End the War on Freedom

One reason I'm not blogging much any more on my Lisplog sites is that most of my writing these days is on Medium or Steemit.

I like Medium because communication there tends to be kinder than on other sites. There is still strong disagreement, but somehow their platform encourages discussion of issues more than deprecation of character. It's also visually beautiful, and has an incredible online text editor. Check out my essay, What I Believe (also at billstclair.com/beliefs).

On Medium, I end up responding to gun grabbers more than anything, even though, as L. Neil Smith says, in Why Did it Have to be... Guns?, that's really not my only issue.

People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician--or political philosophy--is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.

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?

If he doesn't want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it?

If he makes excuses about obeying a law he's sworn to uphold and defend--the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights--do you want to entrust him with anything?

If he ignores you, sneers at you, complains about you, or defames you, if he calls you names only he thinks are evil--like "Constitutionalist"--when you insist that he account for himself, hasn't he betrayed his oath, isn't he unfit to hold office, and doesn't he really belong in jail?

Steemit enables those who are popular with the "whales" to earn fake money with their writing. Except it's not completely fake. Steemit's content, and its "money", are blockchain-based, like Bitcoin. I've never been comfortable with money that has no basis in physical reality, i.e. gold or silver or other durable, fungible commodities. But you can trade both Steem dollars and Bitcoins for Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs), and the guy at the corner store will trade you food for those pieces of paper and worthless tokens. So they're effectively money.

BTW, my account started out being worth $6. It went up to over $20 after I wrote a couple of popular essays. It's under $10 today. So, as usual, I'm not managing to make money off of popularity. My likes don't tend to be mainstream.

Look at the people I follow on Steemit for some good reading. One advantage, and drawback, of Steemit, is that everything is public, all recorded on their blockchain for all eternity. Well, everything except your very long passphrases, which they generate, with no option I can to find choose them yourself.

Gab is a new Twitter-like service that focuses on free speech. They have a handful of rules, a bunch of legalese about Terms of Service, and a Privacy Policy, and all three pretty much make sense. They're in beta. I applied nine days ago, and have not yet received my invitation. They said when I applied that it could take up to four weeks. So I only know the tone of the place by the Tweets of their CEO, Andrew Torba, gab.ai/a. I followed him for a while, but he filled my stream, so I stopped. The guy likes to talk. More on Gab after I have some actual experience there.

Writing this post has reminded me of why I like Lisplog, the blogging system I wrote, in Lisp. It's very responsive, and does everything exactly how I like it. But it's a dinosaur in the online world, saving everything as plain text, so that it serves up instantly, without any waiting for code to run or database to respond.

Come to think of it, I'm a dinosaur, too. A dinosaur who loves to dance. And sing. And play the trombone. And ride a bicycle. And my next post will be about those things, especially the bicycle.

Add comment Edit post Add post