Here over the last two weeks in south central Minnesota we’ve gotten considerably more rain than we received over the entire summer. Last week I broadcast-seeded oats (which will winter-kill over the next several months due to freezing) and hairy vetch (will grow beneath the ground all winter and then spring up and grow like crazy late next April), and these cover crop seeds — thanks to all the new soil moisture — wasted no time at all in sprouting and growing. That much was expected. What was notable and unexpected, however, was the fact that much of bitter buckwheat I sowed in mid-July, just didn’t sprout because there was just not enough moisture in the ground this summer. Now that there’s not enough time for the buckwheat to mature before winter, it is now doggedly but belatedly germinating and trying to grow anyway.
Point of all that preamble is that it’s been raining enough today to prevent me from working outside, a fact which allows me some time to briefly address a matter that came up as a result of my four recent very short posts touching on the altogether important matter of free speech.
Whether it was from reader ennui or antagonism, I immediately ‘shed’ almost 20 free subscribers to the Grundvilk Substack (~1% of the total free subscriber list) after my serial (September 18, 19, 21, and 22) mentions of that pesky free speech “problem”.1 In this regard, it is important to remember that a dominant characteristic of adult-aged, but still immature persons with a disruptive, chaos-generating mode of behavior is that they actively seek to restrict information flow in order to try to control the decision-making and actions of others. As Bernstein so very ably puts it when describing how to defend against such trouble-making people:
Know Them, Know Their History, And Know Your Goal
The way to anticipate vampires is by knowing how they've acted in the past. Chances are pretty good that they'll do the same thing in the future. The big mistake you can make with vampires is assuming, without evidence, that though their record has been bad in the past, that they have learned their lesson, and will do better this time. When you deal with vampires, always ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish and why. If you're not sure, don't do anything until you've thought about it carefully.
Get Outside Verification
Vampires want you to listen to them alone. To control you, they'll try to isolate you from your usual sources of information. Always check out what they say with a trusted friend, especially when you'd rather not. Vampires can't operate in the light of day.
Isolation from otherwise available information is not at all a good thing when others are concertedly and self-interestedly trying to control you. It is important, as Bernstein says, to know how they’ve acted in the past, because it is extremely unlikely that “…they have learned their lesson and will do better this time.” I’m not sorry at all if mention of that particular truism and the consequently perpetual necessity for unhindered free speech ends up hurting anyone’s feelings. Life is a very serious business, and not all people are “nice” and “well-intentioned”.
Here the Hungarians demonstrate just how all this works at the national scale:
And here is an example of the ‘narrative protection racket’ in play:
https://www.steynonline.com/13776/spirits-of-the-age
I deliberately use the word, “problem” here because I absolutely despise the lily-livered word, “issue”. “Issue” is a categorically inaccurate replacement for the word, “problem”. An “issue” is arguable and may not really exist — and may therefore not merit any human attention at all, while a “problem” is not at all arguable, does absolutely exist, and definitely demands human attention.