Colonel MacGregor is an experienced analyst and his judgment generally sound and highly respected. I appreciate very much the additional depth you have brought here, where my outrage quickened my fingers on the keyboard, and too soon hit enter.
Thanks!
Edit: overall I should think the West has strategically handed much to Russia by inundating it's people with even worse propaganda than has Russia, as by speaking truthfully and not poking that bear the West would be in much better straits. It is such failures of principle - or proofs of malice - that most causes me dismay at the execrable leadership that billionaires foist off on the West, and none worse than in Germany, sadly, IMHO. Not even the kleptocrats that gain seats in Congress nor mismanage federal agencies in America have been so unbelievably suicidal as to shut off our sources of power as have the Greens of Germany, as I understand it.
It is a phenomenon I find incomprehensible, since we Germans in particular should have learned much more from our Nazi era. This shows once again how little this period has really been dealt with and how much people have left untold by exercising violence on themselves. The sheer superficiality with which my generation has been educated about German history ( today even worse than back then) and the incredible guilt complex that we have instilled in ourselves prevents any intelligence in this respect. It is even a criminal offense in this country to use the swastika in any form, I believe. So because we can be made to feel guilty very quickly and the collective guilt complex is apparently incredibly deep-seated, the Greens were able to pull off their suicide mission.
I can't explain it any other way, because any stupidity from above can only be successful if it is supported from below. .. But, one more thing: we here in Germany, and I believe in the whole of Europe, lack the excellent constitution that you have in the States and which protects your free speech much better (although the means of censorship are huge and have been used - but what comes to light and is torn to shreds on a grand scale in your country does not happen here in that way).
For example, I have never ever in my life heard a character like McGregor speaking in my country. Never.
I don't doubt you regarding the Constitution, but note that America isn't ruled by a document, but men have trespassed and enforced it's provisions. Lysander Spooner advanced the view that the Constitution had failed to secure the rights of Americans, even prior to the Civil War, and it is hard to fault his analysis, because immediately after that war the US became a corporation, and by and large, gradually and all at once, the provisions of the Constitution have increasingly been ignored, transgressed, and overturned.
In truth that freedom humanity enjoyed before that is literally inconceivable, unknown to us today, even in America. The words expressed don't have the same meanings today, the experience potential isn't at all the same. The transcontinental railroad enabled the buffalo hunters to eradicate their abundant herds, the Carolina Parakeet became extinct, as did the Passenger Pigeon. That abundance underlay freedom, something that is incomprehensible to us to day, who cannot walk up to a tree fluttering with an infestation of tasty pigeons, and knock our dinner out of the tree with a stick.
The world has changed, and that has changed the freedom humanity could even understand.
We may still spout off more here, but MacGregor was born after this change in the world, and he and I both lack that fuller sense of freedom that once existed.
You are talking about a freedom before civilization in its modern form? While the pre-modern folks must have experience a for us unknown sense of freedom, they nevertheless were not free in another sense.
For the human race absolute freedom never was the case. Every circumstance you find yourself in, comes with certain limitations and restrictions, without exception, is what I think.
Technology altered our human world big time. In the face of such tech the requirements for our species to get along with each other adapted to the good and bad.
To have a document regulating the very principles was something, your grounding fathers were convinced, was needed. In order to know that the constitution was trespassed, you need to know its original words.
Just imagine for a while, such constitution would never have been written. Would you think that it would have lasted until today? And since you can go back to the source and read it, you can try to understand it on your own.
Mentality and expressions before modernity were given to the next generations orally but that habit shrank very much in comparison.
The lack of a sense of freedom cannot be experienced when it cannot be understood, I guess. All of us may carry something in us, we may call a common inheritance or memory. There is joy to it as much as there is a sense of loss. We nevertheless can be tricked by it.
This is true to date, because of the necessity of centralization to technological advance from the Stone age to the present Space age. During that technological transition all technology has been so crude that manual labor has been necessary to production. The Space age is when that changes. In Space age technological advance, without exception the decentralization of means of production is the mechanism that increases productivity, that advances technology. This is true across all fields of endeavor, across every industry.
The above quote then is becoming untrue, because it is wealth that has underlain power, and centralization centralized wealth and power, while decentralization decentralizes wealth and power, which restores agency to free persons that oligarchs lose by losing the parasitic sources of wealth and power decentralization cuts their access to. Technology will progress. Economic productivity will continue to be desirable. We depend on it.
But economic productivity is not necessarily centralized. It isn't necessary to work for wages as collective labor producing widgets in a factory owned by some oligarch that parasitizes that production. Decentralization creates the ability of a producer to themselves be the entirety of the labor and themselves to own the means of production, severing that flow of their productivity to oligarchs and restricting to themselves the fruits of their productivity. They retain 100% of the wealth they produce. They create no profits, and no taxes, because they own the means of production they produce with, and they do not buy or sell their products to earn income.
This restores freedom by destroying power over sovereign persons. While terrestrial landscapes are the possessions of polities and persons that preclude freedom on almost all lands today, this is the Space age. One of the fastest expanding industries is providing launch services, and manufacturing of launch and spacecraft burgeons almost incomparably. Terran I was only launched in March 2023, and was the first 3D printed spacecraft. Every spacecraft since has been increasingly 3D printed, and 3D printing technology continues to plummet in price and increase in features and productivity available to ever smaller pools of labor. As we have seen in other fields, the ultimate labor pool is one when decentralization is the direction in which technology advances, and while it seems ludicrous today to think of an individual manufacturing their own spacecraft, that is the inevitable future of continued decentralization and automation of the means of production.
At some point, the freedom of sovereigns becomes literally illimitable when personal spacecraft and the ability to own automated means of production mature, because it is impossible to field armies and conquer and control a diaspora in space. So, while history only provides examples of freedom being reduced by increasing centralization, and that has been correlated to civilization, that is because the advance of technology has been serial and proceeds directionally from the Stone age to the Space age, and as the Space age develops and matures, that is the change it brings. That change has not been potential to crude industry heretofore. It is the improvement in productivity that is adventing and developing today. While it is only beginning, it's maturation is inevitable as long as technology advances and productivity increases.
Freedom shrank as the world became private property, and oligarchs attained that property because they parasitized the populations. Freedom will grow when new property becomes available because new means of production become available that will include access to the illimitable resources off Earth. The ability to be free remains a critical aspect of humanity despite the impossibility to actually be free on an increasingly locked down planet. When tech advances it always increases productivity, and this creates irreversible changes in development. We cannot retain our productivity and return to pre-enclosure pastoral landscapes. We cannot increase productivity and avoid attaining to un-enclosable property off Earth. We cannot fail to increase productivity absent a collapse and global catastrophe - and that is the 'great reset' oligarchs seek to impose because it is obvious to them they lose their power when decentralization matures by ending parasitization of production.
Our survival is their eradication as overlords, and they would rather rule over tombs and ashes than become mere peers dependent on their merit for their supper. They are a pathological group, attaining power in centralized hierarchies because of their psychopathic traits that suit inhuman institutional hierarchies. Human society isn't dependent on such institutions. Rather institutions are dependent on society, and on society that does not advance technologically beyond the industrial age to the space age. The laws of physics make no boundary to tech advance however, and institutions are incompetent to reform the laws of physics. The displeasure of oligarchs, as consequential as it is today, is increasingly becoming trifling, and will eventually be inconsequential. Our posterity will probably wonder why we ever put up with any of it, and that incomprehension is the goal I seek to advance with my life. I want people to one day be so free that they will not even understand how we were ever enslaved. I remain convinced I am winning the war with slavers, one crypto token, one 3D printer, one aquaponics system at a time. I remain watchful, seeking ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory that I must avoid, but I observe that I am only a mote surfing the mandate of the laws of physics, and it is their expression that ultimately will prevail.