Posted on 02/14/2022 3:58:37 AM PST by Kaslin
In the movie 300, a fictional version of the very real Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., Sparta’s King Leonidas found himself in a conundrum. It’s the same conundrum that Americans and the truckers in Canada are facing, today.
Xerxes, king of Persia, sent messengers to Sparta to force him into a Faustian bargain: “If you value your lives or your complete annihilation, listen to me,” the messenger said. “Xerxes conquers and controls everything he rests his eyes upon. He leads an army so massive, it shakes the ground with its march – so vast, it drinks the rivers dry. All the god-king Xerxes requires is this: a simple offering of earth and water; a token of Sparta’s submission to the will of Xerxes.”
“Submission,” said Leonidas. “Now that’s a bit of a problem.”
Spartans were a free and brave people whose women “gave birth to real men,” as Leonidas’s queen told the messenger. Submission was unthinkable. With a choice of slavery or annihilation, Leonidas relied on his instincts. “This is Sparta!” he yelled as he kicked the Persian messenger into a bottomless pit.
Then he prepared for war.
But being king did not make Leonidas supreme because Sparta had a divided government. War could only be decided by the ephors, the country’s highest magistrates without whose blessing no king dared venture into war. The ephors, who had secretly accepted Persia’s “submission” in exchange for gold, forbade Leonidas from going to war. Their final decision was law. In Sparta, whether man or woman, subject or king, no one was above the law.
Sparta was about to be annihilated and King Leonidas was forced to do nothing by a corrupt government who looked at any pushback against Persia as a crime. The law had become perverted.
This was the king’s conundrum.
“What must a king do to save his world when the very laws he’s sworn to protect force him to do nothing?” the perplexed king asked his queen later that night.
She answered his question, with a question, and it immediately unraveled his conundrum.
“It is not a question of what a Spartan citizen should do – nor a husband, nor a king. Instead, ask yourself my dearest love: ‘What should a free man do?’”
That’s the question for our times as we sit back and watch grinning tyrants ruthlessly destroy the institutions that protect our freedoms, without our consent. While rotten progressive policies, Draconian COVID mandates, and high-level intimidation are causing millions to suffer, millions to lose their livelihoods, and hundreds of thousands to die, woke governments – by law – are forcing law-abiding citizens to do nothing.
Think of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” protests. Thousands of peaceful, praying, and patriotic protesters were lumped in with a few Capitol rioters and viciously targeted as terrorists and insurrectionists by Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department for questioning the dirty 2020 election. So far, it’s worked.
Woke district attorneys and the “defund the police” movement have deliberately snapped the thin blue line, exposing innocent people to robbery, violence, and murder; and businesses to burning, looting, and smash-and-grabs. When victims deign to defend their lives and property, the full weight of the legal system bears down on them.
Kyle Rittenhouse won his case, but the ferocity of the legal apparatus against him had a chilling effect on law-abiding citizens who are now forced to think more seriously about defending themselves as protections are being dismantled. One eye watches the criminal, the other watches the law.
“Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes [armed French police] at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim – when he defends himself – as a criminal,” wrote French economist Frederic Bastiat in his pamphlet, The Law (1850).
Some things never change, which Canadian truckers are finding out. For years, they dutifully sat back watching tyrannical mandates do more harm than good. After witnessing their wives, kids, colleagues, and fellow citizens suffer without an ounce of mercy from the government, enough was enough. Submission is no longer an option.
The world sees exactly what the truckers are fighting for, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau painted them as Nazi racists who spread threats, violence and hatred. “This illegal activity must stop, and it will stop,” he purred.
Truckers are now forced to rely on their instincts.
“I will die to protect my family and my children from overreach by the government,” said one protester, 60, who was fired for not getting vaccinated. His son faces termination, and his pregnant daughter was “harassed” into getting vaccinated.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency and threatened truckers with a year of jail, up to $100,000 in fines, confiscated money sent to them through GoFundMe, and the Ontario Superior Court of (lopsided) Justice issued an order to freeze monies coming into GoFundMe’s Christian-based competitor, GiveSendGo.
“There will be consequences for these actions,” Ford said. “And they will be severe. … Let me be clear, [the] government does not direct our police forces, but we do set the laws.”
These people have no clue what they're dealing with – in Canada or in America. Americans just want to get back to normal. They are sick of the forced mandates, the forced CRT, the forced illegal immigration, the forced climate change response, the reckless spending on junk ideas like “infrastructure equity,” and the forced “men can have babies” propaganda.
It’s all forcing free people back to their roots.
Here are the basics: God gave us all life, liberty, and property – with property being rightfully earned through the “ceaseless application of our faculties to natural resources,” as Bastiat put it. The right to life, liberty, and property existed before government.
We don’t need government’s permission to defend our lives. We don’t need government’s permission to defend our liberty. We don’t need government’s permission to defend our property.
Since defending life, liberty, and property is a natural law, no manmade law on Earth has the legitimate authority to prevent free people from protecting their lives, their liberty, or their property. Government was created to protect them, collectively. When government, by law, stops protecting these three, it loses legitimacy, and laws become perverted – unnatural law.
Today, leftist politicians are attempting to institutionalize perverted law, believing that they can endlessly threaten and muzzle masses of people while they, with good intentions, pave highways to Hell.
But when you make an absolute mess of the country, without the consent of law-abiding people, and you use the law as a bludgeon to force them to do nothing as everything dear to them is destroyed, don’t be shocked at what happens when they wake up one day and ask themselves: “What should a free man do?”
Article V.
I’m mixing apples and oranges here, but a recent Ukraine thread carried a comment that Russia actually lacks the population to occupy all of Ukraine. I think that may be true. 44 million in Ukraine. 140 million in Russia. Occupation and control by Russia would be very difficult.
The USA has 350 million or so, and about 400 million guns. Can the US government “occupy” the US? I hardly think so.
We are free if we want to be free.
And they already have bastardized the First Amendment
The Second Amendment become active.
I read last night that Trudeau had called a late night meeting of government officials and that he had one scheduled early today with the governors. It sounds like he’s following Biden’s urging to “federalize” the “response” to the truckers, which I assume means the use of the military to crush the protesters.
He could end this immediately by just listening to the Canadian people, who have had enough tyranny theater and just want their lives back. But he is so obsessed with his power and image that he just won’t let go and I think he’s going to force the situation to violence and probably will end up crushing the protest and probably killing a lot of the protesters.
There have been protests all over the world against the arbitrary and irrational actions of government that have resulted in the loss of lives, livelihoods and in fact the loss of society and civilization in some places. Extreme poverty has soared, and I think there may soon be famines in some parts of the world. These are legitimate complaints. But the governments refuse to even meet with the protesters, much less understand and grant their peaceful pleas, and instead turn to force (as we saw in Paris yesterday, where Macron’s goons had “dangerous” women and children fleeing before them in the streets and tear gassed on-lookers for good measure).
I am very worried that if the Canadians use force and crush this protest, which so many people have looked to for inspiration and courage, that all of the governments will follow suit and that we will enter an age of such tyranny that we could never have imagined it.
YOUR REQUEST FOR FREEDOM HAS BEEN DENIED.
“Dear Little Working Class Person,
We regret to inform you that your request for “Freedom” was denied as it has been not been approved by your local Commissaries, and failed to have the necessary supporting documents attached, was not in triplicate and was completed in blue ink. Our policies regarding all “Requests for Freedom” specifically state that they must be completed using only black ink. This decision is final.”
[rest at link]
https://stopshouting.blogspot.com/2022/02/your-request-for-freedom-has-been-denied.html
slay tyrants
Nobody has the balls.
Rule .303
——But he is so obsessed with his power and image that he just won’t let go-—
Alternatively, he is fearful and unable to see a clear choice forward. In panic, he ineffectively attempts to strike out.
“Fear is the mind killer”
Here in the U.S. it’s rule 556!
Could be. The thing that is utterly bizarre to me is that nobody else in the government seems to be able to get him under control. But the same would happen here…we have a senile would-be Marxist technically in charge, and people are even afraid to question his mental competence but instead let him bluster and rage.
I realize that Biden isn’t the one who comes up with these ideas, and Trudeau himself is basically just a front man for various powerful left wing economic interests, but you’d think that common sense would tell other people in government that they shouldn’t let these “leaders” push things to the point of no return just to satisfy their egos.
It’s almost as if they want to taunt the people and destroy their own societies.
Bookmark.
——we have a senile would-be Marxist ——
At 79, I experience lapses of finding the correct word. It can last a few minutes or a few days. However, I function pretty well normally. The problem is the need to act at a speed beyond present capability. I work, but carefylly mindful of new limitations. Biden lacks that luxury
Biden was Senator from Delaware, a trivial nothingness of a state.
He is and always has been a tool purchased by the Delaware powers that be. At least Du Pont and maybe some large banks dominate him. He lacks the intellect to be a Marxist. Think of him as Dupont’s hammer or screw driver or socket wrench.
He could only do as he was directed. That tether was severed and the new direction is unfocused and he can’t act
That’s the way it seems to me
One of my favorites.
If he does that, it's fewer truckers to deliver the goods. Then come the consequences, which would be surviving truckers quitting, leaving even fewer truckers to deliver the goods. What's his strategy for that? Tossing petit fours from his balcony to the starving masses?
Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.
Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
We have had 13 states independant 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?
Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.
UKRAINE.
Credit to my wife:
She pointed that no major social change has ever occurred without violence. US Independence, Slavery, Suffrage, Civil Rights, BLM (?), etc.
Not all social changes are good, correct or beneficial but I believe violence may be necessary.
I believe the trucker thing will go violent real quick if the government starts arresting people and seizing trucks. Then we will see social change. The government will have to get in line with the people. Until it goes violent, the government does not believe the people are serious or committed. Violence’s is the test.
He doesn’t have a strategy.
All of these people rely on one thing only: force. So I assume he’d just double down and use force to basically transform Canada into China. They’ve already shown us that they can shut us down, we are powerless to resist, our elected representatives are either powerless or complicit, and there is no appeal to them because they simply don’t care.
And don’t worry…hunger is for the little people. No matter how desperate things become, the Party will always eat well. It wouldn’t affect them in the least if everything else was shut down and the shelves were empty throughout the country.
I read somewhere that as we get older, all we are is more of what we were when we were younger. Biden was always a stupid, corrupt jerk, and, incidentally, had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate. Even Bernie.
In Biden’s case this is made worse by dementia, which isn’t just memory lapses but the inability to process language and a host of other unpleasant things. It’s an ugly sight, and it’s being played out in front of the world and nobody can stop him. Including other Democrats.
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