Live Free LA

Because they want it for themselves when it’s their turn…

LEADING CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS have spent the last year relentlessly accusing Donald Trump of being controlled by or treasonously loyal to a hostile foreign power. Over the last several months, they have added to those disloyalty charges a new set of alleged crimes: abusing the powers of the executive branch — including the Justice Department and FBI — to vindictively punish political opponents while corruptly protecting the serious crimes of his allies, including his own family members and possibly himself.

The inescapable conclusion from all of this, they have relentlessly insisted, is that Trump is a lawless authoritarian of the type the U.S. has not seen in the Oval Office for decades, if ever: a leader who has no regard for constitutional values or legal limits and thus, poses a grave, unique, and existential threat to the institutions of American democracy. Reflecting the severity of these fears, the anti-Trump opposition movement that has coalesced within Democratic Party politics has appropriated a slogan — expressed in the hashtag form of contemporary online activism — that was historically used by those who unite, at all costs, to defeat domestic tyranny: #Resistance.

One would hope, and expect, that those who genuinely view Trump as a menace of this magnitude and view themselves as #Resistance fighters would do everything within their ability to impose as many limits and safeguards as possible on the powers he is able to wield. If “resistance” means anything, at a minimum it should entail a refusal to trust a dangerous authoritarian to wield vast power with little checks or oversight.

Yesterday in Washington, congressional Democrats were presented with a critical opportunity to do exactly that. A proposed new amendment was scheduled to be voted on in the House of Representatives that would have imposed meaningful limits and new safeguards on Trump’s ability to exercise one of the most dangerous, invasive, and historically abused presidential powers: spying on the communications of American citizens without warrants. Yesterday’s amendment was designed to limit the powers first enacted during the Bush years to legalize the Bush/Cheney domestic warrantless eavesdropping program. The Intercept’s Alex Emmons on Wednesday detailed the history and substance of the various bills pending in the House.

Although the Trump White House and a majority of House Republicans (including House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes) favored extension (and even an expansion) of the current law’s spying powers and opposed any real reforms, a substantial minority of GOP lawmakers have long opposed warrantless surveillance of Americans and thus, announced their intention to support new safeguards. Indeed, the primary sponsor and advocate of the amendment to provide new domestic spying safeguards was the conservative Republican from Michigan, Justin Amash, who, in the wake of the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations, worked in close partnership with liberal Democratic Rep. John Conyers to try to rein in some of these domestic spying powers.

Despite opposition from GOP House leadership and the Trump White House, Amash was able to secure the commitment of dozens of House Republicans to support his amendments to limit the ability of Trump’s FBI to spy on Americans without warrants. The key provision of his amendment would have required that the FBI first obtain a warrant before being permitted to search and read through the communications of Americans collected by the National Security Agency.

To secure enactment of these safeguards, Amash needed support from a majority of House Democrats. That meant that House Democrats held the power in their hands to decide whether Trump — the president they have been vocally vilifying as a lawless tyrant threatening American democracy — would be subjected to serious limits and safeguards on how his FBI could spy on the conversations of American citizens. …

As the American Civil Liberties Union put it bluntly about the bill supported by Pelosi and Schiff: “The House just passed a bill to give the Trump administration greater authority to spy on Americans, immigrants, journalists, dissidents, and everyone else.” The privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation echoed that sentiment: “The House just approved the disastrous NSA surveillance extension bill that will allow for continued, unconstitutional surveillance that hurts the American people and violates our Fourth Amendment rights.”

While Trump, as president, is the head of the executive branch, the official with the greatest control over the FBI they just empowered is his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. In other words, Pelosi, Schiff, and their allies just voted to vest great, unchecked power in an official the Democrats have (with good reason) long denounced as corrupt and deeply racist. As Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (who has vowed with Rand Paul to filibuster the bill when it reaches the Senate) put it yesterday: “This Section 702 bill would give AG Jeff Sessions unchecked power to use this information against Americans. This bill prevents his decisions from EVER being challenged in court.” …

Along a prison walkway, a hooded detainee seems to have collapsed with his wrists handcuffed to the railings.

US Military Prsion: Abu Ghraib, Iraq

waoh, jfc

His views are largely consistent with those of Rothbard, who more or less proposed unlimited police brutality and a final solution to the homeless and beggar question, and Friedman Jr.’s love for Pinochet.

Outright hatred for those deemed subhumans isn’t good, but callous indifference is not any better, and the latter helps the former.

Right-libertarians will always defend fascism from liberals and always propose fascist solutions to problems when people aren’t looking, and then say “What? We love freedom. Fascism, which is leftist by the way, is LESS freedom, we want MORE freedom”.

Hoppe basically proposes city-states as a solution to this problem.  But he does go wild on the “covenant” aspect where communities through free association form with their own physically exclusive norms.  

The really tragic thing, though, is that the same signs would be an equally effective protest in so many cities around the country. The problem of “easily startled” police isn’t unique to the Twin Cities. Police misconduct in America is a systemic problem, and too many officers escalate situations they should be trained to de-escalate.

Last week, for instance, I wrote about an incident in Perris, California, where a cop was caught on camera violently tackling a 52-year-old woman, grabbing her arms and pulling her hair — all for the “crime” of selling flowers without a permit.

This week, in Lockport, New York, a woman was hospitalized with a concussion, bruising on her limbs, and a battered face because a sheriff’s deputy threw her face-first onto the ground after she refused a field sobriety test.

Meanwhile, a story from Sacramento reveals a mentally-ill man is in critical condition, being treated for severe burns after police pinned him to the pavement, forcibly stretching his body across asphalt measuring around 170 degrees Fahrenheit, after he had a schizophrenic episode in a restaurant. A month later, he is still in intensive care with second- and third-degree burns. The skin was entirely destroyed on one cheek of his face.

@moralanarchism

@association-of-free-people

@priceofliberty

@anarchyinblack

@anarchyandacupofcoffee

@libertariantaoist

@bonniekristian

@anarchistphilosophy

@thevoluntaryist

@anti-power

@ancaporado

@ancap-curt

@sadoeconomist

@voluntaryist-brit

@theanarchocapitalist

@anaarkei

@laliberty

Many of these blogs will share content from each other so there will inevitably be overlap, but each also generates their own content and additions that make all of them very much worth your follow.  

This is also by no means an exhaustive list: there are many more blogs that participate in Freeblr and/or Ancapblr and they too are worth following and interacting with.  The above blogs, however, I believe are the stand-out cornerstones of the community, bringing news, philosophy, and wisdom that keeps us all bound together in our common pursuit of freedom.  

Pictured, me, a bisexual, cleaning my gun on top of writers claiming that I, a bisexual, will be safer if I’m disarmed.

You do not speak for me and you do not know what is best for me. I know I am safer against bigots if I’m armed, and I know that my partner or I are much more likely to be made into victims if we cannot defend ourselves. 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/16/us/hate-crimes-against-lgbt.html

http://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-assault-and-the-lgbt-community

LGBT members are much more likely to be victims of violence, and I do not plan on allowing myself to be one.

[Trump has been taught] that civil asset forfeiture is when nice police officers take away scary drugs from bad people and only those same bad people would want to curtail it. (Talk about alternative facts!)

Attorney General Sessions will happily confirm that false lesson, and with his new authority over the Department of Justice, ensure that any federal reforms in this area stall as long as Trump is in office.

Colin Kaepernick has been abstaining from standing for the national anthem. Self-styled patriots have been losing their minds over it. That is because they are true believers in a cult. The cult is the State.

All states are cults: religions. And like all religions, states have sacraments, including holy rituals. The national anthem is one of the holy ritual sacraments of the cult of the American State. Those fully initiated and indoctrinated in that cult have been programmed to go into attack mode when divergent cult members (heretics) fail to observe such sacraments, like the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance to the holy pole cloth. Such peer pressure is how cults maintain their numbers.

Voting is another one of those sacramental rituals. As with the national anthem and pledge of allegiance, true believers are aghast when you advocate abstention from voting. School, which is our chief initiation into the State cult, thoroughly and universally indoctrinates its initiates into the sacrament of voting and democracy. We’ve all been brainwashed from the time we were tiny children into the holy myth of democracy: that democracy is what makes us special, what makes America exceptional; that patriots suffered and died for democracy, from the Suffragettes to the Civil Rights movement, from the Revolution to the Civil War to World War II to the War on Terror; that through voting we are empowered to fight for what’s right, to make our country, our very lives, better. You can see how important this sacrament is to the State cult from all of the voting propaganda pushed by the government and the establishment media.

But here’s the thing. Like all mystic rituals, the ritual of voting is based on superstition. Like an incantation or a rain dance, it is based on the superstition that great good can come of a mere gesture. Just as the rain dancer thinks he can summon rain that will save his crops, the voter thinks he can summon reform that will save his country.

But again, it’s a superstition. The individual act of voting is futile. Elections are virtually never decided by a single vote. You’re more likely to die on the way to the polling place than affect the outcome of an election. You know it’s futile. You know that in previous elections the outcome wouldn’t have been any different had you not voted. You know the same will be true for future elections.

Yes, in aggregate voting makes a difference. But that’s a different question. When you’re deciding whether to vote, you’re making an individual decision, not an aggregate one.

Perhaps you think that by voting at least you’re doing your small part, making your small contribution. But contributing toward what?

Imagine a giant siege engine that takes millions of people to push. Imagine if millions of people together purposefully pushed the engine to run over a group of innocent people tied up on the ground. Did those people die accidentally or were they murdered? If they were murdered, they were murdered by somebody. So by whom? The millions who pushed, of course. Even though any given individual’s decision whether to push or not didn’t make a difference one way or the other, every individual who pushed bears as much guilt as anybody else who pushed. Such an action is non-decisive, yet culpable at the same time.

Now imagine if there were two groups of tied-up victims. Millions are pushing the siege engine to the left, trying to steer it away from Group A and toward Group B. Millions of others are pushing to the right, away from Group B and toward Group A. One side prevails, and Group B is crushed to death. These helpless victims were murdered, just as much as the victims in the previous scenario were. By whom? By the millions who pushed the engine in their direction. This is true, even if their primary goal for pushing in that direction was to save the lives of Group A.

That’s effectively what you’re doing when you throw your weight behind a candidate or behind most forms of legislation. Candidates are package deals. Any candidate will violate the rights of some, even if they respect or defend the rights of others.

Objectors say it’s about going in the general right direction, making choices out of which the good outweighs the bad, that do a net amount of good, that is good “on balance.” But that is collectivist speak. There is no “good on balance” for the people whose lives are run over by the candidate you empowered: for the child who is bombed by Hillary’s foreign policy, for the man who shot is by Trump’s police state, or the people Gary Johnson and Bill Weld kept in cages when they were governors.

Objectors call it self-defense. But anti-war people should know better than anybody that collateral damage is never justified by self-defense. Objectors also say they are not responsible for the crimes committed by the office holders they voted for. But you can’t have it both ways. Either your vote doesn’t matter and it’s futile, or your vote matters and you’re culpable. (Although, again, I argue that you’re also culpable even though your vote is futile.)

Don’t fall for the lie that you’re limited to choosing the lesser of multiple evils. You’re not limited to pushing the engine in the direction of one group of victims or another, or even toward a third smaller group of victims. You can abstain from pushing at all. You can refuse to lend your weight to the State. It’s true that a single act of abstention alone won’t make a difference as to whether people get run over, or regarding who gets run over. But neither will pushing in one direction or another: neither will voting. So you may as well choose the option that doesn’t even negligibly contribute to injustice.

Not only do you have the option of merely abstaining from pushing, you can actually work to obstruct the siege engine, or to even dismantle it. Even the mere act of abstaining from voting contributes to the grand project of obstructing and dismantling the State. That is because voting is not just a ritual. It’s a power ritual.

In a sense, all cult rituals are power rituals. They are about building and maintaining the power of the cult’s leadership, or the religion’s priesthood, over the lives of the cult’s rank and file members. Rituals do this by solidifying the adherents’ faith in the cult’s god. The cult’s priesthood poses as representatives and agents for this god. In the case of modern, secular political religions, the cult god is the State itself, which is an incoherent notion of the “general will” made manifest: a mythical abstraction that somehow acts for the good of the people. The government poses as the priesthood of this deity.

Sacraments like the anthem, the pledge, and voting are so important to the government because they are what continually reinforce our faith in the State. Voting is particularly similar to holy communion. Voters line up at the polling booth to partake of divinity, believing that by participating in their own rule, they become one with the saving State they so adore.

This participation is a form of buy-in. It causes the voter to identify with the government — the captives to identify with their captors. The State is the Stockholm Syndrome institutionalized. And the higher the turnout, the greater the perceived legitimacy granted to the government priesthood.

Objectors say they are voting merely out of pragmatism and don’t intend to convey legitimacy to the government. But your intention is not the issue. The issue is the actual effect. It’s a simple fact that the government is able to use high turnout to convince its subjects that it represents the popular will — even to the subjects who voted for a losing candidate. It doesn’t matter that only individuals have wills, and so “the popular will” is an incoherent concept. What matters is that many people believe in it, and believe that high turnout signifies that the voice of the popular will has spoken.

Just think: how convincing would be a democratic government’s claim to legitimacy with a 1% turnout vs. a 99% turnout, even if that 99% turnout was split down the middle? And what’s true of the extremes is also true of the gradations.

Again, by voting you lend your weight to the State. You lend your weight to directing it toward certain victims. You also lend your weight to its sheer power and mass. By abstaining from voting, you dwindle the plausibility of the government’s claim to legitimacy and thus dwindle its power.

“From exposing government corruption to freely disseminating academic research, these men all had different motives and goals. But all of them had one thing in common: their belief in humanity’s right to freedom of information.”