Words of the Sentient

11/11/2020

Wendy McElroy is right.
When we abstain from voting,
it's not apathy;
it's a vote against the corrupt system.

08/11/2020

So true...

Good people don't have to virtue signal.
Their spontaneous actions speak for themselves.
Live as a good person in principle.

02/11/2020

Imaginary difference there be
'twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." — Helen Keller (1911)

Over a century later, nothing's changed. And if people keep falling for the whole sham of supporting "lesser" evils, nothing will.

16/10/2020

• Would you be a moderate on allowing slavery?
• Are you willing to compromise on the legality of r**e?

"I would remind you that
extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!
And let me remind you also,
that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
— Goldwater's Acceptance Speech as the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate

11/10/2020

Gun Control Causes Violent Crime: Robert Anson Heinlein

From a letter to an editor who was censoring his novel, Red Planet

Check out the story of this intolerable stifling of a great writer's words, here:

https://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/works/novels/redplanetbluepencil.html

06/10/2020

Today's Hero of Liberty is still out there fighting for our freedom.

John Frank Stossel started out as one of those consumer advocates who calls for state intervention in your choices.

But he's a rare example of a journalist who is honest and smart enough to realize when he's wrong, and change.

In his own words:

"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people.

"But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer.

"It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."

Having turned over a new leaf, John used his journalistic expertise to carry the message of freedom and community to generations of new people.

John Stossel's Dank Meme 'Stache

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stossel

"What private property does is connect effort to reward,
creating an incentive for people to produce more.

"Then, if there's a free market,
people will trade their surpluses to each other for the things they lack.

"Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer."
— The Tragedy of the Commons

"I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse."

"I suppose beat reporters who cover people like Babbitt and Gephardt are reluctant to offend because they may need the powerful people’s cooperation tomorrow. I didn’t worry about cooperation tomorrow, so I kept offending people today."

04/10/2020

One of our favorite quotes of this year!

Thanks to a rigged system, we're stuck with this ridiculous "choice".

06/07/2020

Yes, this includes people whose ideas YOU hate.
To silence them, is to be an enemy of freedom.

Don't be an enemy of freedom.

Defend the rights of those you despise,
to earn your own right to be free.

Check out Walter Williams' full interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtzqsoM7-q4
He says it at about 43:10

04/07/2020

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine laid out the conditions under which it's reasonable to oppose a corrupt and authoritarian government.

With the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson agreed. He and Paine affirmed John Locke's recognition: That when the state tries to impose extreme restrictions on the People, they have a right to rise up and refuse, stripping it of the authority it is abusing.

This is as true today, as it was back then. The complaints listed 246 years ago today apply just as much now, in their own way, with a long list of new ones added.

16/03/2020

Because if they can't be trusted to govern themselves,
how can they be trusted to govern everyone else?

10/02/2020

Political Class Parasites

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

CWCiD: The earliest version of this quote in print seems to be Larry Hardiman posting it on usenet, but he attributed it to "a friend".

11/11/2019

Rank Your All-Time Favorite Political Quotes, Here:
https://www.ranker.com/list/best-political-quotes/kaz-vorpal
Help drive this list of great quotes to the top of Ranker's ranks!

31/07/2019

In our series, today's Hero of Liberty may surprise some, mainly because he's gotten such a bad rap by the mistranslation of his words as "property is theft", when he condemned the state controlling land ownership and capital. He was actually against what we call today "socialism".

In fact, in his day socialists like himself, Josiah Warren, and Benjamin Tucker defended free markets. Proudhon said that "I never meant to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree, ground rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and voluntary for all: I ask for them no modifications, restrictions or suppressions, other than those which result naturally and of necessity from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity which I propose." As a mutualist, he believed in private property and individual sovereignty based on the productivity of each person in their community.

This is also the guy who coined the word "capitalism", specifically to condemn the state controlling capital the way modern "socialists" want it to.

For the record, it's psychopathically machiavellian Karl Marx who flipped the definitions of those two words on their heads. Sorta like the statists have done for "liberal", "progressive", and "diversity".

A fundamental rule of statism seems to be that when people figure out what you advocate is evil, name yourself after the opposite of what you advocate.

Pierre was probably the first guy to openly refer to himself as anarchist in the good, philosophical good way. But showing how much more that word means than the statists imply, he was also a member of the French parliament. At the end of the day, he wanted a "republic" that freed each person to govern himself. As he put it, "res publico" means "the public", which is comprised of the consensual interactions of individuals.

" I oppose every system in which some authority can choose, the basis of some supposed necessity, to overrule my free will."

"Liberty is not the daughter of order, but her mother"

"This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished. When Warren and Proudhon, in prosecuting their search for justice to labor, came face to face with the obstacle of class monopolies, they saw that these monopolies rested upon Authority, and concluded that the thing to be done was, not to strengthen this Authority and thus make monopoly universal, but to utterly uproot Authority and give full sway to the opposite principle, Liberty, by making competition, the antithesis of monopoly, universal."
— Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (Selected essays and writings on Individualist anarchism & Liberty: (plus selected letters))

29/07/2019

Mr. Niven was talking about Puppeteers,
but it applies even better to these muppets.

20/07/2019

Crepuscular
adj. Living in or preferring twilight or shadow

"And as everything loves its symbol, so the German loves the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, CREPUSCULAR, damp, and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is "deep".
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

"Then they were all there, in the CREPUSCULAR light that promises day. The lush, fruity smells of the rainforest drifted up to them. Warm, too, and that was frightening. He looked up and slightly to the north. Pulsing with menace, the Red Star shone down."
— Anne McCaffrey, Dragon Flight

In the CREPUSCULAR light of the social nether spaces the details of the code are not apprehended with all the facility that might be desired, and these broad underlying canons of decency are therefore applied somewhat unreflectingly, with little question as to the scope of their competence or the exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
— Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class

"There should be three religions, said Elizabeth — not counting the dispensation from Mecca, about which Turk and Hun might be permitted to continue their struggle on the CREPUSCULAR limits of civilization."
— John Lolthrop Motley, History of the Netherlands

"The attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar, from immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow, taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or CREPUSCULAR animals, persistence of infernal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters, pallor of human beings."
— James Joyce, Ulysses

"The very daylight seemed CREPUSCULAR; immeasurable clouds, passing slowly overhead, darkened the whole country at broad noon."
— Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman

ETYMOLOGY:
The Latin root "crepus" (twilight) isn't related to any common English words.
So as a mnemonic, just remember that crepuscular animals may be creepy.

15/07/2019

Words of the Sociopaths...

The lefties have been denying that famous Hi**er quote where he states that the National Socialists are socialist, because Hi**er was paraphrasing a N**i community organizer, Gregor Strasser. As if that quote was an isolated accident, not an expression of 30+ years of fascists advocating and implementing socialism.

Well, here are a bunch of OTHER fascist quotes describing their socialist beliefs.

Mussolini nationalized 80% of industry in Italy. The N**is imposed national health care, gun control, social security, mandatory profit sharing, environmentalism, political correctness, and even affirmative action punishing what THEY claimed was a wealthy and privileged group. And fascism originated with syndicalism, the main socialist movement in Europe at the time. International socialism in Italy, Germany, and Spain was failing, so the syndicalists decided to try National socialism, instead. That was the only real change, ending the international component.

It may be embarrassing for modern leftists, but it's true. And it's important, because the ultimate difference between the fascists and other socialists is simply how much power they got. Statists always push as far as they're allowed. Just ask the Japanese-Americans put in concentration camps by FDR, someone the left has NOT disavowed yet.

13/07/2019

"Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob."

This Hero of Liberty is demonized by the hateful, intolerant Left specifically because she had such a positive impact on the lives of so many people, who learned from her that individual freedom is a moral right. Many a former socialist had the blinders lifted from their eyes by reading Ayn Rand's writing.

Rand describes your right to freedom of choice as objectively moral. That all things universally seen as evil involve violating your right to choose, like murder, r**e, theft, and fraud. It is your consent that defines moral vs immoral. This is Ayn's greatest contribution to the philosophy of liberty.

But even the things her attackers demonize have positive moral messages when interpreted honestly instead of with hate. At the beginning of "The Virtue of Selfishness", Rand explicitly states that she uses the word in its original technical meaning, enlightened self-interest, which includes generousity to and love of others...but the typical leftist will pretend she means scrooge-like greed.

And yes, Ayn Rand drew social security, a system that she famously and correctly condemned for being imposed by force. But of course it is also a system she was forced to pay into for decades. It's not like people are allowed to opt out of being legally plundered by F**A: If they were, Social Security would no longer be immoral in the first place. But the left also spends a lot of their hate energy attacking and demonizing people, instead of their ideas.

That's pretty different than wealthy leftist politicians who oppose school choice while sending their children to the best private schools. THERE is hypocrisy.

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
— The Fountainhead

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
— The Nature of Government

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."
— The Virtue of Selfishness

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter...Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver."
— The Nature of Money

"Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives."

"Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another isn't and can't be a right."

"Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims."

"I guard my treasures: My thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom."

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual.
Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

09/07/2019

Unfit to Rule
"He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens, wants to rule them."
— Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944)