I guess you could call it "negotiating", but it's still kind of dumb and/or evil.
Caught in between them are you and me.
How delightful.
It's hard for any of those sides to understand that someone can be outside their weird triangle. They'll either want to say you are really on their side, or they'll assign you to one of the opposition sides that you don't belong with.
But here we are, just wanting to exercise our liberty without violating anyone's life, liberty, or property. Sometimes forced to defend ourselves or others from someone in that Triangle of Archation.
If you just want to play politics, I can see why you might not always think government (The State) is your enemy. It's that "pragmatism" thing that I hate so much.
Yes, government can often be used to get what you want. It's not worth it. It's never ethical.
Evil methods are often pragmatic-- they'll do things for you and help you accomplish things. What do you give up in the process? Pretty much everything good.
There's always an alternative. Sometimes it's hard to find, but it's worth the effort.
They won't. Sorry to disappoint you and I'd LOVE to be wrong. But I'm not.
Sure, I'd like to see this thing they call "national carry reciprocity" be a thing. No one has the "right" to violate natural human rights, and governments (including state and local governments) have no rights whatsoever. Something without rights can't have the "right" or the imaginary political authority to violate yours. Rights are individual, not collective.
Since the version of the bill I read says that if you're a resident of a state with "constitutional carry", and thus don't need a permit to carry in your home state, you wouldn't need one anywhere. Not that this would make a shred of difference to how I live my life, but I suppose it might be nice.
You know the political criminals in New York, California, and New Jersey (among others) will continue doing the crimes they do, no matter how much "more illegal" it becomes. Because there are no real, immediate, and painful consequences. And there never will be as long as most people believe in the legitimacy of the state.
There's also a bill introduced to abolish the NFA. I want that one even more, since that illegal act forms the foundation of all legislative and bureaucratic anti-gun crime. But ignorant cowards will sabotage that one by claiming liberty is "too dangerous" to be allowed. It won't get anywhere.
I remind you that your rights don't depend on the acceptance of your enemy. They are yours to claim and to exercise regardless of the opinions of political criminals in rule-making clubs. Liberty is your birthright as a human. Act like it. Stop counting on the bad guys to do the right thing.
People who believe in The State are guilty of this, and they impose it on you as well so they don't look as weak and stupid by comparison. They call for things like "making crime illegal again", "border control", "government efficiency", etc.-- pretending these are the "adult" positions. They aren't.
They are trying to impose a State "fix" to a problem caused by the State. You can't solve problems caused by too much government with more government. Especially not with "more efficient" government. That's the path to destruction.
Those who grow tired of living with the consequences of crime, and with criminals emboldened by being protected from their victims by government, call for "making crime illegal again". What a stupid thing to say.
This is a way of transferring your Power-- your obligation-- to defend yourself, others, and property from violators to someone neither able nor inclined to defend any of these things from freelance criminals unless it cuts into their own crime scheme too much. Transferring your Power and responsibility to government like a foolish child might want to do.
You have the natural human right to defend yourself from anyone committing crime whether their crime is illegal or not. Nothing can change this, although doing what you have a right to do will always carry some risk from The State. There's nothing so quickly punished as showing government to be unnecessary and harmful.
"Border control" is more of the same, but worse. Not only does it transfer your Power to defend your property from trespassers to The State, but it denies you have any property rights at all. It transfers your property to The State, denies you the ability to act on your responsibility to defend your property, then pretends the State should control everyone's property (and property that belongs to no one). It's state communism. If that's what you want, be honest about it and stop making excuses.
None of that garbage would even look necessary (or smart) if people would stop letting government take away their Power and stop pretending these things are not individual responsibilities. You can't really transfer your responsibilities to The State. It's going to fail every time because The State isn't a real thing-- it's a superstition. A superstition can't carry out your responsibilities on your behalf; neither can people acting on that superstitious belief, no matter how strongly they believe. Their incentives are messed up.
Government is never on your side. It subjugates you in order to steal your Power and it denies your responsibilities. It instead substitutes artificial "responsibilities" like obeying its orders.
Pretending otherwise doesn't do anything good for anyone.
Humans, even when they try, aren't good at clearing out the underbrush and combustible detritus that collects in most dry-ish ecosystems. That takes nature and natural frequent fires. Let the stuff burn out frequently and the fires can't get hot enough to get through the bark and kill mature trees.
Let that stuff build up because you are "preventing forest fires/wildfires" and when a fire does occur-- and it will-- the fire will burn hotter and longer and mature trees will burn and create more heat and more will be destroyed.
It's understood science. Smokey Bear's message is mostly anti-science and anti-nature. Yes, it sounds nice and helpful, but it's not. I want to like him and his message, but I can't. I see the damage this campaign has done and continues to do,
Even controlled burns are better than nothing, but are usually carried out when it's already too late.
Nature is as subject to being ruined when mixed with politics as everything else. Cities, too. Politics ruins everything it touches. Will the residents (and former residents) of Los Angeles learn? I doubt it. Once people have their minds destroyed by politics, they rarely get them back.
It has broken the Constitution, treaties with the natives, and deals with other governments. It broke the deal that got the gullible to agree to the "income tax" and to "social security".
Government lies.
Don't ever make an agreement with government, unless you have a good plan to use it against government. But I warn you: you aren't as crooked, evil, and sneaky as government. Not even close.
OK.
That is the most common "reason" given.
I want a lot of things, too.
I want to live well into the 22nd Century, so let's just "spring forward" the calendar to the year 2099. That makes exactly as much sense, since numbering years is a human construct, anyway. Just like clock settings.
Or, let's eliminate Mondays from the week since they seem to be unpopular with most people and lasagna-eating cats. Six days seems like enough to call "a week".
Then let's make a year officially 50 weeks, to keep things nice and neat. "Summer" will slide around the year so that people who want snow in July won't have to go to the Southern Hemisphere or climb K2-- just wait a few years. Seasons, and what we call them, are a human construct, too. Right?
I don't care. You do you. But don't try to force me to go along with dumb things. That's when I care. And calling me "legitimately retarded" doesn't have the desired effect.
DST advocates say they could re-set their personal clocks (why, though?) but their employer wouldn't re-set the business clocks without government telling them to. Thus they are cheated out of the "extra hour of daylight". That's dumb. Sorry, but it just is.
If, as almost all DST advocates claim, "everyone" prefers DST, it should be easy to convince businesses to open and close an hour earlier. Either just during the summer, or all year long. If "everyone" wants this, managers will be thrilled you gave them the idea. No need to fake the clock setting.
I've found about 75% of the people with a strong opinion on the matter have the two settings mixed up anyway, thinking we are now on DST rather than on Standard Time. Which complicates reasonable discussion.
(I've been sick with a nasty cold since New Year's Eve. It's wearing me down and my tolerance for BS is exceptionally low.)
I completely understand their concerns and their point, and I even sympathize somewhat, but you don't solve a problem created by government with a bigger, more powerful government. It's just not going to happen. Not ever.
Yes, I agree with them that "you can't have an open border and a welfare state". It's irrelevant. It's not my fault that they can't entertain the idea of abolishing the welfare state- which is the right thing to do regardless. Letting government decide where people can live is wrong, just like letting government redistribute confiscated property (to anyone) is wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. Nor do two rights make a wrong. The right thing is to take those powers away from the state entirely.
Yes, I agree that some newcomers are committing crimes-- just like some who were born here. The solution is to stop making defense a crime! It's true: I condone violence when that violence is defensive. I can't even comprehend any other position.
I don't want governments bringing "immigrants" or refugees here. I also don't want it to keep them out. I don't want it giving anyone handouts, or shielding them from the consequences of violating someone's life, liberty, or property.
I do support forcing government to stop creating new refugees. I know, that's too radical a position.
The idea that the "country" is yours to control is a communist idea. If you like communism, just admit it and stop making bad excuses. Your property rights end at your property lines, and you don't have any ownership of someone else's property or of any "public" [sic] property. To insist this means I'm OK with leaving my doors unlocked and letting anyone move into my house is a way to admit you don't understand property rights at all. One is mine; the other is not.
This is entirely a government-created and a government-exacerbated problem. One that government uses to trick you into allowing it to have more power to smash your liberty. Stop siding with more government just because you hate "immigrants", "illegal" or not, more than you hate the state.
I can tell you the blue hair isn't the issue.
Pronouns are generally either obvious or obviously wrong. You can waste energy fighting against that (in either direction) or you can laugh it off.
When I was young, a "blue hair" was a little old woman who couldn't see over her steering wheel. Some of them had a tendency to color their hair blue to hide the gray. Sometimes, although it was rare, they chose pink. There were several who did this in the church I attended as a teen.
There were some younger free-thinkers (who tended to be actual liberals) who also colored their hair colors of the rainbow. They weren't the narrow-minded fascists we see today with the creative hair coloring.
It's sad that the two things have become correlated. I appreciate creative hair colors and hate to see the style taken over by people so filled with hate, anxiety, and anger that you have to tiptoe through eggshells if you're within miles of them.
But it gets worse.
As long as there’s an “income tax”, all other taxes are taxes on already-taxed property. The tax is stolen from your paycheck, then every cent you spend of what's left gets taxed again and again. Each dollar gets taxed multiple times. That’s evil compounded on evil.
You know it, I know it, and taxers also know it, but they don’t care because evil is their "job."
No, governing is not the same as managing, not when you're discussing political governance, anyway. You can manage something without governing it. Yes, the definitions are probably the same (or have a lot of overlap) in order to make governing seem less toxic, but in practice, they are very different.
Most managers can't kill you-- with impunity-- for not immediately allowing them to tie you up and throw you in a cage. Or for not handing over your property at their demand. If a manager tried to act like government you could kill him/her in self-defense.
If a manager acted like government he would lose his "job" quickly. He would probably be sued into poverty. Only the veil of illusory legitimacy surrounding government protects those bad actors from facing the same fate. Or worse.
If you can't manage something without acting like government, you're doing it wrong. Governing is embracing failure.
Once again, it's not about the weapons evil losers use to harm and kill people (nor is it about where these evil losers were born); it's about the individual evil losers who intend to harm and kill people.
Only children, idiots, and political criminals focus on the weapons used in these attacks.
In doing so, they make it safer to be an evil loser intent on harming and killing people.
After years of living with the disgusting racism (and other varieties of bigotry) of "the Left", I see "the Right" decided to spend some time being disgusting racists, too. I guess they were feeling left out.
When racists are so racist they can't even read the words you write because they are too busy trying to make an entirely different (and still wrong) point, it becomes pointless to engage. I experienced this during the racist meltdown of the past few days.
Racists are some of the dumbest statists out there- right on par with the anti-gun bigots, the taxation apologists, and the copsuckers. But, then again, if statists were smarter they wouldn't continue being statists.
If you want to have a conversation about the relative worth of cultures, that's fine. Some cultures are just better than others. Any culture that respects life, liberty, and property is superior to any other culture, no matter what "race" the individuals in that culture may be. Those people are "my people". People who value theft, governing others, and other forms of archation are not my people. They are not my tribe, regardless of geography or anything else.
Once you understand that, the other things stop mattering.
There is selection pressure to be bad, and I salute those who resist it. Much of that selection pressure comes from government.
Government protects bad people-- as well as stupid people and weak people-- at the expense of the others. Government rewards bad people and bad behavior-- not all bad people and bad behaviors, but too much.
Government provides a place for bad people to work. It provides cover and justifications for bad people to do bad things. It protects bad people-- government employees and freelancers-- from the consequences of their actions; consequences they would naturally face were government not shielding them.
Government is making humans weaker. It is making them worse.
Government turns normal people into bad people.
With all the other weakening pressures of modern life, government is too destructive to allow it to exist.
"Keeping private property requires force and taxation requires force, so if private property isn't theft, then taxation can't be theft."
This is obviously someone who can't do logic, doesn't understand the difference between defensive force and aggression, and doesn't respect consent.
This was in the context of advocating for "free health care" for all. This is the quality of thought that goes into such positions.
Yes, committing evil "works"-- or appears to do so. It is often pragmatic. But it's still evil.
I don't care how well governing others has worked (if it has worked) for the past 5000 years or so. No one has a right to do it. This means if you do it anyway, I'm going to see you as the bad guy and no argument to the contrary will convince me otherwise.
Ethical people govern themselves, never others.
I'm not angry over the claim, just like I don't get angry over flat-earthers' claims. Frustrated, yes. They are immune to reason and ethics. They are scared of liberty and will embrace any excuse they can make up to keep from having to face it.
But they are still deeply wrong, even if their way "works", and even if they ignore all the evidence that it doesn't work nearly as well as they insist it does.
Most people aren't interested in the HD Life, and I can't figure out why.
I feel awful about the woman who was murdered on the subway by being burned to death. My first thought was wondering how could she have let a stranger-- one who probably acted unstable-- get that close to her. Then I read that she was sleeping. Sleeping?!?
Don't sleep in public. No matter how bored or tired you are, find a safe spot before you nap. Hidden, if possible. It's why animals don't sleep out in the open unless they are with their tribe. Strangers in a subway station are not your tribe. You are at the lowest level of situational awareness when you're asleep. If you're asleep in a dangerous place, it's the worst possible situation.
Subways are known for their dangers. Unstable people congregate in cities, and in cities' subway systems. People know this. It's not a secret.
The murderer is 100% at fault here.
And imagine being as utterly useless as the cop who strolled past and did nothing as she burned and as her murderer watched.
Maybe, though, his victim would still be alive if she'd stayed awake and aware. I wish she had embraced the HD Life.
It doesn't matter where they were born.
It doesn't matter if they do it for religious reasons or political reasons (that's redundant).
It doesn't matter if they believe they are the good guys, or if those they are aiming their archation against are really and truly bad guys. too.
It doesn't matter if they are terrorists, bureaucrats, murderers, presidents, muggers/tax collectors, rapists, cops, kidnappers, or any other variety of violator. They are not "my people". Neither are those who make excuses for any of these bad guys.
They could correct their behavior by stopping what they are doing, quitting any job that requires them to do it, admitting and renouncing their archation, and paying restitution to all they've harmed. This would start to put them on my side. If they choose instead to make excuses or call me names, that only puts the nail in the coffin.
First, you can’t do good things through bad methods like taxation or government. The inherent bad cancels out any intended good.
Second, sneaking something like funding for childhood cancer research into a huge spending increase bill just means you’re using kids as hostages or human shields. That makes you a monster who is trying to hide behind sick kids.
It's not a good reason to continue funding government for even one more day.
Shut it down. Shut it all down.
Government “shutdown”? Make it real and permanent and don’t look back.
If you say the government of India has no right to block the internet, and that using the excuse of "drugs" and "terrorists" doesn't change anything, some lovely statist will tell you that you're "woke" for believing terrorists have rights.
If you make clear that only someone who is w0ke would believe rights are given, or can be taken away or lost, and that anyone who violates the life, liberty, or property of another is the bad guy, "even if" they call themselves a government, they'll say you blame the victims of 9/11 for their own deaths.
They have nothing but straw men and mindreading. That's what serves their purpose best. Not rational thought or ethics; just Cathy Newmanesque "so what you're saying is..." nonsense.
Yes, I'm used to it, but it still amazes me that they try this hard to avoid understanding or thinking.
(illustration by Grok- me as a Star Wars character. With, apparently, a donut snake.)
Someone asked, "Why is there an incessant need for them to repeat things OVER and OVER?"
My response was "When you have a vocabulary of only a few dozen words you run through the list pretty quickly and have to start repeating them."
This comment got me labeled a racist and a bigot. It caused at least two commenters to believe they could read my mind and know what I was thinking but didn't express.
One person said, "Why do you have to be racist just say the s**t is stupid and move on your f***ing inbred".
Me: "Has nothing to do with 'race' and everything to do with someone stupid enough to spray bullets indiscriminately. Why did your mind immediately go to 'race'? That’s weird."
Him: "Don’t act slow dips**t you know exactly what you ment [sic] when you said that KENT"
Me: "I said nothing about 'race' nor did it ever cross my mind. Look at everything I post on here and find anything that would disprove that. Do you think smart people spray bullets randomly in public? Really? Would you?
https://kentmcmanigal.blogspot.com/p/kentforliberty_24.html"
He declined to comment further, as far as I can tell.
And, no. I wasn't saying anything about the "race" of the woman making the video. But I am saying something about her intelligence: it was apparently incredibly low.
Kent McManigal is a freelance writer known for his work on liberty, libertarian, and anarchist issues. He shares his thoughts primarily through his blog, KentForLiberty. McManigal describes himself as an explorer and creator of innovative solutions, and he is the creator of the Time’s Up flag. He prefers not to be labeled as a political writer, as he finds it hurtful when his work is described as such.
