You’ve probably had the Mormons knock on your door. Nice guys, clean-scrubbed. Wanting to discuss you-know-what. Which you’re free to do – or not – as you prefer. If you haven’t got the time or the interest, you can demure – tell ’em “not interested” – and guess what? They won’t kick in the door and force you to listen to their spiel, or hand over your dough.
EPautos is kind of like that, only without the clean-scrubbed part.
Every now and then, I’ll knock on your door and ask for your support. If you believe EPautos is worth supporting, you’re free to support EPautos.
If not, I won’t try to force you – even if I had the power. (Which is where I probably differ from religious proselytizers.)
Wouldn’t it be great if the world ran that way? On the basis of non-coercive interactions?
That’s the line I’m trying to spread the proverbial “good news” about.
I hope you’ll agree it’s worth supporting.
With about ten days left in the month, we’re about 60 percent below par (see the red thermometer on the main page, top right).
We depend on you to keep the wheels turning. If you value alternatives to the MSM, please support independent media. Our donate button is here.
For those not Pay Pal-inclined, you can mail us at the following:
EPautos
721 Hummingbird Lane SE
Copper Hill, VA 24079
So maybe you guys can give me some advise for, ‘next time’?
I’m in a lot of pain and I get a buzz going and I go to the local watering hole I’ve been banned from a number of times for saying things like “Freedom!” and “Liberty!” and, “go to ericpetersautos.com” and such in a low key way, [they hate any key that isn’t about Spend Money] when I come across this young guy about twenty-two or so who is complaining about being old.
Yeah, I know.
I tried to tell ’em.
So anyway, I gets to talking to him and I find he loves liberty and freedom, but even more, he LOVEs, The Union. FEROCIOUSLY!
Oh boy! does he ever.
I tried to get him to visit Lewrockwell.com while saying, “It’s a whole big paragraph to explain stufff, just check out the website.” [I didn’t even get into how Alcoa is a maker of fluoride and all that jazz. It was obviously too deep for the moment.]
….Only, it’s Not enough for this guy.
He’s Twenty-something – he knows everything – and keeps ranting about how this is a right-to-work state so the union isn’t a slave organization. …And shit like that.
What would you say to such a person?
[No matter your religious affiliation, did I just meet a demon? That was rhetorical.]
Regretfully I was at a major disadvantage with a loss for words due to it being so late at night and…. so I realized my disadvantage and just hopped on my bike while thinking, “Fuck it” and saying, “Fuck off”… as I noticed the crowd had that whole ‘jump on him’ attitude about them and I had no inclination to kill any body over shit like that..
The buzz got the better of me and I feel like I could have done much better.
But as Tor wrote elsewhere, about reading the stuff and knowing it…. maybe I’ve read too dang much….? I can’t spit out answers like a danged CoMputer at a moments notice.
I guess this means I don’t know my shit? I mean, if you can’t recite it while doing a handstand and a girl is…, how well do you really know it?
At any rate, I’m sorry to say, tonight I failed at being an Ambassador for Liberty.
Shot down in flames.
In the background I keep thinking of this word/phrase: “Mon-Satan” and how oblivious those guys were..
I pity them.
Yeesh, no wonder the Clovers want to bury their heads in the sand? … Or fight everybody and the old man next to them.
Truth is tough.
Helot,
You have likely obtained a valuable insight, I think. I believe the term for it is intellection. Intellection means applying your knowledge to something tangible. More than mere episteme, it involves the far more rare and valued techne.
Oxford dict on intellection – The action or process of understanding, as opposed to imagination.
For example, I would say Eric has understanding of various machinery. Enough so that he can take something apart, fix it, and put it back together.
The problem with today’s young mechanics, is that they are only at the level of having knowledge. Sadly it is often only within the programming of the computer or the with standard operating procedure where the true knowledge, if there can be said to be any, lies.
Most of us lack the understanding to sustain our own lives, we have only limited knowledge, or some process of asking authorities or others in power to provide for us what we need.
We are taking a grave risk in doing so. If we hope to remain alive and continue our chosen way of life, we should increase our own understanding, and also diversify our external sources of understanding, in order to be more robust and ready for whatever may come .
Some quotes which may lead to knowledge, but not to understanding.
“There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it”
“Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.”
“An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved”
“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”
“Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.”
“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”
“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.”
– – –
Intellection and Indiscipline
Yeshiva University – Cardozo Law School
Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 36, Issue 4, December 2009
Abstract:
A discipline will usually become the object of study and its relationship to other disciplines a moment of concern when its borders are precarious and its definition in dispute. Law, ‘the oldest social science’, is arguably both, prior to discipline — it emerges initially and most forcefully as a practice — and without discipline, its object being potentially all human behavior.
If law is necessarily between and among disciplines, both prone to moonlighting and everywhere homeless, it will also always be in some mode of scholarly crisis. Certain conclusions follow. Law is paradoxically dependent upon other disciplines for its access to the domains that it regulates.
The greater its epistemic dependency, however, the slighter its political acknowledgment of that subordination. Which allows a positive thesis: the epistemic drift of law can carry the discipline to a frank acknowledgment of the value of indiscipline both to novelty and intellection.
@helot – Your homework is to study fully, then defend capitalism in its truest sense, which he has never seen. He is stuck in socialism because of his indoctrination of the evil “Simon Legree” business owner. Then bring up Duck Dynasty and similar creative successes. They don’t need no stinking union, which has never created such a product. And they have Tor’s “Intellection.”
Hi Helot,
I feel your pain . . .
Writing a column is one thing. The writer has the time to reflect, to organize his thoughts. To go back, re-read and adjust.
Speaking – discussing – in real time is hard under the best of circumstances. It is much, much harder when you’re attempting to breach the numerous firewalls that protect the typical person’s “main frame” from heretical, heterodox views. Keep in mind that people have been intellectually and socially conditioned since early childhood to accept coercive statism – and “culturalism” – as the givens of life. Most never even consciously consider the question. Let alone the rightness or wrongness of it. It just is – and everything proceeds from that unacknowledged premise. Your young guy at the bar? He’s the Next Generation Clover.
I more and more incline to the view held by Robert Heinlein (and Napoleon before him) that individual liberty is something only a relative few are capable of consciously understanding. That they are the tip of the proverbial spear, but it’ll take a general evolution of human consciousness before aggressive violence is abjured by most normal people.
Clovers are beyond redemption.You cannot persuade them via reason. You cannot reach them via empathy, an appeal to decency.
They are anti-matter to our matter. A negative charge to our positive.
We cannot coexist.
It is an awful thing to realize, to accept.
Unlike them, our most basic desire is to avoid violence. We desperately want to leave them in peace, free to live their lives according to their own judgment.
The problem is they will not refrain from doing us violence. They will never leave us in peace.
I think I see now.
Thanks for your replies.
Eric,
Speaking of “speaking – discussing – in real time”:
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mises-institute/mises-weekends/episode/34441947?autoplay=true
Nice interview.
The only reason we put a lock on our entryway door is to keep the cops and the Mormons out. No joke.
I have a soft spot for the Mormons. The door-to-door missionaries, anyhow. They’re invariably a pair of barely out of high school kids who were wound up, pointed in the general direction and set loose. I do my best to deprogram them – or at least, leave them with a heretical sliver of doubt about their dogma.
If you want to get rid of them fast, invite ’em in for a drink. Wearing only a towel!
Had a boss who was mormon…At dinner one night he ordered a 7up and I ordered a gin and tonic…Waiter mixed them up…It was his first taste of alcohol ever…He was about 60. You should have seen the look on his face as he gagged!
Ha. I would have gagged too.. Gin is so awful it can only mix with tonic water.. 😉
Once in a while, if I was in the mood, I would deliberately invite door to door proselytizers such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons in, ask them to sit, and carry on an endless, long-winded theological debate with them. It never took long for them to become antsy and look for any opening to skedaddle.
Sometimes people asking for donations to dubious “name brand” charities would knock. Instead of hemming and hawing guiltily, I would ask them to reciprocate by donating an equal amount to “Gun Owners of America” or some other organization I endorsed, in a sort of modified “matching fund arrangement.”
That got rid of them fast!
LOL, one’s response to the Mormon test offers great insight to one’s character.
In my parents case, they’d probably each have called in sick to work to listen patiently to the whole spiel, rather than interrupt someone who seem so nice, and didn’t really mean to intrude.
Once, I played amazing grace in an ominous minor key while laughing maniacally. A second time I tried but failed to hit on the girl (actually she was Jehovah’s Witlesses though). The third time,(this time Nichren Buddhists) I saw the light and let two girls come inside and nail Daishonin’s Gohonzon to the wall because one of the two was just that engaging and attractive.
Sadly, no Penthouse Forum material, but I still remember the beginning of the chant the earnestl angel taught me, where you the sacred beads and pray for benefit: Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…
I guess the kind of benefit I prayed for her to bestow upon me just wasn’t in the Buddha’s wheelhouse.
HA! ” , I would deliberately invite door to door proselytizers such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons in, ask them to sit, and carry on an endless, long-winded theological debate with them. ”
Smooth.
….Next time.
For years, my wife would invite any visiting Jehovah Witnesses or Mormons in for a tea, willing to hear their speil if they’d listen to her religious views. She had fun doing it, particularly with the Jehovahs, who’d keep bringing more knowledgeable people with them. Finally, they gave up and stopped coming to the door. Not only that, word must be out among the door to door crowd—I haven’t seen anyone proseltyzing in over a year.
Bevin, I’ve decided to steal your line requesting a donation to Gun Owners of America from anyone begging money at the door. Thanks for the idea.
..on your head.. 🙂
“If you are not for Eric Peters, then you are with the Clovers”
– I hate Statist Tribal-Chimp Parasites.
Hi Forman,
Your statement is inaccurate. Herewith the correction:
If you favor aggressive violence – for any reason – then you are with the Clovers.
I was just being cheeky. A play on Chimp 43 “yur with us or yur with the turrists”. I hate all who claim to own me and my earnings – For any reason.
Don’t forget to check the “Make This Recurring (Monthly)” checkbox when paying.
I tossed a few pennies in the pot. Hope they help!
David Ward
Support of the Defense of Liberty is No Vice.
Thank you, David!
Come on, buy something off the Amazon wish list, or from the Ebay account.
Mail those gift cards and coupons for free stuff you’re never going to use
Box up something from the closet and regift, send old coins, gold coins, silver coins, gadgets, tools, anything of value really, using the lowest priority mail available.
Walk into any Western Union or go online
https://www.westernunion.com/us/en/transfer-money-online.html
Bury something of value and email him the GPS coordinates
https://www.geocaching.com/
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Pay by sail fawn to the designated sail fawn funds recipient
http://www.paybymobile.net/how-it-works/
@Tor – You are so 2010 old school. This is the way.
https://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/
Any way to contribute anonymously?
Hi Escher,
Of course! Many people just send us a money order (or even cash). We won’t tell if you won’t!
“”Anonymity in amerika?! Just what exactly are you up to?””