I just assume he is a troll. Though originally I considered him refreshing, since forums like this can get quite stagnant, so variation is great. But after seeing his a-holish style of communication and rather counter-intuitive claims, I have come to regard him as the proverbial troll.
Proud to be a vulgar libertarian, you fucking assholes.
David Gordon has written a nice review today for those of you who don’t want to pay 15 dollars.
Bob LeFevre on the constitution (he seems to disagree a bit with Paul)
I’m not claling for “punishment by death,” nor do I want everyone to agree with everything I say. I do, however, want to express my displeasure fore the use of the inefficient process of central planning.
Ron Paul may have gotten to you and that’s great - admittedly I think it is! - however, at what cost? BP has a great point about Bastiat. What is seen and what is unseen.
How can someone actually be proud of misusing free market theory to be an apologist for corporatism and the current distribution of property titles? Rothbard most certainly was not a vulgar libertarian, as he made quite clear in his property theory in The Ethics of Liberty.
Jesus, we’re geeks sometimes.
You do realize that appeals to authority are only appeals to authority when the authority has no relevance to the topic - that is, it is not an “appeal to authority” when the authority is an expert on the matter - right?
As SEK3 created the Agorist concept, it seems necessary to understand what he’s talking about, what he says, and what he did to call yourself a well-read Agorist. FSK, is apparently not, though I welcome him all the same.
It wasn’t my original idea to choose the RNC. Matthew B. chose it as a type of solidification of the Agorist paradigm in the Anarchist movement. He chose it specifically for the war issue, I believe.
No, Paul is going to “protest” Pumpkin head at the RNC. He fully supports the idea of a RNC and would gladly participate if he were the winner.
Well, thank you for informing one of the organizers what the RNC gathering will be about. [8-)]
First, the RNC will be used mostly for organizational purposes and not for much else - though we will participate in the protests. The purpose is to get boots on the ground and to gather the most devoted Agorists together to arrange plans for the future.
Second, well… everything else is pretty incoherent.
Third, I’m bored with you. I think the rise climaxed with “You’re an ass.” [|-)]
Now have the last word,
Yes, but we’re geeks with internets. That’s far better than being geeks with dungeons and dragons. Mirite?
Man, I’ve looked into Agorism, and I think some parts of it are really briliant. However, in case you haven’t noticed, it isn’t particularly prevalent or even well-known. Ron Paul, on the other hand, was for a time virtually ruling the interwebs, and he was the one that brought me, and many others, into the exploration of libertarian thought.
There are several things working against Agorism. Firstly, you guys are pissed off (rightly, but still). I may find pictures of chicks with miniskirts and guns to be hot, but many will just be turned off by seeing them on every other website, thinking you (again, quite rightly) very radical. Secondly, and more creepily to me, is the almost cultish devotion I see to Samuel Edward Konkin III in the movement. On the other hand, some people are like that with Ron Paul, too.
Finally, you really do come off like a dick a lot of the time here. Maybe you’re right in your philosophy and strategy, but you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, dude. That attitude will do nothing but disservice to the cause you try to champion.
The two go together these days. [:P]
-Jon
Well, I finally have a well thought out reply from a semi-opponent at least. Thank you, I will take this into consideration, though I cannot promise that my strategy will change, I will revise it. You are correct, one does catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. My position, has, however, been to be the vinegar for the Ron Paul campaign and not the honey for Agorism. Again, I will reconsider this.
Well Hallelujah and Holy Hosannah!
The man is actually going to be FOR something, instead of AGAINST something.
I learned a lot of things being on a college campus this last semester.
Some of the people I met that were interested in Ron Paul’s campaign were willing to organize and meet to discuss real libertarian issues Most if not all were open to the idea of anarchism. We even discussed making an anarchy logo for our club to piss off the The Official Anarchist (socialist) Club on campus. Even if some considered themselves conservative socially (though this very seldom clashes with some more cosmopolitan people). Some were Friedmanites, but almost everyone enjoyed stuff like Walter Block’s various books, lewrockwell.com, sometimes reason.com, etc. It was a pretty diverse group of people… many economics students, some engineers, people in business, some grad students… no poetry majors or hippies (though virtually everyone loved pot, besides myself). This was actually very encouraging that so many understood clearly things like price controls, socialist health care, minimum wage, unions, fiat currency and the Fed, the drug war, subsidies, corporatism, etc.
Supporting Ron Paul, the person, became a problem because people would write articles in the college press about Ron Paul and not any of us. They wouldn’t even engage us for answers (until we became a liberty club and ended support for the RP campaign). So you’d have “progressive” weinies taking pot shots at Ron with their various cliches… like he wants to do “Shock Capitalism” like Pinochet… he wants to steal your public bussing system and our “beloved” postal service… he wants to make families starve to death…and he wants to end (and I kid you not) “our patriotic income tax” et al. Because Ron Paul was the second big name on campus after Obama (no support for any of the other candidates), it became a big thrill for some to try and one up Ron by trying to show that either he will never win or that his economic ideas are old fashioned… or as one idiot regaled “undemocratic like Lenin.” All of this while only passive aggressively addressing us capitalist pigs that would support him.
Republicans on campus were not having it with any exposure of Ron Paul. Though, this turned in our favor. Because eventhough the vast majority of them were unthinking warmongers and irrational idiots, many from the Republicans were so alienated by this defensiveness and ended up just leaving (either the party or to be for Ron). Some Ron Paul supporters sat in at these meetings to see this happen. The Republicans would openly insult people and have ridiculous panel discussions on how best to implement creepy Republican agendas (mostly very unproductive things like anti-global warming events). It was very surreal. Though many were open to many of RP’s ideas. But I think only because the Republican party has been dominated by rhetoric of individualism. It’s not certain that any were actual libertarians. Though I suspect amongst those warmongers, there were probably many who were sympathetic to our views on marijuana – but why waste time with them?
The democrats were actually less receptive to Ron’s ideas or any of our ideas. Most of them seem more interested in passing out free condoms and making Earth day costumes. Never did they do any anti-war protests. The “secretary” of the young democrats actually sent us a letter telling us we can’t be the “students for liberty” but have to call ourselves the “students for negative liberty.” He explained that there is a difference between that and positive liberty. Having read Rothbard, I had to set him straight. Apparently he was writing his thesis on this nonsense.
I found out by real trial and error that many just are not interested in constitutional argument for libertarianism. And not just because of laziness or out of principle. Like RP’s economics, many smarter-than-thou people think they have a leg up on his knowledge of the subject. This is how many conservative talk show hosts are, but I had no idea that the liberals feel the same things. And will just bend it towards their own stupid ends or whatever their professor told them. Plus too much time is wasted on talk about reforming of taxes or argument about the constitutionality of collecting taxes. Many got distracted by Fair Tax and Flat Tax and many of these crank schemes because they were promised as being constitutional or a solution to federal income tax. It seemed silly to me to be for (or against) taxes only because it says so by law whether explicit or not. Certainly government could be reduced to zero or would have to be abandoned all together before ditching all these taxes anyway (someone ran the budget up and someone/thing will have to in some way run the budget back down). And that is the real problem: the force behind it. And the failure of government in general. Not convenience or procedure. All in all constitutionality is something for politicians and lawyers and that whole game and certainly not good theorists. It’s one of the reasons I find minarchism unworthy of real interesting discussion (eventhough these same people have good ideas when they aren’t talking about their compromise with the state).
We ended up passing out hundreds of copies of Freedom to Fascism. I found out that everyone in college loves sensational documentaries like this one and Zeitgeist. Though I wished we’d have passed out Money, Banking and Federal Reserve which I think is more well done. We discussed having a viewing session of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose with guests. But I was a bit iffy about that because I would have to completely cut out his spiel on vouchers, the fed, and the negative income tax.
That is a really interesting post. I’ve also found that school age people really like sensationalist films. I’ve had friends and family approach me after seeing Zeitgeist, knowing that I have been rambling about banking for some time.
I don’t see Paul as being terribly committed to the Constitution, but rather uses it as a point of reference for people to guide them from statism to minarchism. We’ll never really know for sure because he plays it so close to the vest, but I suspect Paul, like his friends Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard is an anarchist at heart.
Paul’s campaign was good to get out ideas and get people excited about liberty, but I have no faith in it as a long term strategy for liberty. Paul will never win the presidency; and I just found out today that Murray Sabrin lost his congressional race. What people who have been campaigning for fail to see is that most RP supporters are not actually Republicans! And a good amount aren’t even _r_epublicans. I don’t think the ReLOVEution is a bad thing; it’s good, but if it steered a bit in the right direction it could be great.
If it goes way too far in the wrong direction, however, libertarianism will become even more synonymous with conservatism in the public eye. This is a great danger indeed.
I’m less confident about Ron Paul in that regard. Ron Paul may have gotten the word out there - though at an inefficient rate with a great cost, though nothing that can be done about it now - but he’s also misdirected people in the direction of the GOP. There’s a quote out there about Ron Paul wanting many of the libertarians to just invade the GOP and “take it back.” Umm… When did Anarchism ever correlate with any political party, much less the Tory GOP?
I didn’t mean I think Ron Paul will take things in a new direction. I’m thinking the RP movement might start using alternative strategies like Paulville in place of taking over the GOP.
Hopefully they’ll see it’s a hopeless battle. So far Jim Forsythe and Murray Sabrin (2 of 4 republicans endorsed by RP) have dropped out, I don’t know what’s going on with the other two, but even if two more RPites get in congress, is that a victory for anarchism? I saw an article on Reason saying about 40 RP republicans ran and it looks like almost every on one of them will lose.
RP’s a Constitutionalist and so are RP repubs. The proposed strategy of “Ron Paul Anarchists” is basically “yeah, let’s pretend to be conservatives and win some elections. Then we can pretend to be conservatives who believe in even less government than the previous conservative characters we pretended to be; once we chop down the government a bit more we can finally start to pretend to be minarchists! Then after a few more years of waiting we can pretend to be anarchists because we’ve already proven ourselves to be everything but!”
I think the ineffectiveness of politics will eventually be understood… even by the minarchists and constitutionalists and paranoid illuminati hunters.
I don’t consider Rothbard more important than my vulgar teachers Mises, Hayek and Hoppe. And being vulgar, I get to curse a lot. Bitches!
Paulville seems kind of too culty for me… I don’t know. They’re investing a lot of respect and trust in Ron Paul when he himself discourages the idea.
I am hopeful though that at least this shows them how futile their chances are.