More About Lincoln

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 15 Feb 2001 13:00:00 GMT

Steven Vore at Mumble Daily - Happy V-Day: Half a page down is a little letter from college beginning "Dear Mom and Dad". Hillaryous!! I saved it locally as Letter Home from College. [mumble]

L. Neil Smith at JPFO - More About Lincoln: JPFO's recent republication of L. Neil's The American Lenin has apparently brought him some heat on the internet discussion lists. He still stands by his article. If anything, it was too tame. [jpfo]

The simple fact is that if Lincoln had done what he did in any other country, we would all regard him as a psychopath and mass-murderer. The only reason he killed fewer of his fellow Americans than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot is that he didn't have the technology they did. Absolutely nothing can justify his crimes. Nothing.
Lincoln apologists have to get one simple (if painful and inconvenient) fact through their heads: the War between the States had absolutely nothing to do with slavery until Lincoln and his political handlers decided to use that issue for propaganda purposes. The war was about northern industrialists not wanting to pay market prices for southern raw materials -- northern industrialists who sometimes owned slaves, themselves.
To respond directly to one individual who has been especially deceived by history-written-by the-victor, Lincoln libertated nobody. His empty "Emancipation Proclamation" decreed freedom only for slaves in territories Lincoln didn't control, It didn't emancipate any slaves in the north -- that would have offended the millionaire backers who put him in the White House in the first place. I repeat: Lincoln freed nobody.

Ilana Mercer at LewRockwell.com - Abraham Lincoln's Pyrrhic Victory: a view on Abe from one of our neighbors to the north. Ms. Mercer reminds us that the right to secession was regarded as the bulwark of liberty, until Lincoln's War of Northern Agression. [lew]

With only 15 percent of Southerners being slave owners, the South was no more fighting to preserve slavery than the North was fighting to abolish it. But let's accept for the sake of argument Lincoln's facade, and grant that slavery was the reason he waged the War Between the States, thus violating the Constitution.
Surely in order to redeem him, it's essential to establish at the very least that to this alleged end, Lincoln was morally justified in causing the death of more than 620,000 people, the maiming of thousands, and "the near destruction of 40 percent of the nation's economy?" To Mises Institute scholar David Gordon, the answer is clear: "The costs of an action," writes Gordon in Secession, State & Liberty, "cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to morality."

Kevin B. O'Reilly at SpinTech - A Dangerous Vaccine: the Hepatitis B vaccine is dangerous, and there's absolutely no reason to give it to newborns. This makes requiring it even more criminal than requiring the old pertussis vaccince (the new one is apparently less dangerous). Whooping cough poses a real danger to babies. Hepatitis B does not. The right thing to do, of course, it to provide information about vaccines, and to allow parents to decide for themselves whether or not to use them. [market]

Charles Schumer at the House Subcommittee on Crime via rkba.org - April 5, 1995 hearing on the second amendment: This was sent out as an alert by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, entitled "Lest We Forget". Let's not forget that Chucky would have us all be helpless victims to the other Chuckies of the world. I don't believe he's changed his stripes in the ensuing 6 years. Still a communist. Still a gun-grabber. My most horrifying memory of Chucky is the Waco videos of his role in the house "investigations" into the mass murders at Waco. The government could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. [jpfo]

There's a new article in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

What did those 'B averages' really mean?

In the end, state-funded education is doomed precisely because this conundrum can never really be resolved. The mob that controls socialist "democracy" demands equality of outcome, in education as well as economics. Everyone must end up with precisely the same living standard, no matter how many times armed men have to seize the wherewithal from the diligent, the creative, and the hard-working; turning it back over to the indolent, the drunken, and the incompetent. Similarly, every parent must be assured -- turning Garrison Keillor's old joke to bitter reality -- that their child is "above average," despite the obvious biological reality that some students are inherently smarter, more talented, and have work habits better suited to academic achievement.

Keith Dawson at Tasty Bits from the Technology Front - 2001-02-14: a report from the O'Reilly P2P Conference. O'Reilly will be publishing a book on the conference, 2001 P2P Industry Overview. Mr. Dawson headlined KnowNow.com's (another pre-launch web page, no hidden comments) Two-Way Web presentation:

By creatively reusing existing HTTP standards with client/server pairs at each node, developers enjoy real-time notification, a standard namespace, and most importantly, a zero-install, scriptable development platform: the 4.x browser.

But the quote of the conference was in Clay Shirkey's talk on the lessons of Napster:

T. J. Watson, fifty years ago, allowed as how he could forsee the need for maybe five computers in the world.
We now know he was wrong. [Pause for audience chuckles.]
We now know he overestimated by four.
I don't know exactly what it will look like, but it won't be Sun ONE and it won't be Dot NET, though both of those will be part of it. Whatever it looks like, the people who make it happen are almost certainly in this room.

Dan Gilmore's ejournal - P2P's Promise, and Peril: a little more about KnowNow's "mind bomb". [script]

StegFS "is a steganographic file system for Linux. It offers security beyond that afforded by a regular cryptographic file system, since it not only encrypts data, but also provides a plausible deniability mechanism by securely hiding the data. It is designed to give the user a very high level of protection against being compelled to disclose its contents. StegFS extends the standard Linux file system (ext2fs), allowing normal and several levels of hidden files to coexist. This allows some data to remain hidden even if some of the keys are compromised." I haven't tried this, but it looked worth remembering. [meat]

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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair