The Militant Libertarian

I'm pissed off and I'm a libertarian. What else you wanna know?

Friday, March 28, 2008

Liberty in Eclipse


The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State
by William Norman Grigg (freedominourtime.blogspot.com)

I've read this book once through and have re-read several sections again. This is on of the best, up-to-date "how they're enslaving us" books available right now. William Grigg is an awesome writer, very succinct, but not bland. He doesn't write about the usual libertarian "abolish the IRS, legalize drugs, remember Jefferson" stuff - not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's overdone.

Grigg writes about our current police-state and how it's proliferating not just here, domestically, but world-wide. He's also the writer of one of my favorite blogs (linked above). The only problem I have with Grigg is that he lives in Idaho...which I consider to be Northern Utah. haha

This book is nothing short of awesome! If you love authors like Vin Suprynowicz and Claire Wolfe, then this man is for you! The book has back-cover reviews by Lew Rockwell and James Bovard, so why do you need my crappy recommendation?

GO GET THIS BOOK!

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Scoping Out Pepe

Why We Should Get It Right, But Won't
by Fred
http://fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

Gringos here in Mexico talk endlessly about how they love and admire the Mexican people, how friendly the natives are, how wonderful the culture is and, by strong implication, how wonderful the gringos are for appreciating Mexico. Actually they don’t. They live in gated communities in the hills, can’t speak three words of Spanish, and have surprisingly little contact with the country. They have invented a Mexico that doesn’t exist, and have fallen in love with it.

Thus many of their ideas about Mexicans are wrong, compounded equally of ideology and wishful thinking. The same happens in America. This will one day give birth to surprising children.

The truth is that Mexicans are about like people the world over, which means that regarding them with syrupy condescension as fuzzy heartwarming Pedros and Marias is a mistake. They don’t much like Americans, regarding them as arrogant and rich. The distaste is no more than distaste: they do not dream of lynching Yanquis. Nonetheless, regarding Mexico as a nation of smiling maids and obedient gardeners overlooks a somewhat darker picture. They would not be quite so smiling and obedient if they had a better economic choice.

An interesting observation: In five years I have encountered no hostility from Mexicans who have always lived in Mexico. The five or six men who were aggressively hostile all spoke barrio English. They had spent time in the US. Think about it.

The US would be well advised to take certain realities into account when it ponders today’s unrestricted immigration. Those who favor immigration tend to hold an idealized view of the newcomers. They are so-o-o-o hardworking! Yes, in the first generation. They just want a better life! So they do. They are just like Italian and Polish immigrants of the last century. No, they are not. They are Mexicans.

Mexico is a third-world country—yes, an upper third-world Latin American country, functioning reasonably well, and not Haiti or Bangladesh. It’s a nice place to live, which is why a half million North Americans are here. Yet Mexico is very, very different from America. If America and England are a few inches apart, Americans and France a few more, Mexico is several feet off in the distance.

While gringos and Mexicans live next to each other here in amity, they do not mix. They can’t. A retired executive from Boeing has nothing in common with a man with a fourth-grade education who will never read a book in his life. Pepe is smiling and amiable while working in the garden. He is also a grown man, not a teddy bear. If the retired engineer met Pepe in Pepe’s favorite bar, the engineer might come to a very different understanding of Pepe.

It is one thing to have Mexicans in America while they still fearful of being deported. They are polite and brown and eager to work. This encourages the tendency to which Americans are prone, to patronize them as just the nicest babysitters and garbage men. Why, they are almost like real people.

It will be a different thing when they are legal and have a voting majority in the Southwest. They understand perfectly that their day is coming. A couple of years back I listened on the radio to a Mexican-American politician from Texas. He pointed out that when the Mexican children now in school reach the age of eighteen, they will control the government of the state. He was not hostile, did not say as Barack Obama’s minister did, “God damn America.” Yet he saw what was coming, and was well pleased. From the Mexican point of view, they are getting back states which rightly belong to them.

They assuredly are. Shortly the US will have a southern tier of states under Mexican-American control.

The hopeful idea is that they will meld as did the Irish and Italians and Vietnamese. The flaw in this happy ointment is that they do very poorly in school—better than blacks, but well below whites and Asians. This is not a problem of the first generation only, in which case it might eventually cure itself, but of later generations also. It looks innate, or at least as if it will continue. Then what?

Then they will have no choice but to be waiters and garbage collectors. The first generation will tolerate it, happy to be making what seems to them good money. A few will succeed and move up. Most won’t. The second generation, relegated forever to jobs of low pay and less esteem, will become resentful. Inevitably they will see the relegation as indicating discrimination, not incapacity. The young, unable to compete, will gravitate toward others who can’t and we will have another permanent underclass. If you don’t believe me, watch.

The United States advertises itself as a land of opportunity, and in fact is, but only for the bright. A poor kid who pops 1500 on his SATs can get into a good university and come out as anything he chooses. Universities look for such students. A kid who barely reads has no chance. For him, there are no opportunities.

Why is it unlikely that the immigrants will improve scholastically? For reasons a fair few understand but nobody talks about. Intelligence. Mexico consists of three layers, or maybe two layers with a spectrum between. The governing class is white, and at about the European level on IQ tests, not surprising because they are European. You have the mestizos, who do conspicuously less well, and the pure Indians, lower yet. The white upper class is not swimming the river.

IQ is a forbidden topic, but it tracks reality depressingly well. No country below Laredo has ever produced anything important in the sciences. And while in any group there are exceptions, it is the majority who determine social results. This bears thinking about. Reality does not respect politics. Holding one’s breath and turning blue will change nothing. Insisting that something can’t be so or shouldn’t be so doesn’t change whether it is so.

Inequality can be seen in the streets here. In Guadalajara, una ciudad muy guera, a very white city, you have highly sophisticated people who talk of the arts on the radio as intelligently as any in America. They go to the opera, buy in good bookstores, and serve competently as doctors and technicians. In the villages you find people with far more Indian blood and almost no academic achievement or interest. Out in the hills there is, dead serious, a lot of witchcraft.

It’s a different world. And coming to a mall near you.

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Thursday, March 27, 2008

The True Source...

What's the True Source of our Right to Bear Arms?
by Paul Bonneau

Attribute to: The Libertarian Enterprise

There are some odd posts being made on gun forums these days. For example, "its people like you that will hand the white house to a commi democrat, who will select the next supreme court justice member....and they will destroy the 2nd..." This, apparently an attempt to convince us to vote for McCain, that great protector of the 2nd Amendment. Here's another: "The jack booted feds will roll you (and me) up like an old carpet. If you think you can resist then you will join the ranks of the Branch Davidians and the martyrs of Ruby Ridge. All the good sheeple will fall in line or die." This is supposedly what will happen if Obama or Hillary gets elected.

There is a very strange notion implicit in these comments: that our rights derive from 9 old men and women on the Court. Thus if we get the wrong ones in there, we are doomed. Since the composition of the Court depends on who is President, this in turn implies that our rights really derive from the President.

This is even stranger than the notion that our right to bear arms comes from the 2nd Amendment itself.

Now, fully recognizing the somewhat linguistic question of whether rights exist at all, our right to bear arms depends on one thing, and one thing only: our willingness to kill anyone who attempts to confiscate them. Surely, that is not news? Yes of course, we write our congresscritters and join GOA and JPFO (and NRA if we are clueless), and write letters to the editor, and argue legal cases in court, and vote for "pro-gun" legislators, and so forth. But our right does not depend on any of these mechanisms, and they unfortunately tend to conceal the hard fact beneath everything: that our right to bear arms depends on our willingness to kill anyone who attempts to confiscate them. What these other mechanisms are good for, is putting off any day of reckoning — which is well worth doing to be sure (up to a point). But they cannot be the whole prop of our right.

Well, what about noncompliance?

Noncompliance is certainly an excellent tool. It's the old saying, "There's safety in numbers." The English have lost their guns because they could not be bothered even to refuse to comply with their law (not enough numbers there, I guess), while New Jerseyites and other Americans still have their "assault weapons" because they did refuse to comply. It's not the ideal situation, since "selective enforcement" is possible, but it is better than the alternative of being disarmed. Massive noncompliance has the additional attraction of making manifest the illegitimacy of government, and if there is anything they hate, it is that.

But in a noncompliant situation, what happens if you are caught? Then, you are back to brass tacks again, deciding whether you are willing to put up with 5 years of prison rape, or instead making the wife of the guy who caught you a widow (if he cannot be made to see reason). That's what is always at the bottom of this. Our right depends on something internal to ourselves, not upon others.

Again, the Presidency and the Court's composition does not matter to the right itself, but bears only on the day of reckoning. At this point the reader is advised to refer to Patrick Henry's famous speech. Is it better to put off that day, so that our children have to deal with it in worsened circumstances, than it is to deal with it ourselves? Who is best equipped to deal with it — those who have already lived their lives, or those in their prime with small children at home? These are questions that should be occurring to all of us.

This discussion brings up another interesting point. What, really, is the difference between persuasion and coercion? One could argue, the difference is a firearm — but not the one held by the persuader or would-be coercer! It is the firearm held by the one being "persuaded".

What does this mean?

I answer with the question, "Can armed people be coerced?" It is at least arguable that they cannot! The persuasion, especially when it gets into heavy arm-twisting, can certainly look like coercion; but for the armed, the question is always decided by a choice: go along, or resist. Just because we mostly choose to go along, it should not deceive us that that is the only choice; whereas for the disarmed, it is the only choice (and thus there is no choice at all). A state-employed thug, or a free-lance one, simply takes from an unarmed man anything he wants including life itself. To an armed man, he can only produce compliance using at worst a threat on one's life, accompanied by the risk of losing his own. Quite a different kettle of fish.

This calculus applies to all questions of compliance, but especially to the question of compliance with gun confiscation itself. One might say this is the meta-question of compliance. If one complies, then one by implication complies with all further demands no matter how extreme, because compliance with this one gives up the possibility of any future choice. It is saying, "Here is my gun. Now, what else do you want to do with me?"

We do not really trade our guns for our life, in a confiscation, any more than the Jews of Nazi Germany traded their guns for their lives. We do not really own our lives anyway, but only borrow them temporarily: we are mortal. The real trade here is guns for little more than a state-determined temporary extension of our lives on our knees — and the lives of our children and their descendents on their knees as well. Despite how repugnant, how low such a choice is, there is apparently no shortage of people willing to make it.

Thus our right, our freedom, does not depend on those people either. They are even more useless than the Constitution, the judges and the presidents in protecting it, because their lamentations of surrender only tend to sap the resolve of others. Our freedom depends on those few who understand the issue at its base; and knowing where the right comes from, step up and accept the duty. It is they who will make the bastards pay, who will refuse to take the easy choice of slavery, who will kill those who force the question of ultimate compliance on them, even at the expense of their own lives. The best end for a useful life is a useful death, and there is no more useful death than in the act of killing tyrants. A Remnant, a few real men and women is all it takes; "the rest are furniture".

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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

The Dollar, Politics, and American Voters




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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Tom Ridge Questioned on 9/11, the Amero, Real ID, and more...


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ATF's New Motto To Be Engraved on Special-Order Leatherman Tools

http://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOJ/BATF/APMD/840400000029/Amendment %20to%20Combined%20Synopsis_Solicitation%2003.html straight from their own website...

Follow the link above to read the official request for bids on some custom Leatherman Micra Tools to be ordered and specially engraved with the BATF's motto: "always think forfeiture"

Not a joke! Of course, the BATF is part of the Dept. of the Treasury, which includes theIRS...

Addendum: my friend Jim researched their site and found that this order has already been filled. This means they're already in the pockets of these nefarious federal agents. Not surprising, since the order was from 2003...

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