RashyNullPlanet

My comment, at Radley’s place, a few days ago:

?A vote is nothing more and always an attempt to push someone else around by electing a proxy to do the pushing.?

Yup. Voting voting is delegated coercion.

It?s also a despicably cowardly act. No one I?ve ever met has the audacity to personally do to their neighbors what a vote-fueled government does.

Would you approach your neighbor’s employer and demand a portion of his pay? Would you prevent someone from attempting to save his own life with an experimental drug? Would you have the balls to go to your neighbor’s house and use force to stop him from eating duck liver? Of course you wouldn’t. But voting lets you do those very things, without getting your hands dirty or risking your own hide.

SaltyPig recently points out that he wrote about this very thing five years ago:

When confronted directly with first-person moral decisions, most people are quick to answer in favor of liberty. So what happens somewhere between lemonade-stand-land and the modern state to make people such hooligans by proxy?

Voting is all about abdication of responsibility and delegation of coercion to impose mere preferences upon others.

Trying to catch up. Been traveling to central america, and the last couple weeks, trying to get back into things here.

Billy has a couple things that are required reading, the first here:

Law & Order types rarely take an effort to distinguish the ethics of any given law and despise doing so. Therefore, it is enough for them to hear that a given person is in-hand, and then Due Process will sort it out. The thinking here is, roughly, “If he was charged, then he must’ve been doing something wrong.” Such a person rarely or never considers the open-ended implications: what if one of his values, the pursuit of which causes no one harm, becomes proscribed at law?

A couple things to note: 1. “Law & Order types rarely take an effort to distinguish the ethics of any given law and despise doing so,” and 2. ‘The “thinking” here is…’

A couple points: 1. law and order types I’ve encountered almost universally crave abdication of their moral responsibility to distinguish right from wrong, preferring instead to rely on easy excuses like, “It’s the law,” even if the law is obviously contrary to what is clearly right, and 2. there is no thinking involved in believing that being charged is the same as guilt. It’s a Pavlovian response, not thinking.

The second item from Billy is here:

Think about “The United States”. These days, you hear politicians and other mouthy twits rattling on about “unity”. Of course, this is part & parcel of the entire socialist theme, but it also has a most unfortunate aspect in its standing in the American political heritage. It’s a long-bone in our political lexicon. What’s grievously unfortunate is that the only thing about American politics that “united” this country was dying lip-service (known as “the Constitution”) to the ideals originally set forth in the Declaration of Independence. It was the essential idea of freedom that was the object of the “union” — no matter how badly it was served, ever after.

No socialist idea was ever a part of that, and this is the ghastly perversion of the concept of “union” that we face now: the socialists have something in mind that is simply not American. When they talk about “unity”, they are not talking about agreement on fidelity to the idea of freedom. They’re talking about a hive.

“agreement on fidelity to the idea of freedom.” That is the essence of the origin of America. And it’s been misunderstood, spit on, ridiculed, manipulated, robbed, beaten, pitchcapped, raped, and murdered since its birth.

What can be done? Well, it ain’t much, but get familiar with jury nullification.

Charles Hueter highlights a horrific example of feral subhumans.

It is impossible to reason with irrational, rabid animals, which is precisely what such creatures are.

So how can a person deal with them? When you catch them in the midst of brutalizing and murdering, kill them. If you encounter them after the fact, shun them to starvation.

Rabid fucking animals.

A woman in Pontiac, MI was shot by her ex-boyfriend this past weekend.

Police said the woman had a court-issued personal protection order against the man. Her brother had been in the apartment to provide protection.

She had a useless piece of paper to protect herself. Neither she nor her brother, who was supposedly providing protection, had armed themselves with a gun.

If you’re so afraid of an ex that you go to the trouble of getting a peronal protection order, do yourself a favor: get a gun, learn how to use it, and keep it handy.

“When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.“

Kyle’s recent article, Response to Luke: Anarchy, Power, Authority, and Will gets at the underlying reasons that voting is gravely wrong:

The present system where power, responsibility, authority, and value are all divorced from one another creates an environment that can only deteriorate. Authority can only be taken and used by force or the threat of force. Wrongs done in the name of that authority cannot be righted except through the extremely high cost and terribly uncertain outcomes of a faceless bureaucratic process in which no-one suffers the consequences of acting wrongly, or, failing that, the massive violence of resistance to the state or outright revolution. And every such incident widens the gap between the so-called collective will and the will of the individuals in which authority resides - thus requiring increased force to maintain that stolen authority, and a higher hurdle to overcome for those trying to convince, or worse, to force, the ?authorities? to allow their own interests to be recognized and pursued.

Voters sever themselves from responsibility for inflicting their will on their neighbors by pointing to politicians. Politicians use the illegitimate vote to claim authority to exercise power over other people without the consent of their victims. At the same time, those same political creatures sever themselves from responsibility for their actions by pointing to the voters. Enforcement agencies sever themselves from responsbility for their actions by pointing to the politicians. Employees of the judicial system sever themselves from responsibility for their actions by pointing to politicians. Isn’t it obvious that it’s a giant shell game?

Sean Bell’s murderers were acquitted this afternoon:

Three detectives were acquitted of all charges Friday in the 50-shot killing of an unarmed groom-to-be on his wedding day

Officers Michael Oliver, 36, and Gescard Isnora, 29, stood trial for manslaughter while Officer Marc Cooper, 40, was charged with reckless endangerment. Two other shooters weren’t charged.

Cooperman indicated that the police officers’ version of events was more credible than the victims’ version. “The people have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that each defendant was not justified” in firing, he said.

With tires screeching, glass breaking and bullets flying, the officers claimed that they believed they were the ones under fire.

The emphasis is mine. It should be obvious what happened: one cop fired a shot, the others heard it, panicked, assumed they were being fired upon, and joined the summary execution that killed Sean.

This is disgustingly predictable:

[Judge] Cooperman indicated that the police officers’ version of events was more credible than the victims’ version.

Deference to police, despite the evidence, has become a prerequisite to being a judge.

In the end, this is all we need to know:

There was no weapon inside Bell’s blood-splattered car.

Those cops fucked up huge. Cooperman lacks the spine to say so, and let the murderers walk away.

Sean Bell’s murder is one more reason that cops should be required to wear forehead cameras streaming live video and broadcasting GPS coordinates.

I thought college campuses were supposed to be havens of free thought, ideas, and intellectual pursuit. Stupid me.

Some spineless pantywaist went crying to mommy because he didn’t like the cover of the book Mr. Sampson was reading.

There is no such thing as the right to not be offended. The infant who whined to the campus Affirmative Action Office is clearly a gutless turd.

Via Billy Beck.

Charley Hardman’s post from a few weeks ago, that was nuremberg, this is now, gets at what I’ve been saying for a long time now, and what should be obvious to anyone with even the smallest shred of principle and integrity: your job does not free you from your obligation to determine right from wrong and to act accordingly.

The implications of that are immense, and apply to everyone, from Adolph Eichmann, to the local dog monitor girl.