The universal victory of anti-police state referendums was the most important thing to come out of the election, much more so than the presidential contest. But the big question is what will the state attack as it loses the drug war as a tool?
Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Kassandra Frederique, discusses a measure that makes Oregon the first state in the nation to decriminalize the possession and personal use of all drugs.
This article nails it down pretty down. The main thing I would add is the left’s embrace of scientism (“science” is not merely a process capable of generating error like anything else but the modern version of a papal bull) and therapeutism (“health” is the highest value and it is the responsibility of the state to make everyone healthy) plays a major role in what the author is describing.
By Paul Cudenec
Sometimes secondhand books can come into our possession in ways that make it quite clear they need us to read them. Such was the case with Le fascisme italien by Pierre Milza and Serge Berstein, (1) which reached me by means of a random sequence of events including a friend moving flat, an unexpected traffic jam and a small public park on the outskirts of Paris. It did not disappoint and, as I am about to explain in more detail, helped me to see a number of crucial issues more clearly.
The Third Reich were actually pioneers in modern therapeutic totalitarianism.
Sound familiar? Reminds me of Russell Means’ observation that the government’s objective is to turn the entire country into one big reservation.
Time to brush up on the long history of colonizers controlling indigenous populations on reservations and through apartheid pass systems. Rockefeller Foundation and WEF’s Common Pass is coming. They aim to control your mobility under the pretense of “health defense.” In truth it is about holding the masses captive for data extraction purposes.
What Pelosi is proposing amounts to creating a committee for the purpose of granting the therapeutic state the power to remove the president from office. The next step would be a committee that approves the “mental health” (ideological conformity) of candidates for public offices.
ABC News
The move comes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that Trump was in an “altered state,” but said Friday the measure wouldn’t apply to him.
“This is not about President Trump. He will face the judgment of the voters. But he shows the need for us to create a process for future presidents,” Pelosi told reporters at Capitol Hill news conference as she introduced the bill.
“This legislation applies to future presidents, but we are reminded of the necessity of action by the health of the current president,” she added. “It’s not about any of us making a judgment about the president’s well-being.”
When pressed by reporters if she thinks it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment concerning Trump, Pelosi responded: “That’s not for us to decide.”
The measure would create an expert panel – with members appointed by Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate – to conduct a medical exam at the direction of Congress to “determine whether the President is mentally or physically unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office,” according to the text of a version of the proposal introduced in 2017 by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
Any critique of modern states must necessarily include a critique of scientism and the therapeutic state, both of which are essential elements of the ideological superstructure of modern ruling classes, with physicians, “mental health experts,” and scientists being primary sectors of the modern priesthood. Thomas Szasz nailed this decades ago.
Thomas Szasz has been challenging the very existence of “mental illness” for over twenty-five years. His advocacy of freedom of choice and the abolition of involuntary psychiatry has made him America’s most controversial psychiatrist.
The Therapeutic State is a unique collection of topical essays about what the author calls “one of the grandest illusions of our age, mental illness, and the quixotic crusade against it.” Pivoting his analysis on news-making events, Szasz exposes the fallacies of our present penchant for interpreting the behavior of “sane” persons as goal-directed and therefore sensible, and the behavior of “insane” persons as caused by a “mental illness” and therefore senseless. In a series of diverse short pieces, originally published in newspapers and magazines, the author shows us that individual liberty and responsibility are indivisible, and that we cannot protect ourselves against coercive psychiatry’s threats to liberty so long as we persist in using psychiatric ideas and interventions to evade responsibility.
Szasz’s recommendation is simple but radical: So-called mental patients should be treated like other people – as no more subject to loss of liberty or entitled to excuses from responsibility than anyone else. Psychiatrists should be treated like other professionals – having no more power to inculpate innocent persons or to expurgate guilty ones than, say, accountants or architects. In short, our aim should be to disarm psychiatrists, much as the Founding Fathers disarmed priests. Nothing less can free us from the “benefits” and “harms” of the Therapeutic State.
The therapeutic police state.
By Christian Britschgi, Reason
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said on a press call today that he would not allow indoor dining to return in New York City unless local politicians devoted significant police resources to enforcing social distancing and other reopening conditions.
By Antony Sammeroff
The following is a list of 8 things I am more worried about than Covid-19. Strap in.
Carlson is in his better form in this although he’s still trying to score some partisan points along the way. Now, if he would only criticize Trump’s law and order police state the same way he criticizes medical martial law.
Now, if these sheriffs would start rebelling against a whole lot more laws, we might have something.
By Jason Wilson
The Guardian
Sheriffs around the country are refusing to enforce or are even actively resisting Covid-19 mask laws and lockdowns, while others have permitted or encouraged armed vigilantism in response to Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests.
Critics say both phenomena are related to a far-right “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which believes that sheriffs are the highest constitutional authority in the country, with the power – and duty – to resist state and federal governments.
James Lindsay outlines the intellectual trajectory of totalitarian humanism, political correctness, wokeness, cultural Marxism, whatever one wants to call it, pretty thoroughly in this, although I would add more emphasis on 19th century Progressive Christianity and Maoism during the Cultural Revolution period than what he mentions. He focuses on most of the high points: Frankfurt School/critical theory, Herbert Marcuse/repressive tolerance, terrorists like the Weather Underground, and postmodernism/deconstructionism and their antecedents like critical race theory, radical feminism, queer theory, etc. although he doesn’t mention certain strands within the trajectory of privilege theory (e.g. Ted Allen, Peggy McIntosh). More emphasis needs to be placed on the relationship between totalitarian humanism, therapeutism, and scientism as well. One very important point that Lindsay raises in this is that the Marxists are correct when they say totalitarian humanism is a tool being used by the bourgeoisie in order to take the left away from the working class. I’m glad to see him pointing that out.
James Lindsay on the theology of the new theocracy. The two most important things that are happening in the developed world at the present time are the re-feudalization of class relations and the growth of totalitarian humanism as the self-legitimating ideology of the rising ruling class. Just as neo-feudalism is reinstating the kinds of class societies that existed in the premodern world, totalitarian humanism is resurrecting premodern caste systems based on ascribed status, but within the technocratic framework of modern totalitarianism. The principal differences between totalitarian humanism and the 20th-century models of totalitarianism are two things: 1) the commercial values of capitalism require a certain degree of cultural openness that is not possible in a Stalinist type of system (hence, “soft totalitarianism” rather than “hard totalitarianism”) and 2) contemporary methods of propaganda and ideological control are far more sophisticated than those of 20th-century totalitarians, more Edward Bernays than Joseph Goebbels.
By Rory Taylor
Vox
The US has signed hundreds of treaties with Indigenous peoples. Here’s what would happen if the government actually honored them.
“‘We the people’ has never meant ‘all the people.’”
These were words of independent presidential candidate and Navajo Nation member Mark Charles as he spoke, to great excitement, at the first presidential forum dedicated to Native American issues in over a decade.
A somewhat interesting interview with a leading black conservative.
I would be inclined to argue that, at present, substantial sectors of the capitalist class (including some major capitalist entities) along with their allies in the new clerisy/new class that dominates the “ideas industries” are fueling anti-racism hysteria in order to deflect attention away from the class-based nature of the insurrection. They do this because a race war is less antithetical to their interests than a class war. However, contra the Marxists and left-anarchists, it doesn’t stop at class either. Even a class war is more co-optable than a direct war against the state itself.
All of this follows an easily identifiable pattern in US history.
I first started developing the ideas that I would later come to call “pan-secessionism in the mid-1990s after notice the emergence of the “right-wing” antigovernment movement associated with the militias, sovereign citizens, tax protestors, and other similar groups. Of course, much of the left and certainly liberal opinion dismissed these as racist reworkings of the KKK. But what I found in my interaction with these people is that most of them were motivated by gun rights, economics, and general antigovernmentism, with a minority being motivated by religion, and an even smaller minority being motivated by race.
Some of the more radical ones were interested in forming alliances with black nationalists, American Indian tribes, or foreign revolutionaries like the Zapatistas, Shining Path, or Middle Eastern groups. The Rodney King riots, as well as the killings at Waco and Ruby Ridge, had happened a short time earlier, and the “Battle of Seattle” happened a few years later. I started to realize the potential for a tripartite alliance between the urban lumpenproletariat (mostly minority department store looters), rural lumpenproletariat (mostly white gun nuts), and what I called the suburban lumpenproletariat (middle-class kids who adopt a lumpen lifestyle by choice). Then, as now, that seems to be a pretty good plan. Here it is.
Previously, I was a Noam Chomsky-like left-anarchist, heavily influenced by the Spanish Revolution, who favored overthrowing the state through the use of anarcho-syndicalist unions, worker militias, guerrilla armies. I had never given much consideration to the idea of territorial or other forms of secessionism, although I knew (mostly from Proudhon) that secession was a historic anarchist principle, along with things like dual power (which I largely learned from Murray Bookchin). I was already an “anarchist without adjectives” as well (influenced by Voltairine de Cleyre and Errico Malatesta).
I never abandoned any of that as much as I expanded it to include the concepts of pan-anarchism and pan-secessionism as an umbrella framework for attacking the state, recognizing that it would be a means of bringing sectors of the far-right and radical-center as well as leftists and minorities into a wider anti-state front. At the time, a lot of these militia/sovereign people were pushing the idea of “county supremacy,” “mini-republics,” or micronations that struck me as basically a right-wing version of Murray Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalist” idea or a gun-toting version of Gandhi’s satyagraha philosophy. Then, as now, this seems to be a fairly on-target idea as well.
What puts me at odds with the mainstream anarchist movement is that most of them are Blue Tribe fundamentalists first and anarchists second, which means that hating on social conservatives is more important to them than overthrowing the ruling class. Regrettably, the Blue Tribe Khomeinists have replaced the Marxist-Leninists as the most immediately visible enemy of anarchism on the far-left, and many anarchists have fallen for it just as they were taken in by Marxism in the past.
Just like the traditional white collar priesthood, the newer white coat priesthood doesn’t mind “bearing false witness” when it’s convenient.
Krystal and Saagar react to Dr. Fauci’s interview where he admits health officials downplayed the importance of masks to save PPE for healthcare workers.
It’s rather ironic that the supposed social democratic utopia of Sweden has adopted the anti-lockdowners’ preferred laissez-faire approach to COVID-19.
I always said the “new fascism” would not be under the guise of national or racial chauvinism but would be wrapped in the banner of “progressive” causes like “safety,” “health,” or “equality.” Where have you been, Antifa?
I originally introduced the concept of totalitarian humanism in this article for Lew Rockwell back in 2007. I discussed the class component, materialist base, and ideological superstructure elements of totalitarian humanism in this lecture to the HL Mencken Club in 2018. Critics of “political correctness” often focus on its pathological fixation on race, gender, and sexuality, but the therapeutic state (a concept originally developed by Thomas Szasz) is also an essential element of totalitarian humanism (there is also a foreign policy component as well).
Tom Woods interviews Thaddeus Russell on left-wing support for scientistic therapeutic totalitarianism.
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It’s been quite remarkable to me the extent to which the lockdowns have divided people along ideological lines. A left-wing case against lockdown seems so easy to make and so obvious, and yet a vanishingly small number of people are making it. Thaddeus Russell, an eclectic and always interesting thinker who grew up on the left, joins me to try to get to the bottom of it.
Read the original article at TomWoods.com. http://tomwoods.com/ep-1655-why-does-the-left-favor-lockdowns/
