A Randian Derides “Libertarians” Who Don’t Support Ted Cruz

122
9658

My recent column, A Long, Hot summer (here) which wasn’t so much a defense of Donald Trump as it was a celebration of the salutary effect Trump’s candidacy is having on the irremediably corrupt GOP establishment, brought forth some defenders of (of all things) Ted Cruz. Now that the other frontman for the irremediably corrupt GOP establishment has been Trumped, all Hope is pinned on the former Bush Machine operator, who is – with an effrontery that would startle Borat – touted as an “outsider” who will rescue “our freedoms” from the grasping talons of the dread Hildebeast.Cruz 2

One such defender of Cruz questions the “Libertarian” (his air quotes) credentials of those who dare to criticize Cruz.

I thought perhaps it might be of interest to print – and then dissect – his missives.

Here goes:

Goodness, I am so glad to be assaulted on three or four sides by righteous “libertarians”! If one cannot figure out that a comment about a two inch penis is a “micro-aggression” than I guess it would be hard to explain just about any thing else in the world. As Mick Jagger once said “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke”. The political process in this country is barely functional. I have hardly endorsed any political candidate over another except to say that a Dem victory in November will be a disaster for any of us who value liberty. If you think that now is the time for revolution in this country, I empathize, but in the same breath dare you to proclaim it so. And while you are at it make sure to publish the names of yourself and all of those who will rise up with you to overthrow the Government. Truth or dare baby. And just to make it interesting, I knew Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. You folks have no idea. Sayonara, I am becoming quite bored with this discourse. Besides, I trust my motor vehicles are quite a bit more interesting than what you drive anyway.

My response:

I agree that a Democrat victory would be a disaster.

And so will a Republican victory.

There is not an iota of meaningful difference – from a Libertarian point-of-view- between the two (to use your format) “parties”… because in fact there is only one party with two wings.

It is the party of the authoritarian collectivist state.Jeblary

You are allowed to choose between a “wing” of the party that emphasizes warfare and a “wing” that emphasizes welfare – though both will give us plenty of the other, too.

The political process in this country is quite functional… if the object of the exercise is to enshrine and maintain the power (political and economic) of a relatively tiny cabal of interchangeable elites.

It is entirely non-functional if the object is to protect the right of the individual to be left in peace so long as he himself is peaceful toward others.

Will the election of Ted Cruz mean I and other peaceful Americans who’ve committed no crime and have given no reason to suspect us of having committed one will be able to fly without a crotch-groping? Will random, probable cause-free stop and searches on our roads be ended? Will I no longer be presumed guilty until I prove myself innocent? Will I no longer be forced to send money to the health insurance mafia?

How about the other mafias?long con

Will “the troops” be called home and disbanded to civilian life? Will the government cease making “war” on individuals who choose to put certain substances into their bodies and cause no harm (as such) to any other person by so doing?

Will the practice of monitoring and recording the private communications of individuals en masse, not even suspected of having committed any kind of crime, be discontinued? Will the federal government repudiate the use of physical torture/arrest/indefinite “detainment” without charge (let alone conviction) as policy? Arrest and prosecute those government officials who enacted and enforced such policies?

Will the creepy talk of a “Homeland” be ended, at last?

Please (as Clover styles it) tell me

Rand, incidentally, was something of a loon. If you knew her, you know this. While advocating in her work for the individual, she derided individuals in her circle of intimates who did not conform to her whims, even to the extent of their personal preferences regarding music and other art.Goldman Sachs

She admired the Apollo program, without mentioning (much less criticizing) the source of its funding (extorted funds) and failed to defend the non-aggression principle as a moral absolute, which is arguably her greatest failing as a philosopher.

On revolution: I dread what is coming, chiefly because I see the country as dominated by authoritarian collectivists of one species or another rather than people who have embraced the philosophy of non-aggression and voluntary, peaceful interaction. But even though I dread this, I do not fora moment believe that a Cruz victory is somehow going to hold the line. Not only because Cruz is himself an authoritarian collectivist (do you seriously deny this?) but because it is too late.

A people, a nation, cross a Rubicon at some point and become irremediable. Once this happens there is nothing to be done but ride it out. It cannot be undone or dialed back anymore than you can change the fact of old age.

I do not relish chaos or violence. I am appalled by the prospect of either. But perhaps it is better to let the sickness pass… and start over, with a healthy organism.charlie brown

And I fully understand that the disintegration of this country’s unitary/centralized system very well could entail even worse violence/oppression than we’re dealing with now. However, it could also mean real liberty for break-away regions. Perhaps not the ideal Libertarian society (as distinct from state) but certainly a vast improvement over the central/unitary state.

Expecting the GOP to advocate for real liberty is akin to Charlie Brown expecting Lucy to not pull away the football at the last second this time.

And looking to a cretin such as Ted Cruz (for god’s sake) for a renewal of real liberty is downright pathetic.

EPautos.com depends on you to keep the wheels turning! The control freaks (Clovers) hate us. Goo-guhl blackballed us.

Will you help us? 

Our donate button is here.

 If you prefer not to use PayPal, our mailing address is:

EPautos
721 Hummingbird Lane SE
Copper Hill, VA 24079

PS: EPautos stickers are free to those who sign up for a $5 or more monthly recurring donation to support EPautos, or for a one-time donation of $10 or more. (Please be sure to tell us you want a sticker – and also, provide an address, so we know where to mail the thing!)EPautoslogo

     

122 COMMENTS

  1. quite a comment list here. Ted Cruz is loathsome adams family worm I doubt his own mother likes. He nearly lost to hard core communist gun grabber beta cuck orourke in frigging texas. that takes talent. who the hell wakes up and says yeah i guess i’ll go vote for ted cruz.

    • God. You can’t have any idea how proud I am that it is MY husband who made this “journalist” go so nuts. 🙂 I’m trying to get him to write a blog. He really doesn’t get how well he makes people question their questionable values. Go, Michael. You go.Clover

      • Hi Gail,

        I merely exposed the truth that Cruz is a Bush Machine puppet. Another one. No different than Jeb! except for the DNA. Or Mittens. Or any one of several interchangeable GOP flag-humping, “values” talking but Big Government luvin’ tools who will not repeal Obamacare, dial back the police state, end the endless wars on everything… and leave us the fuck alone.

        Which is fine, if that’s what you want.

        Cruz will do the bidding of the GOP establishment, like the good little tool that he is. He’ll get power and money – which is all he’s interested in. And we’ll lose more of our liberty as he fronts further expansion of the police state and the warfare state in the name of “security” and “protecting our freedoms.” At the same time, his Wall Street crony capitalist backers will continue to line their pockets at the expense of the people of this country via “free trade” agreements and various money manipulations of the sort that good Republicans specialize in.

        Maybe you support Cruz because of his God Talk, believing him to be a “good Christian may-un”). The Chimp – his former boss – used to peddle the same line.

        • Speaking of ‘the Bush Machine,’ check this out. It’s long, and I have not finished reading it yet, but thought it worth sharing,

            • To paraphrase Gary North (because I can’t remember the exact quote) – Conspiracy theories are interesting, but I much prefer conspiracy facts.

              • Whichdo you prefer. Being stranded on a remote desert island with a dozen men and women of iimpeccable integrity.

                Or stuck on one with high tangible applcable intelligence and ability but of below average mores.

                The first group will soon die or at best eke out a dreary life of subsistence.

                The second will excel and soon transform the island. Also they may engineer a means of escape.

                Even if you value integrity above nearly all else you must put survival and self first. To fail to do this is to be some kind of sacrificial animal and not surviving well. And hence a fraud and not truly of integrity at all.

                To prefer to die over a construct such as integrity is to be delusional and a whim worshipper.

                Such sheep lemmings are dangerous and should be avoided and excluded from your phyle where possible.

              • Murray Rothbard was fond of saying, I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. But I am interested in conspiracy facts.

            • PtB, very interesting article. Thanks. A decade or more ago I read there was a “George Bush” at the scene but he was a retired and now dead former FBI agent. That was how Bush’s presence was explained, same name, just a coincidence.

  2. Jane Jacobs was just another thieving Ted Cruz scumbag. All she wanted, was different scumbags to be installed at the top of the pyramid, her tyrants would still be making all the individual mundanes at the bottom of the pyramid scheme slave their lives away building yet more monuments to force and inhuman ant hills. I discard old rotted fish heads upon her grave.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

    This is not to say you cant learn a lot of how mainstream insects work by reading her. She is a kind of alternative queen bee I suppose, but never the least bit troubled that you have to serve as her drone and live for the inanimate hive. There is not a atom of authentic humanity in anything she writes.

    Just a less common, unique-seeming statism covered in a veneer of a glittering possible utopia that would of course be another dystopia, because it is entirely predicated on the use of captive martial labor of men made mutant human centipedes each of the eating the shit of the one before them, and feeding the one behind them.

    Oh the dystopic places Doctor Seuss and Nurse Jacobs would have made us go. If only they had the power to rule instead of the power to create great statist art.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVUKD3ufRwk

    Remember 10% of your income must go into war bonds, and be sure to finish your entire plate of Green Eggs and Ham, its the law
    https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/10/dr-seusss-wartime-propaganda-cartoons/

  3. Mises and Rothbard each sent letters lauding Rand’s unparalleled accomplishment with Atlas Shrugged…

    MISES AND ROTHBARD LETTERS TO AYN RAND

    January 23, 1958

    Mrs. Ayn Rand
    36 East 36 Street
    New York, N.Y.

    Dear Mrs. Rand:
    I AM NOT A professional critic and I feel no call to judge the merits of
    a novel. So I do not want to detain you with the information that I
    enjoyed very much reading Atlas Shrugged and that I am full of admiration
    for your masterful construction of the plot.

    But “Atlas Shrugged” is not merely a novel. It is also—or may I
    say: first of all—a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society,
    a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals”
    and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies
    adopted by governments and political parties.

    It is a devastating exposure of the “moral cannibals,” the “gigolos of science” and of
    the “academic prattle” of the makers of the “anti-industrial revolution.”

    You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told
    them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions
    which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who
    are better than you.

    If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the
    truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State.
    I warmly congratulate you and I am looking forward with great
    expectations to your future work.
    Sincerely,
    Ludwig Mises
    LM/ms

    October 3, 1957
    Mrs. Ayn Rand O’Connor
    36 East 36th St.
    New York 16, N.Y.

    Dear Ayn:
    FIRST, I WOULD LIKE to begin by saying “and I mean it”; there is no
    exaggeration or hyperbole in this letter. Anything less than complete
    honesty would be unworthy of Atlas Shrugged.

    I just finished your novel today. I will start by saying that all of
    us in the “Circle Bastiat” are convinced, and were convinced very
    early in the reading, that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever
    written. This is our generally accepted initial premise, and the discussions
    over the book have naturally been based upon it. But this is
    just the beginning. This simple statement by itself means little to me:

    I have always had a bit of contempt for the novel form, and have
    thought of the novel, at best, as a useful sugar-coated pill to carry on
    agit-prop work amongst the masses who can’t take ideas straight. A
    month ago, if I had said a book was “the greatest novel ever written,”
    it wouldn’t have been too high a compliment.

    It is one of the small measures of what I think of Atlas Shrugged
    that I no longer pooh-pooh the novel. I have always heard my literary
    friends talk of the “truths” presented by novels, without understanding
    the term at all. Now I do understand, but only because you
    have carried the novel form to a new and higher dimension.

    For the first time you have welded a great unity of principle and person,
    depicting persons and their actions in perfect accordance with principles
    and their consequences.

    This in itself is a tremendous achievement.
    For with the unity of principle and person there emerges the
    corollary unity of reason and emotion: and the reader, in grasping
    your philosophic system both in speech and through acting persons,
    is hit by the great emotion of an immediate and rational perception.

    As I read your novel, the joy I felt was sometimes tempered by the
    regret that all those generations of novel-readers, people like my
    mother who in their youth read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, searching
    eagerly for they knew not what truths which they never quite found,
    that these people could not read Atlas Shrugged.

    Here, I thought, were the truths they were really looking for. Here, in Atlas Shrugged, is the perfection of the novel form. It is now a form that I honor and
    admire.

    But the truly staggering thing about your novel is the vast and
    completely integrated edifice, of thought and of action: the astounding
    infinity of rational connections that abound, great and small,
    throughout this novel. Joey says she used to wonder how a novel
    could take you over ten years to write; she now wonders how you
    possibly could have written all that in a mere ten years.

    Every page, almost every word, has its meaning and function. I am sure that I
    have only scratched the surface of tracing all the interconnections,
    and a good part of my conversation consists of saying; and what of
    page so-and-so: do you see how that fits in? I recall now just a line, I
    believe it was in an early speech of Francisco, where the following
    nouns appear: reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement.

    To some this might seem to be a random string of nouns, but I saw
    immediately that one follows from the other in strict logical progression,
    that each leads to the succeeding. This is just one example of the
    almost infinite treasurehouse that is Atlas Shrugged.

    To find one person that has carved out a completely integrated
    rational ethic, rational epistemology, rational psychology, and
    rational politics, all integrated one with the other, and then to find
    each with the other portrayed through characters in action, is a doubly
    staggering event. And I am surprised that it astonishes even I
    who was familiar with the general outlines of your system.

    What it will do the person stumbling upon it anew I cannot imagine. For you
    have achieved not only the unity of principle and person, and of reason
    and passion, but also the unity of mind and body, matter and
    spirit, sex and politics . . . in short, to use the old Marxist phrase, “the
    unity of theory and practice.”

    This is the sort of book where one is apt to find a phrase or concept
    and exclaim: oh, no leftist could say such nonsense, and then go
    out and find the same nonsense being spouted all around you. It is
    almost impossible, after reading Atlas Shrugged, to take the usual leftist
    arguments seriously.

    At first I admit I missed the presence of a
    great, super-Toohey villain, a Dr. Fu Manchu of evil, but then I came
    to realize that this is one of the key points in the book. And then,
    when I tried to tell a couple of leftist acquaintances something about
    your system, all they could do was curl their ugly lips and sneer
    about a “paranoid closed system.” These are the “intellectuals” of
    our day!

    I now come to the painful part of this letter. For standing as I do
    in awe and wonder at the glory and magnitude of your achievement,
    knowing from early in the novel that I would have to write you and
    express in full how much I and the world owe to you, I also know
    that I owe you an explanation: an explanation of why I have avoided
    seeing you in person for the many years of our acquaintance.

    I want you to know that the fault is mine, that the reason is a defect in my
    own psyche and not a defect that I attribute to you. The fact is that
    most times when I saw you in person, particularly when we engaged
    in lengthy discussion or argument, that I found afterwards that I was
    greatly depressed for days thereafter.

    Why I should be so depressed I do not know. All my adult life I have been plagued with a “phob ic state” (of which my travel phobia is only the most overt manifestation), i.e. with frightening emotions which I could neither control nor
    rationally explain. I have found that unfortunately the only way I
    could successfully combat this painful emotion is by sidestepping
    the situations which seemed to evoke it—knowing that this is an evasion,
    but also knowing no better way.

    So in this situation. I have never felt depressed in such a way after seeing anyone else, so I concluded that the best I could do is avoid the reaction by not going to
    see you. I had naturally been too ashamed to say anything about this
    to you. Strangely, I don’t feel ashamed now; it is as if when writing
    to the author of Atlas Shrugged, that book which conveys with such
    immediate impact the pride and joy in being a man, that it is impossible
    to feel shame for telling the truth.

    In trying my best to figure out why I should have been so
    depressed, I can only think of one or both of the following explanations:

    (1) that my brain became completely exhausted under the
    intense strain of keeping up with a mind that I unhesitatingly say is
    the most brilliant of the twentieth century; or (2) that I felt that if I
    continued to see you, my personality and independence would
    become overwhelmed by the tremendous power of your own.

    If the latter, then the defect is, of course, again mine and not yours. At any
    rate, I have come to regard you as like the sun, a being of enormous
    power giving off great light, but that someone coming too close
    would be likely to get burned.

    At any rate, I want you to know that, even without seeing you,
    you have had an enormous influence upon me—even before the
    novel came out. When I first became interested in ideas, my first
    principle that I had from the start was a burning love of human freedom,
    and a hatred for aggressive violence of man upon man.

    I always liked economics, and was inclined to theory, but found in my
    graduate economics courses that I felt all the theories offered were
    dead wrong, but I could not say why. Mises’s Human Action was the
    next great influence upon me, because I found in it a great rational
    system of economics, each interconnected logically, each following,
    as in Aristotelian philosophy, from a basic and certain axiom: the
    existence of human beings.

    When I first met you, many years ago, I
    was a follower of Mises, but unhappy about his antipathy to natural
    rights, which I “felt” was true but could not demonstrate.

    You introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy,
    which I did not know existed, and month by month, working
    on my own as I preferred, I learned and studied the glorious natural
    rights tradition. I also learned from you about the existence of
    Aristotelian epistemology, and then I studied that, and came to
    adopt it wholeheartedly. So that I owe you a great intellectual debt
    for many years, the least of which is introducing me to a tradition of
    which four years of college and three years of graduate school, to say
    nothing of other reading, had kept me in ignorance.

    And now I find, and marvel at in wonder and awe and joy, that
    I have become a better person just in reading Atlas Shrugged. It is still
    incredible to me that a person’s character can improve from reading
    a work of art, but there it is.

    I have checked and found many friends
    who have read it have felt the same way. I think that reading it will
    bring to the attentive reader, as it has brought me, at least a little
    more of the conviction of pride in being a man, of joy in unlimited
    roads of achievement open before him, of the feeling that pain does
    not matter, of the happiness of being alive on earth, and even of the
    feeling that reason and justice will ultimately prevail. He will walk a
    little straighter, hold his head a little higher, and be far more honest
    (one of the greatest accomplishments of the book is its rational and
    emotional demonstration that honesty is a profoundly selfish and
    necessary virtue—and not just a luxury for suckers. Magnificent!).

    The chief defect in this book—and I am quite serious—is that it
    lacks an index. My chief emotion in reading this book was beautifully
    summed up in an emotion that Dr. Stadler felt when he first
    came across Galt’s manuscript: torn between eagerness to proceed
    onward, and the eagerness to look back and think about and digest
    the many ramifications of what I had read.

    With a novel, this is even more troublesome, since the pull of reading onward is more irresistible. This book cries for a fully annotated index, so that when one
    wants to refer quickly to passages on certain subjects, or to a particularly
    moving speech or phrase, one could find it without delay.

    I know that no novel has had an index before, but none has ever
    required it before, and this does. Perhaps you could be persuaded to
    come out with a “textbook” edition, complete with index.

    Please let me know if there is anything I can do to promote the sale
    of the novel. I will do anything I can: from writing letters to the editor
    to pasting stickers up on street corners.

    I am enclosing a copy of the letter I am now sending to the New Leader, in comment on the disgraceful and disgusting column of Granville Hicks, an “ex”-Communist, about your book. (When I said your book will improve the reader, I
    don’t mean the convinced leftists: I shudder what the book will do
    to their psyche, if they really read it.) I understand, glory be!, that
    John Chamberlain will review it for the Sunday Herald-Tribune—
    and, confidentially, there is a growing possibility that John may also
    review it for National Review, if Whittaker Chambers does not send
    a review in on time.

    Only twice in my life have I felt honored and happy that I was
    young and alive at the specific date of the publication of a book: first,
    of Human Action in 1949, and now with Atlas Shrugged. When, in the
    past, I heard your disciples refer to you in grandiloquent terms—as
    one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, as giving them a “round
    universe”—I confess I was repelled: surely this was the outpouring
    of a mystic cult. But now, upon reading Atlas Shrugged, I find I was
    wrong. This was not wild exaggeration but the perception of truth.

    You are one of the great geniuses of the ages, and I am proud that we
    are friends. And Atlas Shrugged is not merely the greatest novel ever
    written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or
    nonfiction. Indeed, it is one of the greatest achievements the human
    mind has ever produced. And I mean it.

    If Zarathustra should ever return to earth, and ask me—as representative of the human race— that unforgettable question: “what have ye done to surpass man?”, I
    shall point to Atlas Shrugged.

    Gratefully yours,
    Murray

  4. That was a whole mess o stuff in that article, what I got from it was – If you refuse to give a shit about “official” names and stories, you might come to believe texas is just a victor’s mistranslation of centurians old “hello friend”

    The region of hello friend’s Northern border is officially with the Oklahoma Panhandle at 36.500400°N 103.002280°W;
    it’s Southern border is About 5 miles SE of Brownsville, on the Rio Grande at 25.837022°N 97.394150°W; its Eastern border is On the Sabine River, SW of Burr Ferry, Louisiana at 31.031078°N 93.507969°W; and its Western border is 0.6 miles west of the Rio Grande, near Borderland, El Paso County 31.895619°N 106.645657°W or there abouts cording to the local consent’suss.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S._states

    English: Texas is Texan
    Arabic:
    تكساس هي تكساس
    Bosnian (Latin):
    Texas je Teksaški
    Bulgarian:
    Тексас е Тексас
    Catalan:
    Texas és texà
    Chinese Traditional:
    德克薩斯州是德克薩斯州
    Croatian:
    Texas je teksaški
    Czech:
    Texas je Texasan
    Danish:
    Texas er texaner
    Dutch:
    Texas is Texaanse
    Estonian:
    Texas on Texase
    Finnish:
    Texas on texan
    French:
    le Texas est texan
    German:
    Texas ist Texaner
    Greek:
    το Τέξας είναι texan
    Haitian Creole:
    Texas se texan
    Hebrew:
    טקסס היא טקסנית
    Hindi:
    टेक्सास ज़्यादा टेक्सन है
    Hmong Daw:
    Texas yog texan
    Hungarian:
    Texas a texasi
    Indonesian:
    Texas adalah Texas
    Italian:
    il Texas è texano
    Japanese:
    テキサスはテキサス
    Kiswahili:
    Texas ni texan
    Korean:
    텍사스는 텍사스
    Latvian:
    Texas ir texan
    Lithuanian:
    Teksasas yra texan
    Malay:
    Texas adalah texan
    Maltese:
    Texas huwa texan
    Yucatec Maya:
    Texas le texano
    Norwegian Bokmål:
    Texas er Texas
    Querétaro Otomi:
    Texas ar texano
    Persian:
    تگزاس است تگزاس
    Polish:
    Texas jest texan
    Portuguese:
    Texas é texano
    Romanian:
    Texas este texan
    Russian:
    Техас является Техасский
    Serbian (Latin):
    Texas je iz Teksasa
    Slovak:
    Texas je texan
    Slovenian:
    Texas je Teksaški
    Spanish:
    Texas es texano
    Swedish:
    Texas är texan
    Thai:
    เท็กซัสเป็น texan
    Turkish:
    Teksas Teksaslı olduğunu
    Ukrainian:
    Техас є Техаський
    Urdu:
    ٹیکساس کے خاموش طبع ہیں ۔
    Vietnamese:
    Texas là texan
    Welsh:
    Texas yn texan

    These official languages izz some of the dominant modes of thought policework to be found these days. They pass their citizens around from freerange cage to cage. The Rapacy is a big player in that to be sure. But now Them Baptists in the Hello Friend region claim to be more NAPpy headed than them Old Dog Wholly Roamins, but thats just what I seen on virtual paper, not confirmed IRL.

    them Historians trace the earliest church labeled “Baptist” back to 1609 in Amsterdam, with English Separatist John Smyth as its pastor. In accordance with his reading of the Gnu Testamint, he rejected baptism of infants and instituted baptism only of believing adults.

    Baptist practice spread to England, where the General Baptists considered Christ’s atonement to extend to all people, while the Particular Baptists believed that it extended only to the elect. In 1638, Roger Williams established the first Baptist congregation in the North American colon ease. In the mid-18th centurian, the First Great Awakening increased Baptist growth in both New England and the South.

    The Second Great Awakening in the South in the early 19th centurian increased church membership, as did the preachers’ lessening of support for abolition and manumission of slavery, which had been part of the 18th-century tea chings.

    Baptist missionary positioners have spread their church to every continent.
    The largest Baptist ass so chiation is the Southern Baptist Convention, with the membership of associated churches totaling more than 15 million

    Baptists are individ youalls who comprise a group of Christian denominations and churches that subscribe to a doctrine that baptism should be performed only for professing believers (believer’s baptism, as opposed to infant baptism), and that it must be done by complete immersion (as opposed to affusion or sprinkling).

    Other tenets of Baptist churches include soul competency (liberty), salvation through faith alone, Scripture alone as the rule of faith and practice, and the autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists recognize two ministerial offices, elders and deacons. Baptist churches are widely considered to be Protestant churches, though some Baptists disavow this identity.

    Die verse from their beginning, those eye dentifying as Baptists today differ widely from one another in what they bee leave, how they warship, their attitudes toward other Christians, and their understanding of what is importint in Christian discipleship.

    • Baptists, god save me so to speak. I was raised Baptist….or at least the attempt was made. I guess I had a good bullshit detector as a child. They’d say one thing and then I’d say But it doesn’t say that right here. Slap their hands over their mouth and sotto voce He can read.

      I could never draw Jesus for shit. He was a puzzlement to me from the gitgo. He looked quite a bit like my aunt Donnell after a two week camping trip. And why did God always have a golden glow? Well, all those rays slanting down through the clouds were a lot like a west Tx. tornado when the eye got there, before the next big hail and blow. But it wasn’t raininig fish and frogs in those pics, the best part of a good Texas thunderstorm.

      Maybe I should have been a Mennonite from the plains. I lived with them a couple years ago on a big job. I sorta liked how they spoke German and Spanish equally well and had a strange German-Spanish accent in English. They always seemed to think I was one of them and chattered at me in Spanish in he field and German on the phone. They dint let little things like addresses screw them up, just didn’t use them and most didn’t know what I was speaking of. So, how do you get your mail here. Der mail, he brings it on a truck. No, I mean what do you put on the envelope so it arrives here? Nussing, we don’t put on envelope when we get mail. Ok, do you have a phone book. Nein, ve haf computer. Then there were the blues and the greens that all the women were either of one or the other. I gotta say, the blues were really hot. It didn’t hurt that the blue cloth was sheer. In the continual 40mph wind it clung to them like skin. No guessing as to what they looked like without it since they were fairly much all blond and tall. I’d need a pair of those boots like Burt Reynolds wore in Smoky and the Bandit ll to be eye to eye with them. I’d seen an esp. good body on one blue a couple times as I passed by but never her face. So once when I go by and she’s outside I pulled the old air horn cord. She looked right at me, wowzer, what a looker and almost immediately the inside tire on the front driver on her side blew and slammed the cab so hard I thought I’d lose the window. Ok, ok, no honking, I get it.

      • Yeah I too fail at racism cause females be feeming and stuff. In its stead, I try understanding. Da eturny’all white mans bird done. Even them Nord East Merkins, the Yankeest of the Yanks…

        The Diplo vid below is what I imagine anything North of Virginia or West of Ohio must be, since I nevva yet been neether, and fear that I should someday have to…

        This Diplo Disaster is the worst rap song I have yet found. BUTT Instead of decreeing a fatwad agin it, I listen and look at it an try an find… um I dunno, tryin an tryin to feel the appeal.

        gUESS THEM micro aggressin Hippo Hopped Up Honeys Help. Doctor pepper doctor pepper. More you drink that sick sweet food colored mess the more your thirst hollers even better…

        The Diplo Says:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVth_C1zYrw

        “Put it on ice bitch, Dr Pepper. Feeling so clean, it don’t get no fresher
        Chillin’ in the freezer when I’m under pressure. I put it on ice bitch, Dr Pepper
        Dr Pepper, Dr Pepper..” sayeth the Diplo, whomever he be…

        Rand Dumb White Dood Bee Evera Wear…
        http://www.buzzfeed.com/naomizeichner/diplo-random-white-dude-be-everywhere-stream

        bad, yay yuss boy how dee hella badddddd, but still a better story than Twilight or the piss pants rants of the Wet Cooze For Cruz Randian…

  5. Texas, 8southman, aka Hello Friend, 8southman

    TEXAS, ORIGIN OF NAME

    Texas’ state motto, “Friendship,” comes from the Native American word that was adopted as the name of the state. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.

    TEXAS, ORIGIN OF NAME. The word texas (tejas, tayshas, texias, thecas?, techan, teysas, techas?) had wide usage among the Indians of East Texas even before the coming of the Spanish, whose various transcriptions and interpretations gave rise to many theories about the meaning. The usual meaning was “friends,” although the Hasinais applied the word to many groups-including Caddoan-to mean “allies.” The Hasinais probably did not apply the name to themselves as a local group name; they did use the term, however, as a form of greeting: “Hello, friend.”

    How and when the name Texas first reached the Spanish is uncertain, but the notion of a “great kingdom of Texas,” associated with a “Gran Quivira” (see QUIVIRA) had spread in New Spain before the expedition of Alonso De León and Damián Massanet in 1689. Massanet reported meeting Indians who proclaimed themselves thecas, or “friends,” as he understood it, and on meeting the chief of the Nabedaches (one of the Hasinai tribes) mistakenly referred to him as the “governor” of a “great kingdom of the Texas.” Francisco de Jesús María, a missionary left by Massanet with the Nabedaches, attempted to correct erroneous reports about the name by asserting that the Indians in that region did not constitute a kingdom, that the chief called “governor” was not the head chief, and that the correct name of the group of tribes was not Texas.

    Texias, according to Jesús María, meant “friends” and was simply a name applied to the various groups allied against the Apaches. Later expeditions by the Spanish for the most part abandoned the name Texas or else used it as an alternative to Asinay (Hasinai). Official Spanish documents continued to use it but later narrowed it to mean only the Neches-Angelina group of Indians and not a geographic area. Other putative meanings have less evidence from contemporary accounts to support them: “land of flowers,” “paradise,” and “tiled roofs”-from the thatched roofs of the East Texas tribes-were never suggested by first-hand observers so far as is known, though later theories connect them with tejas or its variant spellings.

    Whatever the Spanish denotations of the name Texas, the state motto, “Friendship,” carries the original meaning of the word as used by the Hasinai and their allied tribes, and the name of the state apparently was derived from the same source.

    • Tor, 150 years before Columbus supposedly “found” America, the Spanish had kept quiet their forced domination of countless tribes of S. American they called Aztec. But there never were people who called themselves Aztec, it was an all-inclusive name the Spanish called a variety of tribes and people and not all of the same genetic make-up. There was a tribe who called themselves Tecas. I’m guessing here that they were located somewhere near the ancient city the Spanish later conquered and called Mexico City. They probably split off and wandered northward, away from the coast that Spain desired to keep in control. No doubt their reasoning was to escape the bloody Spanish conquerers as did many tribes.

      The tribes of S. America are a good example of how NOT to welcome strangers. They gave them gold and silver, since that’s what the Spanish were seeking, in hopes of seeing them take their gifts of friendship and get the fuck away since the Spanish had right away caused them damage and sought to control them.

      The huge golden and silver gifts and precious stones were taken back to Spain where they were received as the tip of the iceberg. That was the beginning of the end for freedom of the native peoples and 200 years later various tribes were still fighting the Spanish.

      Texas was part of that area that had no gold and silver for the most part and was safe haven being far from Mexico City and the conquering Spanish. Not much “good” history there unless you’re a neocon as the Spanish were and sought to rob as many people of their precious stones and metals as possible.

      It’s a long and sordid and bloody story and probably no one has even known the whole truth except maybe the Vatican who sent priests of the most bad-ass order to make sure they got their fair share of the booty.

      I’ve often wondered how people came to be so brainwashed as to worship the very entity who sought as much money from their parishioners for simple reasons of greed. Well, it’s not so difficult I suppose when you consider it was always done at the point of a sword. Become a follower, hence a worker for the Papacy or become their enemy. Bushco summed that think up this century with the motto: You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.

      The MSM did a great job of selling to the masses. They stifled the smoking guns that lay everywhere and later, helped the shadow govt. stifle dissent in reference to the redacted pages of the FBI’s internal investigation of 9/11 as had been done many times before.

      Until the people of this country have seen that report in it’s entirety, we’re all still slaves of conquerers in every sense of the word.

      Our not so great edgycashunal system is doing its job…..in spades.

  6. Eric, you have a lot more patience for the pretentious prick to whom this column was written than I do. I would have dismissed his name-dropping, illogical ass immediately. You, however disabused him of his position with yet another fine piece of writing. Thanks for all you do.

  7. It’s hard to face really. How far men have fallen even since a single Jewish girl was born in 1905 in St Petersburg Russia.

    You all describe yourselves as from Texas, SW Virginia, Chicago, Boston, Idaho, etc. Not even enough self identity to introduce yourselves without invoking the enslavements of the state.

    Texas has always and will always be property of the shape shifter Humpty Dumptys who will decree it means. You begin on the right track by creating the term clover. By saying throw it in the woods. Adopting those of your friends like fish heads, got dam, gnome sayin, and the like but you still ride with the overlords training wheels firmly attached.

    You seek stolen merit and illusory valor by saying the founders are your mentors. They are no such things. Only a fondly regarded mirage of the haloed men of means and ways who first domesticated the earlier pioneers and colonists. Who made this entire continent into one giant Wilderness cum Walmart Corporation.

    If they weren’t fascist nationalist socialists to their cores, I don’t know who ever was. Don’t ascribe to them all the accomplishments made in America, because they were behind none of them.

    The US and Israel are both part and parcel of Britania, and could each excersise their long tendered options to rejoin the UK Commonwealth, and you would only hear less static and nonsense there forth. You’d lose nothing of value whatsoever to abandon the so called myths of United States and Israeli homeland. Both of these being an absolute farce and unnecessary expensive dead weight intermediary of no account.

    Alisa once said: I am primarily the creator of a new code Of morality which has so far believed to be impossible. Namely a morality not based on faith, not based on emotion, not on arbitrary edicts, mystical or social, but on reason.

    Mans highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness, and that he must not force other people, nor accept their right to force him. That each man must live as an end in himself, and follow his own rational self interest.

    The BBC article called John Galt a Christ like figure which is an absolute lie.

    Jesus claimed to come to fulfill the scriptures of forced human husbandry written before him. If true, this is objectively evil. Good people don’t advocate for a ruling class treating fellow beings like beasts of burden. If that’s what Christianity is, throw it in the woods.

    Maybe I am missing some things and am barking at straw men.

    This is mostly a one man band here, so I applaud what you’ve done, and am grateful for what I’ve gleaned here.

    So throw Alisa in the woods and become a maintainer of your own property. Don’t take on debt. Avoid idiocies like rap and teevees. A good start but there should be more to Being part of Petoria. Much much more, who else is in and willing to contribute.

    Petoria invasion
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyk0HcNXTQQ

    • Tor, when I mention Tx. it’s mostly because that’s where I live and it’s the place I have to survive in unless I want to move. Loving the country you grew up in and really enjoy is not the same as identifying with some govt. There are other places I like but they have names of a govt. boundary also.

      I do still like the fact that people from this part of the country are self-driven. We’re covered up with people from everywhere now and things have changed govt.-wise and philosophically. Never the less, the wide open sky of this part of the world is something you get to where you can’t imagine being in any other geographical place.

      I have a friend from New Iberia. I asked why he chose to live here when he’d been from coast to coast. He said “Because it’s like home, it’s the same type of geography and air and sun”. And it’s not all of Tx. I like. I don’t care to stay soaked in sweat and eaten alive by skeeters in Houston or the years of constant flooding or the east part where you get into forests and can’t see the sun all day. I like New Mexico as well, not the govt. and not so much the people but the land and sky.

      I have met two people in the last year or two from NY who said they definitely would stay in Tx. and never return to NY. A lot of people have come to this state and settle in the wide open spaces parts of it just because there was something they liked about it. It’s certainly not the criminals and pricks in Austin that make people(except died in the wool yankees)want to stay.

    • Tor Libertarian, I believe the reason some if not all of us mention from time to time the state in which we reside is a hope of learning about new like-minded people that we hope to meet face to face, and has little if anything to do with self-identity. Eightsouthman and I have met and became good friends after having learned in this Internet forum that we live pretty close to each other.
      People here also like to compare notes such as local laws with each other this way. I was from Missouri, but could find no employment aside from OTR trucking in the rural part of that state, so I moved to the oilfields of Oklahoma then to Texas. I had every intention of saving up some money and returning to Missouri to raise livestock on leased land. Here, I learned that my former opinion of Texans was incorrect. We probably have all met former Marines who remind everyone several times a day that they “are” Marines. They are oftentimes dickheads and I have never liked that type of person. When I was growing up in Missouri, I met some former Texan boys who acted that same way. Later in life my experience with Texas was as a truck driver delivering and picking up loads and driving through the big cities during rush hour. I never really had time to do much talking with anyone.
      Well, I moved here and discovered that I really like the people here. I still own land in Missouri and officially moving here would be a big job, so I decided to do more research about this state compared to Missouri. Yesterday I filed my taxes and am getting a refund from Missouri since I haven’t been there for even a day last year. My choice has been made! I am staying here in Texas. I remain a strong Anarchist though.

  8. How to be a good Menckenanian, since Randians are dismissed by local proprietary fiat.

    Step 1. Inherit a large cigar factory.

    Step 2. Eviscerate this enterprise, leave its employees and their families in the lurch. Turn a large fortune into a small fortune.

    Step 3 Use the remaining scraps of value to buy your way into the literary and periodical racket. Develop a large readership based on actual merit. A rich guy brought low has a lot of valuable things to say if he embraces his new low rent normal. H L also had an eye for talent, it was Alissa Rosenbaums (Ayn Rands) fondest hope that he would hire her.

    Step 4 Ta da.

  9. Over the weekend someone placed a tombstone in N.Y. City’s Central Park with Trump’s name on it. Trump has received a number of death threats from various nutjobs including Mormon whack job Glenn Beck who said he would stab Trump.
    If you look up the U.S code section 879, where it specifically states that”whoever knowingly and willingly threatens to kill, kidnap or inflict bodily harm ……
    3. On a major candidate for the office of president or vice president, or a member of the immediate family of such candidate; or
    4.A person protected by the Secret Service under section 3056 (a)( 6); shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
    So why isn’t moron Beck now in custody?
    I think we all know the answer to that question.
    Ted Cruz is a xtian zionist. A total AIPAC butt kisser but then again so is Hillary. Both have pledged their undying allegiance to isrealhell and not to America.
    Both are neo-con warmongers.
    And of course both spit on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
    Now imagine if Hillary or Cruz received such threats.

  10. What you’re seeing Eric, is the Republican far-right trying to co-opt the name Libertarian. Much like how they took over the Tea Party. If you recall, they were originally low-tax, small government, and were fairly close to Libertarian thinking.

    But then the Neo-cons moved in and took over, and started shouting louder than the original members, drowning out the original message.

    I fear the same may happen to the Libertarian movement.

    • chiph, I don’t see it that way. I believe the Tea Party was merely a false flag to let the old guard they actually represent stay in power while making the lost Republicans feel as if it were changing. Oh sure, their cheerleaders made out to be mad and threw the Libertarian word at them but it was simply more window dressing to convince everyone the false flag wasn’t such and pull off the old switcheroo.

      It didn’t work and now we don’t even hear ‘libertarian’ in context to that bunch. Their attempt to make it appear the new boss wouldn’t be the same as the old boss has fallen on its face.

      And the same thing may be happening with Trump but the things he’s said are really poison to Wall St. and the welfare/warfare bunch. He might drag a significant number of people from all sides, the 45 million who sat out the last election.

      I won’t repeat the old mantra of “anybody beats Bush” since it turned out anybody we got would be another version of Bush but at least BO doesn’t try to tell jokes he doesn’t get right. Whether that’s even better or not is not even the question but it’s less embarrassing.

      I didn’t vote for Ronnie but still wanted to crawl under the table when he got out his paper, easel and colored markers and spoke gibberish, looking all the while like the veritable fish out of water.

    • Hi Chip,

      I see Trump as something else (cue Jennings/Dark Overlord from Howard The Duck). He is no conservative and certainly no Libertarian. The Hitler comparisons are a bit much, but not the parallels regarding what he’s tapped into. The rage of a large (and growing) segment of the populace that cannot stand anymore of the same. Trump is drawing from a deep pool of hate – not necessarily the bad kind, either. Hate of political correctness, for instance. Of dry-cunt feminism. Of the cuckolding of men. The demands for more and more “diversity.” And of course, economic concerns (Bernie s tapping into that, too). People are running scared – just as in Weimar Germany.

      America as a nation-state is doomed. This is natural, inevitable. Everything dies.

      Trump is merely the Red Giant stage, if you will.

      • You want a good laugh? Go on Youtube (sorry, I can’t post the link from work) and look up “Johnson calls Trump a pussy”

        This is fun to watch of course, but what I think Trump really is, is a bully.

        • chiph, there is a new way to circumvent the blocks of certain sites by various administrative means but I can’t call the name at the moment. I’ll look for it but it’s gaining popularity wickedly fast. I’ll try to find it. I think I read of it in the last few days on Gizmag.

          • Google Translate works here, for Blogspot.
            It’s just checking the base URL. Haven’t tried with YouTube, because they think the biggest problem here is Us Little People (who work), not those who “meet” for a living….
            I’ll save it for when it’s needed.

        • Agreed, Chip.

          He’s a bully – and possibly worse.

          It’s awful being in the position of cheering him on, purely out of desperation and for hate’s sake (directed at the GOP).

          • eric, that somehow triggered a memory of the only politician, esp. a president, who has ever admitted to a mistake. of out and out saying he fucked up.

            “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” – Woodrow Wilson reflecting upon signing the Federal Reserve Act.

            And boy, was ever correct in his lamentation. Now the shit’s coming back to the roost but the smart birds have left. Squawk, squawk, where’s my head, my ass, my money, my house?….squawk

            It’s been an illusion your whole life……remember? And you even caught on as a teen but when you tried to tell anybody they called you a commie and a traitor and told you to love it or leave it. That shoulda been your wake up call dumbass. Why didn’t you load up for Tierra del Fuego right then?

          • I see him more as one who stands up to bullies. Which is of course what we need if the MIC is ever to be rolled back. I don’t hold out much hope for this, but if anyone had the balls to stand against it, that would be Trump. Imagine Bernie getting the talk? He’s feckless.

  11. Good God, Sanders is more libertarian that Cruz. And Sanders isn’t libertarian.

    Towards the end of her life Rand realized that she had erred in supporting Republicans. She had been focusing on economics alone, but when she realized she agreed with the Democrat justices on a pornography case she realized where the Republicans were just as opposed to her as Democrats were.

    By then the damage had been done though. All the deep thinkers had already left her movement. Nathaniel Branden had been exiled, Alan Greenspan was already using the fame of being associated with her to do things she would oppose, and that left the mightily unworthy Leonard Piekoff to uphold her banner by supporting a party she had ultimately rejected.

    • Well-said, Ayn…

      I still regard her as a kind of John the Baptist figure, though. Today, there is a much more appealing – because more human – form of Libertarianism percolating. The one not focused primarily on money (as Rand’s was) which is not, for most people, the most important thing in life. I mean a Libertarianism that focuses on the simple human desire to not be hurt. To be let alone. To be left in peace. To pursue happiness… however each of us define that. So long as we are not causing a tangible harm to another person in the process.

      This sort of Libertarianism has legs.

  12. Northwestfront.org

    The Northwest Imperative might be the only hope we have. Libertarianism has great ideas and potential, but the prerequisites for its success just seem unobtanium. To be brief, it falls short by disregarding the aspect of race and a racially based government. Yes, we are all ‘human’, but some groups of humans ARE better than others and the only race to codify freedom and liberty into law has been the white race. Any race can enjoy freedom, but only white people create the environments in which it can take root and thrive. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. The next step a conservative needs to take towards fully awakening is to become a libertarian. And the next step for libertarians is to become racially aware. Take the next step.

    Northwestfront.org

    • Like the white race codified freedom and liberty into law for black people? And committed mass murder with nuclear weapons against those sneaky yellow people? Or perpetrated genocide against those red folks who dared to live where pure white folks wanted to settle?

      Thanks for clarifying the immense superiority of the white race. It all makes sense now.

      • MikeinStafford,

        It certainly isn’t the same group that went on the crusades to “sack” the Byzantine Empire* (remnants of Eastern Roman Empire) in the back, while they needed help against eastern groups (e Turks, Arabs and others) pressing on their border.

        (*1204 — Done since it was easier to pillage Constantinople than go to the Holy Land and liberate it from Muslim control.)
        https://worldhistoryproject.org/1204/4/12/siege-of-constantinople-1204

        Unfortunately, there are ß@$τ@rd$ of every race, creed, and gender. They couldn’t care less about those they harm in the course of their daily activities.

      • Just wait until they get the upper hand over us. Being a self hating white person may be the high and mighty moral position to take in this modern deracinated cesspool, but the world our grandchildren will grow up in won’t entertain such feminine views. They will be outnumbered by the other races that hate us and their reasons for hating us will be irrelevant. The other races, possibly excepting the north Asain peoples, cannot build or maintain a technologically advanced civilization. All of us owe a huge debt of gratitude to our ancestors who risking their lives crossed oceans and conquered continents to give the world to their bumbling and ungrateful posterity who have forgotten their past or dismiss it as racist and shameful.

        No apologies. The darker races are infinitely better off because the white race, acting as the shepherd, brought the world into the modern age. That some eggs had be broken to make this omelette is just part of life. If it makes you feel better to lay down and die and give this land back to the cannibals we took it from, so be it. I’d suggest going home to Europe where our ancestors came from, but it’s in the process of being overrun by people who have a purpose beyond hyper-individualism and decadent materialism, so you won’t be welcome there.

        As great as it sounds, libertarianism just boils down to the very small minority of humans of all races who are intelligent and insightful enough to articulate many of the problems humanity faces being drowned in the sea of idiots the darker races are producing at a geometric rate. The dark masses of the world don’t give two turds about freedom, or the non-aggression principle, or sound currencies. They want to get on the white man’s back and ride. They want us to work our asses off and pay taxes so the gubment dey votes fo can gibs dem dat. And any black, brown, yellow, or red man or woman that moves up economically can also enjoy the spiritually uplifting experience of paying to support the inferior specimens of their own kind.

        Maybe the other races will be smart enough to keep a few whites around to keep things running, a la South Africa. That’s the best we can hope for the way things are going. Team Whitey is losing this game because we won’t work together as White people with White interests. The other teams don’t have that problem.

        Northwestfront.org

        • Non Ame,

          Entirely absent from your screed is any mention of the role white people have played in the destruction of the black family and the pathology of dependance. Minimum wage laws and the drug war were originally instituted with explicitly racist goals. Early minimum wage laws were designed to exclude “undesirables” (Chinese, Mexicans, Blacks, etc…) from the work force. Likewise, the origins of the drug war, spearheaded by the odious Harry Anslinger, were explicitly racist.

          However, even with these disadvantages intentionally created by white people, blacks were advancing economically and illegitimacy was quite rare. After Johnson declared “war on poverty” things started to change dramatically. This triple threat (minimum wage laws, the drug war and welfare policies that encouraged dependency and illegitimacy) had a disparate effect on blacks because blacks were economically worse off than the general population. Minimum wage laws excluded low-skilled blacks from the legal labor market, drug laws created a lucrative black market which created job opportunities to those excluded from the legal market, and welfare policies punished low wage employment and subsidized illegitimacy.

          White people, originally for explicitly racist reasons and now to assuage white guilt, created the black underclass you fear. Unfortunately, I am fully aware that my statements will be perceived as just as racist as your despicable comments by a large proportion of the black community. However, that is due to the success of race hustlers like Al Sharpton, and the odious opportunism of progressive politicians. To the extent that the “dark masses”, as you contemptuously refer to them, “want to get on the white man’s back and ride”, it is due primarily to the efforts of white people.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzNYCPZXvlw – Walter Williams

          http://fff.org/freedom-in-motion/video/drug-war-black-america-video/ – Radley Balko

          Jeremy

          • Thank you, Jeremy. I’m trying to formulate a response to that person, but where to begin? You’ve masterfully addressed a large aspect of the post.

            • What strikes me about all of the sound and fury on every side of this discussion is that most of you folks are using identity politics to the hilt…..it has always struck me that viewing the “accomplishments of {insert favorite race here}” as a group looks at individuals according to some sort of group identity rather than as individuals. Let’s face it, just because Leonardo da Vinci was a “white Italian” does nothing to enhance or detract the value of other, similar looking individuals. What has made Western civilization successful in many areas was the value for and reward given to individuals….under that model art, engineering, science, health etc. flourished and it was because of the intellectual environment and rewards of the free market, not because of some superficial group membership.

        • Your eagerness to be the bottom for which ever ruling class national leader is the top. Just so long as you’re a sheep in the righ homogenous flock makes you a bigger nigger than any black man I’ve ever met in person.

          Why don’t you find like minded people and build something with them. I wish you all the best.

          Just Stop saying we. There is no we. I doubt any of us want to be a nigger in your niggerpile, A racially pure Anglo nigger. Is still just a nigger.

          You go on and do you, I’ll go on and do me.

          • When we were getting ready to move to Little Rock in 1961, my Dad told me “It’s not the color of a man’s skin that makes him a nigger.” And believe me, we met some white niggers.

            • Human coloring varies with the amount of the amino acid tyrosine found in each of our cells.
              http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7F.html

              The three kinds of melanins are derivative of tyrosine.

              Why is you so black, Tyrone?

              Cause I is filled with tyrone-isine. I is extra fond of them water melon-nins cause They gibs me protection from the UV rays.

              If you move 2 Africa and mostly live outdoors like my ancestors did.

              In only 20 50 or a 100 generations your descendant too will be black like me cause you too has them water melonins in your skin.

              We jus the same cept you ancestors built a house to keep out da hot sun and created transportation systems to take yous up north where there was more food and less rays is all.

        • Just two points, because I don’t have the time or energy to address all of your assertions with which I disagree.

          You base “they” and “us” entirely on racial grounds. That is absurd. As I tried to illustrate, no race has a monopoly on virtue. Also, racial divisions are often artificial. For example, will you allow people from India into your Utopia? They are Caucasian, even though their skin is dark. What about Arabs, also Caucasian? And Jews? And those swarthy Greeks and southern Italians? Etc. Just how close to Scandinavian does someone have to be to qualify as white?

          I believe that “they” and “us” can be much more usefully separated by personal values: to put it simply, those who live by the NAP and those who do not. I want to be around the former, no matter what their ancestry or skin tone might be.

          The second point is that in your second sentence you use the expression “self hating white person”. Use of such an ad hominem phrase, besides being laughably inaccurate, suggests that your arguments are logically and factually weak, so you have to try to foreclose a response. Not good form and unlikely to score points.

          I wish you luck in your enclave. I want no part of it.

          • Hi Mike,

            Thanks for your insightful post. I also wondered who qualifies as “white” to non ame.

            Kind Regards,
            Jeremy

                    • Ah crap. It was supposed to be the gun before that one, a new style Garand actioned rifle. Go back a pic or two. I’d take that .22 if it was a .38 Super though. Everybody got so excited they wet their pants over the 40’s like it filled a need that no other round did and all the while you could buy cheap Combat Commanders in 38 Super with the same stats as a 40 and damn accurate.

                    • True. I never fired a .40, but the .38 Super is a very good cartridge. My cousin, RIP, used to be a fan of .38Super 1911s. He told me he saw a Thompson chambered for .38S at a gun show.

                      It was a demo model made to court Treasury orders. The guy showing it told him when he asked how much he’d take for it, “You can’t count that high”.

            • Thank you, Jeremy. I don’t often post here, but I usually read the posts, and yours are of the highest caliber.

              I would like to add one factor to the triple threat that you pointed out in your response to non ame: urban renewal. The effects of that particular government meddling were brought home to me for the first time a couple years ago when my wife and I were walking around in the south Bronx, where she grew up. She kept pointing to places and saying things like her cousins used to live in a building there, a shoe repair shop or local pharmacy or mom and pop grocery used to be here, her parents’ best friends lived over a repair shop over there, etc. It struck me that it wasn’t just the buildings that were demolished to build drab government projects, but a community, a way of life. The small businesses that used to provide black teens with their first jobs were destroyed. Families, social groups, and support networks were scattered.

              The take home lesson is that when the government wants to help you, run. Run fast. Run far.

              • Hi Mike,

                Thanks! I think your observation is correct. Have you heard of Jane Jacobs? She argued that cities were spontaneous living organisms and that the “urban renewal” efforts of city planners were literally killing them. Her most famous book is “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. While not a libertarian, she was greatly admired by many in the libertarian movement.

                https://mises.org/library/jane-jacobs-anti-planner

                Kind Regards,
                Jeremy

                • Dang, every time I think I’ve discovered something, it turns out that someone has already been there. It’s life’s way of reminding me how much is out there that I don’t know.

                  I hadn’t heard of Jane Jacobs but will check her out. Thanks for the info.

        • Another thing you forgot to add is the treason of whites on whites ie… leftard whites betraying their own race in the name of political correctness. Once leftard whites are dealt with the other races will fall in line. It’s past time to cleanse the white gene pool.

          • A breed of dog entails more than the melanin in its fur. There is no correlation between a white poodle and a white malamute. There is no white race of canines and never has been.

            A breed of humans likewise entails more than the melanin in their skin. There is no correlation between a white belarussian and a white new zealander. It is nonsensical and imbecilic to suggest one has anything to do with the other. They share no language habit history culture or anything. There is no white race of primates.

            You are severely deluded. No decent race or nation would have you. Especially the “white” ones.

            . You’re a warmongering sloppy overweight ignorant savage nigger in the worst sense of the word, everywhere you go you spread dependence and lunacy. Go back to your hole in the woods or soon to be forclosed cmansion and leave what remnant of livable decent lands remain alone.

  13. Ironically.. Jeblary beds a straining resemblance to Lindsey Graham. Too funny – he really is the poster child for the cuckservative party.

      • Rand’s greatest weakness, in my view, was exactly what she would take the most offense at my pointing out: Her lack of empathy for others. Her authoritarian insistence upon my way or the highway. The whole point of Libertarianism is individualism… and individuals are different. In taste, personality, you name it. There is no right or wrong in it, either. Indeed, one can and arguably ought to appreciate such differences. We are not, after all, ants. So long as we’re all agreed on the NAP.

        I was always troubled by Rand’s failure to grasp – and defend that as a moral absolute.

        • eric, had she done due diligence she might have rightly modified her philosophy(sic)and been influenced, at least to some degree, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a man who paid with years of his life taken by ‘govt’ simply because he “insulted”, by proxy as it were, Napoleon Bonaparte whom he outlived(small victory).

          In his own words espousing what you call the NAP and what he called anarchyism and asked “what is government” and defined it as such:To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.[30]

          He greatly influenced later anarchist movements such as in Spain.

          • Unfortunately, Proudhon had it dead wrong on property. In his own words, “Property is robbery”. It seems counter-intuitive that he would state that “Slavery is murder” and then go on to condemn ownership of property, the ultimate of which is ownership of one’s self. That Proudhon was an anarchist or a pioneer of anarchist leanings, there can be no doubt. But it seems to me that he pretty much had socialist leanings which in the end can only be enforced by, you guessed it, some form of government. This is what slays me about the internal inconsistencies of people calling themselves left libertarians.

            • Quite so, JC –

              We own ourselves (morally, that is)… which is a self-evident truth. It follows, if we own ourselves, that what we produce as the result of the effort of our bodies (which includes our brains) is also ours.

              If not, then whose property is it?

              It must belong to someone.

              If not the person who created it, worked to make it, then how could it possibly by someone else’s, given they did not create it or work to make it?

              • I have read others who espouse property being theft and some point to property as real estate. While real estate can be lawfully gained, can it ever be morally gained? And I think that’s where some get that argument.

                The problem I have with no ownership of real estate by anyone or anything such as the govt. is that it leads to a situation where nothing can be improved. If I don’t “own” the land upon which my house sits, then I don’t own the house either so it’s quite literally open-house for everyone.

                No matter what society we’re speaking of, rarely would you find someone who would argue against a person being able to somehow “own” at the very least, the place they abide, whether hut or hole or castle.

                BTW eric, WTF is that sparkly clover on the right side of the page? It’s distracting if not downright irritating.

                • A clarification to what I said. I didn’t mean to imply govt. should be able to own property since govt. isn’t a living, breathing entity. I realize the Constitution that’s now very dead allows for the federal govt. to own some very small properties.

                  Of course this is a totally different argument and state govt.’s simply expanded that legality as did the federal govt. It makes neither morally correct although if you accept the govt to have rights I suppose it is “lawfully” correct. “Lawfully”, a term that makes me want to toss my cookies.

                • Hi Eric, 8 and JC,

                  As I understand it, Proudhon made a distinction between possession and property. He believed that use and occupation made possession legitimate. But, he believed that unused land could not legitimately be owned. Also, because it is impossible (according to Proudhon) to acquire legitimate title to unused land, charging others rent to use the land is illegitimate. To Proudhon, only the users of the land legitimately possess it. So, the “property owner” who claims title to the land is a usurper who is interfering with the liberty of the users of the land. I believe this is what he meant by the phrase “property is theft”.

                  Interestingly, Rothbard made a similar argument:

                  “A second problem, and one that sharply differentiates land from other property, is that the very existence of capital goods, consumers goods, or the monetary commodity, is at least a prima facie demonstration that these goods had been used and transformed, that human labor had been mixed with natural resources to produce them. For capital goods, consumer goods, and money do not exist by themselves in nature; they must be created by human labor’s alteration of the given conditions of nature. But any area of land, which is given by nature, might never have been used and transformed; and therefore, any existing property title to never-used land would have to be considered invalid. For we have seen that title to an unowned resource (such as land) comes properly only from the expenditure of labor to transform that resource into use. Therefore, if any land has never been so transformed, no one can legitimately claim its ownership.” – The Ethics of Liberty

                  Proudhon was also opposed to interest on loans. In this I believe he was unambiguously wrong. To assert this, one must believe that time has no value.

                  Jeremy

  14. If it’s a Peanuts dilemma we face, guess I’ll be pigpen and live outdoors with snoopy and Woodstock. Better dirty and unchained then clean and caged

    Ayn sure loathed Woodstock. She never claimed to be a philosopher tho, Just sketched enough to support her works of fiction so they were valid. The gulch was about value and merit and no trace of govt or minarchism

    But while working her day job she did still mention the monarchist state option

    Maybe that was possible back in her time in the 1950s and 1960s but not now. Best case is a gulch or 2 remains in the aftermath. See Eric’s rant for the full dissertation,

    Nowadays few are even able to lick Bastiats window, much less reason logically, cooperate for mutual honest gain, and peacefully coexist. Merkins have gone full retard and irreversibly so.

    • I’ll say it again: Ol’ Ayn was a poor writer and “her” ideas were cribbed from better and more original thinkers. Her descendants, The Objectivists, are easily identified: they’re always the most insufferable pricks in any setting they infest.

      Ayn can KMA, always and everywhere. I wouldn’t use her books for bumwad.

  15. it is one of satan’s greatest triumphs that the passionate ignorati demand the ascension of evil; the lesser of two evils it is imagined by them, yet evil nevertheless.

    Thus evil is promoted.

    After a generation or two of such reckless behavior, we find the election process of 2016, wherein the candidates of the criminally insane party are countered by the choice between a carnival sideshow barker and a Canadian promoted by the insiders.

    Should be interesting.

    • “Should be interesting.”

      Yeah, it should be, but it’s getting boring. I hafta admit that for a while there it was the funniest election cycle in recent memory. Both Obama cycles were just so fuckin boring I tuned out on them except for sniping at idiots online who liked one candidate or the other.

      When Obama ran, I knew from day one that he would be crowned. That makes for a boring election when the winner is announced two years in advance and you know they ain’t kidding.

  16. Why is it that during every election cycle there are people out there looking for a mounted knight in shinning armor to ride in and transform America into the great Republic that it should be ? Except for Ron Paul,who ran for the Presidency in 2008 and 2012,there hasn’t been a decent,honest,freedom loving Presidential candidate in decades.
    With that said,a voting majority of Americans get the government and leaders they really want. Any talk about dismantling the welfare/warfare state and returning America to it’s basic Constitutional roots is looked upon as being archaic.
    What,mom and pop without Social Security? Why the “poor” would starve without food stamps. And how could we educate our children without public schools? And,without a large military presence wouldn’t our nation be invaded and overrun by foreigners? Why without big government America would just fall apart.
    Politicians are,by and large,only interested in living off of us like parasites. They really don’t matter. The “real owners” of America want you to think that politicians matter, they don’t. They give you the illusion of freedom of choice. So they hold elections every so often so that you can “choose” your masters from a list of candidates that has been pre-selected and pre approved.
    In reality,the only master you have is you. You have to run your life your way. You have to set up your life,no matter how difficult,to separate yourself from the fools who want to be led.
    In essence,the time for peaceful,political,electoral change has long passed. America is finished as a free country. Best to accept that premise and as Ayn Rand once said,maybe “its time to go Galt.”

    • The two political parties are merely the different wings of the same bird of prey.
      The basic central function of government is the looting of the governed.

  17. Hi Eric,

    Excellent! I took mstahl’s posts to be offering the kind of reflexive, hysterical partisanship that Statists (of all stripes) rely on. So, I was quite perplexed when he claimed to agree with 99% of what I wrote. My immediate thought was, “really, then I must not have been vey clear”.

    However, in his defense, I think the “micro-aggression” comment was quite funny, and intended as such. If insults constitute aggression (as the SJW’s would have us believe), then a comment belittling the size of someone’s penis would be a “micro” aggression. I think he was making fun of the term, not embracing it.

    Cheers,
    Jeremy

  18. Here’s my macroaggressive response. This schnook is no Randian. I doubt he could so much as flush one of Ayn Kampfs tampons without clogging up the job with an epic fail. And Merely knowing Rand or Rothbatd is no indicator of aptitude or intellect. He was maybe their chauffeur or dog walker in the best case scenario.

    Oy, goodness, sayonara, vey, now I’ve gotten the vapors and must lie down until sundown ends this verkakte sabbath’s run of blogorrhea.

    If you’ve ever said for a principle to be valid, it must be universal, you might be a verbalist totalitarian.

    That syllogism is exactly backwards, and presupposes we must all engage in a grim unceasing struggle of all against all with everyone everywhere.

    If you sincerely restricted yourself to live and let live, you would grok that each self selected groups values and principles would be in a market competition with each other. And over time, the best conceptions of right and wrong would advance those who held them, and those that weren’t very good would fall behind.

    And everywhere else this is life. But only in neo nazi America are the slackers and poorly principled and unprincipled pursued unto extinction.

    There are no sanctuary favelas permitted here. No spots in the backwoods where travelers and natives left in peace to scrimp and scavenge a free humble existence.

    Here there is the angry unblinking all seeing eyes in each of your metallic cyborgian heads. Loud ass niggers and Latinos. Smelly drunken profligate deadbeats. Here every creature must be property.and worship everyone else’s property. Nothing is common or of the land. Not even places 100s of miles from another soul may be utilized.

    All must be assimilated. Even libertarians accept this and our unable to grasp that no one owes you any answer or predestined response. That each locale has no need of a founder. Or of a principalitarian who parses and enforces what is wrong-act. And what is right act.

    See the thing is, I only live in this very minute. I have no exact plan for the next hour or day. I have no answer to your what am I doing today. Or did I do yesterday. Or what I believe in.

    My voice is for me to get what I want or need alone. It is not to share with barbaric bubblers and buggerers such as y’all say. I am a true Jew. For I have chosen myself. And I imagine and personify the universe as I like. And I appreciate what you freely radiate. And affirm my debt to you. But may never pay or render th qui though I do already have the quid.

    If you are around me long, You will get those answers via observation. But don’t demand I partake in your lip moving vocal cord vibrating robotic puppet fuckery.

    • Hi Tor,

      I remember my first encounter with Rand’s works – I was in high school – and the initial “right on” reaction I had to most of it. Then I got in deeper; I read about the Weird (and Stalinist) insistence upon adherence to what cannot be described as other than a dogma.

      Non aggression is my creed (as distinct from dogma). I not only don’t care what you do or like or don’t like, I champion your right to like/do whatever you like, believe as you like, live as you like… with the one proviso that what you do (as opposed to what you think or believe) causes me no tangible injury.

      Thus, I don’t give a damn who you or anyone else sleeps with or lives with or what “values” they have nor what you eat or put into your body or what your personal habits and recreations may be, whether you are religious or want to watch fuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhttttttball all day long or do some other thing.

      It’s your life. Do as you like with it.

      And I ask only that the same courtesy is extended to me.

      • eric, so how did it go your first day of school? Did you find it was More or Less courteous than those days that followed? Did the fascination of weird children become More endearing or Less? How long did it take you to figure out the correct answer wasn’t the answer desired?

        Did your school have an outside wall of windows? If so, where did you sit? Did you ever wish you had set further or closer to the windows? Did the girl who sat in front of you and peed her pants regularly make you rethink your seating choice? Or was it better to see it coming than to find out from others?

        Did you ever imagine your teacher as a bird of prey? If so, was she mammalian or reptilian or a bit of both? When your classmates opened their mouth and made noises did it make any sense to you?

        Where did you sit after Bobby dropped the .45 round in the big gas stove right by the windows? Did you keep that big, fat girl between you and the stove and just look over her shoulder? Did you tell the teacher you could take your illegal bubble gum and put it on a stick and retrieve the round after the stove had cooled awhile?

        Turn to page 2.

      • There’s a lot wrong with Rand but this piece she got dead right.

        “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”
        Ayn Rand

        And we are way, way, past the “approaching”.

    • “This schnook is no Randian. I doubt he could so much as flush one of Ayn Kampfs tampons without clogging up the job with an epic fail. ”

      Dag, Tor. That’s funny as shit. The whole post is funny, for that matter.

      “But don’t demand I partake in your lip moving vocal cord vibrating robotic puppet fuckery”

      See?, Killer classic Tor.

      • Well let us see. Where to start? Rand is good for bring the new to the position of the individual vs the state but she doesn’t repudiate the state.

        Now Rothard totally repudiates the state and endorses the individual but offers no rational solution. Gary North falls in to the Rothbard camp. Bitching but no solution.

        Then there are the pundits. Most of whom live outside the uS. I do enjoy reading Fred. BUT! He lives in Mexico. So does Jesse Ventura. While they may retain uS cit, they are not the solution.

        My best solution to the entire problem? Feed’em fish heads and F’em.

    • Hi, Tor,
      You said:
      “If you sincerely restricted yourself to live and let live, you would grok that each self selected groups values and principles would be in a market competition with each other. And over time, the best conceptions of right and wrong would advance those who held them, and those that weren’t very good would fall behind.”

      I think there’s a defect here which is only visible in a long-term time frame.
      E.G., we tried communism in it’s “ideal” form with Plymouth Colony, which didn’t make out so well. Tried it again at some motor company some time back; went bankrupt. IIRC, Tesla tried it again recently, and people were leaving. The people he needed, not the grossly overpaid secretaries…. And then there’s the USSR, China, Cuba, etc, etc, etc… the list goes on.

      Anyway: The objective here is to point out that ideas don’t go extinct, no matter how good or bad. They die out in Gen “X” and come back in Gen “Y” (with X and Y in no particular relationship aside from order; so, it could be Gen A and Gen Z, but the wheel turns and the bad idea pops up because some shmuck is smart enough to push other people’s “WANNIT!!!” button.)

      I believe that was original motivation behind public school, actually.
      Also was the motivation behind most inventions, to be honest…. But I’d point to a lesson from Business classes some time back, where I was told: Man A finds/invents product. Man A does the work of finding, exploring, refining, bringing to market the product. Man B however – he monetizes the product. Couldn’t do the initial work, but he knows how to SELL. And as a result….? Man A dies in poverty, while Man B makes the empire and retires young and rich…

      The original builders are, more often than not, good or pure in intentions. It’s what comes afterwards that’s usually the problem. And on a time scale of decades, the same bad ideas and issues come back, like weeds, but on a longer scale. Mostly from envy and greed, sometimes from wrath itself… But the bad ideas never die.

      Thoughts?

      • Plymouth colony is a fairly conclusive experiment. Yet the Native Asians aborigines here did well, though much of their existence is communal.

        Maybe whites are the biggest niggers of all, at least the Merkins. We hand over our cash properties families and bodies to our owners for the most part and don’t even demand a dignified explanation.

        We kill whoever massa says we must, and never take a moment to take a sober look at what we are really doing for them and what kind of people we really have been.

        The social system du jour is no concern of ours at this point. We need to find a thread of humanity within ourselves replant it, and stop being unthinking killers and fuckups of everything weaker than us in the world.

        Look at Libya, formerly the wealthiest Africans ever. We gutted them for no reason at all. We are the Apes in this Planet of the Apes existence our Simian asses have made. Tho individually, many of us are the greatest.

        Damn those founding Apes to hell. Damn them and bury them in fish heads.

    • Some would say it is better to suffer the outrageous slings and arrows of the eternal bow tied school boy and recipient of a Volker Fund grant and institutional cash for statist quo defense contracting.
      https://mises.org/library/strictly-confidential-private-volker-fund-memos-murray-n-rothbard

      At root he was a devout Abrahamic Adherent. And no kind of go it alone standing on two feet self sovereign individual.

      At least Ayn Stein paid her own freight and sang for her individual supper as an individual, for all her flaws.

      She invented the NAP, and Rothbard helped popularize, mainstream, and institutionally fund the thing.

      Think of Rand as Erno Rubik. Both birthed something new into world. Think of Rothbard as the founder of the World Cube Association. A gimmick to gain some power and authority over some other man’s mind and work.

      Maybe Erno did terrible things. It matters not, this clever architect brought real new wealth into the world. The most popular toy ever probably half a billion of them exist.

      Surely Rothbard is clever, eloquent, persuasive. But he is still a second hander at the end of today’s sabbath. Merely a scholar chronicler journalist audience member. Not a Roark, Rearden, nor Rand.

      Which is great for him and for Rand. Both add value in their own ways. There is no reason to choose between them. Other than where Rothbard twists her insights, and make them serve existing behemoths designs. They are each additive and multiplicative in nature. Not divisory nor subtract or. Think of them as a two color Venn Union. Not a power struggling Venn diagram intersection, where one must ethically eclipse the other.

      • Hi Tor,

        All creators, whether philosophers, inventors, artists or writers, are “second handers”. There are no truly original ideas. The NAP is not an original idea (though it may be an original term). It derives logically from the concept of self-ownership and the fact of human existence within a world of scarce resources (the intersection of ethics and economics).

        Consider the following passage from “The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life” by Auberon Herbert, published in 1885:

        “We voluntaryists believe that no true progress can be made until we frankly recognize the great truth that every individual, who lives within the sphere of his own rights, as a self-owner, and has not himself first aggressed upon others by employing force or fraud in his dealings with them [and thus deprived himself of his own rights of self-ownership by aggressing upon these same rights of others], is the only one true owner of his own faculties, and his own property. We claim that the individual is not only the one true owner of his faculties, but also of his property, because property is directly or indirectly the product of faculties, is inseparable from faculties, and therefore must rest on the same moral basis, and fall under the same moral law, as faculties. Personal ownership of our own selves and of our own faculties, necessarily includes personal ownership of property. As property is created by faculties, it would be idle, it would be a mere illusion, to speak of an individual as owner of his own faculties, and at same time to withhold from him the fullest and most perfect rights over his property, if such property has been rightfully acquired (by “rightfully” we mean acquired without force or fraud), or inherited from those who have rightfully acquired it.”

        I have no idea whether Rand knew of Herbert, or read any of his work. The point is that the specifically libertarian conception of the NAP was fully formulated long before Rand named it. This observation is not meant to impugn Rand, but to point out that people are influenced by the ideas of others, even if they are unaware of it.

        It is interesting that Rand could not follow the logic of the NAP to it’s obvious conclusion. Namely that government, an institution defined by claiming a coercive monopoly on force, necessarily violates the NAP. Rothbard could, and made it clear that he believed Rand to be inconsistent in the application of her own beliefs. I suspect this dispute formed the basis of Rand’s enduring hatred of libertarians and anarchists.

        I consider both Rand and Rothbard to be creative theorists, second handers and popularizers. In my personal calculus, I consider Rand to be the better popularizer and Rothbard the better theorist. But, as you say: “both add value in their own ways. There is no reason to choose between them.”

        Kind Regards,
        Jeremy

        • Jeremy, as usual, an astute and informative commentary. I suspect something long ago when philosophers were coming into their own mimicked self-ownership and the NAP is a current spawn of that reasoning.

          It’s only been in the last few years I have called it NAP or ZAP(zero aggression policy)as some call it. I have lived my life in this manner for reasons I can only guess I got from my parents. Whatever the cause may be, my philosophy has always been “live and let live”.

          I have even “turned the other cheek” when no amount of defensive offense would have served me to recompense.

          I once took a CCL class at the end of which, the ‘instructors’ began to tell us when the use of deadly force was called for and when it wasn’t. When they said we were bound to use deadly force if someone were doing such as robbing a bank or other establishment, they lost my concentration. I gathered my stuff, went home and thought about it.

          If I had felt that if a death sentence or what might likely be a death sentence to stealing was the proper response, this earth would already be several people shy of what it was at the time since I’ve been ripped off on several occasions, even a time or two by the bank. So what to make of their values when dealing with people who stole from me with a pen? Maybe this is the very reason some people have gone into banks and lit them up. I just took it as a lesson learned as in other cases of people stealing from me. I ran my paperwork through the shredder. It made great fire-starter for mesquite cooking. peace

          • Hi Eight,

            Thanks, I find your posts to be enjoyable and informative as well. As for the principle of “live and let live”, I think of it as tolerance. As a teenager I remember discussing “tolerance” with my dad. Mine was the typical, feel-good presentation that tolerance was good because it allows us to get along, etc… My dad responded that it is much more than that, it is necessary for life. Nothing could function without it. No society, no knowledge, no science, … no movement, could exist without tolerance. He recounted to me his experience of attending a lecture, while at college, by Jacob Bronowski and how much it affected his thinking (both scientifically and ethically).

            “Tolerance – is the essential safeguard, the essential degree of coarseness which makes it possible to work with abstract entities in the real world”.

            “The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science–or outside of it–we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses: First, in the engineering sense–science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance.

            But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge–all information between human beings–can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in *any* form of thought that aspires to dogma. It’s a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance–and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

            The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots’ belief that they have absolute certainty.

            It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. *This* is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality–this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

            Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge or error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we *can* know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.”

            We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to *touch people*.” – Jacob Bronowski

            BTW, mesquite cooking can cure a lot of ills.

            Jeremy

            • I grant you that tolerance is important. But it does not mean what the ‘PC’ crowd would have it mean. Just because I ‘tolerate’ your different beliefs and actions does not mean I have to celebrate them, and accept them as correct, or even as ‘more correct’ than my own. We’re still coming back to aggression, or absence thereof.

              • Hi PTB,

                I agree completely. SJW’s and the PC crowd don’t preach tolerance, they preach mandated conformity to “correct” values. They are certain that they are right. In short, they embody precisely what Bronowski rejects.

                Jeremy

                • Jeremy, hear hear, just what I was about to reply. The PC crowd has no tolerance. It’s their total lack of tolerance that separates them from the very people they wish to change, i.e., groups who have been the very essence of tolerance for nearly 200 years, who have had to read history written in this country by the victor without a single word of truth in it.

                  Texas is being attacked on every front of history, from the Alamo to the War on the South. Groups who either can’t or don’t read(mostly can’t)repeat the same tired lies and then expound on them to turn the very same people who died for just causes into unmentionables.

                  And the University PC crowd, people who absolutely must be better educated than what they seem, are falling over themselves to accommodate every supposed minority with a hand out.

                  Where the hell is the reset button for these simple minds?

                  • Hi Eight,

                    Yep, I often wonder, “who in their right mind would hire these people”?

                    So, here is an imagined dialogue between a recently fired SJW and her former “oppression studies” professor.

                    Scene: SanDeE walks into her favorite coffee house, the Badgering Bean and notices that her former professor, Hector Prim, is sitting alone in the corner. After receiving her organic, fair trade, half-caf, Guatemalan, almond milk latte, she approaches Hector’s table and, uninvited, sits down.

                    Hector: Oh, hi SanDeE how are you?

                    SanDeE: Not well, I was fired from my job today. I’m thinking of filing a wrongful termination claim.

                    Hector (excited at the prospect of damaging litigation in pursuit of a cause): Good!, I mean, not that you were fired. But that you want to assert your rights. Tell me what happened.

                    SanDeE: Well my boss, a privileged white male…you know, a jerk wants me to update some files. He explains that he keeps track of his “best” customers, meaning those who spend the most in his store, because he likes to reward them with exclusive discounts at the end of the year. I mean, how unfair, right? Anyway, I’m barely listening because I can’t get behind this discriminatory bullshit that, uh, perpetuates the elitist class structure that, you know, I want to smash.

                    Hector: So, what’d you do?

                    SanDeE: Well, I decided to reorganize the files based on degrees of oppression. That way, like, at least he’ll be helping out the people who really deserve it.

                    Hector: Of course!

                    SanDeE: Yeah, I mean who could object, right? So I spend, like, all day on this project but he doesn’t even thank me. In fact he’s like, “what did you do all day?”

                    Hector: Typical.

                    SanDeE: Yeah, he tells me that I better “do it right”, and that he’s not going to pay me for the hours I wasted on my “stupid project”. I mean, that’s gotta be illegal, right?

                    Hector: Pretty sure

                    SanDeE: Anyway, I yell at him that he can’t force me to do it his way because that would, you know, negate my experience.

                    Hector: Completely justified!

                    SanDeE: Well, he didn’t think so, he told me that I had just “negated” my job. I was like, what do you mean? Then he told me I was fired, can you believe it?

                    Hector: Maybe it’s a good thing. I mean business owners are all oppressors anyway. You should avoid that crass commercial shit.

                    SanDeE: But, just last week, my parents freaked out and told me that, “you’re 27 years old, you finally have a job and we’re not paying your bills anymore”. I mean, I’m cutoff.

                    Hector: Well, I have a taxpayer funded internship opening up next week. After a year, the university will hire you. Pretty soon you’ll be tenured, just like me. Then, you’ll never have to worry about those creeps again.

                    SanDeE: Cool, I’m so glad I ran into you.

                    Jeremy

                    • Jeremy, that’s about it. They think Manual Labor is the illegal out there busting ass and glad to have a job.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here