Etymology for an Ailing World

Etymology is the study of word origins. Over time, words often change their meaning. Sometimes this is a result of natural usage in a changing world, as in the case of the word “goodbye”, which started out as “God Be With You” (or “with Ye”). As the farewell utterance retained its usefulness even among people who grew less religious, the four original words lost their utility. In other cases, as highlighted by George Orwell in his book 1984, authorities manipulate words in order to place new meanings on ancient and valuable texts, common sayings, or other influential bits of language.

Deception is an instinctive tool creatures from bugs to humans use to improve the prospects of continuing their species. Most deception in nature happens between species, for example when a predator or prey accomplishes its goal by providing bad signals to its enemy. Camouflage is one good example. Human beings, however, often use deception on other members of our own species. Though this strategy tends to wane with age, wisdom, and maturity in most, there are certain kinds of people who employ the strategy of deception at an increasing rate as they get older and take on more responsibilities. This is because there is a sharp contrast between the group they favor privately and the group they favor publicly. Etymology is a useful tool for detecting and remedying the damage caused by such deception.

For those who occupy positions of influence, there is always the temptation to get people to believe things that aren’t true, or to look at things in a warped way. For example, when George W. Bush and his administration were pondering how best to protect the usefulness of the national currency against growing interest in using some other medium of exchange to trade oil, they concocted the story of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” to justify an attack on Iraq. It also seems likely that the destruction of the Word Trade Center Towers in 2001 was part of a “false flag” operation designed to justify the attack. There are many examples of such “false flag operations” throughout history. While the majority of the world’s population suffers from the outcomes of these deceptions, any exploration of crony capitalism, fascism, communism, or other government structures will show that they provide great benefits to those who are in power and to their friends and business associates.

Often, it isn’t clear whether a word’s changing meaning over time results from the intentions of authorities or from its natural course of usage among people. Indeed, such shifts in meaning are most often a result of the combination of these two factors. The very word “authority” is a great example. It starts with the telling word, “author”. These first six characters suggest that someone is creating a story, perhaps based on truth, or perhaps a complete fabrication; perhaps intentionally deceptive, or perhaps fiction intended for entertainment. In all cases, the audience of such an author chooses whether or not to pay attention to the story, and how much of it to believe.

In order for an author to become an authority, the audience must find value in the story, feel a growing respect for the wisdom of the author, and ultimately rely on the author for information, knowledge, and wisdom in some specific domain. I am tempted to call this “respect-based authority”, but this is misleading. Authority is always and necessarily respect-based, and the “authorities” know this and struggle with it. Examine the material provided to schoolchildren about “the authorities”. Rather than presenting the claims and writings of these power players so that the students can come to their own conclusions, the material starts with the conclusions desired by the authorities. History textbooks, the novels students read for English class, and even math textbooks are filled with examples insinuating and insisting that “the authorities” are wise and should be respected. Really, however, they are tyrants.

In “The Social Contract”, Rousseau writes “In the exact sense, a tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it. This is how the Greeks understood the word ‘tyrant’: they applied it indifferently to good and bad princes whose authority was not legitimate.” It is unclear from the English translation I have how he means the word “legitimate”. Etymologically, “legitimate” comes from the Latin word for writing, but more specifically, the writing of law. This leads down a wonderful path our readers can explore on their own, along which they will meet Hammurabi, often cited as the first guy who wrote down the rules he would be enforcing. The modern meaning of “legitimate” does not require an author, but assumes that the real world is the measuring stick for legitimacy. For example, a “legitimate” argument cannot contain a logical error because such an error delegitimizes the argument. No author can legislate logic out of existence. A tyrant can, however, and that is the point here.

Authorities are valuable people who earn respect by knowing their subjects and providing help and advice to those who rely on them for the knowledge they hold. Tyrants the world over crave such respect and do everything in their power to enjoy its benefits. The essence of their tyranny, however, is not any written law or lack thereof, but the lack of the more modern kind of legitimacy: reasonable justification. When reason paints the tyrant as a tyrant, his true nature emerges through his reliance on coercion and violence. In his “Essay on the Trial By Jury”, Lysander Spooner points out (and extensively defends) the fact that it is jurors’ “primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.”

Another example of etymology that is highly germane (at least in the United States of America) in the area of applying etymology to the ailments of the world is the word “income”. Peter E. Hendrickson has written a wonderful website page explaining how this term has been abused outside of the law, while its meaning inside the law (from 1916) retains all manner of usefulness for those citizens of the USA who wish to understand the US Internal Revenue Code and avoid paying unnecessary taxes. His essay explains that the word at that time described passive income, and that it is now unofficially abused by tyrants (whom most would call “authorities”) to deceptively maximize tax revenue. His essay is available at http://losthorizons.com/Documents/AllEconomicActivityIsNotIncome.htm.
With this in mind, this author urges you to help other people understand the difference between authority and tyranny, and to point out that an authority that relies on its brute force is not an authority, but rather a tyrant, incapable of relying exclusively on reason, as all genuine authorities must. To put it in a simpler light, if you are “writing your own story” and someone threatens you into changing it (perhaps with a “You may not grow/sell/transport that kind of plant/milk/chemical/monetary instrument/light bulb” or other such law), recognize that you are being controlled not by authority, but by tyranny, and complain loudly. This world needs a lot more voices complaining of the tyrannies under which it suffers.

The seedy Ad Hominem

There are a few people to whom I am very dedicated - members of my family and close friends.  I love these people with all my heart, but they cause me a thorough if weak kind of suffering when they gleefully or happily (I refuse to admit "joyfully") describe the foolishness or suffering of people they don't like.  I may not like these people either, but the connection between derision and consideration has become disturbingly strong.

Consideration is the mental act of considering another person's perspective.  Derision is the act of attacking or demeaning a person.  These two acts are connected as opposites, meaning that acting on one tends to inhibit acting on the other.  This is only natural, but it is being used against most people, and my sensitivity to derision has highlighted this abuse for me.  The abuse of this connection has always been with us, even taught in high school and college, as the false "ad hominem" argument.  It is taught as a false argument, but still it persists, and it is now, I believe being used intentionally where violence is too obvious and deceit is too difficult.

Human beings can be divided into parasites and producers.  Everyone has an evolved sensitivity to parasitism, and we escape it whenever we can, if we detect it.  The easiest way to detect parasitism is when the parasite causes us pain in its endeavor to live off of our own efforts instead of making its own efforts.  Sometimes the pain is not severe enough, or the chain of cause and effect is not clear enough, for us to see that another person is stealing our life force from us.  This is the case with most successful parasitic humans.

They form groups and work out plans to siphon off the surplus of the productive, using all kinds of strategies to prevent their victims from feeling enough pain to escape.  The simplest strategy is violence.  If the group can convince enough people that the violence is necessary and justified, then it enjoys widespread success.  This requires that the violence be quite limited.  This works until the parasite class has damaged so much of the host productive group that their surplus is no longer enough to support the parasites.  This is solved by the parasites through deceit.

The next simplest strategy for maintaining their access to the surplus of the productive is deceit.  For example, the violence used by the parasites is often deceitfully attributed to external parties and used as an excuse for the parasites to take more from the productive under the claim that it will be used to protect them.  When used by the parasite class that is most successful, such deceit is often called "false flag operations."  Increased communications among the productive class, such as through cell phones and the Internet, are currently putting the lie to many such false flag operations.

Another way in which the parasite class uses deceit is to skew or warp the perceptions of the productive class in the direction of relying more on the parasite class for "whatever it is they do to protect us."  Examples of this reliance can be found in the roles of central banking to protect from dishonest bankers, government schooling to protect from ignorance, and "Health and Safety" bureaucracies to protect from danger.  These roles can only be justified by deceiving people about the nature of their relationship to bankers, knowledge, and the natural world.  Again, these deceits are beginning to suffer widespread destruction through the disillusionment that the Internet provides.

This ongoing struggle the parasite class has with an ever-awakening population of productive humans who have had enough is driving their deceit strategy underground, psychologically.  The ad hominem attack is a subconscious kind of deceit.  It does not explicitly make false claims, but rather relies on the subconscious of the victim to make those claims.

When people don't believe them any more, and someone is speaking the truth about how they have cheated people, their last strategy is to get everyone to view the speaker of truth in a bad light.  This limits our efforts to consider what the person has to say, thereby providing a little bit of protection to the parasites whose predation is being described.  This is why derision bothers me so much.

Derision is no longer simply an immature thing we do to get back at people who have been mean.  It is now a full blown psychological manipulation tool.  Every barb and jab at a speaker of the truth weakens the strength of their truth.  Let us thwart them by being kind and defending those who are attacked, regardless of the value of their argument.  Ad hominem attacks are always a strong indicator of the inability to present a reasonable argument, and that is often because the position of the attacker is not reasonable.

The Printed 3D Gun Censorship Aide

For all law enforcement officials who are interested in aiding and abetting the US government in its efforts to prevent the common folk from being able to defend themselves with the newly available printed 3D gun from Defense Distributed, I have compiled the following useful information:

• The file is called Liberator.zip and is available through bit torrent, which means anyone who has the file and is running the bit torrent service will be able to automatically provide it to others who would like to have it.
• In order to verify the integrity of the file, the SHA1 checksum has been published: aa33bc73264b80b87d21ff8d56de02eaecda3574
• This checksum matches the checksum this researcher got from the file when downloaded from cryptome.org, and also when downloaded through bit torrent, and it also matches the sha1 checksum published on the ar15.com website.

Please note, as well, that there is a healthy and useful distinction between authority and tyranny, and the more we share this information with others, the more peaceful our world will be.

Fewer [Blank] Will be able to Purchase Guns.

John Carson (supposedly) of Organizing for America at BarackObama.com recently wrote me an email that says (among other things):

The Judiciary Committee voted to move forward on a bill that would make universal background checks the law for all gun sales. That's hugely important for one simple reason:

If Congress goes on to pass this bill, fewer dangerous people will be able to obtain guns. Period.

Only where he has the word "dangerous", he's making a horrible assumption.  It's an assumption that lies at the core of the problems caused by the legitimization of violence, otherwise known as "government".  The assumption is that the decision about whether or not a person is dangerous is universal and objective, but not only that.  It also assumes that some group of well chosen people will be able to make that decision.

What he should have written, which would be more honest and effective at improving our country rather than destroying it, is "fewer people government bureaucrats and legislators don't like will be able to obtain guns."

If you have a gun to sell, it makes sense to avoid selling it to someone who will use it to violate others, but most people who buy guns end up using them to protect others.  The ratio of people with guns who will protect you to people with guns who will violate you is very high.  The unfortunate effect of laws such as the one John Carson and Mr. O'Bomber are encouraging is to shift this ratio lower.

Paypal Apparently Suffering from NSA Letters

Paypal has updated their policies.  One of the changes that struck me explains:

PayPal will give notice of a hold, Reserve, or limitation it makes to comply with a court order or other legal process, unless the court order or other process directs that PayPal not provide you notice, in which case the court order or other process supersedes any notice obligation PayPal has undertaken or agreed to under the terms of this Agreement. PayPal has no obligation to contest or appeal from any such order or process.

I added the bold and the hyperlink to the section about Paypal being directed not to provide notice to those affected.  Paypal has decided not to defy the government when the government chooses to give unconstitutional commands.  Paypal is not a conscientious objector to the depravity of the state.  It's sad.  Who will stand up to this gross thug we call the US Government if not a company founded by one of the winner's of Libertopia's Sovereign Awards in 2010, Peter Thiel?

I just withdrew all the money I had there.  I recommend that course to everyone else.  I've also resisted getting their Credit Card, even when they offered me money to take it.  I recommend that course too.  Oh- unless you love the parasite and are willing to continue being its host.  If that is your disposition, then you should put all your money in the bank, whether it's Paypal or some other institution.  And make sure you pay your taxes!  Pay a little extra just to make sure you can't be blamed when the country goes broke.  Oh wait, it already did.  Well then, when government workers riot because they haven't been paid for too long.  And don't forget to vote!

The Physical Education Brainwashing

[Note, in this article, I misuse the word "authority", which is why it links to an explanation.]
 
My daughter asked me for a note to get out of PE this morning.  She later explained that her P.E. teacher does trust her decision about whether or not to participate, but if she doesn't have a note, she doesn't get as many points.  In other words, part of the grade in P.E. comes from giving away the responsibility about what you do with your body to your parents, or to the teacher, who is then expected to control whether or not you participate, based on your input.

So I wrote her a note.  She has it, but I don't know if she'll use it.  It said something like this:

    My daughter should be trusted with the decision whether or not to participate in P.E.  She asked me to write this note because her ankle hurts.  Her request not to participate should be honored regardless of any notes from her parents.  It's an important part of growing up.
   
    Thanks, Dave Scotese

   
She read the note and I asked her what she thought of it.  She ignored my question, so I asked again, and this time she mumbled something.  "What?" I asked.  "I hate when you do that," she said.  She lost her appetite; she was going to eat a yogurt for breakfast but no longer wanted it.  This only puzzles me a little bit. 

I think the reason is that her teachers and parents are supposed to be on the same page, and here they are disagreeing.  They disagree about whether or not she should hold the sole responsibility about participating in a program designed (supposedly) to keep her fit.  The "normal" course of things is that the parents acquiesce to whatever the teachers decide, and the teachers decide whatever their bosses tell them to decide, and thus, the power rests at the top of the authority structure.  Kids get used to normal, and when things go otherwise, they become uncomfortable.  For the thugs in charge, this is a great setup because once people leave school, they have been conditioned to leave the important decisions in their lives up to the authorities, and stick with the status quo.

What effect does this have on the people themselves?  Well, just look around.  Economies grow because of the entrepreneurial spirit.  Entitlements grow because of political pandering.  Perhaps it is a stretch to claim that the P.E. programs in public schools are designed to keep the ruling class firmly entrenched by thwarting competition (the entrepreneurial spirit) and making people dependent on them through entitlement growth.

So I make a different claim: P.E programs like this are teaching kids who are just getting old enough to start being responsible for themselves that "they get more points" by appealing to their primary authority figures.  I claim that this lesson is bad for society.  I claim it because I believe (and have experience to back it up) that the vast majority of human beings are good and wish each other well, and thus, that ignoring authorities and making decisions without respect to or for them is one of the important trends that will support human progress.  We need more entrepreneurs and fewer entitlements.

My First City Council Meeting Speech

Sometimes we have stupid laws.  Does anyone here have a good strategy to deal with them?

The primary function of the independent juror is not to dispense or condone punishment, but rather to PROTECT fellow citizens from tyrannical abuses of power by government.

Another way to put it is that sometimes we have stupid laws, and it's up to the jury to say so.  Check out fija.org for more information.

There are laws prohibiting risky behavior.  These laws replace the natural consequences of risky behavior (both good and bad) with expensive artificial consequences.  In this way, all adults, foolish and wise alike, are prevented from taking risks. They are prevented - at significant cost to: everyone.  They are also prevented from gaining first-hand experience (both good and bad), and that, perhaps, is the greatest cost.

For example, gun control laws hinder good and brave citizens who might otherwise put down people like James Holmes and that idiot in Oak Creek before they do so much killing or simply make their plans too risky to start in the first place.  Laws against the use of marijuana prevent this cheap and abundant medicinal plant from providing relief to multitudes.  Laws requiring the payment of taxes fund horrendous wars and encourage presidents to lie about them.  And don't forget that prohibiting a behavior prevents law-abiding citizens from discovering the results on their own, and that, perhaps, is the greatest cost.

All of these bad effects of legislation can be decreased by jurors who understand their proper role. I urge the city council to help all Murrietans become fully informed, perhaps by providing a link to fija.org on the city council website, and lobbying the county to do the same.