I see those “salt life” decals everywhere. I see “Costa” stickers on trucks and Calvin pissing on various objects. What if we gave the young folks a real idea to rally around? What if we gave them the education that the schools wont? I used to work with middle school age kids and in my years of that I never met one who was not liberty minded. They are all about independence and rally around the introduced idea of Liberty. All we need to start affecting the real war, the culture war, is to create a brand and an idea for them to rally around. Remember the 60s and all that “peace” and “love” stuff? How about the idea of LIBERTY sweeping the nation and kids all over wearing a symbol of it? What about kids actually understanding and rallying around the idea that “I own me” and “F the state”?I completely agree that the battle is for the hearts and minds of the people under 35 or so. This is where I've been going, but following Alinsky's rules, I think we need to isolate and ridicule the aging hippies running everything. Take this (really rough) idea with Obama's communist:buddy, Bill Ayers:
I'm aligning myself with the large group saying that the battleground is the culture. As much as I'd vote for someone who said they wanted to go through the Code of Federal Regulations and throw most out, or someone who said their highest priority is Sunset Laws to ensure Federal Laws don't stay on the books forever, I have to admit I don't have a very popular viewpoint. The culture has to change from people saying, "the government ought to do something" to "we can fix that without them". I can see spending a lot of time trying to start new memes.
- What part of your life do you think is so unregulated you need new laws to tie you down? You already commit three felonies a day.
- Don't say, "somebody ought to do something about that", figure out how to do it yourself!
- You say "grid lock" like it's a bad thing! What's so bad about no new laws?
- The government can't give someone anything until they take it from you and me.
Unfortunately, as an artist, I make a pretty good engineer. As those two examples show, I have just about zero skills. Someone with mad Photoshop skills, or any of those meme generating software tools, is called for here. I can see putting memes and pictures on Pinterest, Instagram, and the Book of Faces. YouTube still attracts millions of eyeballs - of all ages. Here, we need someone like comic Steve Crowder, and libertarian Julie Borowski, both of whom put up liberty-oriented videos all the time.
I had once mentioned in passing to a younger, 25ish, coworker,
ReplyDelete"Government is inherently evil, best to have as little of it as possible."
He got a chuckle out of it and thought it was clever - he honestly never heard of such a concept and was surprised that I gave credit to the Founders.
Another good one-liner for my young colleague, "If the law is so clear, why does it ultimately depend of the opinion of five of nine men in black dresses?" He was looking forward to dropping that on his cocky attorney brother-in-law at the next family gathering.
I pointed out over at WRSA, under my old pseudonym, that reason.com is doing some excellent work in pointing out the merits of liberty and pointing out the shortcomings and illogic of government in a way that is accessible to young adults.
ReplyDeleteWhat poster 55six is asking for is going on, it just hasn't reached critical mass yet. Seriously, with all the work that the progressive statists have done over the last century, even with great tools like the internet and social media, it is going to take a little while to build a large movement.
Right now, advocates for libertarianism and voluntarism (anarchism) are very much a counter culture. But understand that counter culture will always be a minority movement. If it gains enough momentum and followers it becomes establishment or popular culture(like the 60's radicals).
What I'm getting at here is this thing 55six wants, that you want, is already going on. Lend a hand and help push, but be patient, this thing isn't going to change over night.
The old "dead heads" DIDN'T have anything to do with the text books. In fact most of them were "nobody for president" supporters who spent there time dropping Acid; NOT "changing the world". They didn't even try to change anything because they just didn't care. The "radicals" who rewrote America were all middle and upper class "children of privilege" who went to collage and got good grades. They were "Kennedy Kids" who Graduated "Suma" became communist in the very same schools you attended, and worked within the very system that they destroyed. They were the Clintons, and the Bushes. NOT the Greatfull Dead. The phony "left-right" divide and Nazi like radical military worship is why we cannot effect real change and until we can break the control government has over our minds and belief's, we never will. ---Ray
ReplyDeleteI think we are too late. Obama has in fact been using Alinsky's rules and he intends to crash the system and destroy the middle class. All efforts up until now have been less then successful. Yes, a steady turn to the left but no solid success. But now with perhaps 20 millions illegals about to be given amnesty there will be a series of inevitable events that will doom us. Amnesty will be the trigger to create a massive rush to our borders by everyone wanting "free stuff". After all wouldn't you immigrate to the U.S. if you were from some third world country? Everyone will get welfare ano our politicians will of course give it to them. Those middle class Americans who no support 50 million or more loafers will have to pony up more, much more as the welfare roles jump to 100 million with the influx of new "citizens". Once this amnesty happens there is no way to undo it. In fact our own legal system will assist the illegals and amnestied to get the "free stuff" and require higher taxes. All of this is no accident, it was planned all along. It will seem "stupid" at first and inconvenient. But as it gets worse and more middle class workers lose their jobs to lower paid now legal immigrants the middle class will be taxed out of their homes and SS will be destroyed/bankrupted. The safety net will tear allowing many to fall through and they will riot. We will become a third world country; law enforcement will be overstressed and fail, medical facilities will be overstressed and fail, schools, retail food stores, everything will begin to collapse. Once started it cannot be reversed and it will seem surreal to anyone who is actually paying attention. We will self destruct. Who will stop it? Hillary? She's on Alinsky's side. Jeb Bush? He would give amnesty if Barry fails to give it. We have no leaders, no visionarys, no statesmen. All we have is some tired old politicians most of whom actually think the Tea Party is the enemy.
ReplyDeleteHere is my pseudo-scientific hypothesis about liberty and human psychology. The psychology part is wild guessing. However, the predictions do seem to match history, so maybe I'm onto something.
ReplyDeleteGetting the majority to desire liberty is impossible. Some aspect of human nature makes wanting liberty a minority desire. About 1 in 100 are born freethinkers, who work out moral rules for themselves. Nowadays they become some flavor of libertarian. Freethinkers are born, not made, they cannot be created or destroyed at a rate high enough to matter. The 1% freethinker birth rate is not affected by whether their parents were freethinkers or the culture they grew up in was freethinker-ish. In all free state projects, including the one in North America in 1650, freethinkers concentrated themselves by emigration. In one generation their non-freethinker children diluted their military power aka vote and re-enslaved them.
Most people are not freethinkers because they have something similar to agoraphobia. Their personal potential for agency terrifies them, and they run screaming to vomit that agency onto the nearest politician who says they can belong to him. They will defend their decision to self-domesticate beyond all reason. If no sufficiently flashy politician is handy, they will invent a new hyper-powerful dictatorial monster out of whole cloth. Reads their minds, speaks to them in dreams. Teleports and does telekinesis. Makes up rules and judges them by them. Lives in the sky and interferes with human history for its own murky purposes. That's right, the god Zeus. Or the gray aliens in the round flying saucers. Or the modern Christian god. In psychological effect these are all identical, in observable evidence of existence (none) they are all identical. At least the Pharaoh in DC exists, that's one point for the liberals.
By asking humans to want liberty, you are asking them to give up their religion, a belief in a powerful imaginary friend which makes them feel safe. Ain't gonna happen. Instead of believing getting out the electoral vote will finally, magically perform different than it always has, freethinkers need to accept they are a permanent 1% minority, and invent military defenses which work against a 1:100 ratio of enemy. Territory denial is good. It's defensive and only targets people who are already acting badly. Put landmines in the front yard.