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Saved by @SteveeRogerr

The worldwide movement toward "limited authoritarianism," already well under way but dramatically accelerated by the coronavirus, is driven by the elite consensus that ordinary people cannot be trusted with so much freedom.

 "Limited authoritarianism" is the best phrase for what the elite have in mind. They have decided that a growing list of topics are simply off the table. Consensus has been reached, and no further input from voters will be permitted on those topics.
This is a natural consequence of the progressive ideology, which is inherently authoritarian, although it peddles itself in the early stage with lots of jibber-jabber freedom and liberty. Progressives by definition believe that the growth of the State can never be reversed.
Every time the State grows - taking more money from the private sector, issuing regulations, criminalizing activities that used to be free - it is declaring that the people can no longer be trusted to make certain decisions. This is the inescapable logic of statism.
You can't be trusted to spend that dollar wisely, so the State will take it from you. You can't be trusted to make those decisions about your health care, so the State will make them for you. You can't be trusted to sell your own labor, so the State will control employment.
The best way to get people to go along with this constant dwindling of their liberty is to make them distrust and fear each other. That way, the State can posture as their loving defenders, keeping them safe from the predations of other free people.
As we move into the era of limited authoritarianism, the previous steady erosion of liberties and theft of money is no longer disguised with gentle maternal language. Now it's time to firmly establish a hard core of power that voters must obey, and can never dream of controlling.
The next steps toward authoritarianism simply can't be disguised as loving, maternal government taking good care of its child-citizens. It requires a level of obedience - the most important resource in a statist system - that simply cannot abide resistance, or even dissent.
There will be too many designated losers in the next step, too many reductions in the quality of life for everyone, and the people have to stop daydreaming about controlling the elite with their votes. They must accept the limits of "democracy."
The emerging consensus among the global elite is that "democracy" can only be saved by sharply limiting it. Our mighty global institutions and their accords cannot be subjected to the will of selfish, short-sighted, foolish, voters with nationalistic inclinations.
Many ideological vehicles have been driven toward this destination, most obviously climate change, which explicitly asserts that people cannot be free to make decisions - or cast votes - that would "harm the Earth."
And then the pandemic arrived, and every gas pedal on those ideological vehicles was slammed down to the metal. The global elite now believes, almost universally, that only authoritarian governments can deal with such a massive crisis. Disobedience and dissent are dangerous!
That pandemic mindset will not be allowed to dissipate. It's too politically useful. We will soon hear of many other "crises" that are just as bad as Covid-19 and demand the same sort of "unified" response, meaning no dissent or dissidence can be allowed. This has already begun.
As statism shades into authoritarianism, the ruling elite will say they're still acting in the public interest, using their superior intelligence and wisdom to make the dwindling field of individual liberty more secure. The playground of democracy grows smaller, but safer.
The difference is that it will be made increasingly clear that voters no longer have a say about these important topics. Even the polite fiction of restraining power with your votes will be abandoned. There will be no pretense that the authoritarian core serves at your pleasure.
The most obvious manifestation of this, now well under way, is the crackdown on dissent. Once you lose the right to vote against power, it follows that you should no longer be allowed to disagree with it. Such disagreement is pointlessly dangerous and counterproductive.
Pointless dissent against the authoritarian core serves only to dilute that precious resource of obedience. You can't change anything - you're not allowed to vote against the great consensus of the ruling class - so your dissent is just aimless vandalism.
The Western world generally has constitutional restrictions on how vigorously the State can suppress dissent, or how much behavior it can compel, because it is still required to pretend the people get to vote on everything and are supreme over their government.
"Limited authoritarianism" gets around this by using corporate power and political activists as instruments of control and obedience. The State has powerful partners in the private sector who will enforce decrees that could not be issued lawfully.
The authoritarian core is almost fully formed now, its hard shell forged during the pandemic. Free people have been taught that disobedience and free speech are dangerous. There are fewer decrees you can argue against, and increasingly, fewer you can vote against.
Remember, always: Those who tell you that only a bigger, richer, less democratic State can deliver peace, health, and justice are saying that YOU cannot be trusted to find those things. After Covid-19, after the 2020 election, you will be trusted with much less. /end

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Time once again to emphasize the differences between totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism. They're often used as synonyms but they are different, although they do tend to lead to each other. Order one, and the other two are usually delivered soon enough.

Totalitarianism is best understood as the politicization of everything. Every facet of life is infused with political meaning... and subjected to political control. There is little room for privacy or individualism. Every word and deed is seen as a political action.

Totalitarianism does *not* require authoritarian government, although it usually leads to such. You can be totalitarian without having any real government power at all, enforcing your political will through mob actions and corporate power. Examples from recent history abound.

Totalitarianism is the easiest of the three deadly "isms" to slide into, because it can easily be disguised with claims of its good intentions. Totalitarians usually claim to be motivated by the Greater Good. They claim to represent the interests of sympathetic victims.

Totalitarians claim that society is unjust and must be corrected by force. Before they gain the power to become authoritarians, they often assert the right to use force outside of the law because the government is corrupt or serves the interests of their ideological enemies.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Just as no amount of flat temperature data would dissuade the climate cult, so no amount of flat (or even negative!) data on mask effectiveness will shake the faith of the Church of Covid. Beautiful Theories cannot be disproven by mere information.

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

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

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

All the while, studies will keep rolling out that masks don't help, and might even hurt. That was fairly common medical knowledge before the pandemic began, but it was aggressively suppressed when masks became a political symbol, and a totem for people desperate to DO SOMETHING.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Panic has always been a valuable political resource, but 2020 was the year our ruling class perfected the art of harvesting it, renewing it, and refining it to weapons-grade purity.

The bitter irony is that one reason panic became so easy for politicians and grifters to sow and reap is the great collapse in confidence caused by their own incompetence and greed over the past few decades. The political class found a way to profit from its own ineptitude.

If public confidence in government and major institutions had not been so thoroughly shaken by years of rampant corruption and incredibly expensive failures, perhaps the public would not have been panicked so easily - and profitably! - when the coronavirus struck.

Even as public confidence collapsed and paranoia grew, social media came along to make our society more twitchy and neurotic. We argue constantly about the spread of "disinformation," but not enough about how social media rewards irrationality and performative emotionalism.

Panic and social media both nourish the human herd instinct, and herds respond to loud noises, not reasonable arguments. Our society was panicking over far less important and dangerous things before Covid-19 arrived. We were panicking over some bizarre social issue every week.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
The U.S. central government grew relentlessly larger, richer, and more powerful during the decades that every problem faced by Americans got worse. Why does anyone think making the government even bigger would *solve* any of those problems instead of making them even worse?

This is not just a matter of government ineptitude and corruption, although both of those are major factors. Our problems get worse as the government gets bigger because the Leviathan State and its clients have a vested interest in making them worse.

One of the biggest lies of statism is that government and its employees are utterly selfless and immune to the incentives that drive people in the private sector. This is absurd. Every government agency seeks to increase its "business" and "profits," just like corporations.

The key difference is that government increases its "market share" by giving BAD service and FAILING to provide value for money. Its "revenues" grow through coercion, not customer satisfaction. Agencies go out of business if they succeed too well at their tasks.

Time is money and money is time. The more of its time and money a nation pours into the fundamentally corrupt and inefficient engines of the State, the less it has for the private enterprises and VOLUNTARY cooperative endeavors that could actually resolve society's problems.
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Why are so many sanghi bigot handles famous & well followed on Twitter despite having no notable quality other than getting called out by liberals? Cos that's all it takes. If they can fool liberals into QTing or even screenshot-ing them, they become heroes and then are like


Another example of #FactCheckBait. This sanghi wants you to identify them while pointing out the very obvious flaws in their logic. This sanghi is counting on it to improve their visibility. Don't give them that oxygen. Call them out like this, without IDs, if you must.


As pointed out by @bongopondit, peak #FactCheckBait was Ted Cruz saying rejoining the Paris climate agreement was about appeasing Paris not Pittsburgh. He knows it's BS. He's an evil psychopath but not dumb. He wants you to QT him and distract from his insurrection efforts.
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I remember every minute of Feb 23, 2020 -- from the speeches to smoke billowing from afar. What I can't ever forget is the face of a man who sat alone in front of a shop, his kurta dusty and torn, blood on his forehead, unable to answer who he was & where he wanted to go.

I've his photo, I never posted it anywhere, and I won't either. He was in such shock, and there was no help around. I tried talking to him but he didn't say a word. He was numb.

It'll take me years before I can fully write down what happened that afternoon -- a stampede, stones flying all around me, a colleague who held nu hand & ran, another who lost her slipper for a minute, tear gas, my inhaler, salt.

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Rani Bhabani was the Queen of Natore, Bengal or 'Natorer Rani' as she was famously called. She made great contributions in Tarapith & renovated Benaras.

In Varanasi, Durga Kund Mandir was constructed by Rani Bhabani in the 18th century.


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A woman as a zamindar was extremely rare in those days, but Rani Bhabani managed the vast Rajshahi zamindari most efficiently and effectively for over four decades.
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