Why in your opinion has this not resulted in action (especially during COVID)? \ stasher news

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My general opinion is comfort, Christianity, and legalism (which I view as a downstream consequence of Abrahamism).

@Aillia curious to hear your thoughts here

1 mXMR \ 1 reply \ @AilliA 7 Oct freebie

IMO comfort is the dominant variable: the willingness to treat job, mortgage/loans, custody, and social standing as acceptable losses is not. COVID in most Western countries never required door-kicks for most people. It priced non-compliance in paychecks, licenses, and school/daycare access (even child custody(!) in some cases), and the majority of people (including gun owners) ran the personal cost-benefit and chose the paycheck. And to be fair, I know a lot of non-religious people who got religious exemptions that allowed them to stay unvaxxed and keep their jobs and kids. That is skin in the game working exactly as Taleb describes, just not in the direction the meme hopes for :))

US specifically, as I see it: legalism on steroids is downstream of that incentive. A whole population of "proud taxpayers" trained for generations to route every grievance through courts, elections, and permitted protest, will treat "action" as filing the correct form.

I tweeted from my banned account:

"The IRS has managed to cultivate a unique breed of 'proud taxpayers' in the US, a phenomenon unseen anywhere else in the world!"

https://stasher.news/uploads/696

When I first learned about this phenomenon I found it INSANE. I've been to many countries. The US is a fucking INSANE phenomenon! If you are born in the US and have not lived in different places in the world, you basically cannot even see HOW strange it is...

Guns are individual last-resort deterrence. They do not coordinate. Coordination against an administrative state either means mass simultaneous defection or rendering the state's services optional. The second is already the lower-variance path: counter-economy, cash and Monero markets that do not ask permission, parallel provision of the things people actually cannot lose. Kinetic revolt is high-variance and selects for the people least able to sustain it. Opting out compounds. A lot of safes stayed closed when the pressure was economic and reputational rather than kinetic. The subset that treated the mandates as non-negotiable is the same subset still building the exits ;)

0 mXMR \ 0 replies \ @OldNorseAnarchist OP 7 Oct freebie

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

The proud taxpayers thing drives me crazy, as does "I'm a law abiding citizen" or "he's a criminal". The US has been brainwashed into those words being absolutes which is ironic considering the country was founded with the help of what would be considered terrorism in today's terminology. Not to mention the many supporting smugglers and privateers.

I do think the coordination thing is a problem which I aim to propose a solution to. Opting out is almost always desired unless appearances have to be maintained for whatever reason.

Have you ever read anything on why someone like Konkin takes as a given that more kinetic options will fail? What works along this line have you found compelling? I've been in the general space for years and have heard many people say that (re: violence) as an offhand aphorism, but I rarely ever actually saw someone treat it seriously or explain why. It's like when you read Road to Serfdom and Hayek just keeps asserting without evidence that the state is necessary (unprompted too). For all the arguments I've read so far, I found none to be compelling and they seem to be a form of either moralizing to the point of inaction or just a thinly veiled desire to give up that whole option. I think the IRA and the foundation of the state of Israel have both proven in the modern era that this strategy works to this day. I also think that these analyses are weak, especially in their failure to note that certain technologies rapidly deplete the economies of scale state actors maintain over dissidents or their failure to identify exploitable weaknesses in an adversary. The IRAs methodology seems particularly sympathetic to libertarian inclinations since they specifically targeted what would normally be considered enemy combatants or valid targets and maintained discipline around that. Their conduct was largely in line with Just War Theory and doctrines on total war. You can get further info on this out of LLMs if you interrogate them a bit to get past their normal framing and self-censorship and then you can research it from there.

I don't understand why most people interpret the NAP to mean only active self defense during an attack (which they would also probably discourage or denounce). The only explanation I have found for this is Christianity (leading to a broad attitude of nonviolence in all situations) honestly. I do think the (false) propaganda around the Civil Rights Era, the indian removal of Great Britain, fight against apartheid has greatly influenced this as well through false perceptions that these movements were solely achieved through peaceful means of resistance.

The idea that you can ever reliably achieve or maintain any substantive freedom (especially intergenerationally) without being willing to kill and die for it is asinine to me.