Alex, you’re anticipating one aspect of my next (possibly book-length) piece, Part One of which will be published to J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review in the next day or two: “Unchaining the Human Heart: A Revolutionary Manifesto.”

Honestly, Jim, I don’t see how your rant is in response to anything I wrote. For example, I quoted a phrase Obama used; I didn’t say he understood anything. And your most important misquote. I wrote: “I don’t know whether planet earth will ever be free. But I do think America is still the best hope for freedom on this planet.” You turned it into “If you think the USA government is the world’s last best hope for freedom, if you think there is any minute possibility that you can change the system by working within it, you are insane.” Then you made a straw-man argument.

Thanks to all others for the nice words.

Neil

You seem to think that the wars are over, the internment camps ended. The US Army is advertising for internment camp guards. Think again.

Your president, the one you think might have learned something “teachable” in the 20th Century? He says that he, as president, has constitutional authority to kidnap you without charges, detain you without trial, cage you anywhere in the world, prevent you from having access to counsel, clergy, or contact with your family, deny you the ancient writ of habeas corpus, and have his military or CIA agents torture you to death. Not only has he said he has authority to do these things, he has had these things done, on his watch.

If you think the USA government is the world’s last best hope for freedom, if you think there is any minute possibility that you can change the system by working within it, you are insane. You are pissing up the same rope that Ron Paul pissed up in 2008, and that his Campaign for Liberty is pissing up now. One gets a warm wet feeling doing that, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.

The tens of thousands of libertarians in America are capable of trade and commerce, privacy and free markets. They can do much for themselves and for each other with free associations and free markets. But politics is a miserable waste of time.

You ought to know by now.

IMHO what you are speaking of is a society motivated by fear…

People crave things like “guaranteed jobs, room and board, socialized medicine” when they are fearful and lacking in self confidence. Fear kills empathy which is the source of morality and enables us to hurt others without remorse to obtain the things we fear we cannot acquire via voluntary exchange.

A society motivated by fear builds big governments by which to inflict their will on each other. But at some stage these fearful individuals grow more fearful of the coercive force they have spawned than they do of their neighbors.

But by then it is too late as rule makers have already plunged the nation state into a deep depression that will ultimately culminate in large scale blood letting.

IMHO the only way to end this vicious cycle is for us all to have the courage to change our conditioned “immediate gratification” response to the impulse of fear. Instead of allowing it to control us, we should seek to control it by facing it and overcoming it.

The way to do this IMHO is by choosing to retain empathy for the would be victims of our coercion and seeking to find enduring happiness by living in genuine harmony with our conscience.

I truly believe that if people sought to control their fears instead of each other, all tyranny would vanish and the state would cease to exist.

With respect I believe Lord Acton is mistaken.
It is not power that corrupts but rather the *desire* for power.
And the desire for power is driven by fear.

As to comment #1 by John H. regarding the “Firefly” series. There is no doubt it was intentionally scuttled; especially when you look at the politics and political actions at the time, in the U.S., that made a strong, and not so subtle attempt at squashing dissent, especially if freedom orientent — and since network TV is simply Government TV you can draw your own conclusions.

That’s some mighty sage advice there, boss. If we learned anything from Penn and Teller, it’s that misdirection is the key to making it all look like magic while actually accomplishing nothing but theft.

If you look on Hulu, for a long time now it has been beating in terms of popularity shows that are -still releasing new episodes-. Now that they’ve reduced the number of episodes that they carry to 5, this may change, but last I checked, it was still up there. So the audience is obviously there. Why, then, do we find that they couldn’t for the life of them reach potential viewers?

A number of people whom I know who watched it when it was airing on TV claimed that it took a concentrated effort on their part to get into it because the advertising for the show and the episodes that aired didn’t match up and the overarching story line was incoherent because the episodes were aired out of their intended order.

Do you think this is the fault of allowing focus groups and network producers to run a show, as is likely, or might it be something even more unsavory?