Telegram Archive - week 9, 2026

participant-3927, 2:50 AM, February 25

Picked up Golda Meir’s memoirs

participant-3927, 2:51 AM, February 25

participant-3927, 3:53 PM, February 25

“Nothing in life just happens. It isn’t enough to believe in something; you had to have the stamina to meet obstacles and to struggle to overcome them.” — Golda Meir

participant-9147, 4:15 PM, February 26

Hello everyone! I’m new, my name is Masha or Marina and I’m here to find out more about emerging forms of statehood - for a documentary.

participant-3927, 6:55 PM, February 26

Hello Masha

participant-3927, 6:56 PM, February 26

If you speak Russian, there is a Russian telegram group @participant-5217

participant-3927, 4:13 PM, March 1

https://flippinggrandbahama.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/bend-or-break-speech/

participant-3927, 4:18 PM, March 1

Freeport is an example of regulators clamping on freedom of people to dispense as they wish with their private property.

Preface: On July 26, 1969, Sir Lynden O. Pindling, then Premier of The Bahamas, delivered this speech during an inspection tour at the official opening ceremony for the new Bahamas Oil Refinery Company (BORCO). This speech in history has been called the “Bend or Break Speech” and has long be said by officials in Grand Bahama to be the reason the lights went out at the “Magical Fair” that was the spark called Freeport.

participant-3927, 4:36 PM, March 1

Note that what is not stated in the speech is that the local communities mentioned were less than 2000 (ChatGPT estimates 700 people) people in 1955, when the development began. It was a substistence lifestyle community of peolpe, who lived without running water, electricity, in wooden shacks and huts. They were fishing, small scale farming, hunting and gathering.

Before 1955, the land in Freeport was swamp and pine forests. The developers decided to built canals to drain the swamps.

participant-3927, 4:47 PM, March 1

Pindling speech is an example of altruism — the expectation that civilized people must sacrifice their interests for the uncivilized, the educated for the uneducated, the strong for the weak. The developers and business owners wanted to hire immigrants who were more qualified than the locals to do the job. Nothing prevented the local to start their own business, except their own lack of skills. Pendling says that those who won’t bend to his demands, will be broken.

participant-3927, 4:53 PM, March 1

Note that Freeport was never formed with the idea of it to be an independent self-governing state (politics weren’t the goal). The purpose was to create a vehicle for profit of the investors. For the 14 years it freedom to self-govern, during which there was an unprecedented growth. On the empty, unusable land there was built a city with 300,000 tourists arriving annually.

participant-3927, 6:40 PM, March 1

Today, the NY Tmes published the following Letter to the Editor (LTE) by Objectivist Peter Schwartz:

Leighton Woodhouse maintains that the Judeo-Christian ethics “is the basis for the American Declaration of Independence.” But the opposite is true.

The radical principle of the Declaration is that the individual has rights—that each of us is an autonomous being, morally entitled to choose how to lead our lives, without interference from any outside authority. This principle is what made American free and what led ultimately to the abolition of slavery.

The Judeo-Christian ethics, however, denies that man is an autonomous being. It rejects the idea that you should decide for yourself which goals and values to pursue. Rather, it demands that you subordinate yourself to the edicts of some supernatural authority. Your life belongs not to you, then, but to God. And if God’s self-appointed spokesmen declare that God’s will is that women who refuse to wear the hijab be imprisoned, or that heretics be burned at the stake, or that homosexuals be stoned to death—a state that is consistently governed by religion will comply.

The ethics of religion leads not to individual freedom but to the eradication of rights.