It’s Jon, short for Jonathan, and not a variation of John.

I think you are accurately describing a state of Mindless Consumerism. I wish you could go on radio and do that analysis in a Howard Cosell accent.

I had the opportunity to listen to AM newsradio for several hours yesterday due to a long road trip. Its incredible how they can talk so much without saying anything while presenting it with such a tone of importance! All the newscasters sound like polite versions of Classy Freddie Blassie, yelling, screaming, arguing while accomplishing nothing in terms of information dissemination. And if you disagree with them, you’re the idiot!!

By the way Colonel Kip Coyote was probably Dick Cheney’s favorite cartoon hero. The little Indian brave makes more sense than most of our newscasters. I see plenty lots of analogies here about the Mideast war if you take the time to watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BJwK9HWJGk&NR

Scott

Yeah you’re right, but compared to what?

…Goddamn me…Yeah, I suppose it does make a terrible kinda sense

…True enough Red…It’s impossible for most people to dislike anyone who makes them laugh

You fail to recognize that they are serious when they are laughing because it is only a way of not crying, and you think they are trivializing when it is only you that fails to get the joke.

If they are laughing they are trivializing it, lol, that’s why they laugh. Put yourself in the position of an Iraqi watching that show with his shit blown up and his family dead. They should cry, and so should you… those people in Iraq aren’t laughing. Are you saying laughing and crying are now so closely related that you, nor anyone else can tell the difference anymore? What does this say about the state of the culture, if it is so? Gone are the days when these two could be seperated? I don’t believe that, in fact, I do believe you are right. But does this mean they must laugh, because they are to weak to cry? They don’t want to face reality? Laughing is cathartic, in this case, like valium or any other drug, it’s an escape from reality, and prolongs the inevitable. This is human nature, sometimes on display more then other times. Path of least resistance, lets see is they laugh when Bush attacks Iran. Realize that hundreds of thousands of people are dying over this.

Here’s the cultural calling that we’ve been asking for, he’s here…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Luis_De_Jesus_Miranda

Check out the links at the bottom, I just saw a special of him on CNN, saint or sinner, his followers are getting 666 tatoos. I don’t think those followers are human, (are people that dumb?) paper paper mache or playdough is my guess…

I’m not rich, Mace Price, my wife and I live on a student stipend and some contract work between ourselves. You have nothing but vague insults to offer, apparently, and no matter whether they are factually based.

As for Redrum, go cry yourself. You should. Don’t ask a comedian to cry for you.

…Yeah I know, I’m a horrible man, I’ve even enjoyed it. In fact I’m a worthless mother fucker and the bane of convention, privilege, hierarchical oppression and the draconian instrument the law. I hold that Politics are diabolic. That given half a chance people are no damned good, that there is an ulterior motive to every act of altruism, that most men are loathe to pass a chance to be a hero, that humanity is an abstraction at best, and that those beneath the division of labor are by and large, doomed to an existence of ignorance and destitution…Having lived these bitter realities I would know…you having never done so, would not…Indeed I have very little to offer the suffering masses that you claim to love so deeply, but exist apart from, nothing whatever in fact, outside an indignant catalogue of hateful truths. As is said, Veritas Parit Odom. If people are to a certain extent, a product of their experiences, bear in mind that experience is a dim light that only illuminates the path of he who bears it. I have very little to offer, and I have never claimed to. But you conversely, have much to offer, it amounts to dutifully unoriginal cant and over civilized, flexible rhetoric the comprises the neo-Marxist Party line. You’re a Clintonista builder of bridges that will lead you to a place on the ant heap…If Western Civilization, that you strive to be arbiter of, is at least predicated on the individual; I would say to you, cease to be ruled by the authorities and dogma of men like Strobe Talbot, Anthony Blair, Carl Jung, Carla Del Ponti, and Kofi Anon…Step back from that bong, look at the world around you…and think for yourself.

…I am a portrait of courtesy itself

Once upon a time, the Democrats were the party that represented lower tariffs, lower taxes, more rights, more freedom. I think that perhaps once again they can not only be a party of victims but of opportunity.

That is how they must bill themselves, the party of open-ness, opportunity, and liberty. If they are to hold on to this recent success.

Mace…..When they do your story do you want Mickey Rourke, Ben Gazarra, or Matt Dillon?

James Dean was a fag?

Mace, I would find this amusing if your rhetoric wasn’t mainly supportive of Republicans by default. I’m not a party loyalist, I’m an American, and right now we need to help the Democrats but next year or the year after that we might not. Can we at least agree that the most dangerous person on the scene right now is Dick Cheney?

hell yeah, I’m a liberal, too.

I wonder if Arthur Fonzarelli (Fonzi) knew about James Dean?

Mudshark, will you torture someone if it might protect your property?

I’ve never seen the show, just a few clips and quotes that people have linked to. I have no idea why their very tepid criticisms of the cretins who rule America are so popular.

and at the moment the people who are in a position to do something to remove power from those most dangerous to our liberty require, if not our support in all that they do, at least some respect and constructive help in doing what we know they must do.

More Nock for you: “The Cleveland Administration had long before proved what everybody already knew, that there was no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; an election meant merely that one was in office and wished to stay in, and the other was out and wished to get in.”

And some more: “The general upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy, the mechanism of the State would work freely and naturally in but one direction, namely, against the general welfare of the people.”

Letting people choose whether the overseer holds the whip with his left hand or his right hand isn’t something to be excited about. And regardless of which group of thieves and murderers are in power, they will never be deserving of respect or ‘constructive help’.

Cous cous, well said, and true, Nock was a defeatist through and through, he considered himself a superfluous man writing to posterity, with no hope of making a difference in his own time.

And to whom do you address your own letters? Who will read them and care?

Or do you think, hope against hope, they might make some difference? If so, then let me say for the record they do, you make minds turn one way or another, by your ability to persuade and demonstrate your believability. It reminds me of a friend whose wife accused him of adultery for many years, and then he got tired of it and had an affair.

Self-defeatism was perhaps not Nock’s problem, for he was at the point he wrote beyond the point his generation could matter, the Rooseveltians had swept in and discredited the Republicans of his day, and deservedly so, and for all the harm you might ascribe to the state since then, it was harmful long before then, and at least we still have some liberty to speak and write which you would not long retain under Republican administration.

To say all government is evil is false, but even if the state and the government were necessarily the same thing, it is manifestly true that some are more evil than others. I do not ask for your help to support what you consider evil, but your forbearance and understanding, because you might discover that what I am attempting to do is not what you think.

will you torture someone if it might protect your property?

meh, that depends on what you’re cosidering ‘property’ - fwiw, ‘don’t think so. too much like drama. it is uneventful and I don’t possess the patience and/or dementia it would require. if you are refering to ‘private property’, as in land, there are a very few who actually “own” any property that isn’t taxed by government and in turn belonging to “the State”, so why would one torture someone else over something that doesn’t really belong to them in the first place and are under the misconception there is something to protect, in effect acting as an agent of the “State”?

the only thing you own is yourself, and if someone thinks they can take that from you, they can explain their actions to whoever, they think, their creator is and see how far that gets them… that is, of course, after they reassemble the contents of what was once contained in their skull.

Cous cous, it could be that our difficulty is terminological. Do you accept the value of having social organizations which provide services to their subscribers, and which rate their membership dues by some formula which takes into consideration the ability of each member to pay? If such an organization is joined voluntarily and can be withdrawn from, would you consider it necessarily a bad thing? The fundamental right which I think you are looking for is the ability to withdraw your own participation and support in any organization you find objectionable, but unless you are going to go off in the wilderness to live by yourself you will probably need to participate and support in some kind of social organization at some point in your life. What I want to get to is a point that there is a voluntary subscription to government, and not necessarily the same government as one another, in the same way as some people subscribe voluntarily to a church.

Mudshark, the fundamental monopoly propping up the state is land, as you say. Thus property as a basis of rights founders if you want to abolish the state.

Some of our differences are due to language, while others are not. Voluntary cooperation is good while involuntary servitude is bad. Charity and commerce are examples of the former while government is always the latter.

You’re right about the ‘withdrawing participation from objectionable organizations’ part, but wrong about having to go into the wilderness to do so. All economic and social exchange can be voluntary. I can freely purchase anything (food, clothes, medicine, security, etc) from whoever offers the best deal, and I can freely associate with whoever I wish. Government is not necessary for any of that.

Property can either be private or public (owned by the government). This means private property is an essential bulwark against the State. The only monopoly propping up the State is its monopoly on crime. It doesn’t exist to protect property rights or any other rights; it exists to violate them.

If a private criminal tries to rob or murder you, then you can legally defend yourself. If the State tries to rob or murder you, then defending yourself suddenly becomes illegal. The State monopolizes crime and only cares about suppressing the competition. As you’ve noticed, it isn’t very good at it.

Being allowed to resist a private criminal obviously doesn’t mean that you will always be able to do so. If it did, there would be no crime. It means you won’t go to prison for telling them “No”. Telling the State “No” makes it highly probable that your future will be spent in a cage or coffin. Voting for a new godfather won’t change this.

You can legally tell a private criminal “No”. The “No” is more persuasive if you’re large or armed. You can’t legally tell the State “No”, and they are larger and more heavily armed than all the private criminals combined.

If you’re acknowledging that law doesn’t stop crime and that crime isn’t suddenly legal when the government does it, then I’d agree. Laws exist to punish anyone who infringes on the States various monopolies: murder, robbery, counterfeiting, etc.

As I wrote in the other thread: “Since the government commits every crime imaginable without preventing non-governmental crime, the absence of government would merely remove the largest criminal entity from society.”