Feb 13th, 2013 - Rebuttal to Los Angeles Times Editoral piece labeled: “Peril from ‘patriots”
Rebuttal to Los Angeles Times Editoral piece labeled: “Peril from ‘patriots” (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/08/opinion/la-ed-patriot-groups-splc-report-20130308)
Normally I would never waste my time with even examining such a piece, simply because it makes zero actual arguments and instead uses generalizations, fear, worry, and doubt as divisive tools to get at its general point, being: guns bad, vis. People who like guns really bad.
Let us first, examine the title of the piece: Peril from ‘patriots’
I did not include the apostrophes’, those are listed in the original story. Normally the inclusion of quotes of some kind around a word implies that the meaning of the word has been skewed from its actual meaning and requires a sort of tongue-in-cheek definition or an out and out reversal of its intended meaning. If one also takes the word from into consideration in the title, then the quotes around the word patriot must imply that the writer is making a statement about what those that would protect the constitution are really doing is not what they themselves think they are doing. In other words, those people calling themselves patriots are in fact the opposite. For clarity, the opposite of Patriot is enemy. Therefore the title itself says that the writer believes We The People should fear the possibility of dangerous enemies of the US living within the borders of this country whom claim themselves as patriots. The title alone, leads to a sense of bigotry and classism.
The subtitle says, “The US needs to keep a close watch on the growing threat of home-grown extremist groups”
Who exactly is the US if it is not the same people that the writer is accusing of being enemies of the country? For as far as I understand the nature of Liberty, all members of this Nation are equal participants in the Country. Who, then, are the people that need to keep a close watch on the people that are watched? The whole of the subject of the line implies a separate entity called the US whom can watch the people. Who is this entity, if not the already over-reaching Federal Government? And which agencies are we speaking of? DHS? FBI? Local LEO? Most of the agencies that have been granted authority to operate have never even been verified as being constitutional, let alone legal. Yet, one must assume that “The US needs to keep a close watch…” must be directed at said federal agencies and not at the people and that We The People being watched for our potential acts of terror should in fact pay taxes to have ourselves watched. This is absurd.
The first paragraph reads: “There are, … cells of angry men … preparing for combat with the U.S. government. They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.”
Did I mention that this so called article is full of vitriolic bigotry? Let us first look at the idea of “combat with the US government.”
I suppose the writer of this piece has forgotten that in 1776 the thirteen colonies on the Americas whom were ruled over by the King of England, rebelled, broke ranks, and declared their independence. I suppose too, the writer forgot, the year before in 1775 the British rule attempted to disarm the colonies to quell the rising rebellion. King George himself believed that the people didn’t really want revolt, that they felt they must acquiesce until such a time that the British Crown could muster an army to defend them (this sound familiar, many current politicians keep telling us that a majority of American's agree with their agenda, yet the statistical data implies that people agree more with their being something wrong than agree with taking away rights). Perhaps too, the writer, forgets, that in 1773 Bostoner’s stormed aboard ships and threw tea into the harbor in open revolt to the King’s illegal and usurpous power, which, for their crime against the crown found themselves unable to even commit legal commerce with their neighbors due to heavy laws laid against them after the fact. Boston of 1775 was not a place for any man or family to live, thanks in large part to the actions of government.
To make the statement that We The People are preparing for battle is only a partial truth if true at all, for the government has been at the door of our Life, Liberty and Property for more than 100 years. Nothing has changed, in the past the slavery of Liberty, the crime of murder of Lives and the theft of Property was not easily seen and muddled by the daily grind. Now, the argument has come to a point that everyone is capable of seeing; a direct constitutional right, which clearly states that it cannot under any circumstance, be infringed. The so called preparing has been an ongoing legal war in the courts against the theft of our rights for a very long time. (A man had three boxes by which to have Liberty: the voting box, the jury box and the cartridge box) How exactly would you deal with decades of draconian demagogues but to blister a general distrust in those that say they will help, while they destroy? Is it really that hard to imagine that the battle hardened veterans of this war for Liberty and Natural Law would not gain the same tools by which those whom would keep them oppressed use? Heavily armed in order to protect the values of a Constitution that they believe in. One should then ask, what the writer of this piece believes in if not the Constitution and equal rights for all mankind? The puzzling answers dizzy my intellect, and none of them look to be of equanimity.
The writer then says, “blinded by an intractable hatred” and later in the article “what can be done to reverse this tide of belligerent ignorance?” and “venting steam by meeting with like-minded Neanderthals”
To come away from such, I find myself speechless, for it implies that a litany of evil upon the head of individuals like myself that do more than simply examine the pulling of my heart strings and worse, it slithers out insults and barbs for no reason other than to say bad things about a people the writer does not obviously know. Thus, in the writer’s own way he is “venting steam by meeting with like-minded Neanderthals” to spew this overly false image of what the writer perceives as the enemy. Not exactly an enlightened view to use the same tactics as one accuses of us.
Are we, the Constitutionalist, the Libertists ,really blinded by an intractable hatred? I can not point to a single statistical set of data that would agree nor can, or would, I make such a general assessment of an entire section of people. It is the same exaggerations that occur when people say “All Democrats are socialists.” It’s pure judgment without the requirement of logical evidence to support the opinion. Such an argument, even in a college course, would have been thrown out by any semi-intelligent professor. It, therefore needs no reply. But I shall say, that personally, it is not hatred and surely it is not intractable, but is instead a general distrust of a government that has lost its way in regards to personal Liberty and especially when it comes to the rights of an individual to his own Property. Even the writer of this article would be angry if I simply cut and paste his or her work into a blog and called it my own. The writer would be up in arms at what he would call plagiarism, the theft of his intellectual property. I bet even if the writer found me going through their refrigerator on Sunday afternoon that I would soon find myself behind bars for breaking, entering, and stealing. Is this concept of personal property really so hard to understand that one need remind individuals that government under any type has always been at war with individual property, from heavy taxation as a form of control over property to outright emanate domain and that the founders of our Constitution worried dearly about this theft that they placed as much of the less obvious stuff in the constitution as possible and defended it until their own deaths: that their Federal Government was to be small and very limited in power. And that the very point of your rights was to further ensure that the government would not get out of control? And that, most importantly, there must be a supreme law (the Law of Nature, Natural Law), that can not be easily over run by other laws, for if one can simply alter one for the sake of the other, then we’d live in a perpetual state of chaos where one year they may allow people to vote, the next no, and then again later yes. Like some Dictator that only opens the vote when he's sure he will win. There must be a highest, if you will, divine, set of rules under which we all must comply. If we disagree with this pinnacle law than we need, as a whole, to change it. This is why we have constitutional amendments. And when a government does not use the constitution it is in fact acting illegally and violating its oath of office, performing sedition and probably acting in outright treachery against the ideas of Liberty. Knowing such is the case, that the government is not capable of seeing individuals, only the compiled line of votes, means even more, that we should be ready to defend our rights, because it’s clear that the government is not. If they are not there to ensure our Constitution and protect us against enemies both foreign and domestic, then the reality is, they have become the enemy of the Constitution. They have become the Tory, following not a doctrine of individual freedom and Liberty but a blind system of intellectual faith.
What’s more, the writer says, “they are convinced that the government is out to seize their weapons”
Any ban on the sale of property that I can own, be it of any animal*, vegetable, or mineral, is a violation of self responsibility and a direct attack on the principles of Life, Liberty, and Estate. What a ban does is to negate my work. Work is the application of life and my physical body (my property) in the transaction of passing time. For this work, in our current system, I earn more property that I then add to my Estate, thus increasing my overall property (myself). When someone tells me that I cannot own something, they are in fact stealing my work, and by doing, limiting the value of my life and more over, shorting it, because I’ve used time that I can never get back in the application of creating work. This is a fundamental requirement of living, to apply work to gain Estate. All living things do it. Not a single creature created or born has ever lived outside of this requirement. But, government seems to think we should. The argument that a ban keeps guns out of bad men’s hands is egregious in its vain attempt to bastardize the tool. Afterall, the argument is to keep guns away from criminals, even their side of the argument recognizes that the people are criminals. They are not law abiding, but criminals. They show, probably by accident, that the bad guy is the real issue, not the gun, therefore, disproving their own argument. I suppose the writer does not remember the divisive tools the pushers of Prohibition used to get alcohol off the streets? They put out flyers saying that alcohol made men rape and cheat on their wives. They even went so far in WWI to claim that since beer was mostly made by German immigrants, that it was evil by association. If nothing else, it’s good to see that the tactics of pointing the finger at the wrong thing is still going on and that no one has come up with a different manner of spreading lies in order to perpetrate a false ideology on people.
The truth is far to simple for the writer and it almost always is.
People have the right to own what they want, regardless of other peoples fear of it. And if the tool is used by a bad man, then it is the man, not the tool that is too blame. That’s common sense, that’s the kind of Common Sense Thomas Paine would have used, not the rhetoric being espoused by the President, which gravely disappoints me being that I am told he taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I wonder exactly how much Constitution was in those classes, apparently no Mr. Paine.
---
* Animals really are not property anymore than people, this is simply a an old saying implying anything under the sun.
Normally I would never waste my time with even examining such a piece, simply because it makes zero actual arguments and instead uses generalizations, fear, worry, and doubt as divisive tools to get at its general point, being: guns bad, vis. People who like guns really bad.
Let us first, examine the title of the piece: Peril from ‘patriots’
I did not include the apostrophes’, those are listed in the original story. Normally the inclusion of quotes of some kind around a word implies that the meaning of the word has been skewed from its actual meaning and requires a sort of tongue-in-cheek definition or an out and out reversal of its intended meaning. If one also takes the word from into consideration in the title, then the quotes around the word patriot must imply that the writer is making a statement about what those that would protect the constitution are really doing is not what they themselves think they are doing. In other words, those people calling themselves patriots are in fact the opposite. For clarity, the opposite of Patriot is enemy. Therefore the title itself says that the writer believes We The People should fear the possibility of dangerous enemies of the US living within the borders of this country whom claim themselves as patriots. The title alone, leads to a sense of bigotry and classism.
The subtitle says, “The US needs to keep a close watch on the growing threat of home-grown extremist groups”
Who exactly is the US if it is not the same people that the writer is accusing of being enemies of the country? For as far as I understand the nature of Liberty, all members of this Nation are equal participants in the Country. Who, then, are the people that need to keep a close watch on the people that are watched? The whole of the subject of the line implies a separate entity called the US whom can watch the people. Who is this entity, if not the already over-reaching Federal Government? And which agencies are we speaking of? DHS? FBI? Local LEO? Most of the agencies that have been granted authority to operate have never even been verified as being constitutional, let alone legal. Yet, one must assume that “The US needs to keep a close watch…” must be directed at said federal agencies and not at the people and that We The People being watched for our potential acts of terror should in fact pay taxes to have ourselves watched. This is absurd.
The first paragraph reads: “There are, … cells of angry men … preparing for combat with the U.S. government. They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.”
Did I mention that this so called article is full of vitriolic bigotry? Let us first look at the idea of “combat with the US government.”
I suppose the writer of this piece has forgotten that in 1776 the thirteen colonies on the Americas whom were ruled over by the King of England, rebelled, broke ranks, and declared their independence. I suppose too, the writer forgot, the year before in 1775 the British rule attempted to disarm the colonies to quell the rising rebellion. King George himself believed that the people didn’t really want revolt, that they felt they must acquiesce until such a time that the British Crown could muster an army to defend them (this sound familiar, many current politicians keep telling us that a majority of American's agree with their agenda, yet the statistical data implies that people agree more with their being something wrong than agree with taking away rights). Perhaps too, the writer, forgets, that in 1773 Bostoner’s stormed aboard ships and threw tea into the harbor in open revolt to the King’s illegal and usurpous power, which, for their crime against the crown found themselves unable to even commit legal commerce with their neighbors due to heavy laws laid against them after the fact. Boston of 1775 was not a place for any man or family to live, thanks in large part to the actions of government.
To make the statement that We The People are preparing for battle is only a partial truth if true at all, for the government has been at the door of our Life, Liberty and Property for more than 100 years. Nothing has changed, in the past the slavery of Liberty, the crime of murder of Lives and the theft of Property was not easily seen and muddled by the daily grind. Now, the argument has come to a point that everyone is capable of seeing; a direct constitutional right, which clearly states that it cannot under any circumstance, be infringed. The so called preparing has been an ongoing legal war in the courts against the theft of our rights for a very long time. (A man had three boxes by which to have Liberty: the voting box, the jury box and the cartridge box) How exactly would you deal with decades of draconian demagogues but to blister a general distrust in those that say they will help, while they destroy? Is it really that hard to imagine that the battle hardened veterans of this war for Liberty and Natural Law would not gain the same tools by which those whom would keep them oppressed use? Heavily armed in order to protect the values of a Constitution that they believe in. One should then ask, what the writer of this piece believes in if not the Constitution and equal rights for all mankind? The puzzling answers dizzy my intellect, and none of them look to be of equanimity.
The writer then says, “blinded by an intractable hatred” and later in the article “what can be done to reverse this tide of belligerent ignorance?” and “venting steam by meeting with like-minded Neanderthals”
To come away from such, I find myself speechless, for it implies that a litany of evil upon the head of individuals like myself that do more than simply examine the pulling of my heart strings and worse, it slithers out insults and barbs for no reason other than to say bad things about a people the writer does not obviously know. Thus, in the writer’s own way he is “venting steam by meeting with like-minded Neanderthals” to spew this overly false image of what the writer perceives as the enemy. Not exactly an enlightened view to use the same tactics as one accuses of us.
Are we, the Constitutionalist, the Libertists ,really blinded by an intractable hatred? I can not point to a single statistical set of data that would agree nor can, or would, I make such a general assessment of an entire section of people. It is the same exaggerations that occur when people say “All Democrats are socialists.” It’s pure judgment without the requirement of logical evidence to support the opinion. Such an argument, even in a college course, would have been thrown out by any semi-intelligent professor. It, therefore needs no reply. But I shall say, that personally, it is not hatred and surely it is not intractable, but is instead a general distrust of a government that has lost its way in regards to personal Liberty and especially when it comes to the rights of an individual to his own Property. Even the writer of this article would be angry if I simply cut and paste his or her work into a blog and called it my own. The writer would be up in arms at what he would call plagiarism, the theft of his intellectual property. I bet even if the writer found me going through their refrigerator on Sunday afternoon that I would soon find myself behind bars for breaking, entering, and stealing. Is this concept of personal property really so hard to understand that one need remind individuals that government under any type has always been at war with individual property, from heavy taxation as a form of control over property to outright emanate domain and that the founders of our Constitution worried dearly about this theft that they placed as much of the less obvious stuff in the constitution as possible and defended it until their own deaths: that their Federal Government was to be small and very limited in power. And that the very point of your rights was to further ensure that the government would not get out of control? And that, most importantly, there must be a supreme law (the Law of Nature, Natural Law), that can not be easily over run by other laws, for if one can simply alter one for the sake of the other, then we’d live in a perpetual state of chaos where one year they may allow people to vote, the next no, and then again later yes. Like some Dictator that only opens the vote when he's sure he will win. There must be a highest, if you will, divine, set of rules under which we all must comply. If we disagree with this pinnacle law than we need, as a whole, to change it. This is why we have constitutional amendments. And when a government does not use the constitution it is in fact acting illegally and violating its oath of office, performing sedition and probably acting in outright treachery against the ideas of Liberty. Knowing such is the case, that the government is not capable of seeing individuals, only the compiled line of votes, means even more, that we should be ready to defend our rights, because it’s clear that the government is not. If they are not there to ensure our Constitution and protect us against enemies both foreign and domestic, then the reality is, they have become the enemy of the Constitution. They have become the Tory, following not a doctrine of individual freedom and Liberty but a blind system of intellectual faith.
What’s more, the writer says, “they are convinced that the government is out to seize their weapons”
Any ban on the sale of property that I can own, be it of any animal*, vegetable, or mineral, is a violation of self responsibility and a direct attack on the principles of Life, Liberty, and Estate. What a ban does is to negate my work. Work is the application of life and my physical body (my property) in the transaction of passing time. For this work, in our current system, I earn more property that I then add to my Estate, thus increasing my overall property (myself). When someone tells me that I cannot own something, they are in fact stealing my work, and by doing, limiting the value of my life and more over, shorting it, because I’ve used time that I can never get back in the application of creating work. This is a fundamental requirement of living, to apply work to gain Estate. All living things do it. Not a single creature created or born has ever lived outside of this requirement. But, government seems to think we should. The argument that a ban keeps guns out of bad men’s hands is egregious in its vain attempt to bastardize the tool. Afterall, the argument is to keep guns away from criminals, even their side of the argument recognizes that the people are criminals. They are not law abiding, but criminals. They show, probably by accident, that the bad guy is the real issue, not the gun, therefore, disproving their own argument. I suppose the writer does not remember the divisive tools the pushers of Prohibition used to get alcohol off the streets? They put out flyers saying that alcohol made men rape and cheat on their wives. They even went so far in WWI to claim that since beer was mostly made by German immigrants, that it was evil by association. If nothing else, it’s good to see that the tactics of pointing the finger at the wrong thing is still going on and that no one has come up with a different manner of spreading lies in order to perpetrate a false ideology on people.
The truth is far to simple for the writer and it almost always is.
People have the right to own what they want, regardless of other peoples fear of it. And if the tool is used by a bad man, then it is the man, not the tool that is too blame. That’s common sense, that’s the kind of Common Sense Thomas Paine would have used, not the rhetoric being espoused by the President, which gravely disappoints me being that I am told he taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I wonder exactly how much Constitution was in those classes, apparently no Mr. Paine.
---
* Animals really are not property anymore than people, this is simply a an old saying implying anything under the sun.
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