Amerika.org, always has controversial material, though I tend to disagree with much of it, but it is still thought provoking. Like this bit on why, from the Right, defunding the police may not be all bad, and in fact could turn out swimmingly well. It is all part of a decentralisation philosophy, and eliminating police would entail community policing, and more personal self-protection via personal firearms and weapons carry, as in medieval and Dark Ages times, where in some respects, people had more freedom than today.
http://www.amerika.org/politics/yes-defund-the-police/
“Every once in a long while — thanks to the increasingly hazy and highly malleable Leftist talking points — I find myself agreeing with the Left on a specific issue. One such case arises with the question of defunding the police.
In this case, we have the rare opportunity where we can give the Left what it asked for: unity. Doesn’t the Right keep calling the Left “self-destructive”? Now we have a golden opportunity to test that theory, all while actually agreeing with Leftists for once! The Left has its reasons to demand the abolition of police forces, which differ from ours. But who cares as long as the goal is the same?
The police force should be cancelled. It has demonstrated its complete irrelevance by incarcerating and punishing citizens walking the streets without a COVID-19 mask. It has demonstrated its silliness by freeing pedos, serial rapists and killers because of a manufactured prison COVID panic, and then filling up those same prisons with maskless dissidents or people who had dinner with one person too much.
Police show up at the door of citizens and books them for merely speaking their mind on social media. Meanwhile, grooming gangs, human traffickers and coke cartels thrive, as police forces are busy booking believers praying the rosary outside abortion clinics and priests defying lockdown bullying to celebrate Mass.
The police force has become an idiot alliance executing the silly orders of a tyrannical and childish “elite.” It cracks down on the very people who support it and always believed in it. And those who hate the police? They are freed from prison because of COVID panic. A broken clock can in fact be right twice a day.
Once the police are no more, there would be a noticeable slump in world idiocy. Conservatives or people with common sense would still have enough moral baggage to not need any police to manage their neighborhoods, plus they’re armed and willing to use their firearms. Bring back the Wild West, where criminals feared for their lives every moment, instead of worrying about how to pay the right lawyers.
The pedos and coke dealers of the world will ironically find themselves without a police force to ignore them — or protect them. They would find themselves with no one to bribe or a legal system that they can game. The Left wants to protect these people, but removing the police would do the opposite, so it would be an absolute win for the Right.”
And, after all, the Dark Ages were not so dark, not as dark as the coming collapse is going to make our Mad Max world:
https://rushkoff.com/in-defense-of-the-dark-ages/
“IN DEFENSE OF THE DARK AGES
When I was in the process of editing my new book Life Inc., my copyeditor pulled a paragraph out, in which I had explained that the so-called “Dark Ages” didn’t exist – that the ten centuries between the fall of Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance had many good ones among them. And that, in fact, the Late Medieval Era – the 10th through 13th Centuries – were a great age of prosperity and economic development.
She yanked the paragraph because, in her words, no one used the term Dark Ages anymore, and everyone was well aware they were a fiction.
Not so, it seems. The main critique I’m getting these days to my suggestion of reviving some pre-Renaissance media like complementary currency or local banking, is the argument that I’m asking for “a return to the Dark Ages.”
I plan to address that on The MediaSquat tonight. But here’s my two main points:
First off, the Dark Ages were not dark. The Late Middle Ages, in particular, were extremely prosperous. Population and wealth went up, work hours went down. Height and health went up, death and taxes went down. This is when the cathedrals were built, with local profits generated by local economies.
The notion of a “dark ages” is really Renaissance disinformation. It’s an effort to make Renaissance innovations to banking, manufacturing, and corporate law look like modernity instead of the extraction of wealth by the few. It was only after the invention of monopoly centralized currency that the economy in Europe began to tank, common lands were fenced in, farming and grazing became impossible for peasants, sustainable land became speculative property, food supplies diminished, jobs required going to workshops in the city, health deteriorated and, you guessed it, the plague began.
That’s right: the plague didn’t happen during the Middle Ages – it was the direct result of centralized monetary and business policy in Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance. Once the plague killed off more than half of Europe, people got healthier and wealthier again, because the crippled, centralized economy could support that few.
Finally, retrieving technologies and ideas from the past doesn’t mean we have to go back to living the way they did in the ancient past. For example, we might choose to reinstate Sabbath – a day off – as a priority in our always-on culture. Turns out (I really promise) we can do this without all moving back to the desert and living in tents like they did in Bible when this idea first surfaced.
Likewise, we can reinstate some of the social and economic institutions outlawed during the Renaissance (and unrevived to this day) as a way forward rather than a leap backwards. To shun the lessons of history because they happened a long time ago is to remain always a baby.”