B.P. Bollocksworth

Dec 29, 2018

James,

Saw this link and thought it said something interesting about different ways of managing human livestock:

zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-28/chinese-journalist-sentenced-4-years-over-subversive-retweets

You could argue the overtly authoritarian way is more humane than soft-authoritarian. In China today, or the old USSR &c., it was pretty clear what was off limits as their system allowed for explicitly outlawing activities counter to the perceived interests of the owner class.

But the choice isn't between "freedom" and "tyranny", it's between overt and covert red lines. In America, we have an owner class too, who allow themselves to be constrained by 18th c. liberal institutions. They're constrained, but they're still operation under the same incentives as the ChiComs, and seek to maximally exploit their sentient, free-willed livestock. They can't/won't quite outlaw speech or private organization, so instead of simply telling us what we can't do, they work behind the scenes to thwart would-be competitors, while pretending we have broad freedoms.

I'm thinking specifically of the case of Kwanzaa. I learned a few days ago that Kwanzaa was essentially an FBI creation. The FBI were concerned about black nationalism back in the 70s, so they backed the most extreme, loony black nationalists they could find. Sound familiar? Long story short, a side effect of pushing the extreme black nationalists, who were inevitably irrelevant, was getting the Kwanzaa meme fixed into the culture. This is almost as good as the CIA promoting modern art.

I for one promise I will never try to agitate the other slaves, but still find observing the scene fascinating, which is why I read you. I do wish they'd just tell us what our social credit score is (guaranteed every American has one) and what we can and can't say. I suppose they have their reasons for keeping things as they are.