This Did Not Work: It Never Will

Independent Individualist ^ | Apr 07, 2008 | Reginald Firehammer

[B4Ranch]

I am quite convinced that if you have control of the national media, you will have control of society. This is because most people are sheep. They prefer to follow a leader than accept the risks of being the leader.

[philetus]

When any American today believes the lie that “voting” is “participating” in America, when there is no one to vote for but various brands of corrupt politicians”

Tell me if I’m wrong Hank, but isn’t it possible for everyone in the U.S. to vote for “A” for President and the electoral college to elect “B”?

[PugetSoundSoldier]

Being an individualist does not mean being a hermit; rather, it means working for the benefit of one’s own life. Often that means working with others who share the same goals to protect our own freedoms.

[21stCenturion]

...

[tbw2]

Especially when voter fraud means there is an increasing chance you have already voted Democrat before you yourself are turned away at the polls.

[gimbal]

It sounds like this material may hearken towards some Libertarian ethos — errr, “sounds libertarian to me, bob”, in another way to put it ;^)

Considering, I would agree with the assertion that no individualist movement would ever succeed in being anything more than the furtherance of a paradox :^) To take as an objective, that it would be a “movement”, that could be somehow contrary to the nature of individual freedom.

Still, the founding *communities* (as an effort, it was not only of the who men signed the Constitution) the founding communities of our US managed to pull it off, somehow — a “movement”, was it? and there must have been something of an objective for to establish such freedoms as allow for individual freedom — implicit in it.

In the effects of that “movement”, if you will, our nation *is* a nation and is a ‘free’ nation (with all of the philosophical difficulties implicit of that phrase, albeit), whereas it was not ‘free’ as so, before the Revolutionary War.

Pardon the naivety of my counterpoint ;^)

[Grandsons of Liberty]

I think the full extent of the influence of Ayn Rand’s works will be realized in the not-to-distant future...As our government becomes more and more out of control, crime continues to run rampant and other ills, the desire for freedom and our founding principles will only grow and lead to a significant political movement.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

I hope so, but as someone who just went back to college in my late 40’s, I know that students are not being taught what freedom is and far to many don't seem capable or willing to question what they are taught. Professors who were part of the 1960’s movement; question authority and don't trust anyone over thirty are teaching the kids to do the opposite.

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the ping.

[traviskicks]

Libertarian ping! To be added or removed freepmail me or post a message here.

[YHAOS]

”How can one be an “individualist” in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia?”

By being snitched on by a Hitler Youth zealot, or by a terrified landlady who told lies about her tenants if she couldn’t find anyone to genuinely turn in to the Gestapo (in the case of the Germans). Not all Germans were “good” Germans. They committed sabotage, they passed on information, they even planted a bomb under Hitler’s conference table in his eastern Wolf’s Lair. And, they died; by the thousands. Often under exquisite torture. They were gunned down in the streets, and in the basements of government buildings. They died from starvation and abuse behind the barbed wire of the same camps that claimed the lives of millions of Jews, of gypsies and dwarfs, and all the other “mental defectives” of Eastern Europe. And from Tiananmen Square, to the killing fields of Cambodia; from the Gulags of Siberia to the re-education camps of Vietnam, there is no reason to believe that the last chapter of this human tragedy has been written.

[Jack Black]

OK. Well I understand. It’s pathetic. Really, really sad.

[secretagent]

...an organization, not to impose our ideology upon anyone, but to prevent anyone from imposing his ideology upon us by physical or social violence."

Social violence?

[Ultra Sonic 007]

Interestingly enough, having played both the game BioShock and its sequel, the Objectivist antagonist Andrew Ryan slipped into a totalitarian mode and left his Objectivist roots. Things turned south for him in a big way once he started throwing his power in the underwater city Rapture around...and when he nationalized the business of a rival, people rioted.

Funnily enough, the antagonist of the second game - Sofia Lamb - is a die-hard altruist; the practical polar opposite of an Objectivist.

If nothing else, the games are more “anti-extremism” than “anti-’insert ideology here’”.