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A batch of the best highlights from what Stefan's read, .

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.

Permanent Record

Edward Snowden

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

Furthermore, under this line of thinking, one could extrapolate that a right-wing journey would gravitate toward no government (anarchy), while a left-wing journey would navigate toward total government. This possibility calls into question the integrity of the old left-right dichotomy, meaning that the old, circular, horseshoe theory or U-turn spectrum (pitting fascism and communism as polar opposites) is either broken, a complot of historical sabotage, or simply an invention of pure fallacy. Such bending is absurd, at best, or dangerous, at worst. Why? Because if totalitarianism is positioned on the circular ends of both left and right, then “the political spectrum teaches us that opposites are the same and the same are opposites.”[155] Such absurdity fogs the mind with uncertainty and confusion; reality becomes nearly impossible to identify or define. And without clarity, how can anyone determine what is true or false?

Killing History

L.K. Samuels

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