RE: I Have To Speak Up About Ben Farmer and Adam Kokesh

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I Have To Speak Up About Ben Farmer and Adam Kokesh

in anarchy •  7 years ago 

I appreciate your impatience with the flaws of the Kokesh campaign. Two things strike me as likely, though I cannot say for sure:

  1. Your past efforts at supporting a viable candidate gave you a taste of supporting an actual movement toward liberty that had a pulse. Philosophically-proper libertarian candidacies since Harry Browne and Ron Paul have not had that kind of pulse, because they had no coherent libertarian message, or they had zero strategic competence (See: http://www.redstate.com/diary/Morton_C_Blackwell/2010/10/01/the-real-nature-of-politics/ --replace "conservative" with "libertarian" and ignore the bullshit about Reagan, except insofar as it relates to an incorrect estimate of libertarianism on behalf of the general public). Ron Paul attracted people who were strategically competent, because they could see he was "the only game in town for a pro-freedom standard-bearer." This means you are far more valuable to the Kokesh camp than what they realize (if they are genuine), but it also means "anarcho-dipshits who hate all political action, and all effective political actors" will hate you. Kokesh very likely has such dipshits on his team, although I don't want to cast aspersions on them, having never met them. For all I really know, you're completely in the wrong, and have a hair-trigger temper.
  2. You don't seem to tolerate ineptitude with any patience.

The second point above means that you're unlikely to successfully engage with any modern libertarian movement (assuming you're philosophically genuine), because you'd have to drag them, screaming and kicking, toward even minimal political success.

The government schools and thousands of government-paid internet trolls have introduced and strengthened the idiotic Konkinist idea that "voting, itself, is evil." They have attached this idea to "anarchism" and Rothbard unfortunately unwittingly strengthened that idea (though he was repelled by the idiotic extension or "misapplication" of his own ideas by Konkin). This is largely because the government schools have created an entire nation of unphilosophical half-wits.

Politics sucks. It's boring. Filing paperwork and showing up to meetings with strangers (especially politically-or-strategically-inept-but-philosophically-aligned ones) is boring.

The people who work the hardest never get the credit or payment they deserve. ...Especially in the Konkinist portions of the LP. Sadly, those are the ONLY portions of the LP: Politically inept Konkinists vs. undercover FBI agents. That's pretty much what the struggle currently is.

Don't get me wrong, it's possible to retake the LP from the government goons. ...But it will be expensive and unpleasant, and they will fight to retain their "totally politically nonviable third party" or "controlled opposition."

From what I've seen from Adam, he's actually somewhat aware(at his best) of what "Joe Sixpack" is thinking. Although this is true, he hasn't reconciled Clay Conrad with SEK3, and probably doesn't even realize he's defaulting to SEK3's "cynical fatalism" by default.

This is easy to do, if you won't admit (as even LeFevre admitted) that the government does some good things. Gasp! Heresy! ...Until you meet the FBI's ISU who are tracking down the murderers of innocent women and kids. Whoa! I just said that the same organization that hired Lon Horiuchi (the murderer of Randy Weaver's wife) did something good! ...But it's true. (And this is the propaganda that has been very effective with the general public!) The government is a huge organization, and it employs a lot of good people. (Note: this is not saying it still has a right to exist. It's just acknowledging a true fact that average people want you to acknowledge, so that they see something of themselves in your argument.) If getting rid of the entire government got rid of those people's jobs(the people in the ISU), it would be a minor ill. ...And this is true even though those people are outnumbered ten-thousand-to-one by totally evil people who harm innocent people, and do things like burn churches full of innocent people to the ground.

The prior shows you why you cannot make unqualified statements about "immense organizations that have self-contradictory missions." Some people will fight to expand the good portions of the organization, and try to expand means of allowing the good portions to fight against the evil portions, and hold them accountable. ...If you make unqualified statements, then voters with localized countermanding information will simply ignore you. They will say, "John Douglas of the ISU helped bring the serial killer who killed my college friend to justice. He was compassionate and decent the whole time." ...If your worldview is "well, then I'm against you," you just lost a voter. They don't have to vote for our candidates! If you acknowledge what is good, and you say, "That's all the more reason it's a horrible crime against humanity that people like Lon Horiuchi and the ATF can use FBI resources to harm innocent people like your college friend." ...You've made a point they cannot ignore.

If you accept the average voter's "highest empathic value" as legitimate, it actually helps you quickly make them into a voluntaryist. John Douglas (originator of the FBI's ISU) is 100% opposed to laws that punish non-criminal actions, AKA "victimless crime laws." (He's stated that such laws literally help serial killers murder women and children, because they take police power away from known techniques that apprehend serial killers, victimizing innocent people, and thus causing them to further distrust the police, which further enables serial killers by interfering with tips about actual crimes from the general public.)

By showing "mainstream voters" that we share the same core of empathy with them, we dramatically expand our effectiveness. (Kokesh has been improving at this, in every video of him I watch. He is 100% right to be continuously posting videos of himself interacting with the general public. Even when I think he gets things very wrong, he's 100% right to be making the attempt.)

The people who don't want us to communicate effectively work for a different portion of the FBI(a huge and internally-incoherent organization) than the ISU(Investigative Support Unit). Those "other units" are the ones who hire people like Douglas Durham to infiltrate anti-government Native American Organizations, and they probably hired someone to murder MLK and frame escaped convict and then-fugitive James Earl Ray for the crime. They are a criminal organization, and the ISU doesn't come close to "forgiving" their many crimes. (FBI, CIA, NSA, ...it doesn't matter who does these things. There are 17 near-totally-unaccountable "secret police" organizations in the USA, and none of them are acting in any way that complies with the common law or U.S. Constitution.)

My point is that libertarians seem to like attacking sacred cows whose continued existence has no bearing on whether there will be liberty or tyranny. We tend to "talk past" those we intend to convert. They are purely concerned with "our priorities" ...and we never give them "our priorities." ...We say stupid shit like "We're going to abolish the entire government, and the office of the presidency." And they say, "That's cool! I'm pretty anti-government myself." (But in their minds, they're thinking "I don't think this guy has a sense of what he's up against. He's making grandiose statements about what he will do that would be very difficult for an articulate multi-billionaire to accomplish, and he's obviously not wealthy. ...Not to mention that my college friend's killer was brought to justice by the FBI, and I'm not sure I want to throw out a police entity that actually serves a legitimate purpose and pursues suspects with a legitimate "corpus delicti" or "cause of action" along with all the others that don't." ...And in the darkened voting booth, they're totally unaccountable.) ...

Adam does this all the time. That allows him to be profiled as essentially a non-threat to the establishment. He is exactly the kind of "libertarian candidate" they want to run against. ...Or not. He's "on the margin" of becoming effective. If he gets too big, and makes too much money, he could actually learn to be a real nuisance to them, especially if he continues in the direction he's been heading in the past year, outlining his plans coherently and relating his views to the average voter's views.

I'd like that.

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