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A Deeply Fractured US

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brihard said:
Jumped out at me:

“Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda.”

Sounds like things probably an us problem too.
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In 1970, My dad was invited to a medical conference in Moscow. In 1967 he was a NDP MLA. So we got permission to enter Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, entered the USSR, drove through Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad and out to Finland. I firmly believe they were hoping to turn my dad. He was rather naive about the threat of the USSR, but I suspect they decided he was not worth the effort. I should have paid to acquire a copy of his file when the KGB archives were briefly accesible.
 
lenaitch said:
"Because the first presidential debate broadcast on the radio was between Honest Abe Lincoln and his Republican challenger for the presidency, Frederick “Buster”Douglas."

Really? They had radio in 1858?
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The really sad thing about that tweet (or whatever the f they are calling them now) is that it is difficult impossible to determine if "Three Year Letterman" is trying to be sarcastic, ironic or comedic or if he is really that stupid. Such is the state of education and pubic discourse (and not just in the US, but they are a target rich environment) that it is easy to accept that the writer of that drivel thought he was being serious.

I was first going to make a comment based solely on my first glance at the photos of Lincoln and Douglas and the phrase "Lincoln-Douglas debate" - that was the wrong Douglas. Yes, my initial reaction was that stupidity trying to masquerade as factual was encroaching on the forum (it wouldn't be the first time). But @Cloud Cover's comment and emoji gave me pause that the twit can't be serious. I don't follow anybody on social media. I'll sometimes go to those sites to read the additional text or to see where something came from originally. Usually I'm disappointed by the experience; no difference on this occasion. I still don't know what was the purpose of the original tweet; I suspect his sole purpose is to generate views, so, unfortunately I've been suckered into his game. I do, however, still think that the writer is an idiot.
 
Blackadder1916 said:
The really sad thing about that tweet (or whatever the f they are calling them now) is that it is difficult impossible to determine if "Three Year Letterman" is trying to be sarcastic, ironic or comedic or if he is really that stupid. Such is the state of education and pubic discourse (and not just in the US, but they are a target rich environment) that it is easy to accept that the writer of that drivel thought he was being serious.

I was first going to make a comment based solely on my first glance at the photos of Lincoln and Douglas and the phrase "Lincoln-Douglas debate" - that was the wrong Douglas. Yes, my initial reaction was that stupidity trying to masquerade as factual was encroaching on the forum (it wouldn't be the first time). But @Cloud Cover's comment and emoji gave me pause that the twit can't be serious. I don't follow anybody on social media. I'll sometimes go to those sites to read the additional text or to see where something came from originally. Usually I'm disappointed by the experience; no difference on this occasion. I still don't know what was the purpose of the original tweet; I suspect his sole purpose is to generate views, so, unfortunately I've been suckered into his game. I do, however, still think that the writer is an idiot.
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3YL is a very well known parody account on Twitter. He posts all kinds of absurd stuff for comedy and has quite a following. In real life he’s a lawyer - I think somewhere in the Northeast - and he donates his Twitter revenue to various good causes like children’s hospitals.
 
brihard said:
3YL is a very well known parody account on Twitter. He posts all kinds of absurd stuff for comedy and has quite a following. In real life he’s a lawyer - I think somewhere in the Northeast - and he donates his Twitter revenue to various good causes like children’s hospitals.
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Coach is a licensed Notary with specific expertise in US Constitutional Law and its influence in the drafting of the Holy Bible by the founding fathers Thomas Roosevelt and Theodore O’Brady Jefferson.
 
The story got huge attention because of Trump and Vance, but it’s not really tied to the election so I’ll put it here. Facebook strikes again.

www.thedailybeast.com

Source of Trump’s Dog-Eating Immigrants Claim Unmasked

The poster got the story from a friend of her daughter who heard it from an “acquaintance of a friend.” Trump quoted her, but “I don’t have any proof,” says Patient Zero.
www.thedailybeast.com
 
In American Leviathan, Ryun succeeds by making what is complicated quite comprehensible. He takes a century and a half of mostly forgotten history and political debate and boils down all the sordidness into a digestible, if unpleasant, meal. He traces the origin of the administrative state to a group of American intellectuals who were fascinated with Hegel’s philosophical defense of authoritarianism and the absolute power of the Prussian king. He pinpoints the rise of the Uniparty in the overlapping policy preferences of leading Republicans, Democrats, and socialists at the beginning of the twentieth century. He recounts how progressive Republicans, such as Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt, advocated for radical expansion of government and rejection of long-respected constitutional constraints that mirrored many of the wishes of progressive Democrats, such as Woodrow Wilson and The New Republic founder Herbert Croly. Together, these various thought leaders (at times hostile to one another as they advanced similar goals) initiated what Ryun calls a “Progressive Statist movement” demanding a fundamental transformation of the American system of government and the elevation of the State at the expense of Americans’ individual liberties.

Ryun defines the administrative state, the national security state, and the Deep State as distinct entities reflecting varying degrees of power, privilege, secretiveness, and incompetence, but he recognizes all of these unelected factions as parts of the same beast: the Leviathan. With that appellation, he refers to the political treatise Leviathan, from seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose inclination toward a strong, centralized government emerged during the chaos of the English Civil Wars. In the Old Testament, Leviathan is a sea serpent and demon associated with the sin of envy. The monster eats the souls of those who are damned because they remain too attached to the material world to reach God’s realm and receive His grace. Although the biblical Leviathan epitomizes chaos, Hobbes used the idea of a terrifying creature composed of myriad souls as a metaphor for an all-powerful State constantly shaping citizens and feeding from their individual energies. The frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan shows a monarch clutching the symbols of earthly power in one hand and spiritual power in the other. The monarch’s body is formed from hundreds of faceless individuals who, through their actions to support the king, embody the State. At the top of the illustration is a Latin quote describing Leviathan from the Book of Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.” It is in this sense that Ryun describes the American Leviathan.

Although Hobbes saw the Leviathan as a necessary force for taming violent chaos, Ryun recognizes it for what it actually is: an uncontrollable, ever-growing, and ravenous beast that devours any prospect for representative democracy or individual liberty. Interestingly, just as Hobbes saw the Leviathan State as the union of the secular and spiritual worlds, Ryun sees the American Leviathan as a usurper claiming dominion over both worlds, too. He takes great pains to show how Progressive Statists depend upon a rejection of God, so that they can claim His powers as their own. In the same way that the theological Leviathan represents the deadly sin of envy, the American Leviathan is envious of all forms of power outside its own. Ultimately, to choose the unelected administrative state over the constitutional republic and the protection of Americans’ natural rights is to worship government above all else. The American Leviathan is an obscene and false god.
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www.americanthinker.com

Slaying Leviathan

Ned Ryun has written a new book, American Leviathan, and I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy. If you don’t know Ned, he’s the founder of American Majority and Voter Gravity, grassroots organizations that specia...
www.americanthinker.com www.americanthinker.com

And here we are, @Edward Campbell , 300 years later.

Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and George Berkeley vs John Locke, Anthony Ashley-Cooper and Frances Hutcheson.

The advantage of our Canadian democracy is that we can afford to ignore history and indulge our passions for a decade or so secure in the knowledge that parliament is supreme and no parliament can bind another.

10 years of Hobbes followed by 10 years of Locke. And repeat.
 
Just found - I love serendipity.

During the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke up against censorship and for lay readers in the wake of an attempt by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen to eradicate communist books from libraries:

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book . . . .​

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? . . .​

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.​
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Don't bring back the Index of Prohibited Books. Most of Christendom has only been granted leave to study freely since 1966 and Vatican II.

Read the books for yourselves and draw your own conclusions.

An expert is someone that has read more books than you.
 
The reason the Catholic Church has never come to terms with the Masons is that the Masons provided a forum where lay people could gather away from the influence of the establishment and get to know each other and their opinions.

The Masons never rejected Catholics. The Papacy rejected Masons. And still does.
 
dimsum said:
www.independent.co.uk

JD Vance says US could veto NATO if Europe tries to regulate Elon Musk’s platforms

Republican vice presidential nominee says ‘Germans and other nations’ – not Russia – would ‘have to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction’
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk

It’s not technically about Trump so I think it fits better here.
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I kind of put this into the same folder as Gutenberg, Caxton and the Stamp Acts of 1712 and 1765 and other Taxes on Knowledge.

The basis of the Freedom of the Press amendment.

Along with The Royal Mail going private, which I believe created the original internet, Boyle's "Invisible College"

The Royal Mail can trace its history back to 1516, when Henry VIII established a "Master of the Posts",<a href="Royal Mail - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>8<span>]</span></a> a position that was renamed "Postmaster General" in 1710.

Upon his accession to the throne of England at the Union of the Crowns in 1603, James VI moved his court to London. One of his first acts from London was to establish the royal postal service between London and Edinburgh, in an attempt to retain control over the Scottish Privy Council.

The Royal Mail service was first made available to the public by Charles I on 31 July 1635, with postage being paid by the recipient. The monopoly was farmed out to Thomas Witherings.
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en.wikipedia.org

Royal Mail - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org

Invisible College - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Prior to privatization of the Mail people had to meet face to face to discuss ideas - Colleges and Institutions
After the mail ideas could be expressed clearly across Britain and over oceans. The environment for the proliferation of Coffee Houses, Taverns and Free Masons.

Elon Musk may be a bastard, but I like him. Boyle and Luther would approve as would Locke, Shaftesbury and Mills.
 
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