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Sunni Maravillosa at Liberty Round Table - Speech given at the 4th annual LRT Conclave: Tells the short version of her conversion to anarcho-capitalist thought, and tells us how to nudge other people towards freedom. ["lrt"]
Some people would say that yes, it is time to start shooting the bastards. As DLT said, he doesn't agree with that just yet. Personally, some days I feel like the time is past right and I'm ready to put on my camo gear and go out there; other days I think it really is too soon. Irrespective of where you are on that question, we do need to start getting our ideas out to other people. I think that for one way we can do that--not selling our souls or trying to do the "evangelist" thing that really turns people off--we need to do just three simple things, and I think our message will go a long way with people who are interested.Those things are: be passionate; be right; and be nice.
Unfortunately, for a lot of pro-freedom folks, the last one is the hardest, I think. Being nice can be hard, particularly for folks who come from an Objectivist perspective. They may question whether it's worth it to be nice to a statist who pays taxes that help kill people like Peter McWilliams. I'm not saying that we condone their activities; what I'm saying is that we need to engage a person in a way that is going to reach him or her...
Don Lobo Tiggre at Liberty Round Table - A Goal for the Freedom Movement: Speech given at the 4th annual LRT Conclave: Tells the story of Israel's war for independence as narrated in The Pledge. The Jews in what is now Israel would have been wiped out except for the actions of one man, Ben Gurion, in motivating them to arm themselves, illegally. He then statest that the goal for the freedom movement should be to get prepared to finish the war when the statists start it. He ends with the story of the murder by government of Peter McWilliams. ["lrt"]
So, I said I was going to take more action, personally. I was going to unsubscribe, and I was going to Do more Freedom--as I've been urging people to do for years. And I did. And we got rid of the house, we got rid of the cars in our names, we got rid of bank accounts and everything we could that would link us to the identities the state once tracked us with. Our location is now, generally, a fairly well guarded secret. That's one reason we made an exercise in security out of this conclave; it's important to us. And I can tell you that, in spite of all the difficulties, and all the challenges, and all the things we decided not to do or enjoy... You know, dammit, those things were ours to enjoy by right, but... The sense of personal freedom is tremendous.I mean, you talk about spreading your wings and jumping off the cliff!
[Laughter]
It's like that! But when your wings actually work, and they take hold of the air, and you feel yourself flying above--not that I look down on everybody else--but flying above... And it's working... And you're living your life as you want to--not as any system mandates. It's... It's an incredible feeling. It's extremely rewarding. I can't overstate the value of it. Just that feeling alone makes everything that I've done and everything that I plan to do worthwhile.
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But when the war starts, when leviathan is the clear aggressor, when they are doing wrong that's so egregious, and so obvious, and so systematic, and so repeated that even Joe Sixpack (who is soon to become wiser in a certain comic strip) can see the writing on the wall... Then we will be able to respond, even with lethal force, an have public support. We can use whatever tactical means are appropriate, and moral--that make you the defender of justice and the freedom fighter--and still get the support we need.
It's like when the proverbial wise father tells his kids, "You better not start a fight, but, by God, if it starts, you'd better finish it!" This is the goal I think the freedom movement needs; to finish the fight the statists start. It's a good goal, because it enables us to set forth the 'one, two, three' of what we need to do. What exactly do we need to be able to do to finish the fight once it starts? Think about that for a moment. I bet every one of you, even if you're not military--and I'm not just talking about military goals and tactics here--can start thinking of things. What would need to happen first, if we're going to finish the fight they start?
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As far as specific hardware tools, the number one answer--as per the punctuation from the peanut gallery a moment ago--is guns. Liz Michael wrote a wonderful essay with the simple message of: BUY GUNS NOW. By an air gun. Buy a .22. Buy a Barrett semi-auto. Buy an old revolver. It doesn't matter--just buy as many guns as you can. Hide them under your bed if you don't like them, but get them. Buy them and give them to someone else if you really can't stand them, but buy them and increase the arsenal our side will have at its disposal when the time comes. Buy more guns!
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In this country, in this "land of the free and home of the brave" (my hair is standing on end again, just thinking about it), murder has become legal for those in power. They killed my friend! I am not exaggerating. Evil is rampant. It is growing. It is implacable--it will not go away on its own. And if evil's champions start a fight, we'll need to have planned--long range--how we're going to finish it.
Don & Sunni are the creators of Doing Freedom!, which has been mostly quiescent of late. According to an email I got recently, the reason is that they are moving their server from an NT box to a Unix box. Another story of the impossibility of working with Microsoft's web server software.
New articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:
- Another brilliant idea - The city of Las Vegas is going to quadruple its parking meter fees to pay for 3/4 empty tax-subsidized parking garages. Vin shows them they haven't a clue.
- Could they really have done it on purpose? - John Taylor Gatto
knows why America has become a nation of pathetic bed-wetters: the
government schools. His thesis is developed in his new book,
Underground History of American Education: A
Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern
Schooling. So much to read. So little time.
Gatto's thesis is one of those "big ideas" that takes a little time to wrap the mind around. The public schools cannot be reformed because they're not failing, he argues. They're succeeding beyond all expectations at precisely what they're supposed to be -- not only a huge make-work jobs program, but also the incubators of a dependent class of conscienceless sociopaths, their emotional development purposely stunted, a generation (by now two or three) with little knowledge of "the narrative of American history connecting the arguments of the founding fathers to historical events, defining what makes Americans different from others besides wealth."
Oblivious to that heritage, our young people instead sulk about, whining for the modern Morlocks of our welfare/police state to do a better job feeding them and keeping them entertained.
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Yet Gatto reminds us of a young American who left school at an early age because he was judged "feeble-minded." Just before turning 12 he talked his mother into letting him go to work full time as an apprentice on the railroad, "a permission she gave which would put her in jail right now," in Gatto's phrase. Claiming some old type from a printer who was about to throw it away, the young lad begged a corner in the baggage car in which to set up a little four-page newspaper about the lives of the passengers and what could be seen from the train's window. At age 12 he had 500 subscribers, earning more than his former schoolteachers.
"When the Civil War broke out, the newspaper become a goldmine. ... He sold the war to crowds at the various stops. 'The Grand Trunk Herald' sold as many as 1,000 extra copies after a battle," amassing the young man a handsome stake for his next venture.
If he tried that at age 12 today, everyone involved would be arrested and put on trial for exploitation of "child labor" ... and we would likely never have heard of the young man who got the early start in question, Thomas Edison.
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Mr. Gatto's books -- he promises his next will be How to Get an Education in Spite of School -- are a wonder and a delight. It's only too bad they're true.
- Hanging on the telephone - Concerning the danger of
anti-telemarketing legislation and regulations.
Politicians, of course, consider themselves to be in the business of responding to the frustrated cry, "Why can't someone make a law?" But real leaders and statesmen might instead take the opportunity to remind us that government can't mandate politeness, and that any bureaucracy with the power to really stop unwanted phone calls (or even knocks on the door) would necessarily intrude into our privacy so far as to become a considerably greater hazard to our freedoms than the relatively minor annoyance hereby being "solved."
The private market responds far more quickly than any lumbering regulatory bureaucracy ever can. Given the chance, private inventors and phone companies should be able to quickly produce and offer phones that refuse calls from unidentified numbers -- or which inform an incoming caller that his number will be billed $4 per minute while we happily listen to his spiel: "Please punch '1' if you wish to continue. ..."
- They're reading our mail - Carnivore must be shut down. Until
then, assume that your email is being read and use encryption to
secure it.
FBI and Justice Department witnesses stressed to committee member John Conyers, D-Mich., that it would be a violation of federal law for an agent to abuse the intelligence-gathering ability of Carnivore to collect information about non-suspects. "They're not going to unilaterally break the law," promised Tom Talleur, a former federal law enforcement official. "If they do, they're going to jail."
Well, don't we all feel safer now? Like that incident in which the Clinton White House hired a couple of barroom bouncers to pore through hundreds of secret, raw, FBI files on the Clintons' political enemies, looking for anything that could be used against them -- remember that?
How many people are now serving time for that violation? How many FBI personnel have ever gone to jail for listening to the wrong phone conversations while engaged in an authorized wiretap? How many IRS agents, for perusing secret tax records on their lunch hours, just for fun? Refresh our memories, Mr. Talleur.
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The Constitution never envisioned any federalized domestic police force. We are now learning why.
- {@That someone could have a gun in the store!} - Vin's contribution to the premier issue of Doing Freedom! Read it.
