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Letter from Jeff Fullerton

Fights Erupt During 'Jews for Trump' Rally in Manhattan

This sounds a little like the riot stated by the Nazis at Madison Square Gardens back in the depression era. Also from those dark days—there is a remark attributed to Hughey Long: That if we get fascism in this country it will be called anti fascism.

And it came to pass. We have ANTIFA.

Jeff Fullerton
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Letter from A.X. Perez with reply from L. Neil Smith

Hate Free

Maybe we should disarm and let the hate build up until we fall on each other like the Maenads and tear each other apart with our teeth and bare hands. God forbid we learn to listen to each other and love each other and forgive each other for having the nerve to disagree with each other. I think I need a knife or three on my person for chores more than I need to make myself crazy with hate, but people say I'm weird. (Besides you can't target practice with hate as efficiently with hate as a handgun.)

The Beatles - We Can Work It Out (Official Music Video)

A.X. Perez
[email protected]

L. Neil Smith replied:

Yesterday's flower children and their idiot descendants have tried long and hard to pretend that they can make perfectly healthy, evolutionarily sensible human emotions disappear. It's childish, really, like a little kid pushing his fingers in his ears and chanting, "I can't hear you! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"

The big deal in my misspent youth (in the 1960s) was jealousy. Hippie-types preached and lectured endlessly that jealousy was bad, so when you found your beloved in the sack with somebody else, you were just supposed to shrug it off and be "civilized". Anthropologists, however, have a different view. The idea is to provide a clear avenue where property inheritance is concerned, and to get your own genes into the pool, not somebody else's. Elks battle their rivals, sometimes to the death, and a squid will use sea water to flush a rival's semen out of his mate's genital tract.

If Joe Biden and his goblins try to cancel my Bill of Rights, I hate them for it and am motivated by that emotion to take appropriate steps. It's completely normal and natural. What's really important is the _reason_ you hate somebody or something. If you hate them for their actions and intentions toward you, that's understandable and commendable. If you hate them for their pigmentation (or lack thereof) or other such characteristics, you are not rational by anybody's definition.

El Neil
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Letter from A.X. Perez with reply from Sean Gabb

An Upscuddle

El Paso, Texas is experiencing a Covid-19 explosion and a political upscuddle. Basically, there are so many cases of the virus that we have had to put up sick beds in the civic center, put up hospital tents, and ask to reopen an old, out of service military hospital to handle the overflow of non Covid patients.

In response the county judge and mayor agreed to call for a 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew and other steps to slow the spread. This leads to the upscuddle. Our county judge has called for a two week shot down, including closing all non- essential business. According to the Mayor and The Texas State Attorney General, that is outside the judge’s authority. This creates the upscuddle as the local PD has said they will not enforce the shutdown, the Sherriff’s Department says they are checking whether the shutdown is legal before the decide to enforce or not.

Now some readers of this essay do not believe the Covid pandemic is a real problem, so I am not going to waste their time or mine in a “yes it is, no it isn’t” argument. Instead, let us consider the following. The Federal Government and Texas State Government authorized local governments to take certain actions and El Paso’s County Judge attempted to exercise power beyond those limitations. He claims that the emergency is so great he must and must be allowed to exercise unconstrained power.

It is possible that the steps Judge Samaniego wishes to take are necessary and prudent. If so, I am sure that Governor Abbott can be convinced of this and permit His Honor to do what he must. The issue is that the Judge wants to exercise unlimited power without legal limitation or constraint.

And I happen to think that leaders and rulers with unlimited, unconstrained power are greater risks to humanity’s survival than a virus as destructive as Covid-19 is made out to be.

A.X. Perez
[email protected]

Sean Gabb replied:

Albert,

I take a different view. Though I still doubt that the Coronavirus is anywhere near as dangerous as we are told, let me for the sake of argument agree that it is a terrible danger. This granted, it becomes legitimate to set aside the normal process of law to the degree that there is a danger.

Let us suppose an asteroid were approaching us. The only way to deflect it is to launch a missile from my garden at 2pm tomorrow— don’t ask me to explain the dynamics behind this: just accept it. I refuse to let the authorities in to set up their launcher. The British State is allowed to take property for its own use, but the process takes months of hearings and then a valuation to compensate me for any damage and general inconvenience. Would anyone seriously object if the police arrested me on some pretend charge, and the authorities then marched into my garden?

To take a real example, the Great Fire of London in 1666 was halted by demolishing houses in the path of the flames. When the owners objected, and insisted on due process of law, the Mayor of London ignored them and sent in men to do their work. Compensation was made much later.

My objection to the lockdown is purely on the grounds that I deny the extent of the danger. If I could be persuaded that there were a danger, I would have no objection to lockdowns, forcible testing and quarantine, or even compulsory vaccination—assuming I could be persuaded beyond reasonable doubt that a vaccine were likely to be effective and was less dangerous overall than the Virus.

Therefore, I say that aggressive force is justified when there is a sufficiently great emergency. Because we live in a statist society, the main agent of aggressive force at the moment must be the State itself. Even if we lived in a libertarian anarchy, neighbourhoods would just as legitimately use aggressive force against their neighbours in the situations i have outlined.

This is why it is important to get our facts right. Eco-laws are not illegitimate because they are illegitimate in themselves, but because there is no meaningful climate change over which we have any control. There was never any worthwhile danger from acid rain. All the other great panics of the past century were equally based on bad science or outright lies. I suspect it is the same with the Coronavirus. But, if I am wrong in my facts, I can have no objection to what I presently think are those outrageous laws about wearing facemasks in the supermarket.

That’s my pennyworth.

Good luck for Tuesday, by the way. The Beeb is convinced Mr Magoo will win—but we can hope for a better outcome.

Sean Gabb
[email protected]

A.X. Perez replied:

And that’s the rub. The question is, did Judge Samaniego have time to discuss things and just arrogate power that wasn’t his, or has the CV-19 situation gotten so bad in El Paso he had to act without asking, “Mother, may?” of a higher authority?

A.X. Perez
[email protected]

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Letter from L. Neil Smith

Dear Ken,

My article in last week’s L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise “Our Chinese ‘Friends’” informed my readers that the bloody-handed commies are dismissing the historic and world-shattering philosophy of the American Revolution as an “outdated fantasy”.

I am confident that our “outdated fantasy” will ultimately destroy the People’s Republic. I also think the best way to rub it in their faces is to carry that “outdated fantasy” with us to Mars, where it can form the cornerstone of civilization on humanity’s second home planet for the next three hundred years.

Thomas Jefferson would like that.

El Neil
[email protected]

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