If you hang around Australians for any length, you will hear the idiom, "She'll be right, mate." It's the Aussie expression of optimism. now, but all is well in the bigger picture.
It's easy for Australians to have the "She'll be right" mindset. After all, 85% of the people down under live within 50 kilometres of the 25,000-kilometre coastline.
As I sit here typing away, I look out over a golf course and beyond, the sparkling ocean. Dolphins are a regular feature, and pelicans descend from their rocky perch, diving into the water to satiate themselves. Kangaroos and rabbits frolic on the golf course and adjacent park.
The woke crowd would probably say I'm a white colonial persecutor and should pay reparations. I do pay them with my annual tax bill. Speaking of persecution, the only persecutors that I've seen in the past three years are politicians. You know, the ones imprisoning people with lockdowns because of a virus and mandating that people stifle themselves with silly face diapers.
One thing that the wildlife in my area exemplifies is freedom. As humans, seeking autonomy is one of the fundamental motivators of human behaviour. Few of us wake up in the morning wanting to be less of ourselves or to feel constrained.
Freedom of thought and speech is being suppressed to the most significant degree today. More so than ever in the past 100 years to a truth-seeking society. Instead, censorship and collective shaming have infested contemporary western culture. We are becoming China.
We expect that people in China or Iran do not have complete autonomy, but in America and Australia? The riots going on right now in China against the harsh totalitarian state will probably be crushed, much like that of Tiananmen Square in 1989. Similarly, protests in Iran have been destroyed by that extremist regime.
While we sit back in our comfort zones and regale in our lifestyle, we must recognize that this is just a lull. The World Economic Forum has other plans for us. This is what its leader, Schwab, said recently.
China is a "role model"? Censorship, crushing any dissent and using the Uighurs as slave labour is to be commended? China's economic growth has been astounding, but who made them? The west, of course, under Bill Clinton, pushed to get China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). The expectation was that China would liberalize into a democracy or moderate socialist state.
There was also the expectation by the big businesses of cheap labour. We got the transfer of jobs and wealth to the CCP instead, and it remains a Communist state whose mission is world domination, supplanting the U.S. China is the most highly surveilled state in the world with a social credit system. Are people there free? You can live in relative peace if you don't criticize the state. However, try to protest for more freedom and what we have are images of tanks, once again rolling down the streets of Chinese cities.
The freedoms we enjoy are tenuous. The strategy of stripping us of free expression is pervasive in today's Big Tech ecosphere, and the censorship is only in one direction. Apple, which Governor Ron DeSantis called a vassal for China, is threatening to suspend Elon Musk's Twitter from being purchased in its online store.
Two years ago, I saw the direction that Apple was taking. All its products were made in China. I decided to replace my old Apple iphone with an Android precisely for this reason. Apple has sold out to a Communist state and is taking on its values. We must recognize that freedom and self-autonomy have been the exception rather than the rule throughout human history. As Ronald Reagan once famously said:
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
My LG was made in Indonesia. Of course, we’re all suveilled today. We have become China. It doesn’t help when people like Biden, Tim Cook and Klauss Schwab are beholden to China; all praise while ignoring the values that western democracies hold dear. The real question is, do we hold those values anymore?
When Iimmigrated to Australia in 1980, we actually made TVs here. The west in it’s wisdom sought to outsource everything to China; thought we were smart. Well, as an Indonesian friend of mind—now deceased—would like to say, we in the West are stupid.