These are my (admittedly pessimistic) thoughts on governments around the world. What can I say — this period has allowed me to stop and think, which is something that I was too busy to do before. The lockstep behavior of so many governments, at the behest of the powers that be, in order to advance a clear agenda, has also tipped their hands and allowed us, those who want to open our eyes to the truth, to see what’s really going on.
Tag Archives: rights
On lockdowns
As more lockdowns are enforced in various countries all around the world, I thought I’d lay down my mixed feelings about them.
I realize they destroy small businesses and they obliterate the hospitality industry. We own a small business. Thankfully my wife and I set it up from the get-go so we could run it from home, therefore we weren’t so badly affected. We still lost money though. Also, during late 2019 and for most of 2020, we were part of the hospitality industry, because we opened a small pension in a Saxon parochial house, on an historic property adjoining a Saxon fortified church where we were taking care of the buildings through our NGO. Obviously, we lost a lot of money on that venture. Lots for us, so much so that we had to cut our losses and move on. Operating a pension during a worldwide pandemic is not a profitable business model.
I get it. My bank account gets it. Every time I have to print out a form, as we do here in Romania, sign it and stamp it with our company’s or our NGO’s official stamp just so I can leave my home, it gets tiresome and infuriating.
However, as you’ve read here on my site, time and time again, I welcome the quiet and the peace that sets over cities, towns and villages when there’s a lockdown, and that’s because:
- I cannot stand loud noises. I can stand purposeful noise, such as construction noise, or the noise of diligent work, but idiotic or unnecessary noises, particularly loud music, parties, yelling or loud voices, banging, etc., they really set me off. I don’t know if you’ve ever been so mad that you’ve seen red, that you were ready to jump on someone and rip them apart with your bare hands, but that’s how I get when there are loud noises.
- I cannot stand crowds. I find them suffocating. I find the invasion of my personal space by other bodies, voices, looks, body odors, to be repulsive. I can’t help it. I like people, but I have my limits. I enjoy being with friends, every once in a while, I enjoy seeing acquaintances on the street and having a short chat with them, every once in a while, but to find myself surrounded by a sea of people when I go into town is unbearable. Having to dodge and weave my way through a crowd just to run a simple chore is insanity. Different strokes for different folks I guess… I enjoy seeing happy, peaceful people at work, playing with their children, living their lives. I don’t enjoy crowds and their inherent chaos. I like to see order and ordered, purposeful movement. So you can well imagine that lockdowns, which do away with crowds almost completely, are a welcome respite from a loud, crowded, chaotic world.
- I welcomed the change of pace that accompanied the lockdowns this year. It was nice to slow down and take time for personal reflection, for rest, for reading, for one’s spouse and child. That was a truly wonderful benefit, an unexpected present from a horrible situation.
A case in point: one of the villages near my town, where we are doing maintenance and restoration work on another Saxon fortified church and parochial house, is a gorgeous place. It’s got beautiful nature, wonderful rolling hills, healthy forests, clean, crisp air, fertile ground, good water, etc. It’s the kind of place where you’d want to live and grow old — except there are a few shitheads that completely ruin the place. They throw drunken parties, they put loudspeakers in their yards and blast loud music that can be heard up and down the main road of the village, and if you try to reason with them, they make threats, they intimidate, trespass and sometimes assault people. The village police have offered no permanent solution to the problem, because they’re more interested in maintaining good relations with everyone than punishing those who are guilty to the full extent of the law. It doesn’t even matter that plenty of other villagers complain about them, the police still do nothing. So a village that could be heavenly turns out to be unbearable, just because of a few rotten apples. When I go there to do repairs or maintenance work on the historic buildings and there’s loud music in the village, I have to make a decision: do I call the police, in which case I am going to get threats later on and as soon as the police leave, the music will probably get turned on again, or do I just go home and come another day… It is exactly because of situations like this (and there are plenty of them everywhere, even in our town) that I welcome lockdowns, because it forces the shitheads to be quieter. It doesn’t quiet them completely, but things are better. I realize liking a lockdown just because it makes a few shitheads quiet for a while is like using a machine gun to cut the grass, but there you have it.
Let’s talk about how these lockdowns affect the world, because that’s the important stuff. Remember how I talked about the pandemic being an agent for change? I can see the changes taking place and they’re not pretty.
I see the ultra-wealthy drooling because they’re making tons of money during this pandemic, including during the lockdowns. While decent folks are losing money left and right, these grievously greedy grubbers have already made a ton and they stand to make much more. I see how entire sectors of industry and economy are being purposefully destroyed via lockdowns, just so a few ultra-greedy sickos with a foot in the grave can get a bargain-basement price on good companies and properties as they gobble them up and add them to their empires. If profit for the few is any indication, I don’t think these pandemics will stop, because they’re too profitable. That’s troubling.
I can see the erosion of our personal freedoms. For a virus with a 99,96% survival rate, I cannot believe how much we have to give up in terms of the freedom of our movements and associations. In spite of what the politicians say, you cannot save everybody. People die every day. Death is kind of mandatory for people. It’s hard to avoid it. Using 0,04% as an excuse to shut down the world and lock people in their homes is either irrational or premeditated. I agree that the experience and sequelae from serious cases of COVID seem to be pretty terrible, as described by those who’ve gone through them. It’s an odd variance of the typical coronaviruses. But something to keep in mind is that people are suffering and dying everyday from all kinds of diseases and conditions. Every single day, people around us are dying, whether or not we know about it. While the world is obsessed with coronavirus, those people are still dying, and their deaths are no less important than a coronavirus death. Furthermore, their decreased access to treatment because of the pandemic is the real downside and what I would call the real sick part of keeping the world and the hospitals obsessed with COVID. A death is a death is a death.
I see the censorship that’s happening on social media and in the news. We cannot express any point of view that disagrees with the narrative that the media want us to know, and the media is all on one page, as if they’re all being fed the same script. I’ve been either forbidden from posting links to dissenting articles and videos on Facebook and Twitter, or I’ve been fact-checked after posting them. In much the same way, governments all over the world fell in line with the pandemic narrative soon after the virus hit the Western world. This is worrisome and it should be on your mind. It’s not about the spread of disinformation. It’s about the active suppression of information, and this has never happened to this degree in the Western world before. We’ve prided ourselves on our freedoms, including our freedom of speech. We’ve prided ourselves on questioning the status quo, on questioning the media, on questioning our politicians. Now we are not allowed to question them publicly, only privately. It isn’t right. I remind you, the survival rate for this virus stands at 99,96%.
I see the sickening desire to control more and more, and to gather up more and more wealth. It’s masquerading as the exact opposite, as a “great reset” that will improve the world. It won’t. What it will do, if it’s executed, is that it will concentrate power and wealth in the hands of even fewer individuals, while the rest of the people will be left to kiss the foot of those individuals in order to have a life. Not a good life, just a life. Good lives will be reserved for the vomitously unabashed brown-nosers and the exquisite lives will be the domain of those with the power and the wealth. That’s a disgusting and repulsive prospect.
I see the long game. What we’re experiencing now has been in the works for a number of years. The signs are there for you to see, if you do your homework. This is wrong. This is not the direction the Earth should be heading. This is not the direction humanity should be heading. An immediate course correction is needed.
On the automation of surveillance
We are seeing an increased use of surveillance at every level of our lives (on the street, at work, online, on our phones, etc.), and we see increased use of automation (simple, algorithmic and AI) to sort through all our activities. It’s a worrisome trend. We should be asking questions such as:
- Who’s surveilling us and why? It’s easy to answer this with two terms: government and big tech, but the answers can be and should be much more granulated.
- Who’s keeping track of that data? Exactly who are the players who have access to our data, who are running analysis on it and who are storing it, backing it up, etc.
- How long is our data kept and where?
- When algorithms decide our human fate, is that just? Should we tolerate it?
- Who wrote the algorithms and are they skewed in some way? Given the recent censorship issues on Facebook and Twitter, I think algorithms are clearly written with an agenda in mind and they can be easily skewed to fit the needs and wants of the companies who apply them.
- And many more questions like this…
I’d first like to point out the following: we live in a human world, and we’re meant to relate to each other in human ways; it doesn’t work well otherwise.
However, as I’ve pointed out in past posts, the world is too full of humans, and there are many complications that arise from that. Chief among them is this: an unusually large proportion of them aren’t relating to their fellow humans in human (or humane) ways and they are engaging in violence, murder, kidnappings, rape, pedophilia and other perversions, vandalism, theft, looting, corruption at all levels, drugs, road rage, terrorism, con schemes, etc.
That’s when law enforcement and governments, unable to keep track of every one of these so-called “humans” with existing personnel, turns to computers, mass surveillance, facial recognition, algorithms that identify suspicious behavior, etc., in an effort to sort through the mass influx of human faces, some of which are engaged in criminal/inhuman activities. The issue of why personnel cannot be ramped up in these institutions so that humans can sort through and keep track of these activities is up for debate, but I think we can all agree that when surveillance and automation are used to flag and identify the activities listed above, so that humans can sort through them, it is probably okay, and it is probably to be expected.
It is not okay when automation of surveillance is used to:
- Spy on our private activities simply for the purpose of keeping track of everything we do, “just in case” we do something wrong,
- Restrict freedom of speech, such as when social media algorithms simply won’t allow us to post certain links or words on our accounts, or will outright censor certain subjects or people,
- Dig through our online activities and disqualify us from obtaining a job simply for having posted something questionable in the past, or to destroy our lives altogether, as today’s cancel culture and supposed race inequality movement is actively trying to do to so many people,
- Monitor all our communications, such as our messages, emails and telephone calls, in the name of national security,
- And the list can probably go on and on…
Here’s my understanding of the direction of this trend so far: as long as humans will continue to grow in number and to present a very complex environment where it’s thoroughly difficult or outright impossible for a limited number of people involved in law enforcement to keep track of illegal activities, the arguments for the use of automation in surveillance (to the point where artificial intelligence will handle a large part of it) will continue to mount. Also, as long as hidden agendas will continue to be tolerated in government, in the media and in academia, hidden surveillance will continue, for various nefarious purposes, such as persecution, extortion, a building up of arguments to support certain policies, etc.
The solution as I see it is to decrease the world population till we stop being numbers and countless faces and we become communities once more, where we know everyone who lives around us, where we are not one nameless face in a mass, in a ridiculously large throng of people, but a meaningful, contributing member of a neighborhood, a village or a town. That’s when surveillance and its automation will no longer matter. It won’t even be an issue anymore. We’ve got to stop multiplying like rabbits. We’ve got to stop focusing on large numbers. We’ve got to focus on quality, not quantity. We’ve got to focus on meaningful human interactions and meaningful numbers when it comes to our communities and our towns. To those of you who live in smaller communities, what I’ve just said is obvious, but to those who still prefer to live in large cities, I think my words will sound quite strange. And for them and because of them, mass surveillance and the automation of surveillance will continue…
On voting rights
Yesterday’s presidential elections in Romania have prompted me to write about something that’s been on my mind for some time: voting rights in a so-called “democratic” country.
I’m concerned about the quality of the electorate and their capability to make objective decisions for the good of the country, not just for their own good. I’ve seen the average comprehension and literacy levels of adults drop across the board, on both sides of the pond. It’s a scary prospect, to be faced with a general electorate that can understand less and less of what you, as a legitimate candidate, are trying to communicate. If this keeps up, our future presidential candidates will need to yell, “Me, give food! Me, give shelter!”, wait for the grunts of approval to subside, then add “Press red button for me! No press red button, no food!”
Pandering to the lowest common denominator leads to short-sighted political decisions, to skeezy populism, to electoral promises/lies, and to a wanton disregard for the kind of leadership that is needed in a world increasingly screwed up by people — the kind of world where governments need to start making long-term, tough, redressive decisions and abide by them through regime changes.
We can look at the origins of democracy (Greece, Rome) in order to see how they handled voting rights, and the main takeaway in those cultures was to not let anyone vote who didn’t have “skin in the game”. By that the Greeks meant well-to-do men who’d also served in the military and the Romans meant men who came from good families (aristocratic) and were well-educated. Women weren’t allowed to vote, and neither were immigrants.
Here’s my proposal:
- First we need to start thinking of the act of voting as a privilege, not as a right. It’s rightfully a privilege that can be lost if one screws up.
- We won’t take away any of the hard-won voting privileges that exist in current democratic countries. Clearly women’s voting rights will stay. Clearly naturalized citizens will be able to continue to vote. But we’ll add some requirements; more specifically, the ones below.
- You must be actively employed or own an active business entity, and you must have done so for at least 1 year prior to voting. In other words, you must be a contributing member of society who’s been working productively, or employing people productively, and paying taxes to that society. This is the crux of my proposal: if you want to have a say in how a society is currently run (which is the definition of a vote), you must currently contribute to it.
- This means that certain groups of people will not get a vote: the retired and the unemployed. These are the two classes of people who’ve been skewing elections in the wrong direction in Romania for decades, and who almost sabotaged the current presidential election. Criminals will also lose their voting privileges, and rightly so.
I have nothing against retired people; they’ve put in a lifetime of work and they deserve their pensions, but they always vote for the people who will promise them $10-20 more in their monthly pension checks, regardless of what horrible things those people have done and will do to the country. And it’s a lot harder for them to vote objectively. A lot of them vote subjectively, particularly through the lens of nostalgia. This has to stop if a country is to move forward.
I have nothing against someone who’s temporarily unemployed and is looking for a job, but we have a huge problem in Romania with people who game the unemployment system and collect checks while they’re working here and there on the gray and black markets. They’re sucking up aid from the government any way they can, including by making babies for the sole purpose of getting more money per month from the government, while they contribute nothing. And their political allegiance is to any party and/or group of politicians that will bribe them off ahead of the elections and will promise to keep their aid coming. These people are uneducated, morally bankrupt shirkers whose only cares are whether they have enough cheap crap to stuff into their mouths and working television sets. They produce nothing except body odor, and they contribute nothing except body waste. They are the biggest threat to a country’s fiscal stability, particularly in the face of a decreasing work force, because they start barking and getting violent as soon as you tear them away from the teats on which they’ve been suckling. No politician wants to touch them, but they’re a problem that has to be addressed.
Thankfully, anyone excluded from voting under the rules I’ve proposed above can quickly remedy the situation by getting a job or starting a small business and contributing to the society in which they’re living. Then they’ll have earned the privilege to vote.
The Education of Little Tree (1997)
A little boy loses his parents during the depression, and his grandparents take him to live with them in their mountain cabin. The premise is simple, but the lessons are many. I liked this movie because it taught respect for native Indians.
Let’s face it, the “red skins”, as they used to be called, owned this land. It was theirs long before it was ours. The early American settlers drove them out of their homes and used every possible means to push them aside, to disown them of their inheritance.
That was shameful. And what added insult to injury was the way they tried to “integrate” them into society after they’d been pushed aside for so long. This film tells the story of one such boy. Half-Cherokee, he is forced into an “Indian” school, where he is treated like an animal. The idea is to erase all sense of individuality and family out of him, and to get him to become an “American”.
You might think the subject matter is outdated, but only recently, the Canadian government has had to issue an official apology to Canadian Indians for their treatment of their children.
Quoting from the article: “Between 1870 and 1996, an estimated 150,000 indigenous children were wrenched from their homes and sent to Christian boarding schools, where many were sexually and physically abused.”
The movie offers a solution that I only wish more Indian children had taken. The little child runs away from the school (aided by his grandfather) and spends his teen years hiding from government officials who want to put him back in what they call “schools”. He gets a real education from his uncle, an experienced Cherokee who acts as his surrogate father and prepares him for a solitary, sometimes troubled, but free life in the mountains.
I get raised hackles every time I hear the word “freedom” trumpeted about, yet find clear proof of forced behavior or oppression. For all its talk of freedom, the US has always managed to oppress certain of its population, throughout time. First it was the native Indians, then it was the slaves, then its Japanese and German citizens during WWII, then the presumed Commies during the vile McCarthy trials, then various other groups during the 20th century. Now, this oppression has culminated into the mass reduction of our liberties through the so-called Patriot Act, a filthy lie of a misnomer if I ever heard of one.
The real patriots always stand up for the rights of all, and they always question the system in order to keep it in check. Sometimes, the best statement a free person can make is to stay free, even if it means thumbing your nose at idiotic rules and policies and living in the mountains, outside of society. Because eventually, the government comes around to realize its idiocy, and issues an apology. By the way, the American government is long overdue on just one such apology.
If you want to find out more about the movie or buy/rent it, you can find it at Amazon, Netflix and IMDB.
Raoul Pop 