[RoosterRedux]

Ping.

[RoosterRedux]

HT to Freeper Dumbgrunt, who linked to this great article on another thread.

[Chauncey Gardiner]

Sounds like the U.S. Under obama

[IronJack]

Bookmark.

[Da Coyote]

Hmmm, those points lie extremely close to a certain “religion” coupled with progressives.
Both are cases of extreme lack of morals and intelligence.

[\/\/ayne]

Soviet Union:

Restrictions on the free flow of information. ✊
The subjugation of women.
Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.✊
The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
Domination by a restrictive religion.✊
A low valuation of education.
Low prestige assigned to work.

[Fiddlstix]

[spokeshave]

Domination by a restrictive religion. = liberalism progressivism communism rinoism deepstateism islamism.

[goodnesswins]

Hmmm....I was thinking Oregon was on this list.

[miss marmelstein]

I imagine The Guardian will be picking this story up shortly, Rooster, and claiming it fits Texas to a tee!

[slowhandluke]

The subjugation of women.

I don't know about this one, seemed to work well all during the Industrial Revolution.

I'll duck now.

[familyop]

"There is a global marketplace and, increasingly, a global economy. While there is no global culture yet, American popular culture is increasingly available and wickedly appealing--and there are no international competitors in the field, only struggling local systems...Globalization demands conformity to the practices of the global leaders, especially to those of the United States. If you do not conform--or innovate--you lose."

It's alright except for the rhetorical little balls of fecal matter.

"No government can afford practices that retard development."

Like so many American-based manufacturing firms producing on foreign soil, monstrously big government spending on administrative salaries at every level of government, thousands of regulatory organizations stopping new business starts, thousands of other little de facto governments working against private property rights and operating as though they were NGOs,...?

We'll see how it goes over the next few years. The goofy global economic structure that supports despotic foreign enemies with their military buildups is really pretty if-y. There are also the real problems with lack of free speech mass brainwashing in those countries.

[Billthedrill]

A great piece - Peters may have lost some of his clarity of vision of late (IMHO) but the model is sound.

There is a difficulty in that some of the pieces of that model tend to bleed into one another. Where science becomes religion it is necessarily less scientific, as we see in the dogma-bound travesty that is (sic) Climate Science and nearly all of the social sciences of late - Peters did mention the latter, and it's true. Where the free flow of information is treated as a commodity it tends to become choked with agenda-driven keepers that devolve into censors so quickly many of them don't even notice it happening: Google, Facebook, etc. Where politics trends toward tribalism all of the flaws Peters cited come to the fore: one does not vote for the best candidate, one votes for "our" candidate, one does not examine ideas for dogma, one filters them through "our" dogma, one does not cultivate a wide range of associates and friends, one restricts the social horizon (and concomitantly the free flow of intellectual challenge) to "our" party. And one replaces reason with passion.

I agree with Peters that societies that shut their women out of productive roles are firing on half their intellectual and economic cylinders. And the single most arresting phenomenon related to the accession to power of feminism is its tendency to to precisely that. Do you want to be a mother and homemaker? The Party has other plans, sister. Better you should be a marginal plumber, or oil worker, or soldier, than a superb nurse because what matters is the numbers, not anyone's personal happiness. Here liberation has turned its face toward stifling regimentation, and what emerges liberates no one.

Even the most successful societies can be broken down by those determined to do so because in free societies there is always the choice for evil, one reason the Hegelian State was supposed to provide for more human happiness through order, wonderful in theory and no one has ever come close to making it work in fact. It is shiny, though. But to go down the order of Peters' bellwethers:

- Restrictions on the free flow of information. Addressed above, we currently have some very disturbing trends.

- The subjugation of women. To borrow Milo Yiannopoulos' phrase, feminism is cancer. It has turned liberation back into slavery to dogma.

- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure. Hillary Clinton, anyone? She isn't the only one by far. There is a systemic inability on the Left (and not only there) to appreciate its failures and accommodate change to address them, instead to double down and hope that something changes.

- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization. Addressed above. When politics turns tribal the very same thing happens as Peters points out: within the tribe, trust; for outsiders, amorality, betrayal, and predation.

- Domination by a restrictive religion. Addressed above. When science and politics displace religion as a source of dogma they become religion without its redemptive feature of God and a universal source of moral behavior and suasion.

- A low valuation of education. Addressed above. When education is diluted by the intrusion of dogma that enforce their validity by threats of professional and physical violence, education loses. Social reformers pushing the grotesque notion of "Women's Math" understand neither women nor math. Degree fields that displace learning with passion and precision of speech with jargon are detrimental not only to their institutions but to intellectual life at large.

- Low prestige assigned to work. Perhaps the least threatened of these criteria in America at the moment. It is still widely considered shameful to reside in one's parents' basement at age 30, spend one's time playing video games, and subsist off the largesse of a previous generation and a wastefully benevolent government. That may not always be the case.

I think the real revolution is firmly in place and beginning to roll, and that is the revolution of information access accorded by the Internet, and is one reason the ruling classes worldwide are struggling so desperately to bring it under control. I think it's too late, or so I hope.

[familyop]

"There are also the real problems with lack of free speech mass brainwashing in those countries."

Insert the word, and, between free speech and mass brainwashing.

[aquila48]

Bookmark

[M1911A1]

I’m no big fan of Peters. During the election, he was as about as NeverTrump as they come.

Color me enlisted, but this article strikes me as a typical wordy staff officer PowerPoint, but in print. The enlisted version would run something like...

“Free countries mostly do better than slave countries. Even free countries can have policies that suck. Look to see where both the enemy and your allies are strong and where they suck.

Sometimes you have to fight alongside crappy allies, or go to s-—hole places ‘cause you do what you gotta do.

Freedom makes our geeks creative, so that’s an advantage.
Maybe smart guys like me and you should run the planet.”

Peters spent about four years in the Army as an enlisted man. It doesn’t show in this article, but he did call Obama a “total pussy” on Fox, so maybe he hasn’t completely lost touch with his enlisted roots.