Politics Creates Anarchists (true or false?)
My (dear, departed) father was active for some time — a few years, perhaps — with the LP, decades ago. Later, he declared himself (at least quietly, to me) an anarchist. He was a peace loving man, and never quite grokked the vital importance of guns in peaceful hands to a free society. But, aside from that …
I guess I’m a chip off the old block, since I repeated precisely the same pattern years after he did it — got actively involved with the L.P.; collecting signatures, stuffing envelopes, delivering yard signs, waving signs on street corners, making phone calls, the whole shebang — and ultimately I came face to face with the hideous nature of politics. Perhaps there are a few anarchists who are just “born that way,” or get there without experiencing the political grist mill — but I suspect my dad and I were/are fairly typical. Who was it that first said, “The difference between a Libertarian and an anarchist is one election cycle”? — a statement so often repeated, I’m not about to turn to a search engine to find the answer . . . but it’s very apt here.
I do think that becoming actively engaged, as both Dad and I did, is key to learning; that the vast majority of voters never do get actively involved, they just make sure to “get out and vote” every two or four years, without having a clue re: how manipulative and corrupt the political process is. Should they stay home? Probably, but they’re more prone to consider it their “duty” to vote. Instead, many of those who DO stay home (or go fishing) instead of voting … do so out of an uneasy familiarity with the system. Rather than apathy, it’s “I’ve got better things to do.” (There have to be better ways to change the world than choosing between Hillary and Donald. Personally, I’d rather learn how to fish. It’s at least a useful survival skill.)
Years back, I recall a relative griping that she’d wanted an Al Gore yard sign (yes, really) but never got one. I wonder: Did it occur to her that someone had to get out and DELIVER her yard sign, and maybe there was no one available in her area to do it? Did she consider volunteering to do it herself? I doubt that. Too bad, if not — I’m sure she’d have found political activism educational. Maybe she’d even be an anarchist today. I love her too much to ask whose sign she’s still waiting for this year . . . Bernie’s, or Hillary’s? Or, if her yard sign was delivered this year, which one it is . . . 😉
When I first came across Larken Rose Exposes Statist Clowns, (Gary Johnson, Austin Petersen & John McAfee) — a Youtube video where Larken Rose expresses annoyance over Adam Kokesh’s endorsement of John McAfee — an objection that could just as easily apply to me, it felt appropriate to do some soul searching. Were my recent posts (re: McAfee) misleading people into politics (which was not my intent)? It seems reasonable to suspect that readers of VinSuprynowicz.com are already quite aware, politically, and largely of a libertarian bent — was my enthusiasm for McAfee (tempered as it is by experience) irresponsible? I don’t recall having any reason to disagree with Larken before, and don’t wish to start now. He’s certainly one of the ablest — and least apologetic — spokesmen for anarchism around, IMO. I admire him for it; he’s good — and not shy — about being just that.
So I was glad to get further perspective from Adam Kokesh, defending said endorsement. Adam recognizes that different individuals come to different conclusions about voting, and activism, and evolve individually. I really appreciate Adam’s ability to keep his cool, avoid using hot button language, the care and compassion with which he speaks. If he truly intends to run for president in 2020, that will be interesting to watch! It’s probably safe to say my own reasons for liking McAfee are similar to Adam’s.
I also enjoyed this episode of Anarchast with Marc Victor: Marc’s one of my favorite speakers (aside from Vin, that is!) — I appreciate Marc’s optimism, and his insightful perspectives. The conversation covers lots of ground — from the freedom-destroying war on drugs, to freedom activism (to vote or not to vote, etc.) to embracing vegetarianism as a personal choice while acknowledging both vegetarianism and voting as matters of conscience, and others should be free to choose.
Yeah, freedom to choose. Whoever you are, wherever you are, someone somewhere will object and want to interfere for some reason. With whatever choice, whenever, wherever you make it. We all make bad choices, given the freedom to do so. That’s how humans learn . . . it may not be the sort of education that’s taught in school, but if schools were in the business of teaching anything useful, mistakes would earn gold stars. If learning were really the objective. If you flunked courses, that might well mean you were a good learner. No more, no less. The educational system failed you, as it was meant to do.
If there is a road to freedom, can it be other than the one you choose for yourself? Proceed with caution, and may the way open before you.
With love, because that’s really all there is in the end … 🙂
May 27th, 2016 at 8:51 pm
Your html makes it so hard to read your posts. Please simplify it. I’m willing to read it, truly. Just leave out the pics or something.
May 28th, 2016 at 9:50 am
Anyone else having trouble viewing the post? Our tech whiz friend — bless him! — says, “The site is legible in every browser & OS combo I tried: Pale Moon, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome, under Win7, Mint Linux, and Android. It works on regular display and on a mobile.”
Vin feels that adding graphics makes posts more interesting, and I agree — but if they are costing us otherwise interested readers, that would be a shame. 🙁
May 28th, 2016 at 12:40 pm
No probs here. Firefox and Android browsers.
May 28th, 2016 at 5:30 pm
Everything looks great on both Firefoxes (MacOS and Android)
May 28th, 2016 at 9:44 pm
Absolutely, real political experience creates Anarchists! That’s how I got into it. (And I could read this just fine on Firefox.)
May 29th, 2016 at 5:11 pm
Thanks, R. and Vince — glad no one else is having trouble with the site. Phew.
Leslie, I’m especially grateful for your feedback — thanks! 🙂
So, now: with Johnson/Weld as the LP’s official presidential picks, up against Trump and Hillary in the weirdest race ever, does anyone else foresee a likely HUGE new crop of anarchists in 2016? 😉
May 29th, 2016 at 8:29 pm
Maybe Berkley Breathed is using a phone to read the site.
My android does fine but the text is small and zooming makes it overlap the edges requiring me to move it back and forth to read it.
Otherwise it looks just fine (maybe a little like fine print!)
IE, Edge, and Chrome are all no problem. And I can zoom the text just fine too.
Sure would be nice for Berkley Breathed to ID the browser being used, that little bit of info would go a long way to answering the problem, eh?
May 29th, 2016 at 8:34 pm
Forgot to say;
Maybe Libertarian is where people who care about the system go when they find it is rigged all to hell and gone.
Then those same people quit bothering with it once they see Libertarians being pushed away by the rigged system?
Thing is, the founders intentionally designed a system that would accept change only with great effort and then apply that change only in very small amounts over a very long time.
May 30th, 2016 at 2:21 am
Actually, there’s pretty good evidence that a significant number of the Founders (if we include A. Hamilton and John Marshall) sold the “system they designed” via intentional fraud, swearing up and down the powers of the central government would be so limited (to foreign affairs, funding a defensive Navy, etc.) that the average person would scarcely feel its impact or remember it existed, from one year to the next.
Then, once the thing was ratified, they simply re-defined “To . . . make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper” to mean “all laws which we shall find handy and convenient . . .”
Today, the “representatives we send” to Washington (choose Millionaire Lawyer A or Millionaire Lawyer B) raise their right hands and swear an oath to “protect and defend the Constitution,” in an act which would not be significantly altered in meaning or impact if each of them intoned “Yabba-dabba-doo; Gabba-gabba-hey; DDT did a job on me, I’m a teen-age lobotomy.”
As many have pointed out, this “system of government” will maintain a state of peace, freedom, and prosperity only in the hands of a people who retain some moral and ethical compass. Left unsaid? “And a capability to be outraged.”
These characters swear to protect and defend with their lives a Constitution which grants the state no power to wage a “War on Drugs” (imprisoning a million — a MILLION — of our non-violent fellow citizens), or to wage undeclared aggressive wars all ’round the world with military expenditures which NEVER EXPIRE. (” . . . but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”)
They swear to protect and defend with their lives a document which bars the federal government from claiming to own or control ANY land within the Western states which has not been “purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings” — let alone more than 40 percent of the land area of California, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.
They swear to protect and defend with their lives a founding document which specifically BARS the central government from restricting private ownership of belt-fed machine guns and rocket launchers (in fact, that government is actually directed to “provide for arming the militia” — I’d like an Abrams tank, please, for the next time a Zoning Code Enforcement Officer comes around), that specifically BARS the central government from imposing by force of law the Green Religion with its grant of precedence over all other concerns to the preservation of weeds and bugs yet to be named, along with its absurd holding that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant that causes global warming.”
They swear to defend a Constitution which bans the imposition of any direct federal tax not sent to the states with an order to collect each state’s share by “capitation” (a provision NOT repealed or altered by the Sixteenth Amendment, which was probably never ratified, anyway.)
Asked where that document authorizes a penalty on those who refuse to “buy health insurance,” Nancy Pelosi replies “Are you serious?!”
These characters violate the Constitution eight ways from Sunday within hours of taking these oaths of office, and no one acts the slightest bit surprised or outraged. To betray such emotions would simply mark us as clueless, unsophisticated rubes.
Where does the “system they designed” authorize the Federal Reserve? The FDA? The IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the federal Department of Education?
The federal government has now seized control of what passes for “education” in the mandatory government youth propaganda camps — right down to edicts concerning the use of lavatories by those who “identify with a sex other than that into which they were born” — and we’re shocked that elections among the “graduates” of these government propaganda camps (“Lincoln freed the slaves!” “Driving is a privilege, not a right!”) have degenerated into a simulacrum of television viewers voting who should be “kicked off the island”?
I was an editor at a major metropolitan newspaper for 20 years. Over those decades, those who hooted with laughter at our attempts to interview all candidates (including retired high-school principals in bow ties, and even some Libertarians) and endorse them based on their political and economic philosophies (regardless of their fund-raising) gradually gained complete dominance.
Eventually, we were ordered to bother with such time-consuming, in-person interviews only in that small number of legislative or Council districts where nearly equal fund-raising (from the locally dominant corporate interests) and voter registration numbers made a race “competitive.” Then, a publisher who’d been promoted from “chief ad salesman” called us in and scrapped THAT deal in about 30 seconds, simply telling us without rationale several collectivists who we were to endorse (often apparently based on ethnicity and/or interventions by advertisers) while insisting endorsements in most of the rest of the races could be more quickly and easily decided simply by reviewing their Web sites . . . by tomorrow morning.
Are all these the changes the Founders meant to be imposed on us only incrementally, over a long period of time? Are we to believe they — or anyone else who’d just risked their lives and fortunes, and seen plenty of their comrades bayoneted to death — would want to see their descendants content to attempt to CORRECT this situation only by very small degrees, over a long period of time?
The Libertarian Party is dominated by small former Republicans in skinny neckties who ran and hid under the bed in terror from the idea that the party might gain some national attention through the candidacies of anyone as controversial, outspoken, and in-your-face as Russell Means or Howard Stern . . . or John McAfee. Far more important to them is being judged “credible” and “mainstream” and winning plaudits for “working responsibly within the system” as they discuss the latest essay in Reason magazine on school vouchers or toll roads at some cocktail party at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or who knows where else “inside the Beltway.”
By pursuing this course of gradual, incremental. non-confrontational, inoffensive change — which the party began FORTY YEARS AGO — when do we expect to free the majority of American youth from the absurd dumbing-down of the “public schools” through the adoption of some dynamite “voucher plan”? By 2040? By 2080? When then will we get around to ending the War on Drugs? By 2150? By 2300?
In 1993, William Weld endorsed a ban on the kind of semi-automatic rifles wrongly dubbed “assault rifles” if their magazines hold more than 15 rounds. Do you know what the “welcome” signs said (and presumably still say) as you drove into his state of Massachusetts? “Have a gun, go to jail.”
Under four years of Bill Weld’s “budget-slashing” governorship, state spending in Massachusetts climbed by 25.4 percent. (http://www.city-journal.org/html/bill-weld's-revolution-wasn't-12372.html .)
That’s the second standard bearer of today’s LP.
Asked in the Las Vegas debate two weeks back if he’d get the federal government out of the business of funding scientific research, Barack Obama said he’d have a group of “experts” report to him on whether proposed research projects were likely to generate more in returns than what they cost. Oh, I’m sorry, did I just report that “Barack Obama” said that? I meant “Gary Johnson.” It’s so easy to get confused. I believe it was also Mr. Johnson who said he didn’t see much need to change Mr. Obama’s policy on the use of drones to kill people overseas.
I’ve often said the best thing that’s happened to the LP is that it HASN’T managed to elect a Bob Barr or a Gary Johnson or a Bill Weld. How long after the victory speech do you think it would take for these guys to start selling out the platform? (“Well, obviously, Rachel, politics is the art of the possible, and a lot of those platform planks represent long-term goals adopted years ago under quite different circumstances on which we’re certainly not going to waste a lot of our political capital during the first term . . .”)
The LP has turned its ballot access — its only major asset, as these guys see it — over to third-tier Republicans who will plead with the Presidential Debate Commission (which is owned by the Republicrat and Demopublican parties — I don’t mean that metaphorically; I mean they OWN it) to allow them to sit at the folding table in the corner and share the punch and cookies with the grownups if they promise to speak only when spoken to.
The Commission has promised to allow this to happen if Gary Johnson registers at 15 percent — no, I think it was 20 percent — no, no, I’m SURE we said 25 percent — in at least one, no, I think we said two-out-of-three — no, no, three-out-of five, that’s the ticket, I’m sure it was three-out of five national polls . . . which have to be conducted on Wednesdays, I’m sure we mentioned the Wednesday part, didn’t we? . . .
Republics turn into empires which turn into totalitarian police states until the troops mutiny over being paid in a worthless, devalued fiat currency. Reversing this course is easy: People who have found that progression a good way to amass personal wealth and power just have to be convinced to give up their ill-gotten wealth and power, and go back to earning an honest living, producing something that consumers are willing to buy. You know, the way (should they lose this election) I’m sure we’ll find Gary Johnson and Hillary Clinton next year wearing colorful hats, working in some frozen yogurt stand.
Alert for the irony-deprived: in other words, it’s NOT likely to be be gradual, incremental, or orderly. Chaos theory teaches us sometimes you wake up the next morning, the Yellowstone caldera has blown up, and it’s the Ice Age.
It’s a hard rain gonna fall.
May 30th, 2016 at 10:07 am
As usual you nail a lot of it.
Most of your comment covers the last 40 years.
I think things were working, reasonably well, until this country fell for “The Other America” hype.
While there were hungry people here, there were far more in places where the authors political leanings came from.
This is what has made all the rest of your details possible since then. It does seem, to me, most of our worst problems really took hold just about the time that book became such an influence on our society.
June 16th, 2016 at 8:47 am
I’m reading on an iPad. No probs. Don’t have smartphone. Speculate that the busy layout might not work well on tiny screens. Have you got a mobile-specific rendering?
June 16th, 2016 at 5:25 pm
Thanks, Terrymac — “mobile-specific rendering” sounds like something exceeding our technical capabilities, so probably not, unless it’s through WordPress. I do have an old Android “smart” phone, but find it nearly useless for web browsing … it’s OK for calls and texting. It’s a crappy phone, basically — I should upgrade, since I’m paying for the data service anyway.
Not one other person has reported problems, so far as I know … but I’ll try to avoid using so many graphics in future. I’m sure they could be annoying on a tiny screen. Vin and I are old farts, I guess … we both still use desktop computers. 😉