Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

If you have a bug placed on someone's purse and they talk to others, you are wittingly surveilling them. Unwittingly would imply it was not foreseen that others would be spied on (e.g. placing a wiretap on the wrong phone number).

This can go either way, of course. We're sort of in between a rock and hard place. American oligarchs are guiding the country toward a 21st century brand of serfdom. The tyranny of the mob doesn't seem like a better alternative. You might expect the so-called Benedict Option to succeed, much like it did in the so-called Dark Ages.

> The issue is that the consensus is more difficult to reach due to the scale of the US voter population combined with tactics like gerrymandering and overall difficulty of orchestrating movements to support ideals most people seem to support (which isn't oppressing a minority unless we classify power and wealth hungry individuals as a protected minority which we currently seem to do).

These same oligarchs also employ psychological warfare to divide and occupy the populace. For example, all the recent race conflict? A total fabrication because the establishment is feeling the heat and the pressure of rising awareness. Racial conflict is a dependable tactic that has worked before. Sexual liberation is another form of political control. Get people addicted to porn and masturbation, unleash sex from the confines of marriage, divorce it from its procreative end, and you have a mass of people staring at their genitals and obsessing over orgasms as if it were the rapture (hilariously and tragically enough, rates of sexual intercourse are dropping and rates of ED in men are rising). Similar things can be said of the other cardinal vices. Whip up envy and people are kept busy envying each other. All this makes them easier to control. A man has as many masters as he has vices. That's why "sexual liberation" is such an oxymoron. "Sexual enslavement" is more fitting. The legalization of drugs is likely another weapon in the oligarchic arsenal. Get people doing drugs instead of facing their problems, growing in reason and virtue (and therefore freedom), and repairing the ills of the culture beginning with themselves. Get them to escape into myriad diversions, entertainment, and bullshit causes. Whip up emotions and sensationalize. Have then at each other's throats in the throes of wrath. Where two are fighting, a third profits.

> Reaching consensus amongst citizens is far far more difficult these days,

And why is that? Because the cultural and civilizational underpinnings of the West are disintegrating. So many things that to so many seemed so minor have been the thin ends of a wedge. Over time, they weakened the principles and the tradition that marked their continuity. The withering of classical education means that tradition, in practice, became reduced to mere convention, leaving people vulnerable to revolution and moral corruption. It means you have no defense against the unfolding of the consequences of liberal philosophy and modernism which now puts you in the defensive position.

> It doesn't help that those in power actively try and divide the general voter population and set us against one another making it even more difficult to reach a consensus.

And there it is. Libido dominandi, the lust for power.

The Legalists believed that if you had good laws then the rest would take care of itself. They "advocated government by a system of laws that rigidly prescribed punishments and rewards for specific behaviours. They stressed the direction of all human activity toward the goal of increasing the power of the ruler and the state."[2]

But the Confucians, particularly Mencius, pointed out that good men would create the good laws; while bad men would corrupt good laws. The laws were important for the ordering of society but insufficient. i.e. : "The sage-kings of antiquity are a model, but one cannot simply adopt their customs and institutions and expect to govern effectively (4A1). Instead, one must emulate the sage-kings both in terms of outer structures (good laws, wise policies, correct rituals) and in terms of inner motivations (placing ren and yi first). Like Confucius, Mencius places an enormous amount of confidence in the capacity of the ordinary person to respond to an extraordinary ruler, so as to put the world in order." [3]

To borrow from the Confucians; the Constitution is a product of good men and good laws to help protect goodness and order in society, but without good men to continue to have a living embodiment of the principles, it is still just a law that can be corrupted or ignored.

A beautiful quote from Etienne that you reminded me of is this, where he advocates to simply stop supporting tyrants: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

Tyrants only have power because people choose to follow.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servit...

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Legalism#:~:text=The%20Lega....

[3] https://iep.utm.edu/mencius/