I tend to believe that you could be the purest person in the world but by the time you would get into a high position, you would be a completely different person. Money, power, favours, threats change people.
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You won a new follower today. INDEED! I was working with the most beautiful people you ever met, the Ron Paul sign wavers. Stand in the cold for hours to pass out information, work their weekends at gun shows - whatever needed done. And it was about working together for truth and justice. Then the little titles were bestowed via "free and fair elections" and all of us had to deal with a new ego trip, unlike anything you have ever experienced unless you got elected. People treat you differently, you start to act differently. People TRUST you, so you make decisions based on YOUR values, they elected YOU, right...? I watched many fine people turn into powermongering ghouls before my eyes. I got a bit ghoulish myself, it is heady stuff, all that power. AND I WAS A PEON. A state central committeewoman. My husband was a Precinct Committeeman, but we had Congressman and Senators kissing our ass. Most people kissed back... we got out.
Good to hear a personal experience related to this topic. It seems to me that you made the right decision. Not everyone's stomach can handle this.
I know people who jumped into politics quite heavily. One was one of my best friends. A good person with a sad past. It's brutal to see the gradual change up until the point you feel you don't know your friend anymore.
Yep. My "right hand man" all through the campaign, just a rock... stabbed me in the back at the very first shot. He played all cool while his wife sat there turning red, then nearly crying, because she knew what he was doing was not right, and she knew I was not buying his bullshit about what he was doing, and at least SHE still had a bit of ethics. Not enough to stand up to him, but it was her husband. Sorry for the loss of your friend.
Thanks.
Well, not the happiest campaign story. She faced a difficult decision. Both confronting her husband and not doing anything is quite wrong but for different reasons.
By the way, the husband sounds like a successful politician. :D
The karma bus rolls, never when you expect it but always on time... It was not long before he was getting knives in the back too.
If you can post something like this without indicating what type of politician the person was (a Ron Paul? A John Lilburne? A Frederick Douglass? A Lysander Spooner? A Thomas Massie? A Thomas Paine? Pursuing voluntaryist policies? Claiming to to pursue individual freedom the way Obama did --totally self-contradictory and obviously lying from the beginning? Claiming to pursue individual freedom the way Ron Paul did --coherently, but without a radical focus on the courts? Claiming to pursue individual freedom the way Lilburne, MLK, Frederick Douglass, and Rosa Parks did, battling for his and her life against the courts, speaking publicly to huge crowds of the similarly-oppressed, demanding results they would not be paid for? Claiming to pursue freedom like Cobden and Bright did, on stage, coherently, but with little of their own freedom at stake?)
We know literally nothing about your situation. Certainly not enough to judge whether it's one thing(freedom), or the very opposite of that thing(tyranny).
Your friend could easily be a radical freedom fighter, and you a half-assed "fairweather friend" of liberty. ...Or vice versa. There's no way for an informed observer to know from your comment.
...But the assumption that "power is bad" is there. ...The fatal error of the liberty movement!
One type of power stops the big, bold, fat, wealthy S.S. officer from gunning down skeletal Jews and pushing them into a mass grave.
Are you against that type of power? The power wielded by the Allies when they liberated the death-camps?
I'm not.
Justice+Power+slow improvement, slow reduction of political power = freedom.
If the liberty movement has no power of its own, our children will go to the gulag, in chains.
It's as simple as that.
You'd better figure out what would cause you to pick up a rifle, and what would cause you to donate money to what quality of messenger for your ideas: so you don't have to.
If you read the full chain of posts you would know he was a Ron Paul supporter, and I just love how you assume I just misjudged his character. he stabbed me in the back in such a way his WIFE was about to cry. Maybe she misjudged him too, we don't know him like you apparently do.
I don't know anyone on this thread.
I was commenting about one post from cryptosenpai. My focus here is simply to urge people away from the pointless mire of "political fatalism." Humans will always be at war, as long as unproductive parasites can use "feedback-and-correction"-based control mechanisms designed to deal with rights-violations to steal money, instead of earn it.
The famine in the Ukraine and the gas chambers of Nazi Germany are how bad it can get. Poland's Perestroika, the USA's abolitionist movement succeeding at making slavery unenforceable in MA, etc. are how good it can get. Abolishing the DEA and ATF are well within the bounds of the politically possible.
The good in a political world that is full of sociopaths admittedly isn't very good. Lobaczewski, Milgram, and other students of "political evil" were and are right. (But the political good of "true democracy in the proper sense" allows improvement, and rising intelligence.) The bad("totalitarianism") doesn't allow improvement, until we've lost literally everything of good in our lives, and in the lives of our grandchildren.
Most people don't see the huge price-tag cynicism, resignation, fatalism, and political-relinquishment carry until they're in the gulag, paying it. Then, it's too late.
You seem to know this. I don't get the sense cryptosenpai does, since he's spouting off Konkinist assertions.
I dislike Konkinist assertions that detract from serious political involvement. I'd like to see libertarians become as serious as Ron Paul's supporters were, and then, even more serious than that.
Politics is the art of the possible. It requires continual passive support of the best available option, above a threshold of "acceptable." (Hillary, Bernie, Trump, Otter, etc. are all "unacceptable" in my view.)
What's even more unacceptable than that is pretending that one is doing something against the state by "sitting at home on election day." There may not be a good option, but, if so, that's shameful, because our republic is in shambles, dominated by totalitarian sociopaths.
Your story's really vague. Maybe your friend was a pure sociopath, like most power-seeking politicians. Maybe you're 100% full of shit, and think every libertarian has a duty to lose, if he's "a real anarchist." You've not given anyone enough information for them to have an opinion on the situation. You've not even given them enough information to identify a pattern from reality. Your assessment might be right, it might be wrong. ...I don't have enough information to know, and anyone who thinks they do is full of shit, and "siding with their kneejerk reaction" or "engaging in confirmation bias."
This kind of thinking 1) is usually not true or absolute. 2) encourages libertarians to "not donate money" ...the default action.
It's hard to get people to confront the government. The government is now a tyranny, an unconstrained mess of totalitarian bullshit.
I'm glad when people give money to FIJA.org ...and I'm glad when they give money to Adam Kokesh. ...And I'm even glad when this happens and those two entities misspend the money. ...Because their mistakes allow them to learn, and to improve.
I don't think Adam Kokesh is likely to turn against freedom. He's staked too much of his image on it. (I could be wrong. Anyone can be "controlled opposition" ...but generally, the LP thinks their best friends are controlled opposition, and thinks their most dire infiltrators are "trustworthy beyond question." ...I've never met a group of people less aware of political technology than most big-L Libertarians.)
Some of the things Adam says would not be said by an infiltrator, "late in the game." I'll be watching closely to see if he keeps saying them, or if he "walks them back."
All communications are both signal and content, and the line between both is blurry, depending on the context.
Adam does a pretty good job of keeping disparate groups happy, and also saying meaningful things.