Monday, March 16, 2009

Dismantling The Killer Elite







Maintaining the pretense of authority: "Nothing to see here! Please disperse!" commands Frank Drebin, Lt. Detective, Police Squad -- a special division of the police force.


Sometimes the truth is best told through fictional allegory, especially when a dash of comedy is used to make the parables more palatable. Witness, for example, the variation on the familiar "I'll need your badge and gun" scene from the action farce The Naked Gun.


Countless police films present exactly the same scene, in which the forlorn hero, after being led by his zeal to commit some grave breach of protocol or some (apparent) lapse of judgment, is put on administrative leave and forced to surrender his insignia of office and his government-issued firearm.


The conventions of movie melodrama dictate that as he turns over his shield the disgraced police officer take generous pause to look pensively at the token of official authority, wordlessly conveying a deep sense of inconsolable loss. And the balance of the story consists of the cashiered officer working through back-channels and other unsanctioned avenues to vindicate himself and take down whatever criminal mastermind was responsible for his humiliation.


As I said, we've witnessed that scene in scores, perhaps hundreds, of cinematic and television variations. However, to my knowledge, only Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) of The Naked Gun has actually allocuted the otherwise unspoken thoughts of the police officer forced to turn in his gun and badge.


"Just think," a dejected Drebin comments to his anguished partner, "the next time I shoot someone, I could go to jail."


A more pointed version of the same sentiment, delivered without a particle of comic irony, was expressed by both Tom "Turk" Cowan (Robert DeNiro) and his long-time partner David "Rooster" Fisk (Al Pacino) in
Righteous Kill, a formulaic cop thriller released last year.


"You don't become a cop because you want to `Serve and protect'; you do it because you want respect," explains Cowan. "Most people respect the badge. Everybody respects the gun."


Fisk, who by all appearances plays Damon to Cowan's Pythias, is even more direct: "The badge is nice, as long as it comes with a gun."

***



***

Embedded in such scenes is the assumption that the state-issued badge is, quite literally, a shield: Not only does it symbolize a specific professional function, it also confers official permission to kill other human beings.


Those who receive this officially consecrated jewelry are thus elevated above the common mass of undifferentiated humanity, and few things are more poignantly painful than being relieved of that token of exalted status, and deprived of the sense of impunity it offers.


A recent essay describing some of the challenges experienced by female police officers briefly noted one social challenge faced by distaff members of the Killer Elite: "It can be very intimidating for the person who is dating a female cop who carries a badge and has a constitutional authority to take a life." (Emphasis added.)


That "constitutional authority" thus makes the female police officer intrinsically different from members of her potential dating pool (which the author, in dutiful PC fashion, implicitly expands to include both sexes). The officer has it, and unless her would-be suitor is part of the same privileged caste, he or she does not.


But all of this begs the following question: Where, exactly, does the "constitutional authority to take a life" come from, if it doesn't inhere in each individual, and the people at large? What mystical property of the state permits it to summon that "right" into existence, and by what principle of justice does the state confer it exclusively on its own armed enforcers?


If the people, both individually and in the aggregate, do not have the moral authority to take a life when necessary, how could they confer that authority on their servants in government? Or are we to understand that the powers of government are innate and unqualified, rather than derivative and contingent, as the Declaration of Independence asserts?


The answer to that question is made obvious in the behavior of our supposed protectors on those occasions when an otherwise inoffensive civilian asserts his right to be treated with the dignity and the deference due to a human being. With rare and priceless exceptions, theirs is hardly the conduct of servants.


Furthermore, the "constitutional authority to take a life" that is supposedly the unique possession of the state's armed enforcers is not restricted to self-defense or the use of lethal violence to carry out the apprehension and punishment of criminals. It also encompasses the supposed right to kill innocent bystanders, victims of mistaken identity, or even those who merely prove to be inconvenient.


Portrait of a murderer as young West Point graduate: Future FBI-employed serial killer Lon Horiuchi (left, and below, right), who murdered Vicky Weaver at Ruby Ridge and played a still-unknown role in the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel, outside Waco.


About ten years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals brushed up against this notion when it ruled that FBI assassin Lon Horiuchi couldn't be prosecuted for manslaughter in killing of Vicky Weaver during the 1992 federal siege of her family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.


From the spurious concept of "supremacy clause immunity," the court fashioned an even more fanciful principle called the "discretionary function exemption." Under that standard, the only significant questions were these: Was Horiuchi acting under orders from his superiors, and was the kill-shot justified by "his subjective belief that his actions were necessary and proper"?



The former question essentially permits Horiuchi (and others in his position) the luxury of the notorious "Nuremberg Defense"; the latter question reverses centuries worth of common law wisdom by arguing that armed enforcers for the state are exceptions to the principle that "no man can be a judge in his own cause."



On the basis of such assumptions, the court ruled that it would be impermissible for a federal law enforcement officer to face civil or criminal prosecution for official acts that would otherwise be criminal in nature -- including, in this case, gunning down an unarmed mother while she was holding as small infant. (In sworn testimony Horiuchi admitted that he knew it was Vicky Weaver in his sights when he pulled the trigger.)


In a dissent seasoned liberally with incredulous outrage, Judge Alex Kozinski condemned the majority for creating what he called a "007 standard" -- that is, a license to kill. By exempting Horiuchi from prosecution, wrote Kozinski, the Ninth Circuit Court was granting that lethal license "to all law enforcement agencies in our circuit -- federal, state, and local."

Victim of the "007 Standard": Vicky Weaver, before she was murdered by Horiuchi.


Just months later, the Ninth Court partially reversed that decision in order to permit Idaho (the plaintiff in the original case) to prosecute Horiuchi under state laws. Denise Woodbury, an assistant prosecutor from Boundary County, was prepared to prosecute the FBI sniper, but incoming county attorney Brett Benson had no appetite for taking on the case. So Horiuchi remained at large without prosecution, and the "007 standard" remains in force by default.


It is by no means incidental to this discussion that Horiuchi's lethal services came in the course of federal sieges of socially isolated people (the "white separatist" Weaver family and the Branch Davidian community, a breakaway sect of the Adventist faith) arising from technical violations of federal firearms laws.


Randy Weaver was initially approached by an undercover agent for the criminal syndicate called the ATF. The federal snitch offered to pay Weaver a substantial sum to buy shotguns that had undergone "illegal" modifications specified by the snitch himself.


Once entrapped, Weaver was told the only way he could avoid prosecution was to act as a federal snitch within the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation, a sect with which he had a trivial and distant connection. To his immense credit, Weaver deflected this blackmail attempt -- and the Feds punished his principled defiance by carrying out the murderous assault on his family.


The initial "Showtime" raid in Waco by the ATF was carried out on the pretext that Branch Davidian religious leader David Koresh, a federally licensed firearms dealer, was illegally converting semi-automatic rifles to full-autos. Told of the agency's concerns by a Waco-area gun dealer, Koresh invited the ATF to inspect his inventory weeks prior to the raid. That offer was turned down in order to preserve the pretext for a PR-friendly raid on an eccentric but harmless religious community.


Several Davidians were shot during the ATF's unnecessary (and, therefore, illegal) raid on February 28, 1993. Four ATF agents were killed by the Davidians in an act of entirely legal self-defense. Scores of people were later immolated by the FBI (and special forces operators) duruing the final siege on April 19.


Nobody in a position of authority has ever been punished in any way for the needless ATF raid or the avoidable deaths (including those of the four federal agents) that resulted. Four of the Davidian survivors, on the other hand, were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the use of a firearm in committing a violent crime. The "crime" in question was defending their home and place of worship when it was besieged by an armed mob.


The Waco episode fleshes out the "constitutional authority to take a life" even further by adding this critical codicil: Those on the receiving end of criminal violence by the state's armed agents have no right to defend themselves in kind. In other words, if someone invested with the "right" to take a life wrongly targets you, either as a result of error or of malice, you have a duty to die.


Another very important legal principle must be taken into account as well: Not only can the state's enforcement agents more or less kill at their discretion, they also enjoy the privilege of deciding whether or not to come to the aid of a given individual citizen. A long string of legal precedents dictates that individual citizens have no legal or civic recourse against police who fail to protect or defend them when they are threatened by violent criminals. The duty of the police is to "society," not to an individual finding himself in need of specific assistance.


What this means, of course, is that the state's armed agents can kill you at their discretion, but have no responsibility to save you from the criminal violence of others.


All of this could be considered the inevitable outcome of alienating to the state the individual responsibility for self-defense against violent crime. Given the tendency of the state to aggrandize itself in any role assigned to it, and to pervert delegated authority into unaccountable power, why should we be surprised that the police are acquiring the customs and demeanor of a militarized killer elite?


In 1993, more than a decade and a half before Eric Holder would denigrate Americans as "A Nation of Cowards" because of our lack of enthusiasm for ethnic collectivism, constitutional attorney Jeffrey Snyder made much more appropriate use of that phrase as the title of
an essay published in the late (and otherwise unlamented) neo-con quarterly, The Public Interest.


With the unflinching determination of a surgeon attacking a gangrenous limb, Snyder applies the scalpel of logic to the putrescent assumptions of "gun control" (or, as honest people prefer to call it, civilian disarmament).


Layer after layer of rotten pretense surrenders to his blade before Snyder uncovers the core of the issue:



"To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state's totalitarian reach.... Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people."



Yeah, that should work....


In a phrase: The Second Amendment certifies that the state does not possess a monopoly on the use of force.
Yet we have abdicated the role of self-defense to the same state that is now overtly taking on the characteristics of a brazen kleptocracy.


How on earth could rational people believe that the same state responsible for plundering us through taxation, stealing the value of our earnings and savings through inflation, and subsidizing Wall Street's multi-trillion-dollar crime spree, will actually protect us from the violence of common criminals when our ongoing economic collapse begets widespread social turmoil?


One of the ironic blessings of a cataclysmic economic "correction" may be the widespread dismantling of state and local police departments -- assuming, of course, that the vacuum can be filled with informal "citizen's posses" and "home guards" composed of armed, responsible property owners.


As a homework assignment for those skeptical that such arrangements can work, at least in modest-sized communities, I recommend the wonderful book Tough Towns: True Tales from the Gritty Streets of the Old West, by Oklahoma attorney Robert Barr Smith.


The title is slightly misleading, since some of the best accounts of spontaneous law enforcement by the citizenry (such as the battles against bank robbers in Miller Creek, Oklahoma, Menomonie, Wisconsin, and especially the small black enclave of Boley, Oklahoma) occurred in during the (last) Great Depression.


With wit and insight Smith describes eighteen small battles between vicious gangs of armed professional criminals and armed citizens determined to protect their property and their neighbors.


In each episode, the criminals come out a poor second, often leaving this world in agony as their bodies are perforated by gunfire coming from every direction. And in nearly all of these accounts, government law enforcement -- usually represented by the local sheriff, or a territorial marshal -- plays a role best described as peripheral.


That's how it once was when our country was relatively free. That's how it could be, and should be, once again.




On sale now!










Dum spiro, pugno!












29 comments:

John Washburn said...

Excellent article.

Sorry to nit-pick but in the lines:

Told of the agency's concerns by a Waco-area gun dealer, Weaver invited the ATF to inspect his inventory weeks prior to the raid. That offer was turned down

Weaver should be Koresh

Dylboz said...

Washburn beat me to it. Otherwise, fantastic as usual.

William N. Grigg said...

I really appreciate the free copy-editing help! It's a real blessing to have readers who pay such careful attention.

Anonymous said...

I'm reminded of my father's reaction on seeing Schindler's List. He said that there was a scene where the concentration camp commander would pick up a rifle and randomly kill a prisoner walking through the yard below. The prisoners were obviously helpless to do anything about this, and because of the distance they had no warning.

Now the entire US is such a camp, and those with badges are the ones with the sniper rifles. Grovel, citizen, if you want to live.

Anonymous said...

My one regret for the many years I worked in my home school boy scout troop is the number of young men who viewed joining the police or armed forces as an act of PROTECTION of the people, rather than an act of protection of the people ROBBING the people.

JJ said...

As always another great article. I often look forward to Pro Libertate and it never disappoints.

Anonymous said...

A great article, Will. But, remember, both the People In Charge, and the general public, don't care about such lofty and inconceivable notions as "common law" or "exemptions" or anything like that. And because they don't care, politicians and police officers can get away with ANYTHING.

"The illegal we can do right away. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." Henry Kissinger.

The only thing these bastards react to is fear. Fear for losing their jobs, fear for losing their benefits and plush amenities, and fear for losing their lives.

Perhaps we, as freedom loving people, should stop whining about things like this, and start posturing and threatening. If that doesn't work, then it's time to act on those threats.

Anonymous said...

'One of the ironic blessings of a cataclysmic economic "correction" may be the widespread dismantling of state and local police departments.'

Actually, according to a story in today's Hackensack, N.J. Record, foreign wars are already having this effect. The Record says that of 3,000 N.J. National Guard members serving overseas, 300 of them are cops.

While we should perhaps be grateful for their willingness to serve (despite the foreign occupations being illegal and unconstitutional), I worry about how militarized law enforcement officers will treat civilians on their return. Will we be told, like Iraqi ragheads, to 'get out of the car,' or be shot if we don't?

I had extensive conversations with a supervisor in a big-city police department. He was completely unfazed by the myriad of local and state regulations which pose a dangerous obstacle course to civilian gun owners who want to transport their weapons.

In a nutshell, he was 100 percent confident that this inpenetrable maze of 'gotcha' regulation would NEVER be applied against him by a brother cop, while carrying his service weapon cross-country. He described a New Orleans cop who was shocked to learn that he (unusually) wasn't armed, and offered to lend him a pistol during his visit to the Crescent City.

I expect that my cop acquaintance is correct -- 'professional courtesy' will protect him, maybe even in New York City or Chicago, against prosecution for not possessing the correct local paperwork. Whereas ordinary, law-abiding citizens, properly licensed in their home jurisdictions, can and do get sent to prison for straying across a political boundary into a locality which doesn't (contrary to the constitution) honor the privileges and immunities granted by other states.

I don't resent the privileges my cop friend has. I just think they should be available to all of us. And the Fourteenth Amendment ('equal protection of the law') backs me up.

But then, the constitution is long-dead. So let's not get waylaid by extravagant, pointless fantasies. A citizen proposes; martial law disposes. Serfs must know their place in a backslid, pre-enlightenment culture.

old world chaos said...

Allright an agitprop poster from it's a human right page. I saved all of those to irritate conservatives nazis in my family. They make great desktop wallpapers. The cops are the state sanctioned gang. Don't steal the government hates competition!

qnunc said...

old world chaos @5:13

What are you talking about?

qnunc said...

This is something else from the essay "So You Want to Marry a Female Cop?":

We are naturally suspicious. . . We are taught from the very beginning that the world is a violent place and people want to hurt us.

Well, you know what? No, they don't. I'm so sick of their stupid childish martyrdom. Mommy, bad man hurt me! If people want to "hurt" them, why are the cops the ones doing all the chasing? Shouldn't that be the other way around?

Anonymous said...

Not to quibble, but several documentaries show the FBI machine gunning from a helicopter while the "compound" was ablaze. They were making sure the kids burned to death. Those guys are murdering scum, and if I were a surviving family member of one of the murder victims, well-you know. Snyder really nailed it. Of course the state calls them gun "buy-backs." Their propaganda can be slick.

Anonymous said...

Will,

I have often thought on the the topic of what I would label the most destructive items of my life time - and frequently I have to answer that it is the television.

It is the ultimate propaganda tool beamed into our homes 24/7. Don't misunderstand me, the true entertainment value if offers is considerable. But, like most things gov't regulated has become vacuous and corrupted beyond belief - which is why the internet has become such a threat.

When I was young, the westerns portrayed an image of truth and justice (that didn't exist even then). Now, it is mostly 'might makes right' and 'the ends justify the means'. This is liberally interspersed with the gov'ts official propaganda message in 'The News'.

People are lazy, they have no concept of a philosophical/moral concept, they don't read and they don't understand history's very real message. That's why something as simple as a Ron Paul bumper sticker is now considered an indicator of 'extremist tendencies' by law enforcement (there's a link on Strike-the-Root if you're not familiar with this development, though I'm sure you are).

As always . . .

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Marc said...

A question for you fellow (in the eyes of the state) helots - when the stench of a police state mingles with the reek of a tax gulag would the mixture be be a polag?

Anonymous said...

Will,

i've tried myself to figure out where the state gets the authority it claims to possess whereas the people do not have this authority.

i start with God and He creating us in His image, and He only being able to put in us what was in Him. He created no man above another man. He gave no man the authority to tell another man what he could and could not own. He gave all free will. He told all to respect another man's free will/rights with respect to His laws.

and then somewhere along the way man foolishly creates the state, something He did not want. so the state gets its powers from the people. if i cannot do it, the state cannot do it. and then i get lost.

somewhere the state creates new powers for itself. its new powers did not come from the people because the people did not have the power. it did not come from God (whose son is Jesus Christ) because God cannot do some of the things the state claims it can do like forcing a person to testify or be thrown in jail (i could go on). it's too easy to blame the devil, too. i can only argue that man gave it to himself --lifted himself up. sounds like something lucifer tried to do and failed. speaking of 'him', he's probably laughing at how he has gotten us to turn on each other.


i've reached this conclusion, rather than have God rule over them (or in other words, rather than be free and individually responsible), the majority of men prefer to be a slave. man won't come out and admit it, but this is what he wants. he wants security in another man instead of security in God's hands...which means living by faith, instead of by another man's decree. and we wonder why God said He would destroy the planet.

on another note, did one of the BDs really have a hand grenade?

rick

old world chaos said...

@ Qnunc the poster with the German soldiers holding MP-40 Sub guns is from its-a-human-right www page a pro gun, pro self defense page. I would post a link but I'm not sure if blog admin allows that.

dixiedog said...

That's why something as simple as a Ron Paul bumper sticker is now considered an indicator of 'extremist tendencies' by law enforcement (there's a link on Strike-the-Root if you're not familiar with this development, though I'm sure you are).

He is and even blogg'd a short piece about it on his Liberty Minutes.

BTW, I concur with everything anonymous@8:13 PM said. The trash tube is REALLY the true bane of the brain. If I have to hear about how folk are becoming "addicted to the internet" one more time, my ears will wilt. Isn't it puzzling that "addicted to television" is never mentioned? (Hint: NO! They completely control that passive content-delivery machine).

I guess Will still manages to sit through and watch certain movies that come hither from Hollyweird and finds nibblets of poignant simile between the fictitious and the factual to expound upon in the blog later. However, one would have to usually wade through a tsunami of trash and depravity in the process. Perhaps, these examples were exceptions? Whatever the case, I don't watch anything that it produces anymore.

I did notice one thing right away. This piece may be a first for Will in that it ever so slightly begins to lament the hoard of commoners for their passive apathy and misguided belief in Leviathan as their security in both the physical and economic (>50% these days, BTW) sense. To view our predicament from a different perspective in addition to the tried and true one is refreshing ;).

One of the ironic blessings of a cataclysmic economic "correction" may be the widespread dismantling of state and local police departments -- assuming, of course, that the vacuum can be filled with informal "citizen's posses" and "home guards" composed of armed, responsible property owners. [emphasis mine]

Keep in mind, Will, modern America only remotely resembles the America of the (first) Great Depression era. Obviously, the physical place itself and the political boundaries are still largely intact, but the aggregate people are not of the same stock in terms of character, morality, hardiness, etc. Also, today's inhabitants of America, by and large, possess little to no "life" skills, certainly nothing approaching the levels possessed by Americans during the 1930s. Skills such as gardening, raising/slaughtering animals for meat, making ones own clothing, adequate building/carpentry skills, fixing/repairing ones own appliances, etc., etc.

A lot of this is, of course, due to the malignant growth of urbanization in America and folk becoming packed like sardines in metro areas where there's no immediate need for these kind of skills when there's not adequate space and most goods are obtained through "just-in-time" supply channels.

But the "life" skills aspect can be corrected relatively quickly and people can learn to do a lot of things when the pressure of life prompts it, but the internal makeup of the people themselves is harder to reshape, takes much longer to accomplish. People today are much more Leviathan-centric in their view of their security than the folk of yore. Dependency, the bane of all folk, which was virtually nonexistent before FDR's New Deal, is pandemic today.

As a homework assignment for those skeptical that such arrangements can work...

That said, yes, needless to say, I'm skeptical on the big picture, of that hardy scenario working (without chaos) in ANY setting other than modest communities, but I'm not without hope for the old America and perhaps a spiritual revival can take place.

After all, we're all dependents, it's just a matter of honestly answering the all important question of upon whom or what are we dependent?

Great piece as always, Will. And I'll add one of the best so far, IMHO.

Ralph said...

Anonymous 4:00 AM(rick), I like your thinking.

One should read Leonard Levy's Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Origins of the Fifth Amendment". This traces our origins outside of Roman law and shows that when William of Normandy conquered the english countryside, he found a system of community courts and tribunals in place, not unlike the system advocated by Jesus in Matthew 18.

Granted, it had evolved some strange practices through the centuries, but it was a community based legal system in which the enitre community participated, with judgements renderdd by people who knew the accused.

The "state" under the Normans, made use of this system, expanded under Henry I, which became our court system, along with jury trial.

Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar writes that the founders probably intended a bicameral court system just like our bi cameral congress. Along with the senate and the house of representatives, we had a judge and jury to determine guilt and innocence by due process.

dixiedog said...

I just want to add that the Tea Parties planned in many states and localities are a hopeful sign, however.

In fact, as for me, I'm thinking of attending either the one in Richmond or Va. Beach on April 15th.

AvgJoe said...

There are a number of web sites that are done by firemen and police in NYC who believe that their friends and co-workers were murdered.
Murdered by September 11 2001 being an inside job.
Just something to throw in this topic as food for thought.

Anonymous said...

DD:
Since quitting college and working in the private sector, for the last two years, I have been laid off from two different jobs. In both cases I purposed to not take unemployment comp. and to not rely on any govt. handout or support of any sort. By God's grace I have succeeded in both instances. Since the last layoff I now have my own company that continues to generate income even in these tough times. My reason for mentioning this is to reaffirm the fact that we can survive without the State as our guardian and that the hardiness self sufficiency that was more common in the early 1900s is still around today (albeit in smaller pockets). I think you will find it most common in the rural regions of the West and even the far northern parts of New England.

liberranter said...

Anon 10:49 - Congratulations (if that's the right term) for your success in the midst of economic adversity. I'd also like to point out that your quitting college might have been a wiser decision that you realize. As many of us are beginning to realize now, a realization that is being brutally forced upon the youngest current generation, a college diploma is NOT a ticket to or a guarantor of professional or financial success. In fact, given the deteriorating quality of higher "education" in this country, it is often an actual hindrance to the ability to produce anything useful in a free market. Your decision to apply your time and energy to productive endeavors is obviously bearing fruit. Now if only more of those in direct State thrall could see your example and follow it accordingly...

no respect for authoritay said...

Look for Linda Thompson videos for an alternative view of the Waco massacre. She was ran out of town after proposing a march on Washingtong 14-15yrs ago. The video shows agents going into second story window while another agent is outside blasting away where his comrades had just entered. The masses need to get over this doglike obedience to authority. Look back over history and you will see that life is improved for all by rebels. Like the rebels that founded this once great republic. I have a problem with authority myself but I do respect and fear the lord of lords, the king of kings.

Sans Authoritas said...

Rick @ 4 AM, dead-on accurate.

-Sans Authoritas

freakface said...

Just read an article at another blog about a Pennslyvania state trooper who killed a 33yr old motorist on St. Pats day. This same menace killed a 12 yr old boy in 2002. James Bond 007 license to kill going nationwide?

Anonymous said...

Rick, Sans Authoritas, others

Don't you think it's a little late in the game to be philosophizing? At this point in time, it's safe to say that almost all libertarian philosophical and political thought, christian or not, has been hammered out quite extensively, and any further ventures into it can be equated to self-congratulatory mental masturbation. This is also the case if you understand free market economics yet regularly read articles, describing what you already know, from Mises Institute, lewrockwell.com, Reason.com, or any other related site. If, however, you don't quite understand it, or want a free market perspective to new and developing stories, that's different.

My point is that now is not the time to hammer out such thought. It's been done before. Now is the time for action.

Sans Authoritas said...

Anonymous @ 7:19:

We should not cease speaking the truth. There are still many, many statists who hold the idea that our rights are given by dead men who scrawled ink on a scrap of paper. There are still many, many people who believe that taxation is moral. That taking money and property from innocent individuals, at gunpoint, is moral. Such people are afflicted with the mental illness of Statism. It is, literally, insanity: not perceiving reality as it is.

I don't want such people acting at all, because they can't even orient their moral compasses.

Examine the tenets of the just war theory. (And excise the nonsense about "a legitimate authority." No such thing ever exists in a State.)

We are not called to commit suicide.

This is the time for the action of spreading the truth that the non-initiation of aggression, lived to its ultimate ends, is the only moral lifestyle. Hundreds of thousands, millions more people must believe in this basic human principle before any social progress can be made. Otherwise you'll end up having people simply putting new thugs in power. I don't want anyone put in positions of coercive power. But that is precisely what the Constitutional statists would accomplish if they had half a chance.

Action at this point must be limited to "evangelization" (to alleged Christians, ironically,) and to resistance in clear, present, and active violations of the life and liberty of individuals. (People getting brutalized by police, arrested for non-crimes, and people getting shot over 1/2'' of metal pipe on a firearm) and the like.

People don't act well unless they think well. They are not yet thinking well, so I don't want them acting. People will stand around, bleating like sheep as a herdmember is pulled down and Tasered until they realize that what the badgethugs are doing is horribly atrocious. Then, and only then, should they act.

-Sans Authoritas

Anonymous said...

to Anon at 7:17.

no. it's never to late too state, restate, or even re-assert one's beliefs.

after all, if you don't know what you're willing to die for, you're not really living.

i agree that now is the time for action, but i'm far safer moving in God's timing instead of my own, or what other people's so-called timing might be.

take the book of Esther for instance. here you have a jewess, who is not supposed to marry a heathen, in the harem of an king/emperor who worshipped another god. God hid her there. while there, she kept close contact with mordecai (i don't thnk she revealed that she was a jewess either...another point!). she did what she was supposed to do while in the harem. she was there for at least a year just going through perfume treatment. then the king's queen screwed up and Esther became queen. what did Esther do while she was the queen?

"well Russ, she queen[ed]."

so there she sat for some time and then mordecai's adversary made his move to try to wipe out all the jews. did Esther run unto her king to stop this? nope. she went to mordecai and asked him to get all of the jews to pray for her, and she would fast and pray herself before she went unto the king to obtain his favor.

then one day, in God's timing, not her own, she went in unto the king and petitioned him to stop that slewfoot's (whose name i forget) decree to kill all of the jews (he had gotten the king to sign it, i know). the king heard her appeal, and granted her people a reprieve. basically, the king, IMO, signed one of those bills like congress submits and didn't think it all the way through. so the plan to wipe out the jews was stopped, the bad guy wound up hung from the gallows he had intended for mordecai, and all of his conspirators were wiped out by the jews by the king's decree.

i don't know about you, but i'm gonna sit back here and wait...and prepare, until God tells me to move.

be patient man!

if you move just one second too soon, or even one second too late...you could die. so wait for God to hike the football, or you'll be called off sides, or get slapped with encroachment. and in life, that could mean your pre-mature death. and i know God is all-mighty, but how effective do you think you will be if you're in jail?

rick

Anonymous said...

Yes, no Fort Sumters.

Two can keep a secret if one is dead.

It's only illegal if you get caught.
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"Hypothetical: you walk into a room. your buddy is on the phone, giving up an operation. They have his
kids. he’s trying to lie so they won’t hurt the kids but they won’t catch you either.

you must shoot him in the face.

if you can’t, you were an idiot to get someone else involved.

if you can, you’re just evil.

work alone.

cellular structure is the last war. they have too many ways into the OODA loop. for the foreseeable
future we must be a nation of lone gunmen.

work alone. never stop. "
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