Just had a brief conversation with a stranger and she says to me "You have great energy!" And I'm thinking "Are you feeling the Spirit, or what?" 🤨😄
"Internationally, the control that governments could exercise in the name of #COVID mitigation appeared almost limitless. #Canada made it impossible for the unvaccinated to leave the country. #Germany and #Austria locked down their unvaccinated, with the latter even making the injection a legal requirement. #Australia seemed to return to its roots as a prison colony, beating protesters, arresting families in parks, and placing large numbers of their aboriginal population in detention camps in the name of reducing the spread. Footage of police in #Amsterdam turning dogs on “unauthorized” lockdown protesters was shared widely on the internet.
"These are, in theory, Western liberal democracies that respect individual rights to assemble, protest, move freely, and have bodily autonomy over medical decisions. Yet those rights quickly vanished as the state moved to consolidate its authority." (from Ch. 2)
True, and I was using Amethyst when I thought of this. I just think swiping would make it more of a fluid action.
I've never been there. Do you think it's better or worse now?
What do you think of this idea for the Global feed?
When scrolling, you can swipe right to follow someone you don't already follow and left to mute/block someone so you don't see their notes again
#asknostr #ideastr #Nostr
The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684515580?tag=lrc18-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1
This might be a good read. Libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker gives it a great review even though he ends up agin it!
Particularly intriguing to me is where Tucker writes: "MacIntyre... believes that the liberal project of the 17th and 18th centuries were the product of rationalistic arrogance, the belief that whole societies and cultures could be cajoled into a single model of organization by virtue of pieces of parchment, governmental architectures, slogans about human rights, and strict models of what defines the very notion of freedom and progress.
"He attempts to map out how the freedom of past centuries gradually mutated into the total state of today, a political order in which the entrenched and global bureaucratic elite face no limits to their power and ambition. He is not even slightly shocked that the center of the empire is the US simply because the US was the most successful deployment of the liberal democracy in history, and hence the one most vulnerable to the trajectory of arrogance, corruption, decadence, bloat, and hegemonic imposition without limit." 👀
Added to my reading list...
From the Introduction:
"No legislation had been passed, no war had been declared, but most of the population suddenly found themselves locked in their homes.
"...The experts who had locked down the entire country were drunk on the incredible power they had amassed in the space of only a few months and had no interest in letting it go. Many state and local governments worked in concert with federal agencies to treat those who opposed the lockdowns as the equivalent of public-health terrorists. Business owners who attempted to open shop were fined millions of dollars, parents who took their children to the park were threatened, and pastors who attempted to hold church services were arrested.
"...Little to no action was taken to challenge the constitutionality of these restrictions and punishments.
"I was absolutely blown away by what had unfolded before me. The US Constitution was the bedrock of my American identity. I had been told all my life that the carefully crafted checks and balances built into the system limited the government’s ability to seize power in exactly this manner. Even if all the branches of government were to work in unison to encroach on people’s freedom, the Bill of Rights stood as a final bulwark against the destruction of our liberties. I had been told the Second Amendment existed primarily to make sure nothing like this could ever happen. Yet freedom of assembly and worship had been summarily abolished and very few people seemed to care. Obviously the politicians had buckled under but even those around me who I’d known for decades and who largely shared my political views were happy to go along. Conservatives and libertarians who had spent their whole lives railing against government tyranny found ways to excuse and deflect. When tyranny came, nothing happened. The Constitution I’d believed in my whole life did nothing. Those who had parroted the myth of limited government seemed to go on as if nothing important had been lost."
If you have an Android phone it's really easy with Citrine. I've had it a few weeks now but haven't needed to use it to restore my follows yet. 🤞
I'm still following you. Welcome to the club! It's happened to me twice. It's like a Nostr initiation. Now you are a true Nostrich 😁
'I Thought I Invited Comedians,' Says Confused Pope After Stephen Colbert Shows Up https://t.co/IYv5ZlNSQ0 https://t.co/3huzYet2gN 
I so wish the Pope had really said that 😄
"...the use of private emails and pseudonyms appeared to be a frequent pattern of behavior in the Obama administration [in violation of federal record-keeping laws, as well as likely circumventing Freedom of Information Act requests]. In addition to Biden and Kerry, Clinton notoriously rerouted her email to private, unsecured server that she maintained possession of at her home.
"The server, which revealed several emails with classified markings, despite Clinton’s efforts to destroy the evidence, was believed to have been compromised by the Chinese."
Lemme know if y'all get a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind there tomorrow, or cloven tongues like 🔥 on your heads...
#pentecost
A great except from Thomas Paine in *The Rights of Man* (1791):
> A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It had its origin in the principles of society, and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has in man and all the parts of a civilized community upon each other create that great chain of connection which holds it together.
> The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their laws; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything that is ascribed to government….
> [I]nstances are not wanting to show that everything which government can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common consent of society, without government. . . . The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act.
"We should strive, therefore, to achieve a radically decentralized society politically, even stateless societies, governed, not by constitutions, but by voluntary contracts rooted in the natural rights of individuals; and a society where bills are paid for services rendered, not taxes imposed by ruling elites. Public laws of the “sovereign state” should give way to private law and private governance, with subsidiarity and depoliticization the guiding principles. We have much work to do."
We Hold These Myths to be Self-evident...
The U.S. Legal System Is a Wreck... Here's the Proof
https://www.crisisinvesting.com/p/our-legal-system-is-a-wreck-heres
#news #newstr
#TodayILearned all nine of the U.S. Supreme Court justices are multi-millionaires and accept "gifts"...
#TIL The U.S. #GovtIsTheProblem
'Narcissist' Trump's sensitivity about his 'tiny hands' will end Marco Rubio's VP dreams https://www.rawstory.com/trump-rubio-tiny-hands/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
Good, Rubio is a neocon anyway.
#meme #memestr #nostrmeme"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system."
–George W. Bush