Speaking Words of Wisdom: Let Me Be

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"A form of latter-day Net performance art" ~ an anonymous critic of mine

So right, and so wrong.

Ordinarily, I'm one of those "live and let live" types. Yet, all the same, I am a curious sort. While I'd tangled with a few hard-core evangelical Leftists in my electronic travels, I've never really gone to any major nests of them and faced a whole furious hive.

Now, to fulfill my "Truth In Advertising" obligation, I will confess to an enduring dislike of the Left-Statist, more so than of any other type; I find extremely disquieting and offensive the Left-Statist's alternating naive faith in the beneficence of the State and the Gramscian ruthlessness with which he desires to control it, his philosophy rooted in the belief that the road to human happiness passes directly through my expropriation and murder for the twin "crimes" of owning my body and the products thereof and my harboring in it the heretical desire to not participate in his program for global Utopia. The mendaciousness with which he promulgates this philosophy merely stokes my wrath further; the Left-Statist's entire vocabulary consists of soothing blandishments evolved to direct attention away from the pyramids of human skulls looming on just the other side of their Golden Tomorrow. They have perfected - top to bottom, from ivory tower to street-beating rabble-rouser--a lexicon of unctuous euphemism, a rubric of linguistic cozening, a brazen duplicity as shocking in its chutzpah as it is contemptible, a salacious appetite for the agenda-enforcing omnipotence of the total State unmatched by any other Statist group in the world today. Is it any wonder that the political minds of the Bush team cut their teeth in this camp?

Why should I go a-prospecting for Left-Statists on the Internet, though? Don't I have better things to do with my time, like work on ways to examine my own brain with a cold-chisel and a series of automotive inspection mirrors, or see how many of my own fingernails I can pull out with my teeth, or something? Well, not really. Why? Well, first, because I am a malevolent and sadistic son-of-a-bitch. (Or so people choke out to me between sobs while frantically rummaging in their desk drawers for a can of Mace, a small-caliber handgun, or an alarm button to summon Security, anyway.) Second, because these ideologues number among the chief architects of and adherents to an ongoing, hideous program of organized murder and theft, the worst visited upon decent people in recorded history, a crime for which they and their ideological antecedents have never answered except perhaps to God (and he's not talking). Third, because the current targets of opportunity--Bu'ushists such as Freepers et al.--are overstimulated, they need some time to absorb some Reality, let the Prophecy be fulfilled. ("Hold on now, you mean that turbocharging the Fed's printing presses to pay for a Democracy Crusade in Iraqistan really is a bad idea? Leads to ruin, you say? Shit, we wish someone had told us that before . . .") The fourth and most important reason: I'm bored.

Cue horror-flick music.

It took a little Googling, but I caught up with a couple of my former best enemies--Left-Statists all--and found their current mailing-list haunts. (Archaic though it seems, mailing lists are my favorite milieu; I prefer them to blogs or Web forums. Something about the discrete nature of mail messages satisfies more than typing into a text box in a Web browser.) I subscribed to these mailing lists (listed below [1]) and started browsing the archives. I selected the "lightest" one--lbo-talk, a general-purpose leftist discussion forum--and lurked a bit, then jumped into a thread. Now, I will admit, I was an ass, and quite intentionally too. I started out with a broadside in a debate involving the concept of adult pornography as exploitation of women in se (the idea is purest guano straight from the boil-encrusted asscheeks of Marx and his disciples, of course), inquiring about the possibility that the participants are actually capable of contracting their services in exchange for money and asking pointed questions about some other cherished Leftist shibboleths. I believe the wheels started to come off when I suggested for comparative consideration another "solution" to the "problem" of adult pornography, the practice among ultra-orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims of stoning the unchaste. (A very popular, "democratically-decided", and still-practiced solution to the "problem" of sexual immorality in general, but one which is of course anathema to this crowd. Hmm, I guess that that "diversity" isn't celebrated.) All this, of course, was perpetrated with heaping helpings of my typically acerbic and uncharitable style. My insightful and penetrating insights were not received well, to put it mildly. And lo! the very next day, the Commissar hauled me down to the tiled cellar and put the virtual bullet in the back of my head. Oh well. C'est la vie.

It is instructive at this point to note one of the prime differences between essentially anti-Statist forums, and essentially Left-Statist ones; while a Left-Statist may not make much headway on an anti-State forum, they are generally welcome to continue to do so, whereas on a Left-Statist forum, anyone showing any intellectual tendency remotely traceable back to an anti-State or private-property philosophy is excoriated, and if he persists in this heresy, receives the forum equivalent of the death penalty to prevent further contamination. These attitudes correspond precisely to the form of social organization each group prefers. Private-property proponents want to live and let live, to cooperate and tolerate, in strict literal accordance with the ancient saw "to each his own", whereas Left-Statists demand obedience and submission on pain of death, backed up by a rigorous program of invasion, confiscation, denunciation, and execution. This has been observed again and again, in place after place and time after time. That's why countries embracing these principles invariably require concertina-wire-topped walls at the borders, guarded by snipers and dogs, to keep their inhabitants from leaving. (And yes, Right-Statists engage in this behavior too, though not nearly to the extent that the Left has in modern times.)

However, that isn't the point.

The point: as any Freedomista, anarcho-capitalist, Austrian economist, gun nut, Federal Reserve conspiracy-theorist, gold bug, secessionist, political monkeywrencher, dope-smoking marijuana-reform activist, civil libertarian or other amateur or professional contrarian possessed of even the most rudimentary understanding of his beliefs will tell you: the fundamental human right is the right to be left alone. That right does not evaporate when you pass some hazy income or property-owning threshold, the Marxist version of transubstantiation, a change in quantity becoming a change in quality; it is not contingent upon some bureaucrat's definition of the word "is", or upon how much some other party "wants" something, or upon how much "social utility" can theoretically be gained according to this one totally mind-blowingly erudite and celebrated economist by the simple and painless expedient of temporarily suspending just this one eensy little right in just this one unimportant corner case just this once, pinky-promise; it does not waver in and out of existence upon the crossing or re-crossing of a border, coming and going like the eponymous Karma Chameleon; it is under no circumstances and at no time dependent on the addled whim of any majority or plurality at a vote. It is not ill-defined, it does not exist temporarily or only for sympathetic defendants, it does not have "limits". It is crystal-clear, eternal, universal, and absolute. Most succinctly put: it's just plain so. Somebody who tells you it ain't is sellin' somethin'. Most likely somethin' bad, too.

From this right, merely the right of self-ownership restated, all other rights spring; the right to defense of self and property, the right to freely assemble, the right to freely contract, the right to free speech and free belief. From those rights spring the two basic moral duties; to abjure force and fraud. Because of that singular, primeval root right, I am all for the ejection of the disruptive--why, if someone comes onto your property and makes an ass of himself, shouldn't you bounce him? It is, after all, your property, yes? That's even part of the definition of property; "that which you may justly exclude others from the use of." Hell, if it's your property, you don't even need a reason to throw him out, other than that you don't want him there anymore. I ask merely for fairness, for that right to be recognized by and granted to all--not to some, nor to many, nor even to most; neither solely to "the most deserving" nor "the most expedient" nor "those that can make the best use of it"; but to all Men, at all times and in all places.

I am, of course, supremely unlikely to receive my piddling request from the secret chiefs of this world or the architects of the next, unlikely even to have it seriously considered. "You hear what this mook is asking for?", comes the baritone chuckle from the blackened pit, "What a maroon! I bet he believes in Santa Claus, too!", followed by a chorus of harsh rasping laughter and the sound of gnashing fangs. All the same, hope springs eternal.


[1] The mailing lists:

LBO-Talk, a mailing list hosted by the "Left Business Observer": http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

The Economics department at the University of Utah hosts several Leftist mailing lists, the subscription gateways for which can be found here: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/

Of especial interest is "Marxism." Be gentle, folks, if you subscribe: they don't agree with you, and they don't like you. Their stated worldview consists of the root premise that it is okay to kill you and take your belongings for the crime of owning more than they believe seemly. They are very unlikely to respond well to any attempted refutation of their beliefs - my own experience confirms this - yet the task is worthwhile, and at any rate they do make some very amusing reading and can be loads of fun to bait if done gently. Best of luck!

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Szechuan Death's picture
Columns on STR: 6

Szechuan Death is one of the obnoxious, poisonous creatures that lives in the dark spaces of the Internet.  His life is dedicated to the Art of the Flame, and to the destruction of toxic thought-patterns (e.g. Statism) wherever and whenever they arise.  He is a mathematician, professional systems/network administrator, and all-around jack-of-all-trades, know-it-all, and smartass.  He currently resides in Alaska.