Irony

The Democratic party has always held itself as the party that defends ordinary workers and consumers against the exploits of avaricious business leaders. They certainly have turned that upside-down now. Never have corporations like Big Tech and Big Banks held so much power over society as they do now, and never have these big businesses worked so tightly in-league with any political party as instruments to impose its agenda upon everyday people in society.

This same party whose governors have been mainly responsible for the draconian lockdowns that have decimated the jobs and businesses that kept millions of people self-reliant and independent is also the one primarily advocating for establishing a Universal Basic Income to enable those now economically-destitute people to continue to survive. Now that people who supported Trump are being de-platformed, de-banked, fired, censored, prohibited from flying, and blacklisted from employment and other vital staples of life, how many libertarians or conservatives (the main demographic for the proprietors of all the now-destroyed small businesses) who end-up on UBI are going to continue to hold onto their beliefs and convictions ? We will probably see the Blue states that destroyed their own tax base by going along with hard lockdowns get their federal bailouts from the new administration now.

The Orwellian stuff that we saw the Chinese implement starting a couple of years ago with their ‘social credit scoring’ system is now in full play here in the US. Not only is free speech dead in this country, but persecution, suppression, sanctioning of people just for what they think is actively ongoing. And anyone who is still cheering this stuff because they assume it will move the political needle only in the direction they want and no-further, and that it will never be used against them if/when they disagree with government leadership has absolutely no appreciation for the precedents of history (unless you are a full-stop totalitarian radical). Only in China are the biggest power institutions of society more closely aligned with punitive Marxist politics than they are now in America (Oil is the one big one in Russia). And that is more than coincidental. If you have never watched the movie “The Lives of Others”, I recommend it (its on Amazon Prime where amazingly you can still find “The Plot Against the President” as well).

What is underway is finally just dividing the country and is very dangerous. America no longer functions as ‘one nation’. Texas and some other states are considering a bid for succession (“when in the course of human events…”). Over 12% of Facebook users just left. The dems now control the senate, house, and the White House. If they do make Puerto Rice and Washington DC states, the senate will most likely be theirs for a long time. If they stack the Supreme Court with more than 9 justices, they will have it as well. And if they change the electoral college and grant amnesty, followed by voting rights, to tens of millions of non-citizens, they will hold the White House into the far future. It is unlikely that the group now holding power will ever be voted out in my lifetime. Biden will get the cabinet he wants, rules in the senate maybe changed to silence Republicans entirely, and red states will not be represented anymore with a 52-state lineup. The distributed balance of power so carefully designed by the country’s founders and enshrined in the constitution may finally be undone, and if they get enough seats, the document itself may be eviscerated.

Noone knows what the Biden team will do, but the democrats are now constituted, and largely-driven by, a group of far left Marxists with a divisive identity politic. What is certain is that these people have been working for decades to get the power they now wield and are therefore very eager to impose their changes at long last. We will see whether they now drive or divide the democratic party. They certainly have come out of the starting hard strong even before Biden’s inauguration.

The conservative faction, believing in freedom of thought and ideals, has never tried to outright eliminate this anti-democracy anti-capitalist (nor any other) group, but it looks like this group is willing to eliminate their ideologically-polar conservatives, just as their ‘comrades’ have done in many other places before. There is talk that Biden will implement a 100-day Federal lockdown in February. Like the previous lockdowns, it will do little to affect the spread of COVID, but it will certainly finish crushing the economic vitality and independence that we’ve had. Then I suppose we would get to see what ‘Build Back Better’ means. I’m glad that I will be on my way out of the very crowded blue state that I’ve lived in by then. There could be a lot of really hard-pressed people running around.

Before the constitution was written no matter where you lived in the world, you lived under the total control of a king, queen, emperor, tzar, sultan, tribal chief, etc. Very occasionally, the leader was benevolent but even then when some event like a blight or famine happened, his troops came to visit to take all your grain and other foodstuffs and leave you to eat bugs (“sorry !”). It was only in 1776 that a nation was setup with the ordinary man on the street as the sovereign power with inalienable rights. America has been a wonderful land to live in. But it is obvious to all, including those who ignore history, that whenever government acts to strip a group of law-abiding peaceful people of their means to make a living, along with a number of their freedoms and their access to the use of institutions, infrastructure, and services that are vital to functioning in modern life merely because of their opinions, they cannot endure it. And this is what is happening – The imputation that anyone who voted for Trump was a supporter and enabler of the Capitol Hill protest is egregiously unjust and unreasonable fabrication. Because the politicians actively or tacitly enabling these sanctions now must know that it will result in more severe protests and uprisings, they must already have a response intended for that. What these “dissidents” (or “domestic terrorists” in now-speak) will receive from them at that point I leave for you to posit. I doubt it will be remediative and healing.

Mainstream (non-Neocon, non-Big State) American conservatives have been driven largely by a love for the unique American system of governance, and their ideological opposites by a hatred and animus for it (which is curious because they have always been free to leave and go live elsewhere under another existing system more like the ones they advocate). But revolutionaries don’t like ‘live and let live’ so much – they always want to change other people, regardless whether those others want to be changed or not. One group wants to be left free to pursue and build on their own ideas, goals, and enterprises. The other seeks to take possession of the things others have built and redistribute them. And they don’t respect and tolerate people who disagree with their views much. It is absurd that they are called ‘liberals’. And it is very ironic that they now in-league with the biggest and most abusive power-wielding businesses and institutions to ever push-around the ordinary American. But at least Biden speaks nicer than Trump, did. Sort of.

Meanwhile my career-long passion for the technical is getting tempered by so many of the ways it is being directed. Everyone knows what AI and machine learning is being used for in a massive way now, Bill Gates wants to dump micro-particles (of something we would breathe) into the atmosphere to cool the earth, Klaus Schwab wants to put micro-machines and monitoring devices into our bodies, and Google is working on stuff like this. All of this Dr. Evil stuff doesn’t sound quite as outlandish as it once did, does it ? In the midst of all the craziness remember this: (i) Governments are dead broke, and (ii) They have decided to handle that in some other way than by admitting it and openly telling us how they plan to deal with the crisis.