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John Carter's avatar

Rights and responsibilities are reciprocal; degrade the ability to meet the latter and the former will evaporate in effect even if not in name.

The problem with the vices is that they directly act to destroy the ability to meet responsibilities. They're corrosive at the neurological level. Hence, those that seek to enslave will promote the vices, knowing full well that an enervated and degraded population will simply fall into slavery. It's an old trick. There's an account in Herodotus about a Persian emperor who did just this to a restive city of Ionian Greeks in order to prevent further revolts. It worked like a charm.

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Chris Fox's avatar

Caesar's charisma and leadership of his troops, his battlefield-won authority as leader of his "mannerbunde," led him to mastery of Rome in the middle of a chaotic and disintegrating Republic. His attempts to be merciful to his enemies, appealing to their shared aspirations for the greatness of Rome, got him killed. His adopted son Octavian did not make the same mistake, and established an Imperial political order that lasted for centuries. The American Republic is in free-fall; Trump has been a kind of proto-Caesar figure (just drive around rural America to see that the country folks desperately want him to be the savior of the US) but can he save the country? Ultimately no, because he is limited by his materialism (true of most of the Boomer generation). Can a true American Caesar be found in time to save the Republic, and lead the people out of the morass of degeneracy? An inner fire, a spiritual clarity, a fundamental orientation to what is eternally true, and a ruthless attitude toward the servants of decay and destruction, are needed, because "Liberalism is moral syphilis" (Jonathan Bowden). And the inner core of American patriots would have to recognize him. A pretty tall order for a hollowed-out US.

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John Carter's avatar

It's an old and autistic point but I think it's still true: Trump was more like the Gracchi brothers than Caesar. He tried to reform the system from within, and the system wasn't having it.

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Silva's avatar

In what way does the point relate to autism?

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Dionysios Dionou's avatar

Excellent essay succinct and to the point. In truth both liberal free market capitalism and leftist socialism are empty soulless ideologies. What is capitalism? The mass production of goods and services with the idea that owning these things will make you "happy" and your life better. Really? Then why is everyone in debt up to their eyebrows working long hours even two or three jobs In this "free market" paradise? Everyone loves the "free market" when it works for you when it craps on you you want a bail out whether you're AIG, GMC, or the little guy in the street. You're free to slave away at a desolate boring mundane "job" and to choose from one of the factions that make up the USA one party state to serve their paymasters and contributors and it isn't you. Liberal democracy is a great system for con men/women, thieves and garden variety low life bottom feeding scumbags. It's not good for middle class, and working class honest citizens. Now to socialism it's claimed goal is to more evenly distribute the goods and services created by capitalism to more people that were denied it except for a select lucky few. The idea being that this would make a happier citizenry and a better quality of life. Well we see how that worked out. Misery, corruption, perpetual shortages, alcoholism, broken families, working yourself to death in antiquated state run factories and dead end jobs. Not exactly utopia which translates from the Greek as "no place" or "a place that could never exist". The truth is socialism was NEVER about sharing anything let alone wealth. It was ALWAYS about and oligarchy that swindles and steals everything uses it for themselves and tossed scraps to the masses if they tot the party line. I would suggest the Bolshevism was elitist from the get go. Why? When the Russian Social Democratic Party met in 1903, they had a big uproar between two faction. One led by Vladimir Ulianov AKA Lenin the other by Julius Martov (Tsederbaum) it was over how to proceed to socialism. Martov wanted to work within the system and gradually enlighten the populace to the joys of Marxian bliss. Lenin argued that it would take too long what was needed was a full time 247/365 we never close cadre of revolutionaries that eat, sleep and drink revolution. You don't cooperate with the oppressors you overthrow them and jam socialism down everyone's throats (my words) at the point of a gun or noose. Unable to agree they split into Lenin's Bolsheviks and Martov's Mensheviks. Lenin's crew won out and eventually Mensheviks fell in line and joined the Lenin mafia. My point Bolshevism was always about an elite created by an elitist, populated by elitists, and opportunists looking for a "new racket" to enrich themselves. As you can see both capitalism and socialism are flawed. What's needed is an authoritarian system, Imperial Russia, Imperial Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, or for our own time a "people's community", not a Marxian socialism, but a cultural socialism based on ethnicity, cultural and historical characteristics. Where it's all for one and one for all, not all for me and screw you. When you have a market system that is watched by the people through a nationalist party and the will of the people is expressed through the party, and the people tell the state and the giant conglomerates what to do and what they want not the other way around as we currently have in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Rolo I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts and please check out my substack page too.

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Stephen J. Kennedy's avatar

You are a fan of the 'good King', but how do you get one? You are a little vague on that point. And History demonstrates that most of them were not 'good'.

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Epictetus's avatar

A key component is the influence of racial homogeneity. A king / Dictator / Caesar sharing ethnic history with his subjects tends to follow a path of protectionism and prudence.

The rulers we remember the most throughout European history were the ones with revered legacies or those overthrown. Verily, the self correcting sword of Damocles driving direction.

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John Carter's avatar

Given how stable and popular monarchies were, my guess is that most kings were just okay at worst. Some were awful, and that's a problem when it happens. Usually solved with beheading or civil war.

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cassandra's avatar

The problem with an autocrat dictiating terms is that it still is no guarantee of positive behavior. Imagine Jeffrey Epstein, for instance. I do believe that a sense of ethics and self-discipline is important both to societies and to individuals, but the strength of these derives from the surrounding culture. Cultural ethics, for instance will dictate the difference between fair and shady business practices. I sometimes return to the now-unfashionable concept of sin, which I've redefined to be any activity where having fun has trangressed the boundary into destructive territory. It may be fun to cheat somebody, for instance, but that practice is sinful because it will destroy trust and good will that might otherwise prevail. In a highly ethical society, the advantage will usually go to one who is willing to disregard ethiics. Only strong social disapproval, or a punitive and effective legal system, will hold such practices in check. Or a just autocrat: but the "good king" is a widely recognized ideal seldom achieved in practive. I do, however, believe, that some unspoken restraint of fair-play underlies most people's idea of liberalism, and that there is such a thing as liberal retarint which is not entirely opposed to liberal freedom. And, it may be consistent with a benign autocracy, assuming that such could ever be achieved in paractice. There's the trick.

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Epictetus's avatar

The need for prohibition on vice directly ties to the discipline instilled through environment or tradition. Had fentanyl been readily available to American colonists it would not mean the abject failure of ALL settlements; only some. The surviving ones, replete with experience would establish traditions disallowing its use. The West (America in particular) succumbs to poisons of all sorts not necessarily because they collectively lack survival instincts, but because her enemies understand these axioms and weaponize them through propaganda. Deliberately, she lost her best men, strongest traditions, and the self correction derived from natural consequence.

Now consequences catch up, releasing the kinetic energy of too many decadent decades. Should she survive, the process shall invert. From the consequences come the traditions. From the traditions come better men. If only we could first remove the poison from our wells.

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Silva's avatar

"The story I read the other day about two high-schoolers OD’ing on fentanyl is another. @libsoftiktok makes the case for limiting personal liberties better than I ever could."

How so?

Were the high-schoolers not acting as they did despite the supposed limitation of personal liberties? The limitations clearly did not work. How does that make the case that they were a good thing?

The arguments you make are the same as the ones the prohibitionists used in the US about a century ago. It didn't work. It simply gives the gangsters a huge opportunity to make money in supplying a demand that goes unmet by legal means. Crime increases, the militarization of the police against us all continues, liberty is lost, and the vice that they tried to legislate out of existence just keeps right on existing.

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Rurik Skywalker's avatar

It doesn't feel like you engaged with any of the ideas or points I tried to bring up in the essay and instead fell back on boilerplate Libertarian arguments that amount to "420, blaze it fagit"

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Silva's avatar

On the contrary. I've pointed out that attempts to make things people desire go away by legislation fail utterly in that goal. The rest of what you wrote hinges on the presupposition that there is an actual way to create a law that makes things go away, and there isn't. You may be able to prevent a guinea pig from getting something, but preventing humans from getting things has never worked.

The same arguments in favor of restricting liberty because otherwise the vice pushers would rule people (and the government doesn't want the competition) were all made before the US passed a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol... and alcohol use did not go away. Crime flourished, and liberty took a hard hit that we've yet to recover from, and it just keeps getting worse. The authoritarian approach was doomed to fail, and fail it did... badly. It also set a precedent where more laws, more police, more sentences, more jail time are taken to be the solution to all of society's ills.

When your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail... and hammer us they have.

How much of the loss of liberty we've endured in the 20th century has been a result of the growing prohibition of all kinds of vices? No-knock raids, seizures of whatever assets the police want without charge or trial for the owners, militarization of police, growth of the surveillance state, and for what benefit?

The war on drugs has not limited access to drugs, and anyone who wants them can get them. When I was in school years and years ago, the drug education mandated by the state told us over and over "it's your choice," even though the things in question were all illegal. But it was indeed our choice, because the things were everywhere, laws notwithstanding.

That's not at all the same as whatever that phrase you wrote is supposed to mean. Personally, I find all of the drugs that would be or are illegal to be repulsive, and the people that use them are stupid, and if they die, well, consider it a Darwin Award. As for me, I'm half a century old and I've never even tried alcohol, let alone anything harder. The argument that libertarians, in the American sense of the word (classical liberals) just wanna go get messed up is a strawman of the worst order, and nothing I wrote even approaches that.

Government's purpose is to protect my liberty. It's not to save me from myself.

I never really held the idea that people will behave rationally if given the choice... it's more that they have the opportunity to behave rationally, and if they choose not to, well, that's their choice to make too. It's not like a law to the contrary is going to stop them.

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Rurik Skywalker's avatar

>Personally, I find all of the drugs that would be or are illegal to be repulsive, and the people that use them are stupid, and if they die, well, consider it a Darwin Award.

That's a lot of people that you're condemning to death. Your own people. I could never be that callous to my own.

>Government's purpose is to protect my liberty.

Wrong. That is an article of your political faith and not an observable reality anywhere in the world. The only thing that can protect your liberty is an organized force that can fight back against those that would take it away from you. Either the citizenry is moral and disciplined enough to defend their liberty themselves or they need another system in place to protect it for them.

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Silva's avatar

It is not I who condemn them to death. I haven't made their bad decisions for them. They did that themselves, and they bear the responsibility for it. They are autonomous individuals, and it's their choice if they want to make decisions I do not approve of, including those that will lead to their early demise. It is not my job, or anyone's job, to protect them from themselves. Being free means being free to make what some other person thinks are stupid decisions.

Yes, people die sometimes when they make certain decisions. Freedom is not safe, and death is not the worst thing imaginable. It is better to die free than to live in servitude. I would rather not interfere when people condemn themselves to death by their own choices than to preserve their life at the expense of their agency and dignity. They are not pets like guinea pigs that we act to preserve because they exist for our pleasure and we want to keep them around.

I don't care whether it is an observable reality. It's the notion that the United States was founded upon, and that's my frame of reference. If a government is not in place for protecting liberty, it is the very thing that needs to be protected against.

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Rurik Skywalker's avatar

>I haven't made their bad decisions for them. They did that themselves, and they bear the responsibility for it.

Most people aren't playing with a full deck of cards and have no business running their own lives or making their own decisions. That is the whole premise of what I'm saying. They are not rational, they have no ability to govern themselves. Giving them this freedom leads to their untimely demise. The vast majority of people are like this. You can't run a society where you condemn a significant swath of the population to self-inflicted misery.

>Being free means being free to make what some other person thinks are stupid decisions.

Most people do not come equipped to ever realize freedom. At best, they can be guided into not messing up too much by rules made by people wiser than them. But it takes humility to realize this.

>It's the notion that the United States was founded upon, and that's my frame of reference. If a government is not in place for protecting liberty, it is the very thing that needs to be protected against.

If your mainstream center-right Libertarian views are so set in stone, consider reading another blog. I don't share your views and go to great pains to explain my reasoning for a reason - to give people something new to consider. You're just wasting your time here.

Besides, we've been doing it your way for a while now and things are only getting worse. Time to start thinking differently.

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Silva's avatar

I don't think that people are intrinsically incapable of realizing freedom. There is no doubt that many or most are not capable of it now, but that is a natural consequence of not having ever experienced it. When all people are exposed to is authoritarianism (which is the only model that has existed for longer than any of us have been alive), they come to believe that the limits set by governments are "the" limits, and that there is no need for them to give it any thought at all. They wait for government to tell them when to do something, or when not to do something. They live in a perpetual childhood, substituting government for their parents when they reach adulthood.

Authoritarianism does not breed people who know how to be free. They have to practice freedom to know how to be free. They've never had the opportunity.

I find it enlightening to read views that I do not agree with. I will consider them on their merits and try to keep an open mind. I'm not wasting my time to read views that differ from my own. If you're really asking me not to comment in your comment section if I disagree with your post, I will comply, but I am not wasting my time by having discussions or reading things outside of my own personal comfort zone.

We have never tried it "my way" during my lifetime. You used the example of drugs... when have they been legal? Not in the time I've been here. When have we had the kind of classical liberal government that America's founders enshrined in our Constitution? Never during my lifetime. The level of tyranny in this land formerly known as "land of the free" is well beyond that which triggered the creation of the country in the first place. Some other countries are better in some ways, but they're worse in others, and on the whole, I can't think of a single one that I would truly consider "free."

I only wish my "center-right libertarian views" were mainstream. The authoritarian premise that people have to be controlled because they can't make their own decisions properly has been the dominant view in political circles for at least a century in the US, and I've yet to see anything to indicate it has been better in other so-called liberal western democracies.

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