Blog

Libya, North Africa Emerge As Cocaine Transit Hubs

You can’t stop markets – where their is a buyer their will be a seller.

The interventionists (mainly Samantha Power) in the Obama administration (the same ones that now populate the Biden Administration) used the cover of “Responsibility to Protect” to remove the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi thinking a new era of democracy will rise in Libya once he is removed.  As Ron Paul wrote:

“Power, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council staff and as US Ambassador to the UN, argued passionately and successfully that a US attack on the Gaddafi government in Libya would result in a liberation of the people and the outbreak of democracy in the country. In reality, her justification was all based on lies and the US assault has left nothing but murder and mayhem. Gaddafi’s relatively peaceful, if authoritarian, government has been replaced by radical terrorists and even slave markets.”

Now you can add Libya as a transit point for drugs to Western Europe.  Doubt they learned any lesson from this.

2021 01 18 08 11

More here

 

 

 

 

 

The Memory Hole

The Memory Hole

Censorship has been in the news a lot lately. You have probably heard it mentioned in relation to Donald Trump. Twitter, Facebook, and many other online platforms permanently suspended his accounts last week. That’s pretty wild, but there is a lot more worth talking about than any one person losing their Twitter account.

In the past, censorship has taken many forms. Originally, it involved physically stopping people from speaking, either by violence or threat of violence. Then, as speech moved to paper it involved destroying scrolls and later books. George Orwell, in his classic book 1984 imagined a future where censorship happened by literally cutting portions out of newspapers and putting them into what he called a “memory hole” where they would be burned up and destroyed forever.

Today, we have experienced decades of the near free spread of information. The internet has been incredible for that. But, now people are realizing that the same tools which have been so incredible for the proliferation of information can also be used for the mass censorship of information.

In the past, censorship always involved a lot of work. If someone wanted to lead a censorship campaign, it involved getting thugs who would carry it out. They would have to physically find the people and materials that they wanted to censor and then they had to physically dispose of them.

Today, censorship happens at the push of a button. It doesn’t matter whether the contraband information comes from a powerful government official or any one of us regular folks. For better or for worse, the internet has become the public space. It is where we make friends, it is where we interact with people, it is where we keep in contact with family, and now it’s become more and more where we get our jobs done. This combination of censorship becoming so easy and our lives moving to such a large extent online has created a problem worth talking about.

While censorship used to involved trying to get rid of a few books or people, now we risk instantly having huge portions of our life ripped from us without warning and with no recourse.

I experienced this personally with a Facebook group. It was a group of us who met online, became friends, online, and interacted online. We built real relationships and even businesses along the way. We shared births and deaths and countless prayers. Yet, on our fourth anniversary (and just a few days before last year’s presidential election) Facebook permanently suspended our group. It was gone. We lost four years of personal and professional content. They accused us of the vague crimes of violating community standards and spreading fake news.

Our group certainly wasn’t the only one. Millions of people are losing years of their lives to big tech censorship. Donald Trump is only one drop in that ocean.

This goes beyond politics and tired arguments over public vs. private censorship. The source material of history is being ripped from us. Opposing voices are disappearing without any recourse. In an age where we thought that information would be unstoppable, we are watching the historical narrative be shaped in real-time.

Let’s not pretend that Donald Trump didn’t use Twitter as his primary venue for making public statements. Now, when people want to look back at his words they have to rely on third parties and backed up data since the source material has been removed. In a few years, when you share quotes from his tweets people will say, “Yeah, but how can you even be sure that he said that?” What will remain are the incessant fake news articles from the agenda-driven media painting Trump as a hopeless tyrant and anyone who doesn’t hate him as brainwashed Q people.

While you still can, I’d suggest you do whatever you can to back up your online data. It is very easy to download all of your data from both Facebook and Twitter. At the very least, get a copy of your own data before it is ripped from you. Don’t let your posts, your history, your interactions be memory-holed. And going forward, now is a great time to stop and consider where we are sending our data. If our lives can be so easily censored on these platforms, then maybe we shouldn’t rely so heavily on them.

Take control of your life and your online data. Don’t let yourself be memory-holed.


Originally posted at: https://technoagorist.com/50

TechnoAgorist on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@TechnoAgorist:8

TechnoAgorist on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@TechnoAgorist:8

TechnoAgorist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjWlrSuf4b4eApnFX9o82BA

TechnoAgorist is a production of the MLGA Network. Find more great content at: https://mlganetwork.com

Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

I wrote another book, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

.Advance Praise for Enough Already

“If you only read one book this year on America’s unending ‘War on Terror,’ it should be this persuasive and devastatingly damning account of how the United States created the original al Qaeda terrorism threat by its own actions and then increased that threat by orders of magnitude by its wanton killings in one country after another in the name of ‘counter-terrorism.’ Once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop!” — Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower and author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

“Nothing has fueled the abuse of government power in the last 20 years like the ‘War on Terrorism.’ Scott Horton’s essential new book, Enough Already, is the key to understanding why it’s not too late to end the wars and save our country. Three administrations in a row have promised us a more restrained foreign policy. It is time we insisted on it.” — Ron Paul, M.D., former congressman and author of Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity

“With outstanding scholarship, research and analysis, Scott Horton’s new book, Enough Already, lays bare the logical absurdity and self-defeating nature of America’s permanent-war establishment. It might have taken its title from a line in the book’s introduction: America’s war policy since at least the Carter Administration has been ‘a policy in search of a reason.’ As Horton painstakingly lays bare, in virtually none of the military conflicts the United States has chosen to fight in since the 1970s was our security ever genuinely threatened. His ultimate solution is the only one that has any chance of preserving American security and giving us a chance to be ready in case we do face a genuine threat in the future: end the pointless and self-defeating forever wars. All of them.” — Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, USA (Ret.) four-time combat deployer, two-time winner of the Bronze Star and author of Eleventh Hour in 2020 America: How American Foreign Policy Got Jacked Up and What the Next Administration Can Do About It

“This is it! Finally, we have a comprehensive, rigorously researched, beautifully written and unassailable argument to stop the ‘endless wars’ that virtually no Americans outside the foreign policy establishment want to continue. There is no better time for this book to appear and no better person to write it than Scott Horton, who has been the people’s foreign policy expert for decades. If you want to save lives, buy it, read it and share it.” — Thaddeus Russell, professor of history and philosophy at Willamette University and author of A Renegade History of the United States

“I finished reading Enough Already the same week I had to attend the funeral of a sailor from one of my Iraq deployments. He killed himself leaving behind a wife and three boys. Nothing in this book is simply historical or abstract to tens of millions of families. Scott Horton has written an incredible accounting of the wars of the last twenty years. This book should be used to hold accountable those who purposefully committed these crimes and to remember the generations of Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Libyans, Iranians, Syrians, sub-Saharan Africans and Americans whose lives have been forever damaged and destroyed.” — Capt. Matthew Hoh, USMC (ret.), former senior State Department official, Zabul Province, Afghanistan, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy

“Scott Horton is one of the best informed and hardest hitting critics of the War on Terror. His new book is a gold mine for anyone seeking to learn about the frauds and failures of U.S. foreign policy.” — Jim Bovard, columnist at USA Today and author of Public Policy Hooligan

“Scott Horton’s book courageously investigates the deception that is the ‘War on Terror.’ It provides an impressive and wide-ranging examination of the misguided and costly U.S. foreign policy decisions which led to morally indefensible, strategically useless and militarily catastrophic interventions and wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of the world. Enough Already must be read by every American who cares about the future of his country because the cost of these imprudent wars has proven detrimental to the nation’s moral compass, global reputation, economic well-being and, indeed, national security. Enough Already is an eloquently written book. Using accessible language, exhaustive research and indisputable arguments, Horton’s latest volume is a damning and impassioned case against war.” — Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle and author of These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons

“Scott Horton has put together a devastating, deeply-researched account of how the U.S. war system betrayed the American people’s trust in carrying out the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ He shows convincingly that it actually served other objectives and represents an unforgivable treachery that has inflicted incalculable harm on the United States. Readers across the entire deeply divided U.S. political spectrum will find truth in it that they can trust.” — Gareth Porter, Martha Gellhorn Award-winning journalist and author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

“Scott Horton is a walking encyclopedia of U.S foreign policy, and he has managed to chronicle the entire history of the government’s meddling in the Middle East in this well-written and important volume. Enough Already explains why still today the U.S. government continues to bomb countries at its caprice, long after the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, attacks have disappeared.” — Laurie Calhoun, author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age

Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan was by far the best single account of the Afghan mire. Yet Afghanistan is only one of the conflicts unleashed by the U.S. and Western interventions in the ‘War on Terror.’ Scott Horton has now given us Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, a masterly history of these chaotic, tragic and above all futile conflicts, ranging with his usual excoriating accuracy from Mali to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen by way of Libya and Syria. Millions are dead, disabled or languish desperately far from their homes as the direct result of our blunders, bewilderment and outright malicious stupidity. Thousands of our own soldiers have died or are disabled. Hundreds more of our citizens have died in the U.S. and Europe in what Horton calls the ‘backdraft’ of our disastrous actions. Ignore the self-serving memoirs or grandiose academic tomes; if you read only one book on the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ this must be that book.” — Frank Ledwidge, former Royal Navy Reserve intelligence officer, “Justice Advisor” to the UK Mission in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province and author of Investment in Blood

“The United States must end its foolish empire building. In Enough Already, Scott Horton clearly demonstrates the dangers of following those that profit from the deaths of American service men and women fighting in undeclared and endless wars. We cannot wage conventional war on an unconventional enemy. Enough Already!” — Sgt. Dan McKnight, Idaho Army National Guard (ret.), Afghanistan war veteran, founder and chairman of BringOurTroopsHome.US

“There is no better title for Scott Horton’s ambitious new book than Enough Already because honestly, those are the two words that floated through my head the entire time I was reading it. U.S. foreign policy for the last 20 years has been an endless parade of regime changes, useless attempts to ‘fix’ our blunders, extra-legal killing and detention, and military interventions that have made troubled states failed states. It never ends. Whether it be our destruction of Iraq, the illegal drone wars, JSOC manhunting or Hillary Clinton’s last stand in Libya, Scott has expertly harnessed mountains of detail here in a compelling narrative that underscores what a rotten mess the War on Terrorism has become. More importantly it shows that no matter how righteous the mission to go after the 9/11 perpetrators seemed at the time, the American government has managed to twist those goals into something perverse and ultimately more dangerous to the world than the 19 hijackers who changed everything that fateful day. The book is grim but persuasive, and a must read for anyone who is interested in learning how we got to this place two decades later.” — Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and contributing editor at The American Conservative

 

A Defense of the Peaceful Transfer of War-Making Power

Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausevitz famously said that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” I think we can reverse this: politics is war by other means. The ultimate aim of politics (in the narrow sense of the word; there’s a more elevated philosophical sense) is what Frederic Bastiat called “legal plunder.”

Other thinkers have elaborated this idea. Franz Oppenheimer’s book The State comes to mind. Oppenheimer influenced Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and through them the modern libertarian movement. Oppenheimer distinguished work — which he called the “economic means” — from robbery — the “political means.”

A gang can raid a group of productive people, steal their stuff, and ride off to the next community to plunder anew. Or it can stay around and keep looting the same people. Now people tend not to like this and won’t be terribly productive. So to pull this off, the gang will need to convince the people that the arrangement is for their own good. The gang will promise to protect them from other gangs (which it will surely want to do) and provide other services that will tend to keep the people quiescent. The booty they will be deprived of will be relabeled taxes.

To sell this set-up to the people, the gang will need intellectuals or priests to formulate a religion, ideology, or what-have-you to persuade the people that this is all for their benefit. Why? Because rebellion is costly to rulers. For one thing, people who are busy resisting tyranny won’t be producing stuff, which would undercut the point of politics: legal plunder. Better for the rulers, therefore, that the people (at least tacitly) consent to or acquiesce in the arrangement after being encouraged to believe that they are net beneficiaries, despite the palpable costs. Controlling education is useful in this regard.

So we might well look on politics as war on productive people by other means.

This has implications for the revered idea of the peaceful transfer of power, which is much in the news these days. The power that is to be peacefully transferred is the power to make war both domestically and internationally.

Does this mean that we ought to denigrate the peaceful transfer of power? No, of course not. Political power is properly and always an object of suspicion and (one hopes) diminution, but that is no justification for violent transfer. Violence embodies its own intrinsic evils and cannot be controlled or finely targeted. Collateral damage is the rule, not the exception. Moreover, violence will usually result in far worse state abuses — with the support of most people, who will abhor civil disorder.

When President Woodrow Wilson and his Progressive supporters pushed for U.S. entry into the Great War, Randolph Bourne broke with his former allies and eloquently opposed their crusade. What especially irked Bourne was the Progressives’ argument that entering the war would advance their reform agenda.

Bourne disagreed: “He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes.” Of course, Bourne is also the one who wrote that “war is the health of the state.” Both quotations argue against violence as a means of social change. Even in the face of tyranny, we should favor a presumption of nonviolence, or what Bryan Caplan calls “pragmatic pacifism.” (Also see this.)

The methods of nonviolent resistance have long been fleshed out by Gene Sharp. (See Carl Watner’s “Without Firing A Single Shot: Voluntaryist Resistance and Societal Defense.”)

Podcasts

scotthortonshow logosq

coi banner sq2@0.5x

liberty weekly thumbnail

Don't Tread on Anyone Logo

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

Pin It on Pinterest