ClaytonB
Member

What difference does it make whether the shooting is real or fake? I don't mean that in the moral sense -- obviously, a real shooting is a real tragedy that occurs to the victims and their families, and a fake shooting is a real tragedy to that occurs to everyone else. But this isn't about "what really happened". At this point, it is clear that we will never know until judgment day, anyway, because of the Soviet levels of fakery and propaganda in the US MSMBS news. No, this is about The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I don't care about the headlines anymore and I won't care until it becomes clear that there has been a genuine change in my country (my neighbors, community, and so on) that restores truth and transparency at every level of the public sphere. Until then, we're in The Matrix as far as I'm concerned, and the Agents are madly twiddling the dials of the simulation to convince us all to go along with "THE AGENDA", aka the Beast / "Great" Reset System. Why would I invest even one iota of emotional energy trying to decode the mad ramblings of the Agents in the "news" headlines? Until things change, really change, The Boy Who Cried Wolf will simply be ignored...

Funny how they've been saying that for decades, and yet they invest unimaginable resources into controlling/containing the message of liberty. Almost like they know that if the ideas of freedom ever start to germinate in the minds of our children, they're doomed. Because that's exactly what it is. They're the ones fighting gravity, not us. Liberty wins by default. The straitjacket of government school indoctrination is the only thing standing between the clown-"elites" and political annihilation, and they know that better than anyone. They are terrified of liberty. Statism loses by default. Liberty wins by default. STATISTS ARE NOTHING ON THEIR OWN

:confused: This makes too much sense, especially in the light of current events...

It's no surprise that SPLC has no clue what it's talking about. The Mises Caucus isn't right-wing... its namesake is a Jewish academic who literally fled Europe during the rise of the Nazi party. Mises himself was not especially culturally conservative beyond a personal affect that comes across as slightly grumpy "get off my lawn" snobbery. As far as I can tell, Mises was an evolutionist and was broadly secularist. To call MC "right-wing" -- with all the siegheiling imagery that that term invokes -- is moronic at best. Coming out of the mouth of the SPLC, though, it's desperate and transparent propaganda. While MC itself is definitely on the conservative end of the cultural spectrum, I don't think that the MC would make moderns feel uncomfortable. It doesn't emanate from R-Swamp "Christian" conservatism, it's something the DC Swamp has never seen before. It is historically unprecedented. They and their D-Swamp counterparts in the SPLC are right to be afraid. It has the potential to smash the current political status quo.

I am not the one spinning. This sub-discussion began by me pointing out that the term "libertarian socialism" doesn't really make sense, because the usage of the word "socialism" almost exclusively means State-administered socialism. There are other words that more accurately describe what you are talking about -- mutualism, co-op, communalism, and so on. The word socialism, like "democracy", has been politicized on purpose. It cannot and will never serve the interests of freedom, no matter how broadly conceived, because it has been corrupted to mean something that is fundamentally incompatible with freedom, whether freedom to live in an agricultural commune with other like-minded people, or any other type of freedom. I "get" what you're trying to say, but the word "socialism" is fundamentally broken. It's like when Russell Brand says "democracy". I know what he means. He just means freedom, empowering the little guy to make decisions for himself and not be ordered around by the big guys, whether big capitalist guys or big bureaucrat guys. But the word "democracy" itself is corrupted and it will inevitably act like a glass-ceiling on Brand's ability to articulate his own points. The Marxists are far cleverer than you suppose -- they have set word traps specifically to derail the development of thinking of those who are starting to break out of "The System". As soon as you start to break out, you step in a pothole and fall over again. Which is the point. I'm not confused about what you're saying... I know you're not a Marxist. I'm warning you that the word "socialism" is more broken than you realize. It was a distribution under the oversight of the apostles. Note that the individual believers were free (but not obligated) to sell their own property. In other words, it was their property to sell or not sell, Peter didn't just wave a magic wand and confer title of all properties of believers to himself. If anything, Acts 5 (and 2, by proxy) is a massive affirmation of the principles of freedom and private property. You are correct that Acts shows us that the exercise of authority within the church is intended to perform a kind of cooperative distribution of wealth in the case of emergencies or in other cases in order to meet the needs of the body, to the glory of God (in other words, not for the purposes of human aggrandizement). In fact, this is the very kind of distribution that useful-idiot communists falsely believe they can implement through the godless State. But it is not possible for human systems to administer the Kingdom of God... only the divinely appointed hierarchy can perform this work, through the living work of the Holy Spirit -- direct, divine theocracy. That is precisely what the Kingdom of God will be when it has arrived in fullness, see Is. 65, Jer. 31, Joel 2:28ff, Rev. 20-22, etc.

OK BOOMER :rolleyes: The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them. (Psalm 2:4) Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; They are regarded as dust on the scales; He weighs the islands as though they were fine dust... Before him all the nations are as nothing; They are regarded by him as worthless And less than nothing.

In the political space, you are right. But in academics, we know what we're talking about (definitions actually matter). I own my body in respect to all other humans... no other human has a higher claim on my body than I do. While you are right that my ownership is not an absolute title (I did not create it, it was given to me by God), that is the case for all things we call "owned", so it's a distinction without a difference for the purposes of this discussion. What makes ownership of the body uniquely important versus, say, owning a car or a house, is that my body is inalienable ... I can't get rid of it because, without it, I am unable to act in the world. It is a logically necessary precondition to any other action in the world. Thus, if we suppose that someone else could own my body, I would be leashed or enslaved to them, unable to act directly in the world but, instead, forced to go through the "access layer" of their permission/refusal. This construct is extremely broad and includes almost all of what we mean when we discuss "government", which shows that most of what people mean when discussing "government" would better be called slavery. Socialism requires the shared ownership of all property. The "socialist libertarian" can't explain how this can be universalized, while still leaving individuals free to make choices. After all, Suzie does not own Suzie's body, "the community" owns her body. Should "the community" vote to make Suzie a sexual companion for everyone in the community who chooses to make use of her, she would have no logical/moral objection to that on the basis of a consistently socialistic system. And as soon as we say, "Everything is shared except ______" we're right back to capitalism (that is, freedom and private property) since many things are already shared, such as the air we breathe, the beauty of the landscape and the skies, and so on. The idea of sharing cannot be universalized because it immediately leads to contradiction. It only makes sense within a restricted framework. Even Nature shows us this. My body is a "socialistic" organization of cells. No cell works for itself, each cells is performing an assigned role that contributes to the whole. However, the order between organisms is competitive (market-like), not cooperative. The deer does not walk into my backyard, lay down and breath its last just in time for me to fire up the barbecue. No, I have to hunt the animal down and, if it senses me, it will run away from me, as it ought to do. That is the principle of freedom and self-direction (private property) in action. A family or a church is like a body... there is an "ingroup" and "outgroup". Everything in the ingroup contributes to the benefit of that group, as it ought to. And everything that is in the outgroup is left to its own devices, as it ought to be. The idea of universalizing socialism is like trying to make the entire Cosmos into a single, cancer-like, overgrown mono-mind and mono-body.

It's possible to have such a discussion, but 99.999% of the time, when the word "socialism" is used, what is meant is a State-administered socialism. Which is why it's best to choose some other, more descriptive word to avoid confusion. In the snipped post and in your other posts, you're all over the map. I'll save both of us a lot of time by just noting at the outset that we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this issue. The Kingdom of God is neither capitalist nor socialist, it is a universal, absolute monarchy and it is administered by a theocratic order. It is present on the earth today, and it has always been (although it was particularly officiated by Jesus when he came to earth). Socialism versus capitalism have nothing more to do with this aspect of theology than the debate over quantum mechanics versus special relativity in the theory of gravity do. The facts of the world are what they are, no matter whether anybody likes it or not. Even God cannot make 2+2 equal something other than 4. The facts about decision-making -- and how those facts are affected by different legal regimes regarding property rights -- are what they are, no matter what anybody thinks about them. As a monarchy, the Kingdom of God is neither communist nor capitalist, it is the divine-will. What God decrees within his Kingdom is the order within that Kingdom. He makes this crystal clear in the Bible: "Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit." (Matthew 21:43) God retains the absolute, unqualified right to reassign property (including life itself, Deut. 32:39) to anyone he sees fit.

It has nothing to do with assuming anything, it has to do with The Boy Who Cried Wolf. If you want to play the Fake News game, then this is the bed you have made, so sleep in it. The liar is not believed even when he tells the truth. So what is real and what is fake? I don't give a damn, it's all fake lies as far as I'm concerned. The Media has wholly and completely discredited itself and that's on them, not me. Their job is very simple: write down or verbally report what you see and hear. Instead, we have Alex-Jones-level clown-world fakery and showmanship wrapped in Nordstrom pencil skirts and stern faces being pawned off as "the 6 o'clock news". Clown World is Clown World, so let's get this circus started...

There are other causes. A robber baron society is characterized by wealth-inequality. In fact, we see exactly this kind of wealth-inequality everywhere in the world except in those times and places where the principles of private property and freedom have held up -- Christian countries, to put it bluntly. If I am not becoming wealthy through crime, my wealth does not harm you no matter how large it is. "Yeah, but you should share." Maybe I should, but you're still not being harmed, so there really isn't a legal argument here, just an ethical one (potentially). But socialism is never content to remain an ethical debate, it's always a legal/political agenda, camouflaged as a "discussion" about "how to improve society" by "helping the poor" with "the wealth of the greedy rich." The anti-freedom NPCs have to conflate wealth created through illegal activity (most political wealth), and wealth built through honest trade. Of course, the system of crony capitalism so muddies the waters that it is virtually impossible to tell them apart. The big name billionaires of our day are all indirect beneficiaries of political corruption, one way or another. I think it was Thomas Sowell who pointed out that even the funding and building of roads by the State is an implicit subsidy of all car-owners because they benefit disproportionately from such spending, vis-a-vis the truly poor who cannot even afford to own a car. This is why we cannot allow the socialists to control the discussion, because they want to draw the boundaries of the discussion just so that we don't have to talk about the hidden logical contradictions in socialism/communism. In this way, they are able to pass off their nonsense gibberish as sounding plausible or even inevitable. The concentration of enormous wealth in the hands of a tiny elite is a symptom that something is wrong in your society. But attacking the inequality itself is like trying to cure skin cancer with skin salve. You're evading the root cause altogether and just trying to treat symptoms. And in the course of doing that, you only play into the hands of whatever is actually causing the problem by failing to address it. First, you must diagnose the disease. Then, it is possible to choose an effective treatment and be healed. But the socialists want us all to run around like chickens with our heads cut off screaming slogan-counter-slogans at each other. Divide-and-rule.

^^^ DING! DING! DING! You successfully completed all levels of Clown World! Prepare for the Boss Clown Fight!

The article is serviceable for this discussion. Either works for me. Once again, only by playing word-games. Is my body my property or not? If it is my property, then we are not socialist. If it is not my property, then neither are my vocal cords or the fingers I am typing this with. So you have abject tyranny, in principle, whether or not the social order actually works out all the ramifications of that. Property is not merely stuff and things. Property is the exclusive right-of-use. This is easily seen in timeshares, for example. The time-shared beach-house does not completely belong to any one holder of a timeshare, it belongs to all of them, together. But the property right of each individual shareholder consists in their right-of-use of the premises for the allotted time. There are countless such examples and, in fact, these kinds of intangible properties are far more numerous than actual physical properties. In the end, every resource must have a single owner within its extents because, otherwise, you are trying to jam two families into a time-share at the same time, which defeats the whole point of even having a time-share. This is as true in Marxist communism as it was in free wheeling 19th-century American capitalism. It's not about "social norms", it's about causal structures. It's simply impossible to have two independent decision-makers simultaneously controlling the same resource. There is only one steering-wheel in a car for a reason... steering and control of a vehicle is not a "sum-of-effort" activity, it is a sole-decision-making activity. This is the logical structure of all property and all decision-making, regardless of the political rhetoric it is wrapped in. The Marxist commissar is the de facto owner of the resources for which he is the final decision-maker, just as much as JP Morgan was the owner of the gold in his vaults. We can play word-games and pretend there is some distinction between these, but there is none, it is the very same thing wrapped in different flags and national anthems.

While your feelings are valid, this is also the single weakest argument against socialism and communism, because the socialists/communists just wave it away as special pleading. Of course the king likes being king... he's king! Of course the "white privileged" love their white privilege... they're privileged! The two most powerful arguments against socialism/communism are based on (a) logic and (b) historical evidence. Logically, socialism is inherently contradictory and fraught with impossible constraints. It "works" as long as you don't think about it too carefully. In a worker-owned fast-food joint, who cleans the toilets? Somebody has to do it. And it's equal pay for all. "Easy, just rotate it." OK, but who decides that? In other words, any proposed solution to deciding who cleans the toilet just creates a new problem of who has the job (rank, privilege) of making that decision, and then we have a new problem of the same form, just bigger. And so on up the chain of socialist decision-making. In the limit, the problem is that the individual in a socialist society technically has no will -- you do not own your own will, it belongs to "society". But who is this "society" and how does it ever reach decisions when all of its constituents have no will of their own?? This is only the first of many devastating logical problems with socialism. And the historical evidence perfectly bears out the logical predictions. The fact is that, in socialist societies, nobody ever cleans the bathrooms. If you've ever lived in a dormitory (not prison, not military), you will know that one of the biggest difficulties is deciding who will clean the bathroom and kitchen, sweep the halls, and other matters like that. Even when the landlord or some other authority figure hands down a fixed order of assigned duties, you find that some members are supremely skilled at skipping out of them. And so the privileged elite in a socialist society are precisely these people -- those who are supremely skilled at skipping out on duties. Ultimately, that's what the Party is. A few years ago, I worked in a church facility crew for a few months. As a rule, we didn't have this problem. The cleaning assignments were always done to excellence regardless of who they were assigned to, or on what shifts. What is the secret ingredient in church work that is missing from godless socialism? Oh yes, faith in God. In other words, the belief and practice of a "God-seen life" leads to a social order where duties can be assigned without respect to payment for time, and people will do them because they understand and believe that what they are doing is done in the sight of God. I don't think they are motivated by guilt and fear, either, they are motivated primarily by devotion. And the real insult of most socialist discussion is that we are "supposed to" talk about socialist society in these terms, while ignoring the reality that people, apart from God, will only do whatever is the bare minimum to skirt by and maintain their own personal life and interests.

Yes. I have the very same pet peeve. On this very topic, to boot. Only by playing word games. From Wiki: "Socialism is a political philosophy and economic system based on the collective ownership and control of the means of production; as well as the political and economic theories, ideologies and movements that aim to establish a socialist system." The key problem is in "collective ownership and control". Suppose the subway mugger informs me that he and I collectively own my wallet. OK, fine, so be it, but who decides how my wallet will get used? That's always the question that the mythical "non-state" socialists can never answer. The mugger has an answer: he's got a gun to me and so I'll kindly hand over the wallet if I value my life. The "non-state" socialists either have no answer (they just never thought about it, or assume it "will all just work out") or they have a hidden agenda (hidden gun). Either way, they're no better than the openly statist socialists. Both are equally dangerous and both are paths to tyranny.

"Socialism" is a bit of a misnomer for this. Mutualism, community/agricultural co-op, etc. are more accurate terms that describe some of the variations on this that have been tried over the years. Nobody will stop you from experimenting in this way. In fact, one sure-fire sign that you are living in a free society is that there is a broad diversity of forms of social organization in different communities. The more uniform and cookie-cutter communities are, the more sure you can be that they are the product of a monopolistic, nepotistic, tyrannical central State that either controls the market outright (socialism and communism) or indirectly (crony capitalism, lobbies, bribery, etc.) In other words, an ancap society that does not have pockets of mutualists, co-ops, (private) communes, and the like, is not actually free, it's a pirate oligarchy with a patina of liberty. As I wrote in a post in another thread a few days ago, the issue is scale. A family household is a communist organization. The parents (traditionally, just the father) owns the means of production. The children own nothing, not even their clothing. The few naive communists out there who "really believe" it could work "if done right" fall into this trap because they imagine that it is possible to universalize a family structure at a nation-state scale. And that's simply impossible. The communal structure of a family breaks down somewhere in the range of a few dozen people. Extended family structures allow this to be scaled up to the range of perhaps a few hundred people, but beyond that, it simply disintegrates into a sham where everybody pays lip service to "the way it oughtta be" then goes out the door and does whatever it is they have to do to survive. Tribal scale, community scale, agricultural national scale and industrial national scale... each of these is unique and no one social structure is appropriate for all of them. But the final social order, the one that is "above all" orders will always be the order consisting of no order, that is, no imposed order. "Anarchy" is the correct term in respect to human rule. The only global order is the order that emerges from the state-of-affairs as it is. Applying the chisel to the stone mountain does not make it better, it only leaves behind a bunch of unsightly scratches. Everybody has an opinion about how the mountain can be improved by chiseling it this way or that way but, in the end, the mountain remains unchanged and indifferent, too large to be moved or even significantly altered by human hands.

^^^THIS Silent economic devastation...

I know that these events are "supposed to" play for the D-swamp gun-control agenda... but have we considered the possibility that they may have lost control of the beast they have conjured from the Abyss in order to orchestrate this garbage? These more recent mass shootings seem... absurd, in the sense that they appear to be equally politically damaging to either side. It's obvious that they have been baiting a mass-shooting by some kind of "disgruntled, heavily-armed white-supremacist" for decades, in the hopes that that will be the 911 event for a nationwide gun-grab. "Bowling for Columbine", in other words. They keep throwing gutter-balls but, until the doomsday virus, at least they were throwing the balls down the lane in the direction of the pins. Now, it appears that they are just dropping the bowling ball in the urinal and then proceeding to scribble all over the bowling lane with sidewalk chalk. It seems to me that something has changed in mass shooting headlines...

Got a few chuckles out of this...

Direct link to the archive of the deleted document

Yep. And there is more to the world than meets the eye. The worldly are doomed to forever wander in an endless wilderness of confusion because they refuse to acknowledge God, which requires them to admit that there are forces beyond their understanding and heavenly action beyond their sight and hearing. These issues cannot be divorced from their spiritual significance, which is what the worldly want to do. Children are, indeed "gender-fluid" to a large degree, at least, until they reach a certain age. In their innocence, you have to tell the boys that they will grow up to be like Dad and the girls that they will grow up to be like Mom. They are lost otherwise. The predatory groomers do not see this stage of life as a necessary developmental step in any human life, rather, they only see it as an "opportunity" to fulfill their perverted desires. This is what is at stake. But this is only the mouth of hell... it is not hell itself... and there is no bottom to the Abyss, so this madness goes on and on, forever. Those who profess that any opening for their predatory desires is fair game do not understand that they are sentencing themselves, under the principle of estoppel, to the very same fate. They imagine themselves as big grownup adults that are in full control of their own fates. But they are just babes in a vast spiritual wasteland that they have never even imagined, and the infernal predators hunting them are infinitely more malicious and perverted than they are...

Pepe Cyrus