never be sorry again. all your sins have been forgiven, by me personally. your fiance is a coward, and among the weak: you are immeasurably strong. go in peace my child
The abundance and frequency of the current spate of fires, however, can be seen as the result of anarchic capitalism and the drive for profits in real estate. And the serious consequences in death and destruction can be blamed on the lack of social planning to confront emergencies, complicated by an ultra-right president.
The fires themselves are the direct result of overdevelopment of formerly unsettled parts of California — for divergent yet related reasons. In Southern California, the Woolsey Fire has largely consumed high-priced real estate in beautiful, pristine areas sold to people with money.
The Northern California Camp Fire, on the other hand, has affected many poorer and older Californians — some of whom have been pushed out of overpriced urban areas: in other words, due to gentrification.
By using “volunteer” prison labor, the state says it saves $90 million to $100 million a year. It also claims to help inmates learn new skills while working in a team environment. Of course, no jobs in this field are guaranteed for ex-prisoners.
Trump continues to deny that human behavior produces global warming and that this is a major cause of more incidences of drought. The vegetation becomes dry and flammable, providing more fuel for fires. Poorly laid electrical lines may start a fire and then Santa Ana winds spread it.
California wildfires are symptoms of a crisis in capitalism. Exploitation and disregard for the land and resources and for poor and working people have created this annual terror residents experience.
The libertarian to fascist pipeline isn’t a pipeline.
A while back, like, 5 urls back, I made a post on how libertarians can easily become fascists based on their social darwinian perspective. This has been identified as the “libertarian to fascist pipeline” before. The idea is that you start out as a libertarian and begin to embrace fascism once you realize your ideal world cannot be voluntarily achieved. Well, now I’m here to say it’s much more likely there was no pipeline to begin with, and libertarians are fascist at heart.
Libertarianism, like capitalism itself, relies on the belief that poor people choose their fate. We even call them “the unfortunate” sometimes; “donating to the unfortunate”, implying they were simply unfortunate in their efforts. This is of course not true, capitalism relies on the existence of a desperate lower class for profit—this is most obvious under of globalized capitalism, where corporations such as Nestle use child slave labor because paying adults with protections and a minimum wage is more costly. This belief that the poor are at fault for their position in society does not stop at the poor, however. If a group of oppressed people are suffering for the same reason, that social darwinian, individualist perspective leads to racism, antisemitism, homophobia, etc, because it can not reconcile the fact that millions of people can’t by chance be suffering for the exact same reason. There needs to be an explanation. That’s where we see libertarian philosophers start embracing rhetoric along the lines of fascists: “These people are responsible for their bad position, and they’re dragging down us hard-workers”. You can see here how easy it is for libertarian ideals to mimic those of fascists. But I’m not arguing they’re simply mimicking. I’m arguing libertarians have always been fascists masked in a happy banner of “freedom”.
The SPLC put out an article a long while back about how seemingly ridiculous bigoted ideas make it into the mainstream:
“The Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded in 1982 by Llewellyn Rockwell Jr. and still headed by him, is a major center promoting libertarian political theory and the Austrian School of free market economics, pioneered by the late economist Ludwig von Mises. It publishes seven journals, has printed more than 100 books, and offers scholarships, prizes, conferences and a major library at its Auburn, Ala., offices.
It also promotes a type of Darwinian view of society in which elites are seen as natural and any intervention by the government on behalf of social justice is destructive. The institute seems nostalgic for the days when, “because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority [were] likely to be passed on within a few noble families.”
But the rule of these natural elites and intellectuals, writes institute scholar Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is being ruined by statist meddling such as “affirmative action and forced integration,” which he said is “responsible for the almost complete destruction of private property rights, and the erosion of freedom of contract, association, and disassociation.”
A key player in the institute for years was the late Murray Rothbard, who worked with Rockwell closely and co-edited a journal with him. The institute’s Web site includes a cybershrine to Rothbard, a man who complained that the “Officially Oppressed” of American society were a “parasitic burden,” forcing their “hapless Oppressors” to provide “an endless flow of benefits.”
“The call of ‘equality,’” he wrote, “is a siren song that can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human.”
These are just two of many libertarians who when they get honest with you about their views, they reveal they’re fascists.
Libertarians began supporting fascist ideals before they knew it. There is no pipeline, just realization.
べんきょうしなければならない 