First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
What isn't mentioned in that quote is you have to be grounded in reality first. Skip that important part and "they" will probably never move beyond laughing at you. Or, if you do "win", it will be a fleeting victory.
If you are grounded in reality, you have won before they have even moved beyond ignoring you, they just don't know it yet.
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Epistemology! Great post, Kent. "Reality is the final arbiter."
ReplyDeleteY'know, it doesn't have to be a fight. Probably will be sure enough, but it must never be forgotten that such a choice rests with the various thugs, and only the thugs. The free peaceable person CAN choose to live that way, and indeed most of us do. That such a person imagines that the thugs will necessarily choose to fight, does NOT give rise to either abandoning the NAP, nor failing to live as freely and happily as possible.
That this tack may give rise to thugs choosing to fight wholesale, is probably the most common excuse given by those who do nothing but wait until SHTF. Critical error IMO, effectively making THEM the cause of the upcoming "Candid Exchange of Views" rather than the thugs themselves. It's a fine point...naturally the choices of thugs are the proximate cause of what they do, but it's also the case that the choices--and absense of choices--engaged by people who are free AND recognize it, are the proximate choices of what happens in their lives. And after all, it's those lives with which we are concerned...with which any rational person would be concerned.
Nearly everyone is pretending otherwise..."I can't do this and I can't do that because of what they're doing and are likely to do." As I say, critical error. Nothing is literally necessary or inevitable in the human realm.
I know you know all this; just waxing philosophically on the off chance that there's a reader who doesn't.
Wax philosophical any time, Jim.
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