Progressivism is Not Leftism, It's Statism

     Say what you will about the supposed devolution of progressivism into neo-liberalism, it has always been that way. Progressives trusted government from Day 1.

     In 1924, the radical faction of the U.S. labor movement stopped pursuing political reform. The faction of that movement that wanted to continue political progress, became the Progressive Party, and supported people like Robert M. LaFollette.

     Progressives, and the neo-liberals who brainwash them into doing Republicans' bidding, are not leftists. You can't assume they're leftists just because they're left of the American center. The American center is pretty far right. You can be left of American political center and still be right-of-center in the big scheme of things.

     Most American progressives (at least the ones with a modicum of political power) do not claim to be socialists; instead, they say that they support capitalism (or else a market system) but with reform. Given that neo-liberals Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton do exactly that, what is to differentiate them from progressives? None; it is the difference between a dog and its tail.

     Most people who conservatives call communists, socialists, and leftists are not really leftists; they're just liberals. Liberals who are complacent with big government, the military-industrial complex, domestic surveillance, illegal and unconstitutional government programs, unfounded limitations on majority voting, and fiscal austerity.

     Additionally, whom are OK with "limited" government regulation (that really just limits our ability to compete against the multinational companies that are screwing us over). Also, with what I call Nazi-Sympathizing Rape-Enablers (N.S.R.E.s; that is, the Republicans) being in control of our government 50% of the time.

     After the American Revolution, there were liberals and conservatives. Conservatives wanted to conserve the gains of the Revolution, while the (classical) liberals wanted to push that revolution even further, in order to achieve further liberation, and to impose more limitations on the government's ability to control our lives.

     Democratic republicanism and liberal-conservatism are what govern the U.S.. Democrats and Republicans are much closer than politicians and the media would have us believe. Obamacare was based on Romneycare and Pawlentycare (two proposals pioneered and implemented by Republican governors).

     Obama supporters: stop. You are trying to impose Republican legislation on all your Democrat friends, you have effectively become a Republican mouthpiece (nevermind that the bill imposes an infinite tax on a zero-dollar item, its unconstitutionality, or that the only thing arguably redeeming about it from a freedom-loving standpoint is that it restrains the activities of insurance companies that were created with public approval but which should never should have been tied to the public in the first place).

     Progressives: stop. Your cynicism of government is healthy, but it doesn't go far enough. All states draw their legitimacy from the normalization of political violence (a/k/a terrorism). Read the anarchists.

     Progressivism has thus far only succeeded in "solving" market failures by replacing them with government failures. Most progressives are good and conscientious people, but in my opinion many of them are prone to be too trusting of a system that they want to believe is good and can change.

     One needs only look at the 40 [or more] unconstitutional wars we've waged over the years, and the history of moral hazard and regulatory capture (short version: government failure and mismanagement, caused by blind trust in the government that it is doing its job) which have accompanied nearly every attempt at progressive reform, to see that appealing to our oppressors and begging them for more scraps has not been working.

     For my explanation of what Democrats and Republicans both misunderstand about leftist ideas, please click this link to read my September 2018 article "What Liberals and Conservatives Both Get Wrong About Socialism and Communism":
     http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2018/09/what-liberals-and-conservatives-both.html

Originally Written on October 26th, 2018

Edited on December 1st, 2018

Published on December 1st, 2018

Why the Far-Left Should Value the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

     Newly-elected New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was correct when she said during her campaign that the N.R.A. (National Rifle Association) represents gun companies, not gun owners. Like her, I, too, feel that the N.R.A. does not do enough to represent gun owners. But that is because the N.R.A. actually lobbies against personal ownership of powerful weapons (albeit while supporting ownership of less powerful weapons like rifles and handguns).

     Recent federal court rulings concerning the legality of 3-D-printed plastic weapons, is just another example of what I've been saying: letting technology and automation run their courses will lead to cheap alternatives which subvert authorities (authorities which, I will remind you, are Republican, do not give a shit about you or me, and will most likely be in and out of power for the rest of our lifetimes, unless significant change occurs). If allowed to flourish, this technology will not only help protect us against the government, it will also allow private citizens to compete with the big gun manufacturers. But of course, the success of that competition is only realistic when big gun manufacturers are insulated from legal accountability and financial risk through L.L.C. incorporation, and given additional privileges, protections, and favors.

     Conservatives and libertarians tend to criticize Leftists for wanting gun control “like they had in socialist countries, like Soviet Russia, or Venezuela, or Cuba, or China, etc.... I would recommend that any Leftist who supports gun control and hears this critique, simply explain that: 1) not all Leftists, communists, and gun control proponents are Stalinists or Maoists, 2) they don't all want to kill millions of people, 3) “I want common-sense gun legislation because I don't want anyone to get shot”, and 4) the C.I.A. and Yale helped Mao get into power in the first place.

     I think the only way to avoid claims that socialism will lead to mass murder, is to support the use of guns to defend workers against tyranny. Many conservatives are perfectly willing to admit that bosses take the product of the worker's labor every bit as much as politicians and bureaucrats do. Try telling a conservative that “profit is theft”, watch him struggle to understand, then ask him how he would feel if he found out that he had been the victim of wage theft, and then explain that profit is theft because profits are stolen wages. But back to the topic at hand: guns.

     Gun control supporters might argue that guns support white privilege and police brutality, or that gun rights supported the rights of slave patrols to kill black people. I won't deny that they have a point. But those people – black people, the sons of former slaves, and victims of police brutality – do still have the right to arm themselves with weapons too. They retain the right to keep and bear arms, to keep themselves safe from racist and homophobic attacks, sexual assault, and if need be, unlawful arrests wherein police officers use deadly force without cause.

     But Karl Marx, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. all supported gun rights. King applied for a gun carrying permit before his death, but was denied one by his racist state government, which for all we know, probably collaborated with the FBI to murder King. Malcolm X and Karl Marx, and the people of the Paris Commune of 1871, believed that armed workers are safe from both exploitative bosses and tyrants alike. Marx said that any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated with the use of arms if necessary.

     About 200 million people were murdered in the 20^th century by their own governments, very many of them murdered with guns. Sure, many died unintentionally, because of economic mismanagement that led to droughts and starvation). But 55 million of them died in countries which had legally disarmed their citizenries first. The Nazis' 1930s gun restrictions limited Jews' rights to own guns (while expanding Germans' rights to do the same), which led to 1) the creation of an unarmed Jewish police force in the ghettos (Jewish Ghetto Police), 2) the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, in which Jews, lacking guns, brandished Molotov cocktails and hand grenades against the Nazis, 3) pogroms of Jews at gunpoint, and 4) the adoption of Nazi-inspired gun control legislation in America, with efforts spearheaded by Senator Christopher Dodd, Sr..

     There are plenty of libertarians who side with the Black Panthers against Ronald Reagan's gun control measures which limited their right to open-carry. To those of my readers who are leftists: if a libertarian challenges you on gun rights, then ask them whether they support Reagan or the Black Panthers on this matter. If they say Reagan, tell them they support the gun rights of career politicians over the gun rights of working people; people who have families that they can't get the taxpayers to protect for them.

     Not only must the workers be armed, the populace must be armed in order to guard against the draft, against forcible, conscripted service in the U.S. military. Even allowing “support roles” reduces the value of the citizen's labor to zero, because it is forced. Furthermore, it reduces the conscientiously objecting citizen to the status of an accomplice to mass murder. Read the 2^nd Amendment six months before it was formally adopted, before it was chopped in half. It used to protect conscientious objection; it used to protect our right to shoot at the government, to shoot at armies – British, American, Chinese, I.S.I.S., al-Qaeda, any army – whomever is trying to steal our children and turn them into child soldiers and murder us for our land.

     That's what the 2^nd Amendment was originally trying to protect; the right to conscientiously object to being forced to render military service in person, and forced to defend oneself with a gun and as part of a regulated unit. The formal legal definition of “unorganized militia” in the U.S. Code, and a close analysis of the text of the Second Amendment written six months before its adoption (with close attention to the meaning of punctuation marks therein), will confirm this. Founder George Mason was correct when he said that “the whole of the people” is the militia.

     I know that supporting gun rights is a tough sell to leftists, but we must not repeat the genocides and democides of the 20^th century. We must stop American governments from enforcing all sorts of liability regulations and gun control measures that interfere with people's rights to defend themselves and innocent people who are unable to defend themselves.

     I, by the way, am a private security guard who works in a gun-free zone. I think this fact is utterly absurd, and the ridiculousness needs to end. The only kind of common-sense gun control regulation I support is “controlling your gun” by aiming straight, and shooting tyrants and terrorists who want to draft and enslave you.

     That's why, I beg your pardon, weapons of war do belong on the streets of America. And if they don't, then maybe a better place to start would be getting tanks and drones out of the hands of local police departments (a consequence of a Clinton-era law), like we saw in Ferguson, Missouri. Maybe; that is, only if and when the people trust the federal and state governments more than they trust the local police.

     However, if there is any truth to the idea of “common sense gun control”, then certainly, criminally insane people who have committed acts of violence, should not be able to access guns. But that does not mean that we ought to take Senator Dianne Feinstein's lead, and carelessly cast American veterans as insane from P.T.S.D., and thus incapable of owning a firearm. These people served this country for years after learning how to use firearms in highly disciplined fashions, which is an insult.

     To take away someone's right to purchase, own, or practice using a firearm, or to hunt, without reasonable suspicion that they are actively planning to use it to harm someone, is an affront to not just the 2^nd, 5^th, and 7^th Amendments, but also to the very notion that people ought to be presumed innocent until they are proven guilty.

     The “red flag” bills being signed into law in Democratic states (including Illinois and New York), allow judges to issue orders to confiscate weapons of people deemed to be immediate and present threats, by their families who seek orders of protection. While it is more just for a legal order to be issued by a court than by a legislative body, some people could potentially become targets of wrongful disarmament due to fraudulent grounds for orders of protection.

     I am not worried about veterans going crazy and killing a bunch of people. What worries me is that we don't have any mental illness background checks on the psychopathic, sociopathic, and Machiavellian politicians who are crazy enough to think that they're better than everyone else, and so, can order us around. They get away with paying poor people's children to protect their property and die in wars, while they themselves shout “get rid of guns”, surrounded by armed security guards who protect them with guns.

     People like that should not be governing us, and if anyone should be screened for potentially posing a threat with weapons, it should be the biggest arms dealers on planet Earth, the members of the U.S. Congress (located in the District of Columbia, whose chief export is weapons and armaments).

Written on July 4th, 20th, 26th, and 27th, and August 1^st through 4th, and 6th, 2018

Edited on November 16^th, 2018

Originally Published on November 16^th, 2018

Government is the Source of Corporate Privilege

Originally Designed on April 12th, 2016

Edited on April 22nd, 2016