Recent comments

Certainly hope everything is alright with Sam. I have appreciated his input on this forum, and have always looked foward to when he gives his perspective bluntly, without hesitance, and right from his heart. 

Hi, Jim. Glad you like him. The issue of claims seems to revolve around what you have transformed into productive use. And Kinsella would add, that you must make unambiguous boundaries.

It's a fine and concise communication, Alex, and I wish you luck. Good to see there may be at least one of your formerly Libertarian principles still intact.   It presents utilitarian arguments. Although good, I suggest those are inferior to the one endorsed by the new President; that gun rights are natural rights which, in Amendment 2, the Feds have sworn not to abridge.   Does the US Constitution bind the State of Vermont? - maybe not, by Amendment 10. But the Vermont one, in Chapter 1 Article 16, says much the same thing.   All that is paper, which Pols routinely ignore. Until government is eliminated, natural rights will be relentlessly eroded. But then - I nearly forgot - you no longer believe in rights anyway.

So Google is the new Goebbels, deciding what news is fake and what is fit to be read.   There are other search engines; I've been using Ixquick. Any others recommended?

Sam Spade ("Samarami") has met with misfortune and will not be present for posting. Written by daughter on Smart Phone

Guess I will just say I enjoyed the perceptive article and to note that I had a representative who actually communicated with me twice about issues coming up for vote, but no more have ever come requesting my input. Ha. Really a shocker.

Guess I will just say I enjoyed the perceptive article and to note that I had a representative who actually communicated with me twice about issues coming up for vote, but no more have ever come requesting my input. Ha. Really a shocker.

Guess I will just say I enjoyed the perceptive article and to note that I had a representative who actually communicated with me twice about issues coming up for vote, but no more have ever come requesting my input. Ha. Really a schocker.

Guess I will just say I enjoyed the perceptive article and to note that I had a representative who actually communicated with me twice about issues coming up for vote, but no more have ever come requesting my input. Ha. Really a schocker.

Ken: Interesting stuff. Do you prep for dooms day?

Douglas, I am probably way left field wrong about this, but wasn't Moore a GM lay off who had an ax to grind because he was laid off? Might have been one of the line workers caught on film drinking and smoking dope? Can't be sure, my memory is really fuzzy because it was such a long time ago. I think he knows he irritates people and he stays on the formula because it makes him a bunch of money. These are just thoughts because I really don't know much about Moore, and I guess I really don't want to know much.

Congratulations, Will, you won the prize! - for the most lurid expression of loathing in the recent torrent of detestation by the squalid bunch of pseudo libertarian whiners and wannabe psychoanalysts here. It seems to have abated following Keven Patten's sobering and hilarious comment yesterday, so I took the chance to look over the lot of them, and yours was head and shoulders above the rest. Your success was all the more remarkable for being unprovoked; I cannot recall having done you harm - unless you count the question I left with you recently on another thread: about how you can (a) deplore the effect of robots on society while (b) earning a living by designing more of them. Yes, perhaps that was a bit cheeky. You would have faced stiffer competition had not Alex Knight stood aloof above this contest, for he is a professional writer of horror fiction and is very good at it; but he did, so you didn't, and so you won fair and square. Two of the highlights were your shrinking of the difference between libertarians and others by a factor of a hundred billion, and your coining of that phrase about frying my transistors. That was a masterpiece, and deserves an entry in the Compendium of Contemporary Curses and Maledictions - perhaps in the form "May your brain be fried in canola oil and its transistors pop loudly one by one." It reminds me of the scene in Hannibal, where Doctor Lecter seats his sedated victim for dinner, surgically removes the top of his skull, slices off portions of his brain and sautées them for an appetizer in a skillet over a table-top fondue burner. Except that I think he used butter instead of canola oil, perhaps with a little garlic. Be that as it may, I have great pleasure in awarding you the Order of the Black Rosette. I hope you'll print out the image, trim the paper with scissors and wear the result on your lapel when you go to work at your robot factory.  

O.K. A. Magnus, I am lost. You obviously know something I don't. It would be impossible to disagree with the thought "...what is being achieved by lying..."--it's weird because I cannot conjure any benefit for distorting the truth about global warming, or freezing, or etc. The threat implied goes beyond the sales of air-conditioner, or a efficient heater. It has to be something great, huge, gigantic, like controlling the population but for the life of me I cannot see how it plays out that way, so, what is the objective, what are we going to "make do with less so ruling class can have more." More what? What am I going to have to make due with less of.

I don't know much about global warming, well, in fact I know absolutely nothing about it, but for me I haven't noted anything significant that would convince me it is. I recall back in the 1970's a Time magazine warned of a global freezing. Problem is is who do you believe. I am guessing most members here have little or no knowledge about Global Warming. Then of course there were the sky is falling idea that the sun is burning out--that was somewhere in the 1950's. Oh! Yes. There are the meteorite's that are going to take us out. What is the real purpose for publishing this kind of stuff? And what is being achieved by lying about these things? There has to be a bigger objective here. A conspiracy?

You are an example to us all of tolerance and patience. Or of a thick skin - a valuable asset here.   So you served government all your working life and only then discovered the libertarian alternative; that explains it. I hope the QuitGov site is useful when you encounter younger, former colleagues.

Ah! cum on Will Groves. Jim can't be that bad is he. I think he is just tryin to do right. I think of him kinda like a hall monitor. You remember those. I think it is kinda nice theres someone willing to try an keep things straight.

Damned Mishochu yous is xactly rit. I isn't Ohfended. An yep, dat guy is purfectly o.k.s wit me. an yep. I doez lub my Glocks.

*Yawn. Stretch. Crack*    WHAT.....you guys are still here?!?!   Well, at least you're constructively discussing the merits of my arti....   HUH?? What in the name of an unholy fuck is going on here?   BUH GAWD~!!!! The carnage! The madness!   That's it....you're all hereby sentenced to 30 days of Libertarians Anonymous. 

Nope. There are plenty of examples of that on this very page. Yours was one: you disrespected a fellow commenter by ignoring his name and calling him "this guy."  You then compounded it by refusing to apologize, and now by attempting to deflect attention from your rudeness.   If I were to call you an ill-mannered lout, I might be accurate but that would be ad-hominem; it would disparage your character, which may be pretty hard to fix. So I don't; I merely point out that on this occasion, you are writing like an ill-mannered lout.  You've shown no interest yet in fixing that, but you could.

A distinction with very little difference. A troll infiltrates a forum with a particular view, and sows discord. How? - by opposing that view.   Regardless of Glock27's tolerance, you did behave like an ill-mannered lout. That you now refuse to apologize doubles the repugnance of your conduct. 

About that impressive term "AI trollbot", Will.  I enjoy haunting sites like that of The Guardian, which boasts that it is open to all viewpoints but is widely regarded as a Leftist stronghold, and have been unjustly accused there of being a troll (though not yet of being an automated one.)   So I had thought a "troll" was someone who invades a forum with a particular and advertised basis or viewpoint, to disrupt it by expressing the opposite. Would you agree with that?   If so it follows that an open site (like The Guardian's) cannot have any trolls on board. A closed one, on the other hand, may. One example would be someone who argues that paying income tax is a noble and patriotic duty, on a site such as the Simply Schiff Club, whose purpose is to expose the illegal nature of that alleged tax and share ways to avoid it.   Another example would be someone who invades Strike the Root, whose purpose is to advance liberty by striking at government as the root of evil, and argue that government is a necessary institution or that it cannot possibly be abolished.   If we agree on that definition of a "troll", then alas there are several here on STR; Paul Bonneau for example, who openly denied the very core of libertarian philosophy by denying that anyone has any rights; Alex Knight, who subsequently did likewise; Samarami, who cannot or will not define what "freedom" means or why one ethical principle is better than another, etc etc ad nauseam.   Now, several of these may just be confused, rather than deliberately disruptive; it's hard to judge. But one thing is certain; I am 100% in favor of the purpose of this web site, and therefore am the very opposite of a troll. Your apology would be welcome.      

Neither you, Will, nor the mises.org author Brittany Hunter mentioned in relation to this interesting subject how the effect of continuing automation will probably change after government has ceased to exist. In my Blog today I try to repair that omission.   It shows reason to expect that the least skilled in that society will, far from being idled, enjoy a large resurgence of opportunity for dignified and rewarding work.

I stand by my assertion that "Jim Davies" is an AI-trollbot.  A real person who wanted to promote freedom in the world would recognize that perfection is the enemy of the good, and that this focus on purity (by its definition and no-one else's) among freedom-loving people is totally counterproductive.   Also, you gotta love the programmers who added the spambot code to "Jim Davies."  Has ANYBODY here been to that site in the last 2 years??  The one time I visited, the premise of the site stunk like an old-school chain letter gimmick.   In the real world, exponential growth of freedom isn't fostered when anyone who strays 0.000000001% from perfection is shot down.  A bot might not "know" that, and more importantly, it wouldn't "care."   I don't have enough data to figure out what triggers cause "Jim Davies" user-ban-request subprogram to go into action and start sending emails to Rob, but I congratulate Paul Bonneau and Alex Knight on their accomplishment.  In any case, kudos to everyone keeping the transistors in "Jim Davies" hot.  With a little luck, one of those puppies will fry soon.

This guy certainly doesn't need Jim Davies' permission to define freedom for himself. It appears that Jim Davies is so concerned with everyone getting on his "freedom academy" and adhering to its syllabus that he defines freedom for himself as when enough other people (external to himself) accept its tenets then he will be free. This goal is tantamount to dying an enslaved (or not fully free) individual. He refuses to accept the premise that other people will to be free (mentally/internally, where it counts according to some) without waiting for the rest of society (a sadly unlikely goal). Perhaps these people really are free, particularly, free to ignore Jim Davies.