Photoguy?!

I must have started reading TF a week after he was banned. xP
Should have just saved all his posts for a auto-send 2 years later.

From '08

Excellent post Bezzle except for a few things. Your analysis of the situation is incorrect, your trying to cure the symptoms and your solutions aren't really solutions similar to hiding behind a tree when someone is throwing rocks at you might shield you from the effects of the problem but does not solve it.

I would love to elaborate but my account has enough posting restrictions as it is.

Quote:

hiding behind a tree when someone is throwing rocks at you might shield you from the effects of the problem but does not solve it

It may very well lead to a solution if the reason you're hiding from the rock-throwers is that your gun needs to be re-loaded.

-Uwe-

Bezzle,

There's a lot of great stuff in your post but your conclusion reminded why I've never quite gotten around to reading much Ayn Rand.

It's the crazy.

If you think elections are the problem and the solution is to give up on voting and merely try to eke out an existence off the grid while leaving the thieving government intact to hunt you down then I think you're off your rocker.

As I noted earlier it seems to me that you are describing the existence of Anne Frank before the nazis found her. Good luck with that.

By the way- the highest form of civil disobedience is to vote the government out of office.

Yes, it happens.

Pretty close X.

Quote:

If you think elections are the problem and the solution is to give up on voting and merely try to eke out an existence off the grid while leaving the thieving government intact to hunt you down then I think you're off your rocker.

Defeating a powerful and immoral entity requires that you either use MORE power than it currently has or you remove that which gives it power thereby bringing it closer to your level. In the case of one person, you are absolutely correct. In the case of 100 million tax-paying people, how is the government going to hunt you down?

Quote:

By the way- the highest form of civil disobedience is to vote the government out of office.

From Merriam Webster:

Quote:

Main Entry: civil disobedience
Function: noun
Date: 1866
: refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government.

Using the mechanisms given to you by your government to remove some of the people from that government is not civil disobedience. It is civil obedience. Obeying the law as a form of disobeying the law is a contradictory statement.

Withdrawing financial support of a corrupt government goes back a long way

Bilge

Frog stew made in a slow cooking crock pot.

Xennady wrote..

So you think not voting in 1928 and 1932 would have made it all better?

Bull****.

Nuts to your bull****.

I got one word for ya: demographics. Even if the voting were on the level and lily-snow-white clean, they were outnumbered by the actively malicious-- think 20% pareto principle here-- and the greater indifferent masses who passively allowed it to happen.

You do know what happened to the ones who played by the rules, right?

The govt doesn't have to hunt down 100 million people, just hunt down enough so the rest comply.

http://www.newclarion.com/2010/03/ok-tea....

OK Tea Party: Put up — or Shut Up

All right then. Now that the socialized medicine bill has passed, we will now find out once and for all whether Billy Beck is right — that America is dead: http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php?id=P....

Quote:

Mon Mar, 22 2010
"SLOWLY, I turned... STEP by step..."

Look, you abysmal ******ned morons... http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/0....

Quote:

"Republicans despondent because they think the bill is a government takeover that is about to ruin the American health care system may want to cheer up. First, if the bill is half as terrible as the Republicans say it is, Americans are going to be so upset about it that they blame the Democrats." [chomp]

I, for one, don't give a damn in the world who is the black-hat on some simpleton's scorecard in the wake of this. What I care about is what real, live individual human beings are going to have to live through under this atrocity. I don't give a runny **** about the prospect of Republicans' political profit at the polls: they can all go to hell unless and until they swear their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to ridding me of these commissars, and; I would not thank them for doing it, for it is only the right thing. http://www.newclarion.com/2010/03/ok-tea....

The Republicans have not had a single morally probative principle under them in all of the fifty-three years that I have been alive. They have been passively complicit in this whole disaster every step of the way, in their spineless stupidity, and I wouldn't care if they ended up painting Nancy Pelosi's toenails and feeding her bon-bons for the rest of their worthless lives.

Don't hand me any Novembers, *******n you. I will have freedom, or you will have my everlasting hatred. You and your stupid ****ing polls.

Drop dead, and hurry up.

I do not yet agree with Billy. America is not dead yet.

However, the knife is at last on its jugular. Americans must now face the final alternative: to renounce liberty in favor of duty to others — or to summon up the moral courage to say No. http://go-galt.org/Galt_Pledge/

No to whom? Seeing as I'm an Objectivist, the expected answer is no to altruism. That is correct — but I am not operating at that level of abstraction here. Objectivists have been making that point for over half a century now, and sadly, the mainstream epistemology is sufficiently crippled such that people still insist that liberty and duty can coexist.

I'm going to put the alternative to everyone, in terms of a plain concrete, one that lays it out in no uncertain, clear-cut terms, that will separate the moral adults from the altruist children.

It runs as follows:

There is someone in front of you asking for help, and you have plenty of money. Do you have the moral right to say no?

His need is genuine. Do you still have the moral right to say no?

It's not his fault. Do you still have the moral right to say no?

It's a very pressing need. Do you still have the moral right to say no?

It's a child. Do you still have the moral right to say no?

If you do not answer "Yes" all the way down the line — if you do not assert your individual moral sovereignty, if you do not assert your right to choose as being morally prior to anyone’s need –

– than SHUT UP and get out of the way. You are not morally equipped to partake in this battle, let alone win it, and you are wasting your time.

Now PAY ATTENTION, please.

Notice that I am NOT asking what you believe you should choose. I am NOT asking you whether you should give to the needy.

I am asking you whether the choice is morally yours, all the way down the line. I am asking you whether you believe that you still have the moral right to exist after saying "No".

Do not trifle me with waffling exceptions. Whatever they are, they can and will be used against you. Liberty is indivisible; http://www.newclarion.com/2009/06/one-li.... if you cede your moral sovereignty anywhere, you cede it everywhere.

See what was done to this Tea Party protester? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwiKGjM5t.... Expect more of it. Lots more. You've heard of human shields; the needy are the enemy's shield, spear and dagger aimed right at your soul. Don't let them be used as weapons against you in this way.

No entitlement program has ever been repealed in the United States. This is why. If the Tea Party wishes to make political history, they must first make moral history.

Repealing this bill — and more: repealing the welfare state in toto – requires nothing less than the willingness of each Tea Partier — hell, each American — to gaze past the outstretched hand of need, to look the blackmailers behind them all in the eye and declare:

No.

By Jim May · March 21st, 2010 9:48 pm · 2 Comments ·

Bezzle-

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Bezzle,

Thanks for those links.

I'm curious: Have you ever read a book called the "The Fourth Turning"?

http://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-Wil....

Quote:

Defeating a powerful and immoral entity requires that you either use MORE power than it currently has or you remove that which gives it power thereby bringing it closer to your level. In the case of one person, you are absolutely correct. In the case of 100 million tax-paying people, how is the government going to hunt you down?

If you have 100 million people ready to defy the government why don't you just get them to vote it out of office? At least in this country.

If 100 million people simply decided to stop paying taxes leaving the government you oppose still in existence than you leave that government the power to hunt you all down one by one at its leisure. In practice that government will steal enough to maintain its power and kill enough to retain it.

It's an old saying that if you strike at the king you must kill him. You advocate ignoring the king because you don't like him. Alas, this will not kill the king. But it will amuse him while he butchers you.

Quote:

Using the mechanisms given to you by your government to remove some of the people from that government is not civil disobedience. It is civil obedience. Obeying the law as a form of disobeying the law is a contradictory statement.

I'm not interested in civil disobedience as an end in itself nor do I want to discard the Constitution of 1787.

I want people loyal to that constitution to control the US government. The political left does not.

I want to defeat them not hide from them.

Re: Xennady

So you're saying: "I want to control the gun."

I understand that you think you can make the gun smaller. It's still a gun.

Small gun + 200 years = biggest damn gun the world has ever seen.

Pockets,

So your point is...you want to abolish government?

I am against violence.

That is what this thread is about.

Pockets,

I'm against violence too...but I have to disagree if you think just walking away from the present system will avoid violence.

It won't...because the regime will still want the money and will still be willing to stomp on those that won't give it up.

That's the problem- not that government exists.

Well, I would say that government implies violence. It's just the degree to which a government wields it, which is then proportional to its size.

Now of course I don't expect to be left alone if I walk away. The system is not set up to support that. I am against violence but believe it is within my rights to defend myself and to defend others against that violence with whatever force is necessary to repel the aggressor. If I withdraw from the system and the system does nothing, I have won. If the system uses violence, I have forced its hand.

Also walking away doesn't mean go hide behind a tree and cower in fear. I would only do what Bezzle is suggesting if that were a better means to an end of government. If say, the police were coming to take me away for not dotting the "I"s and crossing the "T"s and no one around me was going to stand up to them, sure I'd go find somewhere else.

I think Uwe put it best: "It may very well lead to a solution if the reason you're hiding from the rock-throwers is that your gun needs to be re-loaded."

Heh.

Quote:

"It may very well lead to a solution if the reason you're hiding from the rock-throwers is that your gun needs to be re-loaded."

If that is the logical result of this:

Quote:

If the system uses violence, I have forced its hand.

Then my reaction is this:

Pockets wrote..

I am against the initiation of force, especially as it is codified into the US Constitution in the first ten words of Article 1, Section 8.

That is what this thread is about.

Fixed.

...