive products as harmless toys.
Is there any reason for a 12 year old to have instant messaging? Or a 15 year-old?
If we don't allow you to gamble in a casino at 17, why exactly are children on social media? Aren't we done with the attitude which created the genre of bitchy fashion magazines making women feel insecure with depictions of perfect beauty and peer rivalry?
Restriction of Access to Unpaywalled Pornography
The data is in about porn. It's unbelievably destructive and even has serious neurological effects. It's a massive, unregulated money-laundering scheme run out of Laval (Quebec), by a cabal of shysters who allow fake rape, child exploitation, and revenge doxxing, as part of the business model.
Kids love YouTube. It's the new TV. All their heroes are YouTubers. 9 year-olds make millions reviewing toys. And they are also nasty; loving to shock their friends.
Yes, parents can configure their router with software rules to secure their home connection. Yes, they can tweak their kids' phones with the same.
But the nightmare scenario is your five year-old kid on the bus to school with plenty of other kids who haven't done the same, who shove it in your child's face to shock-bully them. And that doesn't even come close to the harm it does to teenage girls or the drug-addicted "performers" paying off their student loans.
The word "pornography" is a portmanteau of the Greek "porne" (sexual immorality, usually prostitution, but often fornication) and "graphos" (to record, or depict). It is evil. It ruins marriages. It destroys relationships and counterfeits intimacy. But for adults, it's legal. And a form of free expression we cannot ban unless it breaches the constraint of obscenity (which most of Takashi Miike's films also do).
You can buy cigarettes too. Adults should be free to make their own decisions, and there will always be a market willing to help them harm themselves.
The idea five year old children can freely access hardcore pornography is utterly insane. Ask a friend who is a parent. It has happened to them. Imagine trying to explain it to an infant.
Online pornography needs to be completely paywalled (no previews), and search engines need to remove cached material. Period. There is no speech argument when it comes to kids.
Revocation of Social Education Programs in Schools & Anti-Laundering Penalties
There has only ever been one justification for teaching children about sex or relationships in schools: because their parents don't, won't, or fail at it. With the Internet, that idea isn't merely moot, it is almost theatrical. School is a place for academic training, not social indoctrination. Teachers have increasingly become activists, or been handed dubious curriculum from exam board activists they "must" teach.
From March 2018, "age-appropriate" sex and "relationship" education became compulsory in UK schools thanks to a dangerous alliance of the deeply stupid - the (entirely unnecessary) Department of Education and (entirely political) teachers unions. All under the guise of a "sexual health timebomb". The same politicised unions who lobbied for the repeal of a sanction banning the "promotion" of homosexuality in classroom lessons.
The idea fifteen year-olds need help on avoiding pregnancy when they can watch full-length Bukkake for free on their phone is palpably fatuous. They need physical exercise. And music. And adventure. They do not need politicised agendas when we need mathematicians who can get us to Mars or biologists who can create vaccines.
The issue here is students are victims of the same "chilling effect" found in the workplace: they are required to adhere to a "correct" orthodoxy prescribed by educational authorities, of whom 99.9% subscribe to one specific political party. These same unions bought the country to its knees in the 70s, and were radical left-wing Trotsky students. There are few, if any, teachers in public schools who vote to the right of Stalin. If that seems dubious, take a look at Twitter, where they post about how they deliberately inject material to influence kids as part of a political mission. The law requires them to be impartial, yet they flout it publicly.
Many of these individuals and organisations were campaigners for the Gay Liberation Front (GLF)'s so-called "manifesto" which is still on display in the British Library. Sceptics should look carefully at the section on the taboo of "child sexuality" which claims "everyone knows" develops earlier than expected, and children should be "encouraged" to express.
And that all assumes the kids follow their Pavlovian training. If they disown it, we get the Hitler Youth. It's playing with fire.
Parents may no longer remove their children from classes where they are taught the virtues of drag queens or receive "encouragement" on their imaginary gender.
Yet the most alarming development is the inclusion of the same material - after it has been driven out by the Board or concerned parents from social classes - into the "anti-bullying" curriculum. Yes, if you are a kid these days you don't fight it out in the playground and build resilience for the shitshow life will throw at you, you have to undergo Soviet re-education policies.
You will be indoctrinated - whether it is your "relationship" class you howl with laughter at, or the "anti-bullying" session where you learn it's bad, punishable, wrong, illegal, and like, so immoral, to disbelieve other kids when they tell you they think they are Foxkin-gender because they saw it on Tumblr. And everyone who is kind votes Labour because they're the only heroes who aren't secret fascists, like Israel.
In an ideal world, school would be a place for good faith inclusion of discussion of social topics. But the last 30 years have seen the politicisation of children by adults, yet again, which aims to not help them think for themselves, but take on an inappropriate role for the State, and ensure they think a certain way. There is a place for politics - university. Not before 18, and not for activists to train more activists to fight the people they resent.
If the teaching is politicised or politically divisive, no. It has to go. Not because it's not a good idea, but simply because it can't be implemented properly.
Protections Against Extremism & Ideological Harassment
It's simpler to define extremism than one might think: its border is when the intent of seeking consensus stops. As soon as your ideas stop being based on seeking consensus and are about implementing your own will, you're in the realm of extremism. It happens on both ends of the spectrum, but is more clearly defined on the right because of WWII.
The Right tends to extremism when it categorizes people and starts to rank one over the other, using groupings like race. The Left, when it does the same, over-corrects by forced outcome (equity). The former fights to keep its traditions, the latter struggles for reform. And the honourable middle attempts to balance the needs of both.
We don't have too many effective means of finding consensus. The best effort so far has been democracy. And that leads to the tyranny of the majority, because the mob often turn murderous.
Extremism takes many forms, but inevitable it ends with the forcible application of the will of one group upon the other. Will that is typically opposed or objected to.
If you don't think "overthrowing capitalism" is extreme (like ahem, the Guardian), congratulations: you're an extremist.
Re-Establishment of Sedition Laws
If rarely used, sedition is a simple offence: conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state. In many cases, such as tyranny, it can be well-deserved.
"Sedition is legally defined as ''the criminal act of revolting against an established authority, usually in the form of treason or defamation of a government.'' In other words, if you're conspiring or plotting to overthrow by violent force, harm in any way, or more specifically, kill any authority figure in government, you have committed sedition."
https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-sedition-definition-examples.html
However, when a government is constituted lawfully by democratic election, and includes peaceful means for a change or transfer of political system or basis of power, there is no reason make that journey of great risk.
But our adversaries - internal and external - aren't rebelling against a King in the era of fifth generation warfare. They have always advocated an economic revolt as their political cause as the byproduct, as part of their Marxian prophecy. Increasingly, they have been attempting economic destruction, intimidation, and extortion; no doubt in part due to help from their benefactors in the East.
Sedition and its associated offences were covertly excised from UK law in 2008 under the Coroners And Justice Act. By a socialist party, under the pretence they were "arcane".
In the light of BLM, defacement of war memorials, open rioting against the police, and the utter contempt for the Brexit vote, consider what these laws were about:
"[Seditious] intent is broadly defined as “encouraging the violent overthrow of democratic institutions.” (R v. Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary (Ex Parte Choudhury), [1991] 1 QB 429). A range of actions that could be considered seditous, if they are conducted with the intent to cause violence, are frequently listed as:
causing hatred or contempt, or incit[ing] disaffection against the Crown, the government, constitution, either House of Parliament or the administration of justice;
to incite subjects to unlawfully attempt to alter matters of the church or state that were established by law;
to incite crime or disturbances of the peace; raise discontent or disaffection amongst the Crown’s subjects;
or to promote feelings of ill will and hostility between different social classes of the Crown’s subjects. (Blackstone’s Criminal Practice 2010, ¶ B18.9)"
This is almost the exact definition of Critical Theory, Gramsci, Foucault, and a large traft of Marxist theology.
These laws are arcane. But they're necessary as a deterrent in the toolbox. Since they've conveniently disappeared, their absence seems to have helped a lot of people on one side of the spectrum. The key is democratic institutions, not simply authority for the sake of it. It is the electorate who give them their authority.
Reform the Entire Mechanism of Defamation Law
Defamation is shockingly common in a generation of cowards who can't spell the word "honour", let alone understand why it is virtuous to be honourable. Honour or duty haven't been fashionable since Vietnam.
Calling people "racist", "sexist", "fascist", "nazi", "phobic" or other slur wedge words in order to stigmatise them is defamation if the claim has no basis in fact, or refers to some ephemeral concept of their "internalized" feeling. The law is clear on that, libel (written), and slander (spoken):
"Although there is no single definition of what a defamatory statement is, a defamatory statement made against someone is one which is untrue and has one or more of the following effects:
lowers them in the estimation of 'right-thinking' members of society generally;
disparages them in their business, trade, office or profession;
exposes them to hatred, ridicule or contempt;
or causes them to be shunned or avoided."
Again, this is the exact behaviour which has been employed for decades and has met no consequence. The problem is only wealthy people can afford to take two years to drag their own names through the dirt to win no prize; ordinary people in officers, or on social media, are subject to this every day at amplified volume.
Vindictively pathologising those who denounce you morally as suffering a pseudo-medical "phobia" is also defamation. Being part of a "protected" or "victim" class doesn't give you a special card to allow you to slander.
Worst still is the employment of the so-called "Black Legend" which is a form of defamation against a nation or its people:
"A historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history."
It's time to make defamation much more frightening.
Proscription of Extremist & Vigilante Groups
Most Western governments retain the ability to ban membership in certain groups, which, of course, change their names to avoid detection and liability. In most cases, it's a necessary restriction on association to enable law enforcement to seize bomb-making materials, disrupt attempted murder, and deter the spread of violent or divisive ideologies.
Most extreme right groups are criminalised, as are Islamo-fascist groups promoting terrorism. Ethno-nationalists have no place in a democratic plural society. There is no way to achieve their aims, or any public support.
The units that aren't, tend to be the activist paramilitary wings of the political parties who passed the original legislation.
After 42 tries, 100 million killings, and centuries of publishing seditious intent, it's time to outlaw communist parties in the same way Nazism is outlawed. It has a 500% higher death count, and we still have activists calling for camps and lists.
And finally, our old friends, Antifa. The vigilante lunatics trading on the chaos of the Anti-Nazi League and Red Action from the 1980s, who are out to "protect" others by violently attacking whomever they subjectively define as "fascist" (capitalism, police, literally anyone) in the name of anarcho-justice aren't a "leaderless" organisation. And we have no trouble dealing with the "leaderless" cells of the IRA and Al'Qaeda.
Antifa are simply the paramilitary wing of the mainstream democratic socialist left, who give them aide and comfort in denying their existence. They do the dirty work as the voice of their publicly-unutterable vengeance, and claim to be justice fighters for the oppressed in the iPhone-laden ghettoes of the wealthiest countries the world has ever seen.
Prohibit Former Extremists from Holding Public Office
It might seem implausible for a leader to be elected when they house dirty secrets the press would crucify them for in the court of public opinion.
Nigel Farage was the first leader to outright ban membership of his UK Independence Party (UKIP) to anyone who previously was a involved with the the far-right British National Party.
Not so in the case of the mainstream socialist UK Labour party, who ascended the rabidly anti-Semitic Marxist nutjob Jeremy Corbyn into their highest leadership role.
Corbyn hates his own country: he sided with the IRA, unions, Morning Star, Gay Liberation, Militant, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and God knows who else. And of course, he was an anti-Vietnam CND activist who was secretary of, at the least, extremist groups "Anti-Fascist Action" and the boss of "Unite Against Fascism".
Not so long ago, he would have been barred for treason.
Just 10% of Corbyn's appalling record is enough to convince any reasonable person he could never be fit for any public office, and the British people agreed when they dealt him the worst defeat in 100 years. The point is there are no restrictions for democracy-destroyers being admitted to democratic institutions - the Fox is welcome in the hen house.
Defunding of Divisive Academic Subjects
So much could be said about academia it's hard to know where to start. But if you wanted to summarise, our knowledge production institutions are soft, weak, easily-pushed-around, and vulnerable to ideological subversion because they create our leaders.
Since the 1990s, neo-humanities based on crock Critical Theory have been multiplying as they copy American universities. Anything with "studies" as its suffix ("Media studies", "cultural studies") is garbage degree with no economic or intellectual value attempting to promote a "sociology" view of the world - i.e. a politicised Marxist attack on the people who contributed to the subject in order to ruin it. Its purpose is to birth communist revolutionaries for the Long March.
Academic should be free to study whatever they want to go where the painful truth leads.
That includes unbelievably controversial topics like notions of "race", or IQ, or both of them correlated side-by-side.
These subjects are not academic, they produce nothing of any value whatsoever, and their goal is to politicise and corrupt whatever they fixate on. We have no purpose in any society for nonsense such as "Mathematics Studies".
Study them if you wish, but we shouldn't have to pay for it. You can pay for it privately, yourself.
We make a simple deal when it comes to education: our investment in taxes now, for economic and cultural output later. We need to tie subjects to the goals of our investment.
Taxes for physics departments get us spaceships; taxes for classrooms get us a literate workforce; taxes for concert halls get us symphonies and artists; trade schools get us plumbers.
Critical Theory gets us ISIS-style Marxist fundamentalists who are radicalised into destroying the country which nurtured them, entirely unemployable in any place other than a a school or university, and thoroughly destructive to normal people they spend time with.
This course of action is draconian, but it stops short of shutting down the Social "Sciences", which is arguably warranted after 50 years of garbage and activism. It's also difficult to enforce, because universities are cunning in how they allocate funds on the books and weaponise student protests of "fascism". It takes guts.
Registration of Front Organisations & Watchdogs
In 1954, the Communist Control Act was passed in the US. It is an extraordinary document laying out the cynical and underhand way the theology operates.
"the term ''Communist Party'' means the organization now known as the Communist Party of the United States of America, the Communist Party of any State or subdivision thereof, and any unit or subdivision of any such organization, whether or not any change is hereafter made in the name thereof."
http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz/~calda/Documents/1950s/Communist_54.html
The law was written in the full knowledge of the how effectively far-left groups assemble covertly under Leninist "front" organisations and brands, in order to project a perception of majority size and extort cash. They also combine in "solidarity" to create a "united front". They "dog-whistle" logos to their "comrades" with icons like the Raised Fist (BLM etc).
Confucius Institutes could fill their own book. If the Red Guard terror of 1967 isn't enough to make sure any Chinese influence is entirely fumigated from any campus anywhere for 500 years, then the 20 years of reports and whistleblowing about their nefarious influence should be.
The Right tend to wrongly claim they represent the Silent Majority. Both claim they are victims and attempt to "unmask" infiltrators or "entryists" into institutions who are attempting to recruit ordinary people to their cause.
After that, they form "watchdog" organisations and publications which they claim are "neutral" and "independent", but actually exist to "uncover" and smear their adversaries - usually with the help of radical friends from universities who became journalists. One classic example is Searchlight Magazine's think tank, the Orwellian "Hope Not Hate", the self-appointed guardians of unknowing citizens who need to be saved from cunning imposters who sell things like... letting their country make its own laws.
Front organisations and so-called political "watchdogs" need to be registered with their full beneficial ownership and leadership publicly divulged. There is no legitimate reason to be quoting "Hope Not Hate" as a neutral fact-checker on the BBC when they are a far-left magazine staff who have been implicated in blackmail and extortion.
Removal of Subjectivity Creep from Criminal Law
How do you prove what is true? Well, you try to be as objective as possible. In courts, we tend to discount eyewitness testimony as unreliable, and hearsay as divisive or prejudical. With good reason; people can be wrong, or vindictive.
In their zeal to "protect" people and win vanity points on social media, politicians have been passing laws which remove the entire notion of objectivity to make it easier for the police to score their wins.
Mentioned above is the Public Order Act, which is a travesty. It's hard to prosecute harassment or stalking. It's also hard to prosecute ugly brutishness and thuggery, so we came up with court orders (ASBOs).
"A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he: (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress." (Section 4)
"1) A person is guilty of an offence if he/she:(a) uses threatening [or abusive] words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening [or abusive],within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby." (Section 5)
It's a dreadful, useless law. Argue as they might, there is no way of getting around the basic problem that the notion of "fear", "alarm", or "distress" is entirely subjective and nebulous. It criminalises protest.
There is no way to test whether they were actually caused those things, and their experience is entirely subjective. What it means in practice is a parent can claim their own child scared them, and as long as they claim they were distressed or alarmed, an offence has been committed.
Apologies constantly claim it is not the case, but the evidence clearly shows it is relentlessly abused in magistrates courts for personal vendettas, break-ups, smear campaigns, and social ills. It is in no small part, again, to radical 60s students who studied Derrida and Lacan with their bad Semiotics ideas.
What you "feel" or your "lived experience" cannot be made law. The two things are not compatible. One corrupts the other.
This "creep" of badly-written laws for vainglorious, thrasonical poser politicians needs to be rooted out, to the last rotten leaf, as a class action.
Criminalisation of Incitement to Mob Harassment & Ostracisation
Defamation is one thing; anonymous Twitter mobs are another. In the days when a single inoffensive post containing mainstream opinion can get you death threats, pitchfork mobs, employment termination - and one exceedingly radical fringe know it - it's time to carve out a new batch of offences that stretch beyond defamation into incitement.
There are so many examples of this behaviour it has become the de facto standard on social media for mentally unstable crazies who gather together like pettifogging locusts.
These people - if they are not Chinese 50-centers operating from a sweatshop in Shanghai - bear no consequences for what they do. In some circumstances, Big Tech defends and protects them.
It would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, but it's now a new century with new tools and weapons. Victims have no defence.
Laws on speech are clear: inciting others to defamation, which is defined as having these effects:
lowers them in the estimation of 'right-thinking' members of society generally;
disparages them in their business, trade, office or profession;
exposes them to hatred, ridicule or contempt;
or causes them to be shunned or avoided."
is a malevolent act. Encouraging, soliciting, boisterously condemning, or weaponising a crowd on a permanent broadcasting system in this way is unacceptable and immoral. We have never been in a situation where a single anonymous person, or a crowd of pseudonymous pharisees, can defame anyone else to millions across the world before, where they have no defense.
The enforceability of this law is paradoxically simple: it's documented publicly, and it is not protected speech. What is needed is a criminal statute for ordinary people, and the ability of Big Tech to be legally compelled to provide the real-world identity of the offender so they can be charged.
Remember, defamation is clearly-defined; complaint, controversy, offense, and so should never be touched. The distinction is extremely precise.
We are close to needing International or maritime law.
Criminalisation of Accusations of Collective Guilt & Publication of False Revisionist History
It is always a perilous line to attempt to mitigate what is acceptable speech, which is why the fringes are so often abused. We have decided denying the Holocaust existed is so foolish, insensitive, and vile, it crosses the threshold into a punishable offence. It probably shouldn't, and morally shouldn't ever be necessary, but it is.
It's how we now need to start thinking about "Black Legends" and the legacy of Howard Zinn's disgraceful "People's History of the United States" like the so-called "1619 Project".
History can be weaponised. Our enemy in the East did it during the Cultural Revolution, and the Taliban did it in Afghanistan. History is important as it provides identity and perspective. To start anew to build the New Soviet, you have to tear it down. Stories motivate and radicalise people in a religious way, like the Bible and other texts.
Who decides what is true? This postmodern student-argument nonsense is what has fueled the problem. The evidence decides. We know who won WWII and have aerial photos of the gas chambers. We know different sides have different perspectives and history is not an inerrant religious scripture.
Jews were accused of collective guilt via blood-libel. Even today they continue to be libeled with accusations of media conspiracy, Palestinian genocide, and Zionism.
As were Tutsis in Rwanda; black slaves in America, and Kulaks in Stalin's USSR. In fact, almost every act of mass killing or broad oppressive dictatorship is preceded with a story which places individuals into a group under a banner of collective guilt. There is no means for an individual to answer the charges.
Perhaps the only credible accusation can be said of Germany. At a stretch. Few people in Germany believed they were evil, even at the camps.
Lenin and Mao's ideas of "justice" were illusory canards derived from Marx's "scientific" historicism which proved horribly wrong. It was used for blood revolution and genocide, as Hitler's libel was. Defamation becomes killing terrifyingly quickly, as this generation is so utterly clueless and complacent about.
In almost every single case, the word "justice" was a euphemism for "revenge".
It's time we criminalise those who manufacture lies with devastating consequences if they are spread with the click of a button. It's not enough to meet ideas with reason anymore.
Criminalisation of the Desecration of Historical Sites and "Mock Assassination" Protests
What is throwing a milkshake at someone and broadcasting it on Twitter for others to gloat at? Most activists against that person will smugly grin like a child and say it is a form of non-violent protest. To date, a pie in the face is a form of ridicule or shaming. When a comedienne holds up a severed head of a US president like an ISIS warrior, things take on a different tack.
Sam Harris seems to disagree milkshakes are harmless:
"All these assaults are mock assassinations (whether the perpetrators know it or not). Pies, milkshakes, glitter, etc. reveal unavoidable weaknesses in the security of their targets and advertise their vulnerability to the whole world. The result is worse than it appears."
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was "pied" a few times. The fourth time, in May 2002, he was "protested" with six bullets.
What is tearing down a statue, or decapitating it? A protest might be covering it. Also, which statues? In the US it tends to be those representing the south, but in the UK it is those of national pride (e.g. Churchill). A statue of Lenin is left alone, when Lincoln's is defaced.
Is it the same as the Islamists who murdered a British soldier in the street, with machetes, on Facebook live, and stood there, on camera, boasting their political message?
This behaviour is malevolent, and it has a name: desecration. It is the act of defiling or desacralising what is venerated or holy. The equivalent of doing something unspeakable in a church as a sign of disgust or contempt.
Our Cenotaph is holy. Sacred. And there's no shame in saying so.
"the act of depriving something of its sacred character, or the disrespectful, contemptuous, or destructive treatment of that which is held to be sacred or holy by a group or individual." (Wikipedia)
Again, this was a feature of the October Revolution and the Cultural Revolution. The past was deconsecrated with force and violence.
Governments have been unequivocal about this: there is a democratic process to be followed regarding monuments.
If a hostage is made to endure a mock execution, we condemn it as cruel beyond imagination due to the shock, trauma, and unbelievable anguish it is designed to cause as a coercive technique.
We need to define legislation which not only specifically protects our sacred places (like the Cenotaph), but also which purports to imitate the murder of a likeness of human being for political purposes without any artistic justification. Roughly-speaking. It's displaying your desire to murder.
A flag isn't an issue; neither is a building. But there is something about attacking the image of human life which is deeply malignant. It's hard to define and even harder to legislate for, but the penalties and existing laws are not enough.
Provide Defences for Employers Hiring on Merit and Employees Fired on Ideological Grounds
You refuse to undergo "unconscious training" in your workplace to "de-program" your non-existent "phobia" of disabled fat "sex workers". You are threatened with job loss, maligned by co-workers who urge you to accept your own demoralisation by ignoring it, and eventually in receipt of "complaints" by ideological opponents who don't feel "safe" because you won't comply. Vengeful, social-climbing, resentful people who wanted you gone regardless, to secure their domination and groupthink.
You complain. Your boss has to make a decision: fire you, the reasonable one; or deal with a dozen mentally-unstable adult children, who are nuts enough to sue - or at least threaten to. If you have a thousand things on your desk - and are a total coward who was also lazy enough not to check whether you'd hired the campus' sedition department - the equation is simplistic. Easier to get rid of the one for the good of all.
The next day, you're faced with a Black Panther "trans" lesbian Marxist in an interview who clearly knows absolutely nothing about genetics and is a massive liability risk, but is clearly going to sue because you turned her down because of her blue hair.
The workplace zenith of "affirmative action" is being weaponised and abused.
Employers need legal protection for what we already know and respect: hiring needs to be based on competence and merit. They need a better defence in law to rest easy. You don't get to vexatiously litigate your failed interview or berate a company on Twitter with defamation for a quick paycheck.
In short, they need to be able to discriminate fairly on the basis of merit and competence without fear of retribution, either in court, or social media.
And Jane Schmoe, who is pushed out by the radical feminist lunatic in marketing for refusing to get down on her knees with the players on TV at the start of a sports game after work, needs to be able to sue the employ specifically for abusive malpractice (not "discrimination"). It's impossible to prove "ideological" grounds, and "political" grounds are not invocable under most employment law statutes.
Prohibit Legislation or Tort Based on De-Individuation
You can drill it down, argue about it, derail it, or deny it, but one of the biggest issues we face is we need to limit or prohibit Sino-funded, vanity-seeking politicians from creating laws which place collectivism into legislation. Individual liberty is the cornerstone of English common law.
The idea of "groups" in legislation is bad. It's bad law; it's bad grammar; it's bad policy; it's bad everything.
"Group" law is something that was prevalent in tribal humans during pre-history and feudalism; it is an appalling step backward, yet helpfully averts the challenging complexity of increasing population size. A quick win on the Twitter cost/benefit analysis chart for your little speech at the crazies' podium.
Law is predicated on the individual: the individual person, the individual case, and the individual merits. It is entirely anathema to what this generation of activist students have embedded into the legal system to advertise their "compassion" and moral purity.
Even mob behaviour is judged on an individual basis.
If you cannot prove your case, resorting to cheap, vague intellectual evasions such as "systemic" or "institutional" pseudo-crimes is childish and embarrassing. It's the equivalent of a child tantruming about something being everyone else's fault.
Someone's race is not relevant if they are charged with murder; the evidence convicts them on account of their behaviour, beyond a reasonable doubt of twelve of their peers they can effectively choose. Their actions.
De-individualisation is a controversial topic as it would be prudent to reserve the ability to legislate for a group. But it is obnoxious, and there is no reason to trust any politician to honour tradition after the last fifty years' track record.
Laws must meet a threshold where they are enforceable as an offence on an individual basis, and prevented from accession on the basis of a complaint they are not. No more "gender expression" so-called "protection" for hair because they cannot think of anything else to spindle on; the devil makes work for indolent minds.
Fortification of Sexual Crime Laws
If the Internet has done anything, it's turned the Summer of Love into a permanent degeneration within the countries which allow it. And turned up some extremely interesting questions related to how far technology should be allowed into our lives.
Most obviously, parents understand it less than their children do. You have no idea whom your son or daughter is receiving a message from, and neither do they. If Snapchat's disappearing images were anything to go by, Silicon Valley isn't really in the business of moral seriousness.
Criminalise the Display of Pornography to Children Under 14
The NSPCC charity in the UK recently disclosed that according to its own survey, 48% of 11-16 year-olds had seen hardcore pornography online. Most were first exposed to it accidentally. The Protection of Children Act 1978 guards against offenses of producing child pornography, but it's 40 years old.
This isn't your friend's dad's dusty old German VHS anymore. 11 years old seems to be later than usual if you ask any parent. There an incidences of five year-olds being bullied with it, as well as videos of executions.
There is no reason whatsoever, and no justification whatsoever, for an 11 year-old to be viewing hardcore online pornography. And it needs to be a lot more serious for companies and adults to even mistakenly expose them to it.
Kids - particularly teenagers - are always going to go for what's forbidden and are naturally curious about sex as pubescence erupts. It makes no sense to deal with 15 -17 year kids who are easily able to evade disruption to their mischief.
Send a 13 year-old a dick pic, leave the parental controls off, play it in the living room, let your 16 year-old terrorize a first year with it, and there needs to be a consequence which acts as a deterrent.
Allow Victims to Sue Offenders Who Refuse Decryption
Encryption is an unbelievably complex subject: you cannot introduce backdoors for one without introducing them for all. Most governments now how ways of coercing those who are charged on suspicion of offenses of revealing heir decryption keys. The law is ripe for abuse, but governments are in a precarious position.
Imagine a bombmaker has plans for an imminent terrorist attack on an encrypted SD card, with the passphrase known only to him or her. Or the case of child pornographers who realise the Contempt charge will be less than the sex crime charge. That pales in comparison to needing the instant messages from a murder victim's phone to understand who saw them last.
It's not good enough to play the cat-mouse technical game. Victims need to be able to take action on a civil basis if the government can't or won't; if a complaint is made, a court need to be able to compel a suspect to recover the files detailing an offense. It may not solve it, and they may not agree, but the combined pressure helps.
Criminalise Facilitating the Transmission, Storage, or Concealment of Child Pornography
As anyone who works in law enforcement will tell you, child exploitation is one of the most horrific crimes we know of. And one of the most traumatic for any officer to investigate.
Banks have specific "Know Your Customer" laws which require them to certify the people and companies they serve are not doing anything precarious. Criminals don't simply announce their intent; they launder, smuggle, and hide their operations.
The Internet has a myriad of ways for criminals to avoid detection:
- Reverse proxies;
- Tor onion node servers;
- Zero-knowledge hosting;
- End-to-End Zero knowledge messaging;
- TLS/VPN tunnels;
- Peer-to-peer (Blockchain) DNS;
- Direct IP communication;
It is trivial for an offender to encrypt files on a VPS or IoT network of SD cards, then connect the servers together via OpenVPN to create a private network browsable over Samba or SFTP. The worst might even add Plex Media Server. Streaming is worse because live nodes are a game of whack-a-mole.
Zeronet is a classic example of the struggle: it uses Blockchain based DNS with Bittorrent traffic management to create a P2P darknet. Every node downloads and stores the content of the sites it visits. Which means you're storing child porn on your computer inadvertently from a malicious site.
All but the P2P networks have something in common: they need servers. Either for storage or command/control, maybe both.
Child porn is illegal everywhere, but there are too many ways for a defendant to say "i had no idea" when they absolutely could have had, and should have.
It's trivial to search a VPS for Tor software, or work out if large collections of JPEGs and MP4s are encrypted.
The penalties for even taking part inadvertently need to be so severe that only the absolute worst offenders would risk allowing their infrastructure or devices up to anyone.
Reform the Laws on Rape
Rape is an unbelievably poorly-convicted crime. in 2019, only 1,439 suspects were convicted of offenses which were actually reported; 50% of the previous year, and less than 2% of those cases pursued. It's incredibly difficult to prove a personal offense against a person in an "intimate" situation without witnesses, which is why the "Morgan Defence" was removed 20 years ago.
If we had a 2% conviction rate for murder, we'd be crying foul.
When Germaine Greer, queen of all feminists, writes a book on it, we should listen. And the fact she's infuriated almost everyone who really needs offending inevitably means she's onto something.
"… it is not enough for the complainant to know in themselves that they do not consent—the defendant must have knowledge of this non-consent to be considered legally guilty."
"The burden of proof required to prove rape in a criminal court can never be satisfied; if we are to abandon the formulation used in many jurisdictions, that the defendant who reasonably believed that the victim consented is innocent, and instead rely upon the victim’s statement that she did not consent as sufficient, then … we will have to reduce the penalties for rape."
From "On Rape"
Greer is nothing if not fearless. What a subject to take head-on.
But her point is quite simple, and painful: in a court of law it is impossible to prove in relational circumstances the suspect had reasonable knowledge of what another person was thinking. If it was a stranger, or a victim displays evidence of physical violence, it's cut and dry. Otherwise, it is one person's word against another, with no way to determine the victim's mind.
All the ideas presented so far don't work, if they are realistic in the first place. Many of them entirely end up igniting a war between the sexes (how convenient for some groups!).
There is no way - at all, ever - men and women are going to sign contracts, ask each other's permission, film or document themselves agreeing, or make arrangements - in the course of mating. It's an utterly stupid notion no ordinary person would entertain.
What Greer is falling afoul of, however, is a generation who aren't capable of solving the problem. The evil of rape itself is used a weapon against one sex by spurious individuals; a defamation of collective guilt. If we solve the problem, it's one less weapon to attack with.
There are ways to deal with this, but it's a lot easier to shriek your hysterical outrage than actually resolve the problem - because mostly, it would reveal your lack of ability to come up with an answer, and betray your like of being able to use the weapon.
Protection of Academic Integrity
What we know as "academic" is dated back to the public garden - the Lycaeum - where Plato taught his school. Greek philosophy had five schools: the Platonists, the Epicureans, the Aristotleans, the Stoics, and the Cynics. Learning from these groups made you a member of the Academy in Athens, or an academic. Around 1300, Angl0-French gave us the "whole" or "universite" community of masters and scholars.
The first incorporated bodies were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Paris (the Sorbonne, 1150), and the University of Oxford (1167). Young men who had been schooled in grammar, rhetoric, dialectic/logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, went on to pursue specific professions, all spoken in Latin, with the institutions entirely self-funded.
Those professions were specific: medicine, law, theology, the natural sciences, and so on.
In the US, the top universities became centred around 8 English-formed institutions who formed an athletics conference, the Ivy League: Brown (1764), Columbia (1754), Cornell (1865), Dartmouth (1769), Harvard (1636), Penn (1740), Princeton (1746), and Yale (1718).
By the early twentieth century, the fields being studied had come to the include economics, political science, literature, and psychology, and more.
By 1963, the four main objectives had been broadened just before the advent of the Open University in 1969:
"instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching, since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth; and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship."
Around the 1950s, things had taken a serious turn. Fringe subjects like sociology and radical political philosophies (such as Marxism) had always been consigned to the edge of the campus, or alienated institutes which were not deemed credible.
The French postmodernists/post-structuralists descended on Yale and others, with Derrida delivering his first lecture in 1966 at John Hopkins. German exiles Marcuse, Horkheimer, et al, were already active in New York and California. The Vietnam War ignited student protests across the entire continent, and suddenly, universities were vehicles of radicalisation with their original function perverted to social change. By the 1970s, the "Yale School" (or "Hermeneutic Mafia") was terrorizing faculties everywhere in lockstep with Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Summer of Love, which was followed by Neo-Nazism in the UK due to mass immigration from decolonisation.
By the 1990s, hundreds of crock social "science" degrees were on offer for those couldn't hit the mark in traditional subjects, as politicians vied for the prize of sending the most people to higher education; what used to be 10% of the population became 40%. Academic journals had all but collapsed into nonsense, with Sokal infamously demonstrating how useless they were.
20 years later, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff documented "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" in the "Coddling of the American Mind", while students at Evergreen university degenerated into Chinese Red Guards.
Within 60 years, our sense-making systems for producing knowledge and leaders has almost entirely collapsed, and downstream of it, our culture and politics are always around 20 years behind.
Public Veto Oversight of Public University Policy
The freedom of self-determination in universities has always been sacrosanct. Parallel to academic freedom, it has been haram to interfere. However, we are now in such a state that extraordinary measures are required.
Universities are not independent countries. Their existence is a unspoken negotiation. That deal is simple: tax money for knowledge and leaders. In return for being left alone, we trust you to provide for our society's intellectual and political needs.
The universities don't seem to like their countries anymore, and many cases want to undermine and destroy them. That constitutes a violation of the unspoken contract, so it is reasonable for the other party to also withdraw consent as a consequence.
If a student union votes to burn down the buildings, their decision needs to be vetoed; if they decide applause is banned in favour of "jazz hands", their foolishness needs to be restrained. We are no longer in a place where we can trust our wisdom-producers to be wise, or our knowledge-producers to output truth.
Impeachment is no simple thing. Neither is veto. However, there needs to be a legal injunctory process which a jury of the ordinary public can overrule the folly and alacrity of radicalised students they are funding. The universities are not "theirs", they are ours.
Extend Criminalisation of Partisanship to Academia
Draconian as it may seem, partianship, or even even partiality, under the UK's 1996 Education Act is illegal. It even goes so far as to use the word "indoctrination":
406 Political indoctrination.
(1)The [F1local authority], governing body and head teacher shall forbid
(a)the pursuit of partisan political activities by any of those registered pupils at a maintained school who are junior pupils, and
(b)the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school.
407 Duty to secure balanced treatment of political issues.
(1)The [F1local authority], governing body and head teacher shall take such steps as are reasonably practicable to secure that where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils while they are—
(a)in attendance at a maintained school, or
(b)taking part in extra-curricular activities which are provided or organised for registered pupils at the school by or on behalf of the school,they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views.
Race, sexuality, gender, economic distribution, and so on, are political subjects because they are divided between political lines. The so-called "scientific" perspective smuggled in through "relationships" and "anti-bullying" material come from pseudo-scientific and quasi-religious nonsense reified in dubious sociology journals and political movements. They have little basis in science or any traditional subject.
There is no reason for any academic to be rationalising communism to students after 100 million deaths, or discussing socialism when we still have the camps. Nor is there a place for Confucius Institutes to "share" their culture of forced sterilisation with us.
Promotion, advocacy, solicitation, radicalisation, propagandizing are for workers unions and street gatherings. They have no place in a university.
Prohibition of Critical Theory in Public Institutions
Critical Theory has gone unnoticed for so long because it has always been considered a fringe subject entertained by radicals and nuts "needed" in institutions for intellectual pluralism. And that's the problem: it's bar to entry is so low, it functions as a semi-autobiographical subject with zero intellectual merit.
Critical Theory aimed to do for what it called "traditional theory" (i.e. academic stuff) what communism had done to capitalism. Its proponents were openly-radical Marxists whose entire goal was to rip apart Western liberalism from within by politicising and criticisng it to death.
Instead of studying mathematics, students can now choose to study the subject of mathematics and mathematicians, and how it came about. Which is akin to being a film critic talking about actors and directors. Except the job of the "critic" in Critical Theory is to show how "power dynamics" and Marxist/Freudian psychology influenced a subject's development.
In short, how everything is racist, sexist, classist, elitist, and created out of Western imperialism. Dividing academia into bourgeoisie and proletariat, and obscuring it all in incomprehensible glossolalia jargon which is impenetrable to almost anyone.
It produces nothing of any value, contributes nothing of any value to society, and its entire goal is to corrupt, undermine, and "deconstruct" what already exists or is actually useful. It is intellectual garbage.
The entire subject is predicated on being divisive. It's time to time to end any funding of this fecal matter by taxpayers. Should you wish to radicalise yourself, do it with your own money, not out of the pockets of the working class you think you are trying to liberate.
Commission the Intellectual Desconstruction of "Race"
"Race" is a nebulous and inflammatory idea. It has never made much sense, and was born out of a scientific push to taxonomise the human animal. We need to know why it was a foolish avenue of pursuit, and we need to be able to explain why clearly. Not only foolish, but cruel, abused, and ultimately, murderous.
Darwin's infamous tome on how organisms come into existence has a strange title:
"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life)"
It reflects a bygone age.
"Race" is a bizarre and nebulous concept synonymous with "subspecies" which arose "somewhere between 1730 and 1790". It was an attempt to categorize human phenotypes ("the observable characteristics or traits of an organism that are produced by the interaction of the genotype and the environment : the physical expression of one or more genes") by the same community who gave us vivisection, eugenics, and are now the zealots of apocalyptic "climate change": our beloved and worshiped scientists.
There are a plethora of other terms which make life a little easier: population, ethnicity, cline, etc.
It's not scientifically useful. What "race" is the child of a Sudanese man and a blonde Swedish woman, who has a child with a Japanese spouse?
Our world made a critical and quasi-genocidal error when it pivoted from the idea of being able to categorize the differences between human groupings, and then conflating them with ability, i.e. the correlation vs causation argument. It's now self-evidently and manifestly incorrect, and an artifact of history, like "mental science" or "Mesmerism".
Myths need to be put to death, not immortalised through the injury they caused. Deconstruction rarely has much of a place in intellectual life, but when it comes to when we have erred, the postmortem helps us bury the corpse so it can't be forever re-animated or re-autopsied.
Withdrawal of Public Funding For Neohumanities in Favour of Traditional Subjects
There is a strong argument for entirely defunding the social "sciences" in a 25 year moratorium while we pause the degeneration of the Academy. When questioned, almost all academics point to this group of subjects as the source of the trouble.
The course of the university has gone wrong. We need to reset it. That means professions. We have to ask: what is a university for?
Social "science" doesn't seem to produce any use for anything other than perpetuating itself: what use is psychology, exactly? Other than for crock HR departments, and Silicon Valley engineers wishing to addict children to their products? If there is any of these subjects to be preserved, it perhaps has to be psychology, but there is little justification for so-called "interdisciplinary" (i.e. parasitic) imposterism such as:
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- Business Studies
- Demography
- Gender Studies
- Criminology
- Library Science
How does "understanding ourselves", in replacement of religion, relieve poverty or get us to the surface of Mars?
Do these things really need to be funded in a university when they have few, if any, realistic professions outside a university campus? Why do we need criminology when we have the study of Law and the practice of policing?
Demography - identity politics masked as statistics? Managing libraries, for goodness sake? Queer theory? The "study of humanity"?
Do any of these produce anything valuable to society other than employ people in a giant welfare scheme who might otherwise have to do a day's work in a skill that requires effort? These subjects might seem "clever" or "impressive" to the man on a building site or in a church vineyard, but they are new age charlatanism and party political Trojan horses they have spent a lifetime denying they are.
Linking Public Funding to Impartiality & Credibility
Authoritarian-style demands do little to encourage forward motion, if they do act to clean up a mess and limit excess. Humans are, ahem, human. Animal, in fact. The stick is one thing, but the carrot is another. Rewards are needed.
164 institutions in the UK receive public funds: 130 in England alone. 25% of that cash totaling $50 billion (£10b-ish) comes from the government; 44% arrives from teaching fees, and the remainder from endowments and IP. Roughly £20bn is allocated income for teaching.
There is little, if any, measure of what value our societies receive for it. The reasons given for that magical disparity tend to be the inability to quantity said "magical" effect, and the people guessing it are the ones receiving the money who don't want to lose out on it.
In just one example, plenty of organisations have produced rankings of university behaviour and culture, such as the Heterodox Academy. Each institutions student scores are correlated on a yearly basis. There are even websites to list "Marxist" professors.
Google's algorithm was developed to rank the credibility of index entries by the volume of their citations elsewhere, indicating popularity and credibility.
We are able to measure the impartiality of professors, and the credibility of academic research. It's time to link their funding to their scores, just as their students' resumes are linked to their performance.
Dissolution Process for Spurious Research Journals
There is no serious or credible academic who can deny the journal problem is out of control. Since Sokal's hoax in the 90s, the absurdity of academic papers being codified as "scripture" for activists is so preposterous it cannot be overstated. And that's not even the pay-for-play companies.
Peer review is a contemporary nonsense. Academics scorn it as a gatekeeping mechanism useful for the resentful and envious to withhold, derail, and blatantly steal others' work.
A small splattering of the diarrhea these publications disseminate:
- "A poetic mycology of the senses: four poems on mushrooms"
- "Taxi Cab Publics and the Production of Brown Space after 9/11"
- "Picturizing the scattered ontologies of Alzheimer’s disease: Towards a materialist feminist approach to visual technoscience studies"
- "Effects of cocaine on honey bee dance behavior"
- "Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel"
- "No Girls Allowed: Television Boys’ Clubs as Resistance to Feminism"
- "Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage"
- "Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time"
- "Entangling a Post-Reflexivity Through Post-Intentional Phenomenology"
These essays are polemics which belong in political pamphlets or literature outlets who publish obscure manifestos, or abstract efforts in creative writing for the science fiction genre. They are political papers or fiction novellas, not academic reference materials.
There is a reason they get published in these "journals" - so they can be laundered through the universities as legitimate. Once they are a paper, it takes a matter of weeks for a blogger-journalist at Teen Vogue to cite them as authoritative truth.
Journals are publishers, and granted the freedom of the press. But there is a case under trade description law to challenge their special status we grant to academic work. It's not enough to simply ignore this laundering scheme and look down pithy noses at uncited absurdities.
We need a legal process wherein a case of dispute may be bought in front of a court by the government or private citizens which can remonstrate with a journal's public standing, and if necessary, order relief in the form of dissolution (by way of malpractice) or injunct a publisher from falsely describing itself as a legitimate research journal.
Monitoring of Attempted Ideological Subversion
We need to learn the lessons of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Students are naive, radical, capricious, contentious, and revolutionary. As they rightly should be in the experimental, energetic phase of life. Leaders are made in universities, and many people want to manufacture certain kinds of leaders.
We must also take a stake in the leaders we want to produce, rather than leave the institutions at the mercies of foreign adversaries and 60s professors who want to see our world collapse in ourselves for their benefit.
Students give us our political energy, and drive reforms. We should be affectionate to them for it. Our elders balance it with wisdom.
But we have been warned over and over and over and over again. Social media has re-balanced the momentum of unwisdom to the young. Our enemies have repetitively - publicly - gloated in how they weaponise naivety in their Active Measures:
"Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism."
"The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society."
Our enemies are aggressive, cunning, and patient. They are old countries who have radically changed. They have created and altered our leaders, because they think in centuries, not in months.
Our universities are soft, and open to the Long March Through the Institutions as an intellectual exercise, just as they are open to denying the existence of human nature and evil. Freedom is one thing, responsibility is its counterpart; their debt to us is their duty to guard our development. And they have failed.
Serious mistakes need serious correction as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Our security services need to take our knowledge production and sense-making systems seriously, as they are an easier, softer target than our walls; simpler to poison the water supply, than charge at the gate.
Recognition of 4th/5th Generation Warfare Adversaries
Third generation warfare was stealth and speed; land and sea. Fourth generation "hybrid" warfare is urban, army-less, guerrilla jihad that crosses into culture/politics, and defined thus:
"In Fourth Generation war, the state loses its monopoly on war. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the FARC. Almost everywhere, the state is losing.
Fourth Generation war is also marked by a return to a world of cultures, not merely states, in conflict. We now find ourselves facing the Christian West’s oldest and most steadfast opponent, Islam. After about three centuries on the strategic defensive, following the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam has resumed the strategic offensive, expanding outward in every direction. In Third Generation war, invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army.
Nor is Fourth Generation warfare merely something we import, as we did on 9/11. At its core lies a universal crisis of legitimacy of the state, and that crisis means many countries will evolve Fourth Generation war on their soil. America, with a closed political system (regardless of which party wins, the Establishment remains in power and nothing really changes) and a poisonous ideology of “multiculturalism,” is a prime candidate for the home-grown variety of Fourth Generation war – which is by far the most dangerous kind.
https://original.antiwar.com/lind/2004/01/15/understanding-fourth-generation-war/
You can immediately tell why the lefties didn't like that at all. It's a bit "Islamophobic" and anti-immigration. Or something. Sadly, others have to protect the walls to allow them to complain about the people protecting the walls. They're busy making TED videos about insoluble games like "eradicating hate".
That was 10 years ago. It's where you are now: the cultural war, and the talk of the second civil war.
The rise of our old enemy has moved us into the Fifth, "asymmetric" generation, which is far more terrifying.
“the secret deliberative manipulation of actors, networks, institutions, states or any earlier generational warfare forces to achieve a goal or set of goals across a combination of socioeconomic and political domains while attempting to avoid or minimize the retaliatory offensive or defensive actions/reactions including powered actors, networks, institutions, and/or states."
How?
"Fifth-generation as a vortex of violence, a free-for-all of surprise destruction motivated more by frustration than by any coherent plans for the future. 5GW is what happens when the world’s disaffected direct their desperation at the most obvious symbol of everything they lack.
[snip]
"... espoused by [the likes of] al Qaeda… with aspirations of setting up alternative political systems… they’re opportunists, intent only on destruction. But even pointless violence can have a perverse logic, for the sudden, irrational destruction undermines the idea that nations… are viable in the modern world.”
https://www.wired.com/2009/01/how-to-win-a-fi/
Fifth-gen warfare is creating total chaos in your enemy's country without them realising you are behind it. Roughly by antagonising its malcontents so dreadfully they pull it down themselves, or by funding proxies; a technique pioneered so well by Iran in their support for Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemeni combatants, and others.
But, the true threat, as we've all seen after Covid-19, Hong Kong, North Korea, cyberattacks on Australia, Huawei, and the rest of the book-long list, is the dragon of China; our manufacturing floorbed.
War hawk John Bolton describes the Eastern menace in perilous terms for the Telegraph:
"Although temporarily upstaged, China’s Communist regime none the less presents the 21st century’s true existential threat. Trampling the green shoots of liberty in Hong Kong, judging its entire population by state-decreed “social metrics”, and imposing “civil-military fusion” (a truly Orwellian term) domestically, Beijing is equally ruthless abroad. Via the Belt-and-Road initiative’s “debt diplomacy”; mercantilist trade policies; and “wolf warrior” foreign policy, China is advancing along its periphery and beyond. It is pursuing belligerent policies in the East and South China Seas and along its land borders from Vietnam to India. China has also expanded and upgraded its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities; built a blue-water navy for the first time in over 500 years; developed anti-satellite weapons to blind our intelligence and communications; and perfected area-denial weapons to push us back from Western Pacific shores."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/27/boris-johnson-can-show-joe-biden-global-britain-means-business/
Of course, he misses out their cultural war: the funding and agitation of political extremism through Confucius Institutes on university campuses, and funding/training of far-left "revolutionaries" running amok like Red Guards on social media.
But there's one thing crucial thing you need to know about China, and should ask: what they think of black people.
Shut Down All Confucius Institutes, Now
There are 67 of these wasp nests in the US. There are 548 across the world, which have spread since the first appeared in South Korea, circa 2004. Their numbers are thankfully dropping, but they are rebranding. The cutesy description says...
"[they] have provided scope for people all over the world to learn about Chinese language and culture. In addition they have become a platform for cultural exchanges between China and the world as well as a bridge reinforcing friendship and cooperation between China and the rest of the world."
Bullshit.
China is responsible for a lot of deeply evil things, but the 1967 Cultural Revolution, birthed out of student activism in universities, was truly something else.
What began as student groups to debate bourgeois ideas in culture had become a nationwide movement demanding cleansing, rethinking and transformation. The Red Guards combined Mao’s socialist idealism with political fanaticism and the militancy, iconoclasm and anti-authoritarianism of young students. At the August 18th rally, Mao and Lin Biao urged the students to “Destroy the Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. The Red Guards took up the challenge with zeal. By late August, they were rampaging through Beijing and other cities, lining the streets with dazibao, distributing pamphlets, staging rallies and delivering impromptu political speeches.
For months, the Red Guards sought out, rooted out and destroyed anything associated with China’s imperial history or, occasionally, Western values.
Signs and street names were torn down or renamed. Architecture, art, antiques, sculpture and works of literature were all torn apart or burnt, and those who possessed them were arbitrarily punished.
The Red Guards also targeted people. Intellectuals and former capitalists were intimidated and physically attacked.
Sound familiar?
China has no interest in "friendship" with the West. It has one goal, and one alone.
Criminalise Internet Astroturfing
The gift we've given our enemies by putting our entire societies online hasn't gone unnoticed. All they need to do now to cause absolute chaos - e.g. mess with our sense of reality - is control a threshold of online personas we believe are real. It's a Stalinist dream even Scientology couldn't manage.
What is astroturfing?
"the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection. The term astroturfing is derived from AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass, as a play on the word "grassroots". The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support."
PR companies started it, and celebrities refer to it as "bot farms". Socialist-leaning political parties refer to it conspiratorially as "Russian hackers", but all governments retain this new cybercrime capability. It relies on pseudonymous accounts to work.
In practice, the techniques have now become sophisticated enough that they "amplify" posts, articles, tweets, comments, and claims to sow discord and conflict.
China has over 2 million (!) of its "50-cent army" fake internet commenters attacking its critics or dissidents on social media, whilst simultaneously banning Western social media inside China. They started by "defending" China's reputation, and quickly moved on to an offensive posture screwing with our newly-vulnerable societies. In one bout, Twitter took down 180,000+ fake accounts mapped to a network which was "amplifying" the most extreme and stupid tweets from activists.
That tweet hashtag you can't believe was probably 40 idiots when it started, until a legion of proxy-server-connected sweatshop workers paid 50c for each message they retweet artificially inflated it to 10,000 and got the snowball rolling.
The verification of accounts would resolve the problem for the most part, but social media companies get their valuations from their user base numbers.
Restrain Beneficial Shareholding by Adversaries
A strange thing happened to Reddit a few years ago. It was known as one of the "worst" communities because of its libertarian permissiveness to free speech and, frankly, grotesque forum communities. Now, it resembles Tumblr.
The same thing had happened to Epic Games ("Fortnite"), Riot Games ("Leage of Legends"), and a number of Hollywood movies, like "Terminator: Dark Fate", "Top Gun: Maverick" and others. They have a certain political sensitivities.
Lots of changes have been noticed at the New York Times, CNN, NBC, Disney, ABC, ESPN, and others. None of them have been anything really conservative, but their liberalism has gone virulently leftward. Why doesn't Maverick have a Taiwan flag on his jacket anymore?
The thing all these companies have in common is significant investments of Chinese capital. It comes with conditions; favours; requirements. And if you complain, you suffer mysterious cyberattacks - like your studio's email logs being leaked to the world before a movie ridiculing your ally is released, or your power grid going offline (i.e. Australia).
Lots of small black and Latin countries are beginning to notice what is required for that capital too. When you can't pay back the usurious infrastructure loans, that 99-year lease defaults back to the investor.
China is a communist country where the "people" (i.e. the state capitalist government") own the "means of production". In our societies, production is privately-owned. All companies, all produce, all everything, are ultimately owned and operated for the benefit of the party. The party want to spread their philosophy. They believe it is necessary to "progress" through the stage of operating a market economy in order to realise a state of true communism.
They call it "socialism with Chinese characteristics", and "Wolf Warrior diplomacy".
The consequences of our greediest people's deal with the devil can't be allowed to affect us on a national level, and are an issue of national security. We wanted to export capitalism; they want to export their cultural revolution.
Critical Infrastructure Contracts Only To Allies
It should go without saying that to let your adversaries control your most sensitive networks and buildings is a measure of imbecility so grave you deserve what you get because you had it coming.
If you let your enemies build your nuclear plants, cellphone networks, long-distance wiring, military assets, consumer goods, voting systems, or anything you rely on, without understanding the leverage you are giving them, you are a 1st degree idiot.
Chinese officials practice this horror in smaller countries with an unsophisticated contempt, by weaponising corruption: leaders squirrel away all the money and resources for themselves, through grift, laundering, ad nauseam. They bankrupt their countries, which inevitably descend into dictatorship unless they find a way to bribe the people.
An unnamed Chinese ambassador arrives on your doorstep with an offer: China will pay for any infrastructure you want. And you'll get 10% of the contract in your Swiss bank account. There are two conditions:
- You must use Chinese labourers (its moving gulag of dissidents), and
- If you can't pay back the loan, China gets a 99 year-lease on the land and the what's been built.
It's a dream. The politician looks like a benevolent leader who invests for his people with new stuff, the country looks prosperous under his leadership, he gets a chunk of the cash; and by the time they're done, it's the next guy's problem. Ask Barbados.
What you didn't realise is you're on the 2013 "Belt and Road" track: the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Economic Belt.
Western leaders fall for this imperial economic murder for the same reasons: their countries don't have any money because they've mismanaged it all. They think they are exploiting the tiger cub and ripping them off.
It's not hard to categorise critical infrastructure: it's the things an enemy wants to exploit and destroy in a war.
Protections from Democratic Subversion
Outright sedition can be quite ugly; often the Long March and Death by A Thousand Cuts - the relentless attrition - can wear your enemy down more effectively, at a lower cost. There are those among us who by means of their own stupidity, selfishness, or naivety, have caused untold damage to our countries and their political systems.
In 2016, the largest democratic vote in the UK's history produced a result which was divisive, and badly-received by its losers: the clear will by a majority of 1.8 million adults to leave the European Union. What followed was fours years of Machiavellian cynicism unlike anyone could remember in recent history.
Democratically elected politicians did everything in their power to undermine and subvert a democratic mandate. They remain unpunished.
At its height, opposition MPs voted through an unprecedented motion to allow parliamentarians to seize control of the day's affairs, which whisked through a bill (European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019) in literally an hour, requiring the British Prime Minister to send a stated letter to the president of a foreign power demanding an extension of their jurisdiction. It was labelled the "Surrender Act".
Often, our own politicians are those working against us. In all cases, they cry they are doing it for "our own good".
Prohibition of Ideologically Divisive Political Programs Inside the Security Apparatus
Few people need time to comprehend why politics within the army or police is a good idea. It ends in violent revolution, breakdown, or tyranny. Sometimes, all three.
The British Army swear loyalty to the Monarch, not the government. As Parliament's guidance states:
"Members of the armed forces face considerable restrictions on political freedoms that are taken for granted by most of the population. They are not permitted to join a trade union or a political organisation, to speak to the media or in public without permission or to stand for elected office. Members of the armed forces can be criminalised, and even imprisoned, for relatively minor acts of personal expression. The political restrictions imposed on UK personnel are more extreme than those that govern the armed forces in the US and in many EU member countries."
The founding of the Police was also strictly with prohibitions of political character:
"the architects of the English police, Sir Robert Peel and the commissioners he appointed, deliberately moulded an image of policing designed to confer legitimacy on the highly contested institution. This was the depoliticised model of ‘policing by consent’ based on the notion of police as ‘citizens in uniform,’ maintaining an impartial rule of law independent of governments or parties, and with minimal force. The idea was that policing should be seen not as an instrument of class repression but as a service to all."
These were wise measures.
Like schools, who have seen the smuggling of politics via "relationships" and "anti-bullying" materials, the UK Ministry of Defence is now having "diversity and inclusion training" smuggled in from the "Defence Studies" departments of universities. At a cost of £500,000.
It is illegal for the Army to take any political stance, but it seems to be entirely lawful for the government to introduce divisive political indoctrination into the army. Understandably, soldiers hate it. They are traditionalists and nationalists, God bless them. Some of them got in trouble for using a picture of the Marxist opposition leader for target practice.
Among the dangerously stupid ideas being promoted are the adoption of "feminist" perspectives and the stigmatisation of patriotism:
"Originally written in 2017, the leaflet “Extreme Right Wing (XRW) Indicators & Warnings” was sent to senior defence staff to “educate Chains of Command on the indicators and warnings of personnel who may harbour extremist views”.
Amongst the two-dozen thoughts and expressions listed, the leaflet advised recipients to “look out” for soldiers who: “Describe themselves as ‘patriots'”; “Add ‘istan’ to British place names”; “Use the term ‘Islamofascism'”; “Involve colleagues in closed social media groups”; “Refer to Political Correctness as some kind of left wing or Communist plot”; or who “Make inaccurate generalisations about ‘the Left’ or Government”."
The police, of course, have been politicised since the 1970s. So much could be said here, but when the police are infuriated at it, campaign against elected political "commissioners", and we end up in an Orwellian dystopia where ordinary people get a door-knock for tweets refuting Neo-Pagan gender doctrine, enough is enough.
MI6 does not need LGBT support clubs. Why our intelligence services are even revealed at all is beyond anyone's understanding.
The government need to be legally restrained from introducing any type of politicised material into the security apparatus, period. Activists are putting a gun at their head and asking them to shoot themselves.
Criminalisation of Inciting Or Encouraging Seditious Disorder
We used to have a simple called treason. Then, fourth generation warfare erupted. It's home base is the immiserated state of Oregon, on the West coast of the US.
The mayor of London was listening, it seems. 2021's fireworks display featured a communist "Raised Fist" emblem.
We have politicians openly supporting, assisting, and encouraging rioters. Not just failing to condemn them, but openly declaring their intent to assist in violent disorder.
Portland's District Attorney stated he would decline to press charges against rioters; a Philadelphia DA repeated the same, as did another in New York; a prosecutor let 36 people arrested for looting go in St Louis. Washington DC's mayor decided to rename streets with painted street murals as hundreds of feony riot arrestees were released.
People all over the US and UK stood in disbelief and despair when rioters tore through cities to desecrate monuments, attack police, and terrorise ordinary people to the point they were putting lambsblood political signs on their doors to avoid attack from the Red Guards.
Then came calls to "defund" the already strained police, and hundreds of gestures of support. The result? Demoralised law enforcement, open anarchy, a bewildered population, and murder rates up over 300% in major cities.
The message from the 60s radicals-turn-politicians is clear: whether or not you get prosecuted for rioting depends on what you believe.
Politicians need a simple dispensation which applies to the rest of us which can be a basic amendment to already-outdated treason laws: you will be impeached, charged, and prosecuted for encouraging and/or failing to stop the destruction of the country you have been elected to serve.
Fortify Oaths of Impartiality for Civil Servants
Myths about the "Deep State" don't come out of nowhere. They demonstrate entrenched distrust of unelected bureaucrats who have no basis for loyalty other than their own honour. Jefferson famously remarked than impartality is always partial.
In the UK, we have known the shadow government of the Monarch's Civil Service for decades, and ridiculed its appalling cynicism around "house-training" rotating politicians, through the brilliant BBC satire "Yes, Minister" and its lead, Sir Humphrey Appleby:
Bernard Woolley: What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley: What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
Farage bought this issue into the open during his Brexit Party "contract". It was the reason Blair surrounded himself with a wall of management consultants. "Yes, Minister" was inspired by the diaries of a former prime minister.
Their answer has always been: require civil servants to swear an oath, and charge them for breaking it. You cannot force people to do the right thing in the moment, but you can string them for doing the wrong thing in the past.
Sanctions Against Unreasonably Withholding Losers' Consent
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner, as Franklin so wittily observed. It's a hundred people in a room, shouting, with 51 of them overruling the other 49. It's useless.
But it's the best we have.
In sports, and in democracy, there isn't simply the winner. In order to claim the victory, the loser must ratify it and consent to their loss. Election and rematches are held to refresh the air and give the hope of another go at things.
Despots, totalitarians, narcissists, and tyrannically-minded moral busybodies don't consent to their own defeat on subjects they don't wish to concede, and tend to express their resentment with desperation and bad faith, like children in a tantrum.
How do you deal with people who have no honour?
C.S. Lewis puts it with illustrious gravitas:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
His last hammer is the most prominent: these types are drunk on their own moral righteousness. Has there ever been a tyrant who believed they were doing the wrong thing?
After Jeremy Corbyn was defeated in the most catastrophic result for his party in a century, his first words were about the fight continuing and his refusal to resign. What exactly do you do at this point?
If you refuse to honour the democratic process, the electorate need to be able to prescribe penalties which exceed simply the loss of your office. Those who come after, perhaps, could be handicapped in available Parliamentary time; your Parliamentary exemption from legal liability could be stripped for personal litigation; your ability to vote or hold directorships could be temporarily withheld for a prescribed period. Either way, rewarding behaviour with inaction brings us more of the same bad behaviour.
Recall/Censure For Using Undemocratic / Frivolous Means to Sabotage Democratic Outcomes
Returning to the original point of discussion, what sanctions have politicians faced for openly trying to subvert and undermine the result of a democratic process? Among the many disgusting and whimsical tactics that emerged were:
- Claiming the vote was hijacked by foreign intelligence services
- Forcing legislation to block the exit of the country from the EU
- Defaming the electorate as ignorant and self-destructive
- Defaming / smearing opponents as dishonest and fraudulent
- Gaming Parliamentary procedures to delay and frustrate exit processes
- Media scaremongering about the imminent collapse of the country
- Attempting to force another vote to overturn the previous one
- Deliberately voting against what their constituents' will
- Splintering off into new saboteur parties
- Weaponising the BBC and Civil Service to brief against their opponents
- Attacking individuals in person physically
- Covertly briefing foreign leaders against UK leaders
- Seizing control of Parliament procedure
- Writing letters the Prime Minister was forced to send
- Claiming children had been disenfranchised
All this when a massive majority surprised them by opposing their ideas. All this in service of and loyalty to a foreign entity, against what their countrymen wanted.
They lost.
60 of them stood down before they were metaphorically beheaded by a furious electorate. At least 10 of the worst offenders were kicked out forcibly. But not before the country started talking about civil war and MPs started resigning over the death threats.
The key in restraining authoritarianism in taking measures to limit bad behaviour is the issue of consensus: when commentators talk of being anti-democratic, they are elucidating the notion of attempting to evade consensus as the means and end of democracy itself. Your opinion is fine, as is your lobbying; your measures and actions in bad faith aren't.
The Remainer lesson for all countries is: this is the inevitable result of letting extremists and entryists into the democratic process. They don't like it, and they don't respect it. They try to force their way around it. The entire venture is a means to their end. It's no coincidence that the sabotage efforts were led by a vanguard of the most extreme ex-activists of the Labour party in years who had free reign under an extremist leader.
We need a legal process where Parliament, or a court, can hold politicians to account on behalf of the electorate - and sanction them heavily, if necessary, with bans from public office, fines, expulsions, or any other means the people decide could be levied for betraying those they serve.
Restriction of Scientific Adventurism
Infamous 90s-romp "Jurassic Park" delivered an aphorism which will live on through the ages: your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Science has given us many wonders. But it has also given us vivisection, eugenics, Mengele, Unit 731, Covid-19, nuclear and chemical weapons, thalidomide, and yes, sex "reassignment" surgery. Scientists are typically atheists, believe their actions are morally-justified as intellectual discovery, and use term "ethics" as a replacement for morality.
Not all progress is progress; exposing pregnant women to radiation wasn't helpful to anyone; nor is pouring detergent in animals' eyes.
There are many things which flat-out need to be stopped right now, without hesitation. The trouble is our politicians are too stupid - sorry, too "busy" - to understand the complexities and jargon of technology. Most of them are vainglorious braggarts who went to university for political philosophy or economics. The rest are just plain evil, such as Assad or Jung-Un.
Science is no longer a moral business, although many individual scientists are highly moral people.
Restriction of Inhumane Technology in Agriculture
Agriculture has undergone enormous changes during the eras or free trade and globalisation. The vegetarian and vegan movements - no matter how sanctimonious their adherents may personally be - are not onto nothing when it comes to the matter of conscience. Farming used to be about serving local communities with local resources; now it is a highly commercialised industry of mass consumer production.
Few of us think of what goes into our foods we buy in the grocery store. Conversely, some of us think far too much about what happens there, and that we are apex predators. We have more than we need.
- Feeding animals chemicals to increase their profitability is barbaric.
- Cramming animals into small dark spaces is barbaric.
- Physically abusing animals is barbaric.
- Attaching animals perpetually to machines is barbaric.
Abuse is not husbandry of the planet.
These methods and mechanisms are employed for economic reasons: reducing cost and increasing profitability.
There are two ways to deal with that: make it extremely costly to behave in an inhumane way, or make it illegal. And few people would be foolhardy enough to take a side against alleviating suffering.
Restriction of Funding for Political Elective Treatments
Nationalised health systems can typically cope with no more than 2% of the population at a time, making their funding an extremely tough balance. They are unbelievably expensive. The UK's NHS costs £108 billion a year, and is going up to £123 billion this year. That's 20% of the government's spending (£900 billion-ish). It's highest spending is on pensions (£167 billion), with its other high-level area being welfare (£100 billion).
According to ONS, healthcare spending totaled £214 billion, so really, it's anyone's guess.
20% of the budget for 2% of the population.
In 2000, it was £50 billion, or 5.1% of GDP. After WWII, when the NHS was created, it was 2%.
We have to ask some hard questions with a rapidly increasing and aging population which is weighing on a health system unable to cope with a virus 99.997% of people need no treatment for:
- Should we pay for smokers to be treated for lung cancer?
- Should we pay for alcoholics and addicts to be treated for cirrhosis or schizophrenia?
- Should we pay for obese people with coronary heart disease?
- Should we pay for abortions when contraception is subsidised?
- Should we pay for STD treatment for promiscuous people?
- Should we pay for elderly rich men with impotence?
- Should we pay for puberty-blocking drugs or sex "reassignment"?
Healthcare systems are there to ensure no-one dies simply from being unable to afford treatment. And of course, to deal with emergencies.
It's unimpeachable everyone should have access to treatment. The issue is who pays for it.
If you sleep with 5 people in a week, taking no precautions, then end up with chlamydia, who should get the bill? You should receive treatment to ensure you or no-one else is a cause of further harm and you learn your lesson painfully, but if it's the third time, why are other poor working class people bailing you out?
But the question we have to ask is on what the role of a healthcare system should be.
In the UK, the NHS is a religion; the third rail and sacred cow you suffer death for criticising. It is the only socialist invention which has ever had any measure of success, stands as a monument to British labour, and is a symbol of anti-American sentiment.
Puberty-blocking drugs are a political matter; as is abortion; as is almost all sexual behaviour. Almost none of these categories have any consideration of personal responsibility, yet fall in fundable health concerns. Cancer is involuntary; heroin is not. You always have a choice to go through alcohol withdrawal or not. "Addiction" in itself is a political term concocted in the 1950s within the social sciences.
Even if no direct invoice is received, payment in debit from benefits or other limiting deterrent needs to be applied. And funding for elective procedures needs to be entirely withdrawn. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is our healthcare systems are not fit for purpose.
Regulation & Censure of Decision-Making & Filtration Algorithms
An algorithm is merely a recipe; a set of instructions. If you've baked a cake, you've executed an algorithm. You might want to find the shortest route on a graph of nodes, move through a decision tree flow chart, sort a list of data, or encrypt data. All of them are a form of automation to complete a task. One of them determines your FICO credit score.
When social media erupted, it was beyond the means of human moderator teams to police millions of people are once. Companies like Twitter turned to national language process (NLP) to filter a "storm" of incoming text, and e-com sites like Amazon wanted to push you to other products you would like. Facebook needed to present you with a personalised news feed, YouTube wanted to pump video recommendations you would auto-play, and recruitment companies wanted to parse your resume.
Most algorithms today are used to rank data for summarising it.
Facebook's newsfeed used to be called "EdgeRank". Google's indexing was called "PageRank". Tinder used Zuckerberg's original Facemash theory which was originally designed for zero-sum chess tournaments (Elo).
Algorithms produce the means for Big Tech to scale products across machinery and avoid the need for human intervention in decision-making.
The trouble is their algorithms bring out the worst in humanity.
- "Scoring" reduces people to numbers and destroys subjectivity in evaluating circumstances;
- Machines cannot understand context, intention, or nuance;
- Morality or ethics cannot be programmed;
- "Filter Bubbles" of groupthink are created from recommending the same material;
- Humans manipulate instructions for political purposes;
- Algorithms are opaque and entirely hidden from view or accountability;
- Machines can fabricate or alter imagery to look authentic;
This is just the beginning of algorithmic life. Big Tech is completely out of control with their ideas, entirely amoral in their decision-making, and wildly unaccountable for its use.
Ranking people is a very, very, very, very and very bad idea. Very bad.
Consider the use of algorithms in allocating immigration visas. On what basis are those instructions written, who writes them, who reviews them, and who is punished for abusing them?
Worse still is the absurdly-political argument around so-called "Algorithmic Bias" fostered by Google, which is a new industry for grandstanding social science grads to get paid for browsing images to find a way to call search engines racist.
Everyone wants the algorithm to favour them. Surprise, surprise, what happens next. "Ethical algorithms" emerge which are politically engineered.
What is desperately needed is an algorithm regulator, which has enough transparent access without compromising trade secrets, and the ability to enforce sanctions for malpractice - if we can define it.
Regulation & Limitation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
You don't need to fear artificial intelligence: it's no match for natural stupidity. What you need to fear is who is programming the AI and how stupid they are. What we currently have is a form of "advanced guessing" which can become increasingly more accurate over time, with the more information it gets. AI can guess accurately, to a degree of mathematical certainty.
It is the fulfillment of Silicon Valley's transhumanist fetish.
AI relies on electricity we can switch off. Its ability to communicate requires on networks we can interrupt. Its ability to learn depends on what we give it. The "Singularity" of "Dangerous Superintelligence" Skynet from the movies is a long way away.
In 2016, Microsoft released "Tay", a chat bot, onto Twitter. It had to be taken down after only 16 hours because it had been "taught" to repeat racist, sexually-charged, and outright fascist terminology. The first issue with AI is who teaches it, with what information.
The second issue is the inclusion of AI into arms and weapons (LAWS or "lethal autonomous weapon systems"). In 2020, Israel assassinated an Iranian scientist using weaponry with embedded AI. Russia and China are looking at AI for airborne and underwater drone "swarms" which can potentially carry nuclear payloads. In this context, the issue of the fatality potential of AI.
Nor is AI about "ethics". We have a word for that: morality. The problem is not of an alien creature, but what humans will do with it. We are the menace.
The areas are generally divided into:
- Roboethics - how we treat robots and what they are allowed to do;
- Professions which require care, discernment, or empathy;
- Transparency - what companies should give to overseers;
- Learning bias (otherwise know as corruption)
- Legal liability
- Weaponization and lethality
Ironically, transhumanist ideas about AI force us to examine what it means to be human. Humans will abuse AI for their own purposes. If China builds an autonomous drone swarm, we'll be forced to create a defensive swarm; our "artifical moral agent" robots will require an off switch to defend themselves against designed to aggress.
Humans attempting to become gods never, ever ends well. And there is no need for a "wait and see" approach here. What is needed is leadership.
Regulation of Genetic Editing & Manipulation
Choosing the right husband or wife to have kids with is a form of crude genetic manipulation. However, it is the small variations in our genetic sequences - our chromosomes - which determines the individual aspects of who we are, such as our phenotype.
Messing with genetics is bad news. As the scientists in Wuhan helped us all understand.
It's almost as bad as messing with the law. Under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 - a well-meaning provision with ambitious reach - some truly reality-defying political feats imploded into our culture. As part of its objectives:
recognise same-sex couples as legal parents of children conceived through the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos.
retain a duty to take account of the welfare of the child in providing fertility treatment, but replace the reference to "the need for a father" with "the need for supportive parenting"
Two individuals of the same sex cannot conceive a child, as a matter of basic scientific fact. That is the biological definition of "parent". There is no "emotional" or "subjective" concept of primogeniture.
Gene editing goes back to the 1990s, but was found to have been used in 2019 in China for producing humans ("Lula and Nana' or the "He Jiankui affair") from parents with HIV. It caused the WHO to create a global registry for the sector and a massive crackdown on its use.
"Experiments on genes in adults or embryos that endanger human health or violate ethical norms can accordingly be seen as a violation of a person’s fundamental rights. Lawyers say the regulation would mean that anyone who manipulates genes in humans is responsible for what happens to a person. “The law makes clear that those who do research with human genes and embryos cannot endanger human health or violate ethics,” says Zhang Peng, a criminal-law scholar at Beijing Wuzi University."
This is coming from a country who enforced sterilisation and the number of children people may have.
Also prevalent in the 90s was the rush to perfect animal and human cloning, which is about as sinister as anyone might expect. Scientists at Edinburgh University cloned a sheep from 3 mothers which lived for almost 7 years before dying from lung disease.
Cloning of humans is already said to have been achieved, although the moral implications are so staggering it is impossible to properly articulate. The technology in use stems from Edinburgh, and is known as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT). The first embryos were created in 2008, and the first primates were cloned ten years later in 2018. The technique is described thus:
"the nucleus of a somatic (body) cell is transferred to the cytoplasm of an enucleated egg (an egg that has had its own nucleus removed). Once inside the egg, the somatic nucleus is reprogrammed by egg cytoplasmic factors to become a zygote (fertilized egg) nucleus. The egg is allowed to develop to the blastocyst stage, at which point a culture of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) can be created from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst."
Regulating cloning and gene-editing brings up two thorny subjects politicians never, ever want to touch: eugenics, and abortion. You cannot get into this without discussing what personhood is and where it begins. Political cowardice will cost us the world. As it always does.
The road regarding genetic manipulation and transhumanist fiddling with chromosomes, embryos, and DNA, has been laid out: much of this has to stop, because... Jurassic Park. Yes, it might be useful to grow humans for spare parts, but humans die.
Leaderless Societies Flirting With Ruin
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the countries of Europe were sold out to the control of a foreign power, the EU.
When London was carpeted in CCTV, they said we were "sleepwalking" into an Orwellian society.
After 9/11, the bogeyman of Islamic terrorism precipitated mass electronic surveillance and mass immigration, just before the greatest worldwide depression of living memory.
For the last 10 years, the spectre of radical Marxism has bought rioting to the streets and almost total collapse in our universities and government services, as a Red Guard culture of vengeful "justice" has swept over media and Big Tech.
One disaster after another has compounded the relentless storm against the Western world, as liberty after liberty has fallen aside, a victim of rape.
And no leader has resisted. Not one. All of them have jockeyed for position in their international country clubs, or more followers on their social media profiles.
Every institution has been attacked, undermined, subverted, and marched through, as the "eggs" of the omelette which have to be broken for the omelette.
Where is it?
We now sit on a year of mass pandemic disease, trapped under the most egregious economic devastation in a century, and an authoritarian overreach no-one seems able to resist; surrounded and ruled by leaders who hold ordinary people in total contempt, in favour of grandstanding as moral posturers on their mobile phones desperate not to lose their social position. Ordinary people scolding their neighbours in a moral panic about a respiratory illness with a 0.003% fatality rate, while no-one can buy a house or buy food.
In a British newspaper, based in the home of liberty, a "journalist" of a mjaor newspaper writes, almost smugly:
"Scotland Yard revealed officers will be told to stop civilians in the street and quiz them on why they are not shut away in their homes. Anyone who cannot give a lawful excuse will be fined up to £6,400 and those caught without face coverings in necessary areas will also be slapped with an on the spot penalty notice."
Because our "leader" is more concerned with his own popularity than basic competence; and the people are more concerned with moral grandstanding than grit.
When we look at our leaders:
- US: Trump, Biden, Pelosi, Newsom
- UK: Johnson, Corbyn, Starmer
- Canada: Trudeau
- France: Macron
- Germany: Merkel
- Australia: Morrison
- NZ: Ardern
Is it possible to imagine a more vainglorious, feckless, ineffective, cowardly, and impotent group of people? Other than those who came before them?
Almost all were members of the class of 1968, or taught by them. None of them have provided anything else other than curation of their country's slope into chaos, and nothing approaching leadership.
If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the Renaissance thinkers of the Enlightenment - of whom the US Founding Fathers considered themselves - were wise and sensible of the human condition, and its devastating expression in the tyranny of government. Their position was that the ability for abuse must be constrained and limited against the interference of a political class.
They don't stop things getting worse.
We don't have an economic or political problem. We always have that. We don't even have a vanity problem, as we always have that.
What we have, uniquely in the timeline of history, is a cowardice problem. Our pandemic is the compulsive spread of sheer cowardice within the lulling siren of consumer comfort. Duty, courage, honour, grit, wisdom, modesty, command, loyalty, industry, hardiness: all of these were poured away by the class of 68 in favour of their vanity and pusillanimous moralising.
They don't have answers. They can't even bear to hear the question. They have nothing to say, so they say anything. They have nothing to believe, so they believe anything. They run from a fright, shout at embers, and cry to obtain sympathy; angry moralising at men with bloodstained hands from behind a protection unit.
Our Magna Carta isn't a luxury for the philosophers, it is a reclamation of a basic principle surrounding our nature: man's being is tyrannical, because his inner being is lazy and depraved. We have no purpose or occasion to be pursuing transhumanism or building a new planet when the engineers who create spaceships can't figure out how to feed the homeless they pass on the way to work.
Truth starts with reality. It continues with the study of painful history. Burke said the latter is a contract between the past, present, and future.
In 1214, and 1776, and 1939, they realised the situation had become intolerable. In 2021, we seem incapable of comprehending what intolerable is, or means.
Our day is here, and our purpose is here. The question is who history will record as having received it.
A