The militia movement has long since been infiltrated by the FBI. However, I'm seeing a flood of "sponsored" and slick-looking militia videos on YT all of a sudden. WTF? In a down economy, where are these guys finding the spare cash to make slick productions and promote them on YT??
etc.
If you feel the urge to 'get involved', reach out to your friends and neighbors with the peaceful message of liberty. Do (real) charitable work. Spread peace, love, warmth, positivity. Where there is sorrow, be happy. Where there is weakness, be strong.
Who asked any of these militia guys to defend them from the government? If you want to defend your property, fine. If you want to form a private defense collective with other people and defend each other's properties, fine. But if you start wandering the streets with weapons, the public will not perceive you as their defenders and the Feds will descend on you with their drones and their Blackhawks like so many fish in a barrel. Have you ever been on the business end of a mini-gun? An AC-130 gunship?
I sure hope we get a reprieve from the Elites. It's been over a decade of this crap, half of which I was duped and didn't mind it but now I see what they're up to and it's just maddening. We need to go back to honest money, honest governance, honest business (honest day's work), honest legal system. I've been think of two words a lot lately that I think pretty much sum up the type of people among the ranks of the public who are being empowered by the NWO bullshit: posers and assholes.
The posers are multiplying left and right. They're promoting. Their businesses are booming. They're the people who look really busy all the time but, when you just scratch under the surface, you find they actually produce nothing of value. The assholes, too, are rising. They're the people who just have to spread the misery. Miserable little mean-spirited people who have never accomplished anything of value in their own life and, therefore, have to tear down everything of beauty and value around them. And the one attribute they have in common is banality - limitless, monotonous, mind-numbing, lobotomized mediocrity. At root, these people are sociopaths. In a saner world, they would be shining shoes or begging in the streets but, today, they're your boss, your lawyer... the parking meter guy.
We don't need a militia, we need the sane people of the world to shake of their self-doubt, stand-up and say to the mediocre horde: "You are fools." That's it. The sane people will start to recognize each other - "Hey look, there's someone else that isn't intimated by all the posers and assholes!" Before long, you will have a thriving community of adults in a position to help - really help - all these mediocre buffoons with pretenses to competence.
Liberty starts inside of you. It is only a means to an end. Your life, your family, your friends, neighbors and community - in that order - these are the ends which liberty enables you to attain. Unite or die? What has unity ever given me? Why should I - a resident of Portland - want to unite with Boston? Share what you know with those around you and perhaps they will recognize in themselves the beauty, strength and will to be free that each of us has. And to hell with the mediocre horde!
Clayton -
So...what do I do?
"Do (real) charitable work. Spread peace, love, warmth, positivity. Where there is sorrow, be happy. Where there is weakness, be strong."
Truly words to live by.
And how do I do that?
Do you know someone in your life who's unhappy?
Start a business. Plant some flowers for the little old lady next door. Build a thriving social life outside of work. Join a cult. Whatever it takes.
This NWO crap is like a storm. The more you focus on it, the more it controls you and those around you. The more you resolve to be happy regardless of the misery that the Elites are spreading through the world, the more you focus on solidarity with family, friends and community, the more resilient and powerful you make your local social network. Stick to community. Let the politics do whatever it's got to do. All the schemes of the political elites will shatter against strong, tight-knit communities like an ocean wave against a solid rock. The only way they can control us is by disassociating us.
@ Neodoxy
Fortunately no.
@ Clayton
Very interesting.
"Fortunately no."
I might look a little harder if I were you.
@Clayton
First video: Creepy!
Second video: I like how he walks in with the helmet on and then proceeds to take it off as he begins to speak. It reminds me of what Glenn Beck begins to read some passage in his production notes with his glasses on and the takes them off to look at the camera so as to portray frankness.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
SkepticalMetal: So...what do I do?
Finish your education and then join a seasteading company of some sort, on the blue frontier of freedom.
Join the military, learn the tricks of the state.
Then use them against the state.
If you ought to wrestle with a brutal institution, you ought to become brutal yourself.
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
Kelvin Silva: Join the military, learn the tricks of the state. Then use them against the state. If you ought to wrestle with a brutal institution, you ought to become brutal yourself.
You really wanna sign away your fate and ability to choose? Join the military and they will claim the right to "re-activate" you against your will practically for life.
Besides, military skills aren't what we need to win.
We need wealthy and knowledgeable patrons, intellectuals, and builders / entrepreneurs. Learn / preach, invest, or do; your choice.
You're right, they can stop loss you.
Neodoxy: "Do (real) charitable work. Spread peace, love, warmth, positivity. Where there is sorrow, be happy. Where there is weakness, be strong." Truly words to live by.
Sounds more like fluff to me. Just live as an individual. Don't be the aggressor, but vehemently defend your life, freedom and private property.
@ Kelvin Silva
Sorry, but there's no way in hell I could ever join the military.
And why is that?
@ Skeptic
Because if you don't have anyone who's close to you who isn't happy then you're extremely lucky. If there's no one you know who is trouble then you either know very few people or you're blessed beyond all imagining
@thetabularasa
It's not.
*bump* (just to annoy the militia-baiters)
What the heck is a bump?
so what are you supposed to do if you are between 17 and 45 and able bodied, and not in the armed forces? Become disabled?
SkepticalMetal: What the heck is a bump?
Seriously.
Holy crap! I've done that so many times before, and I've pulled my hair out trying to think of something to type.
Lew Rockwell gives an awesome interview with Alex Jones here on topics closely related to this.
The whole thing goes back to the propensity of the masses to assume that centralized action is always superior to decentralized action. Of course, in many cases, organization really is the only way to get something done. In particular, this idea of "individual, mental secession" is I think the single most powerful idea to come out of LvMI and needs to be spread as far and wide as possible. It takes the precise opposite approach of the militia movement.
The militia movement wants to coalesce into a single corpus and confront and provoke the government. The government loves nothing more than a showdown - the police and military have a permanent hard-on for no-holds barred violent confrontation. I know the mentality personally. It's not even necessarily sociopathy (some of them are really sick sociopaths)... it's just nothing more than a simple, base desire to brawl without risk of going to jail (for the police officers). Not to mention having every conceivable advantage in the fight, except numbers, and many times they even have that. As I mentioned above, any discussion of militia resistance against the government is infantile, suicidal nonsense. Peruse some footage from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Federal government will mobilize US military assets - covertly, if they have to, as they did in Waco - in order to quell a real militia threat. They've swatted down every Freeman that ever stood up to them like so many mosquitoes. Even supposing that you managed to build a truly impressive militia - let's say 1,000 men scattered all around the country - they would simply deploy the drones, the gunships, the Blackhawks and Little Birds, the building-penetrating FLIR and millimeter-wave, and so on. In fact, you'd simply be doing the government a favor... getting all together and resisting all at once. Then they can clean up the whole lot of you in one fell swoop.
So, any kind of "getting in the face" of the government is folly. And not only is it folly, it's counterproductive. Every member of the productive class is struggling under the weight of the government... but 99% of them still get up and go to work every day and drive the speed limit. And more of those people than you might think actually resent the control and intuitively sense that the burden of government is unfair. But they understand that the bills have to be paid no matter what. The packages have to be delivered no matter what. And so on. This is how everyone's kids are fed dinner at the end of the day. And here you have a bunch of apes jumping around in a protest march or packing heat and wearing fatigues and pretending they're going to "resist" the government. So, you end up alienating the very people whose interests you imagine you are standing up for. They might even sense that you have a point but the way you're going about it is completely wrong.
What neither the militia movement or the more verbally strident - yet less action-oriented - "Alex Jones" movement do not fully comprehend is just how dangerous individual, mental secession is. See, the person who has mentally seceded is now an opportunist, a kind of statutory pirate. He violates the government's statutes without even breaking a sweat because the government's dictates-dressed-up-as-law hold no sway on his conscience. Of course, prudence is always required but there are always limitless opportunities to violate the statutes in a prudent manner with only a small risk of getting caught. And the more people doing it, the more opportunities there are. Think of dealing in cash, bartering, grey/black-market (agorism), and so on. More and more opportunities arise to simply short-circuit the entire Leviathan by draining its very lifeblood at the source: taxation.
It is the "always on" and "distributed" nature of individual, mental secession that makes it so dangerous and erosive to the strength of government. If you organize into a militia or a protest movement, the government can infiltrate you and make an example of you. But if you simply say to yourself, "I will not obey any statute that doesn't hold sway on my conscience and I will encourage others to do likewise", you have just become a continual, silent, self-reproducing threat to the government. It's like an undetectable computer virus that becomes more undetectable and more powerful and spreads faster the more it spreads.
Someone needs to draft up a "Declaration of Individual Independence". Wheylous?
Armed resistance is suicide, agorism has merit but I don't think it can do the job alone; what we need are more and stronger civil organizations such as LvMI or Campaign for Liberty which are devoted to educating people and/or gradually infiltrating the important institutions of our society: government, academia, the churches, etc. After all, that's how our opponents took power. It's a proven method. What should you do personally (other than continue to educate yourself)? Well, we need libertarian teachers, professors, clergymen, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and politicians to replace the establishment-collaborators currently occupying those influential positions in society, as well as wealthy libertarians of whatever profession or trade to finance all this. Have at it.
Agreed. But I guess what I'm saying is that I think that even folks who frequent these forums do not fully appreciate the fact that individual, mental secession is the root foundation of the whole enterprise. Organizations like LvMI are helping get the message out but it's only the act of one more individual saying "I no longer give the assent of my conscience to these government dictates" that will result in change. Politicians can't do it. Organizations can't do it. Only lots of people changing their minds can do it. The rest is just details (strategy).
I don't want to come across like a zealot but what I'm trying to say is that people who are engaged in the FSP or Seasteading or whatever are wasting their energy, in my opinion. To the extent that they have mentally seceded and are teaching others to do likewise by their actions and message, they are contributing to the only winning strategy. But a great deal of their energy is diverted into "de-municipalizing the garbage collectors" - ancillary goals that, even if achieved, contribute nothing beyond themselves.
Another thing is that there is a tendency in the movement to suppose that there is some kind of "collective action problem" associated with liberty... as if we have to build some kind of critical mass before we can be free. No, the moment you tell yourself "I no longer assent. I hereby emancipate myself of government statutes" you are at once freed, that is, you are freer than you were the moment before. Before, you were thinking that you would obey the government's statutes because "you should" - you were imprisoning yourself, just like everyone else does. But once you stop imprisoning yourself, the world opens up. Every day is a new opportunity to go out and live your life as you see fit, to hell with government. Government is just a moderately dangerous and mostly incompetent hamperer of life. You begin consciously aiming to outwit the government, that is, navigate around its "rules" - it's like having a radar/laser detector but for everything in your life.
So, there is no collective action problem, but the momentum only grows as more and more people jump on board. The more people who are freed of the bondage of their own conscience to government dictates, the more opportunities you have. And no, I don't just mean "agorism" or "cipherpunk" which are focused on starting with the hardest things (e.g. drugs) first... which is completely backwards. We need as many people as possible breaking as many rules in broad daylight as possible... rules that the government can't win the political battle required to enforce them. Marijuana is approaching the tipping point here, but I'm thinking that copyright "piracy" is a big soft spot. Of course, this is just entertainment, so it's never going to make a dent. Another area is just plain old cash economy... buy a small pickup truck, log on to Craigslist and just start peddling. I think that cash peddling is a major threat to the status quo. This helps weaken Leviathan in the most direct possible manner but, more importantly, it is an effective practical conduit for spreading the message. "Practical anarchism", as it were. Of course, prudence is always the watch-word.
I guess I'm trying to agree with you and say that we need to make sure we keep it in the forefront that the goal is to change minds and that this is more powerful than any other strategy. It is, as you said, a proven strategy, the only strategy.
As Liberty Student said, the state IS an illusion and we need to live in our heads logically if we hope to have much happiness. Some people have no souls, some have good souls, some have bad souls and all we can really hope for is that our descendants will live in a world of peace and liberty.
This is yet another good thread by Clayton and the miltia ads have even infiltrated facebook.
@ Clayton: You may have already been aware of this [EDIT: I read more of your OP and now saw that you were when you mentioned mediocre people]... but the only problem is the fact that agents of the state could trick people into joining or that they could force into joining. For example, someone could knock my ass out and then drug me even more, put a chip in my head, and I'd wake up really in a miltia. That's what I'm worried about most honestly and it's a big reason as to why I want to die really soon before I do anymore damage. It has long bothered me that the State has had so much technology. The state can only do bad with technology and that's what Jefferson feared with a forced industrial economy.
I also worry that torture will lead to myself being controlled or even being turned into a King Kong... that would cause some serious damage and I hope it won't happen but it's out of my control.
I should've never been born.
No2statism:I also worry that torture will lead to myself being controlled or even being turned into a King Kong... that would cause some serious damage and I hope it won't happen but it's out of my control.
I'd consider going back on the Abilify if I were you.
There's plenty of reasons to look forward to the future. If one thing has always been true about politics in the US is that it swngs back and forth like a pendulum, from "liberal" to "conservative" (in a social sense). What's going on now is not much different than the 'McCarthyism' of the early 1950's that's being sustained by war nationalism - which simply can't continue because we're broke.
What will the 21st Cebtury versions of the 60's and 70's be like when the pedulum swings back? Wouldn't you like to see government sink back into social disdain again - and into eventual irrelevance?
There are also options of changing gender or citizenship.
Every member of the productive class is struggling under the weight of the government... but 99% of them still get up and go to work every day and drive the speed limit. And more of those people than you might think actually resent the control and intuitively sense that the burden of government is unfair. But they understand that the bills have to be paid no matter what. The packages have to be delivered no matter what. And so on. This is how everyone's kids are fed dinner at the end of the day. And here you have a bunch of apes jumping around in a protest march or packing heat and wearing fatigues and pretending they're going to "resist" the government. So, you end up alienating the very people whose interests you imagine you are standing up for. They might even sense that you have a point but the way you're going about it is completely wrong.
@ Groucho : Those are good suggestions and i am on abilify and everything else as prescribed, but I don't like illusions (ingesting objects that you don't want to take doesn't make you better than how you were born) and I've realized none of my friends last forever. Perhaps electroshock therapy would work, but then I'd be at more risk and there would no point in it.
Really, I blame the federal govt for making it so assisted suicide would be looked down and hard to achieve. I also don't like how the govt has made it so hard for me to get something that I know would kill me... I'm know that my skull is too dense for the average firearm to work.
I really want to die, but I'm worried that I wind up botching the suicide attempt considering what I have access to. I don't like my life and the people I liked won't like me forever.
If I had just been told that I wasn't bright by everyone my whole life, then there would've been no problem. A big factor is that my mom is not intelligent so she took an achievement test (or maybe a verbal ratio IQ) to mean that my IQ was 126 and always told me my IQ was 126. It wasn't because I'm not bright overall. Being told I'm better than average since as long as I can remember and being treated as if I were was a bad idea. Of course, I had doubts my IQ being 126, but I thought I was bright more than I am retarded.
@ Malachi: Thank you for the offer: ) I agree that they are worthless, but they just helped prove, among other things, that I'm a piece of dung.
I'm working on one.
They released one at Libertopia as well, but I find it deeply unsatisfying.
Reply to Minarchist:
The only thing that I don't like about this strategy is that it requires approval from the very people who, being our ideological and ethical opposites, are the very last people from whom we should want approval. I would think there would be something very wrong, for instance, if the liberty movement became favored by the rockefellers or the MSM.
Also, as far as I know, we want revolutionary change and historically changing a state's constitution usually implies (accidentally or essentially) some sort of combat.
Only in the case of the nazis (post-putsch) was a revolution accomplished with minimal bloodshed. Their party reached their ends not so much by recieving approval from the mainstream, but rather by manipulating the weaknesses of the weimar constitution behind which, the mainstream interests protected themselves. Unfortunately the american constitution is too strong and historically going against it has implied succession and civil war. Not that I'm calling for such but, IMO, any revolutionary movement will have to step into the role of the old confederacy, in so much as institutions and peoples tend to repeat and are bound to, their histories.
"Intended as theatre" (aka "It's staged!"):
"There are more than just us" (aka "I don't have any particular reason for being here but do come join us!"):
"We haven't seen Oakland PD all day" ... aka the cops arrive with the provocateurs:
Wag The Dog!
This stuff worries me. Look at the title "A Message from the Milita TO CIVILIANS." Did I miss something? Are these individuals not civilians? And it's "Hey we're not nutty, we're just like you!" As if we all have full BDU's with assault gear AND A LOADED AR15 THAT WE CARRY ONTO YOUTUBE IN ORDER TO SHOW HOW WE'RE NOT CRAZY! You're message to others is done in battle dress with battleweapons loaded? I see where this is going and it sucks. It reminds me of that quote from Bandits:
"Terry You know the hardest thing about being smart? Joe: No. Terry: I always pretty much know what's gonna happen next. There's no suspense."
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
fakename:The only thing that I don't like about this strategy is that it requires approval from the very people who, being our ideological and ethical opposites, are the very last people from whom we should want approval.
In what sense does the strategy require their approval?