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TDV Week in Review January 20th, 2013

The comments just keep on rolling in for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator article I wrote earlier in the week! We're up to over 200 comments last I checked...and I keep getting notifications of more comments every half hour or so. And not surprisingly, most of the people who chimed in after I offered up a tally on Friday have been Rationals (Intuitive Thinking group). I think we're onto something here.

Someone accused us of acting as if the Rational NT's were some "superior" race that could grasp "The Truth" better than the other groups. Well, I wouldn't have put it exactly like that. I would have just pointed out that the smarter protohumans who could craft superior tools outcompeted and outbred their physically more robust cousins. Those who can grasp that the state's gotta go in order for the world to keep enjoying progress will be more likely to outperform those who cling to the outmoded violent ways. (Just like those with an Austrian understanding of the economy are more likely to give the sort of valuable financial advice that will make you rich!). If the overwhelming majority of those fit to build and thrive in the coming world are Rationals...well, that's just the way it is!

Otherwise it's been a very eventful past few days for your Homegrown editor here in the heartland of the Homeland. I saw a very good play at a famous theatre and celebrated my 37th birthday with friends who surprised me with a dinner party. Early that day I also slightly strained the muscles in my lower back going for a personal record on the standing press. It's as if my body was making it a point to remind me on my birthday that it will contine to work less well as time passes.

Aside from that minor injury it's been such a wonderful few days in this little life I've carved out for myself that I could barely bring myself to pay attention to the mainstream news. I didn't want to be reminded of just how deeply gone this country is. The sheep are atwitter with discussions about how much more centralized political control of their lives is "reasonable." I saw a Facebook meme from ProudToBeLiberal.com (or something like that, and I didn't want to sully these pages with the actual image) that said with all this talk of mental illness being the root of gun violence and not the guns themselves, the conservatives should recognize the delusion of fighting off a tyrannical government with their pistols is itself a mental illness.

I've had about enough of these state-worshipers and their nonsense right now. Their own mental illness has them believing that good things come from the monopoly on violence known as the state. They love guns! ...As long as those guns are in the hands or police and soldiers. They mock liberty and gun-loving types as gun fetishists, but I suspect these supposed gun-haters actually orgasm slightly when they think of the guns in the hands of men in uniforms of any kind. But this isn't just about staying armed to keep the government in check. It's about basic liberty and self-ownership. And these people simply can't think in those terms. They are by their very natures collectivist. They see the entire species as the real organism and any individual as a disposable cell. They long to lose themselves in the group, to maintain just enough individuality to offer praise to the collective. Individual achievement or freedom or happiness mean little to nothing to them. They literally have a lack of mental acuity so that they can only see the forest and might actually want to have you killed if you suggest that there might be individual trees.

They are missing some basic wiring that more individualistic types have. This brings me back around to the MBTI. Among the responses on the comments page there was a sprinkling of other types whom I had claimed were all more likely to be collectivists either of the fascist/Republican or communist/Democratic variety. I readily admit that the evidence clearly shows that voluntaryist market anarchism is not the exclusive domain of the Rationals. At the same time I can't help but believe that some people simply cannot be helped, especially those in the "improve the world at gunpoint" crowd that is chock full of those from the Idealist group. Good lord, save us from these idiots. They will never understand the near-magic of free human interaction. They will always, always think that a small group of supposedly enlightened thugs has to point guns at everyone else and tell them what they can buy, sell or ingest, how to tie their shoes and when to cross the street.

Maybe it's the painful Minnesota cold. Maybe it's the pain in my back. Maybe it's the disagreeableness of a midlife birthday reminding me of my ever-shortening march to oblivion. But right now I'm just sick to death of these people and wish they would all drop dead. I am morally opposed to initiating violence, but I wish these people would just go away somehow. If that leaves us with a world with a lot fewer Idealists or Guardians, then so be it. But the sad reality is that we're stuck with these people and their irrational nanny state worship for several more decades or centuries. They're not going anywhere. If you want a break from them, it will be you who has to leave. Luckily, there are a couple places you can go to get away permanently without leaving the planet (here's one).

Regards,

Gary Gibson
Editor, The Dollar Vigilante

Welcome back, dear TDVers. We trust you had a good week, out there amongst the sheeple. As 2013 gathers steam, it’s more important than ever to visit TDV for insight and opinion you can’t find anywhere else. So sit back, settle in, and see what we wrote about this week…

MONDAY, January 14

Citizen–Based Taxation: Thank War for It

Wendy McElroy considers the roots of citizen-based taxation, and its reach to expats.

“No Americans renounced their citizenship over the double taxation. There was a simple reason for this. From its creation, America implicitly adopted the common law tradition of perpetual allegiance by which renunciation was not an option. This was high irony since America had been founded by people who violently expatriated themselves from Britain. Moreover the Declaration of Independence reads like a proclamation of expatriation. It opens, ‘When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’”

TUESDAY, January 15

Myers-Briggs Personalities and the Peaceful, Voluntary World

TDV Editor, Gary Gibson, investigates the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and where libertarians fit into the Jungian-based personality test.

“Myers-Briggs is a very handy way to categorize personalities and I strongly encourage you to read up more on the theory since this article will only look at the theory very narrowly. Here we use the MBTI to explore why so many people hate liberty and love the state monopoly on violence while so very, very few are prone to be Objectivists, libertarians or individualist anarchists who appreciate the morality and benefits of peace and freedom. Stay tuned because there will be a test at the end to see where you fit in.”

WEDNESDAY, January 16

Gary Gibson on Obama’s gun control efforts.

“People call Obama a hypocrite, but he's been pretty consistent on this: he wants to keep American kids safe. Kids in the countries he wants to drone bomb can go to Hell. If you're going to call Obama a hypocrite on anything, you could do what the NRA has. The NRA has pointed out in a "controversial" ad that the president thinks armed guards at schools make complete sense IF it's the school where his own precious daughters are. Armed guards at commoner schools? Ha! Don't make your elitist hypocrite political masters laugh!”

THURSDAY, January 17

The TDV 2013 Year Ahead

TDV Editor-in-Chief Jeff Berwick previews market’s coming year.

“Worse than that though is that most of the actual money owed by the US government is not properly accounted for. As just one example, Socialist Insecurity extortion payments are taken off of US subject’s cheques and included as income of the US government. Then, part of that money is paid out to current pensioners and the surplus is immediately absconded and spent on other things with an IOU left in the Socialist Insecurity dropbox. Besides being a Ponzi scheme, this, obviously, if done by any private company would be obviously fraudulent. Taking money from employees, telling them it is for their retirement, including that income as revenue and profit on your financial statements and spending it all on other things would be the height of fraud.”

FRIDAY, January 18

Feedback Friday – January 11, 2013

In this week’s Feedback Friday, questions on Myers-Briggs, affirmative action, Africa, and more.

Comments (2)

mava (not verified) - 17 weeks 2 days ago

The fact that all these different people have their own ideas, opinions and egos is not the problem. It is that they want to necessarily violently force their choise on the rest of us, that is the problem. For this reason, I don't think we should try to figure out a way to involve them, instead, we should try to figure out a way for us to survive, aside, while they paint themselves into a corner that would suffocate them all. We should stop offering any results of our reasoning to them, because they never act on all of it, - they only act on some bits in order to survive and to continue to enslave us, the non-aggression types.

dscotese - 17 weeks 2 days ago

Dear Gary,

I am a die-hard Homegrown fan. For now, it is way too difficult to plan an escape. I have made peace with it, and I've learned to live with, like, and even love some of the brainwashed sheeple. You are (one of? our main?) Homegrown editor, so I think you should be exploring more the ways in which we (who still live here) can cope with them, perhaps draw them toward the light.

They, some of them, like weed and other mind-opening drugs. They just haven't used enough to see the light. Some of them are intelligent enough to be more rational, but their circumstances don't bring them any closer to our reasoning, and the ire and disgust you express in articles like this one don't attract them to it. Especially Sensitive folks. I've been thinking about the reasons we choose between iNtuiting and Sensing, and I think a big part of it is feedback. We voluntaryists have probably written a lot of stuff that Sensing and Feeling types would totally agree with, rationally, but they can't trust their rationality with all the propaganda being fed to us. That "basic wiring" can be learned; it just needs nurturing and tenderness, rather than the constant barrage of crap from TV, radio, newspapers, and pseudo-authority figures like teacher and cops. And also rather than the bile of our disgust for their chicken-heartedness.

There are so many directions I could go on this meme. I know people to whom I can explain something and they will vehemently disagree (however emotionally and unreasonably), but if I just drop it, or ("Squirrel!") change the subject, then I can expect them to start behaving according to the explanation I gave within a few hours or days. However, if I argue and provide more evidence and reasoning, they will grow a protective wall or detector of some sort so that later, when the reasoning gets to them and they finally feel like behaving as my explanation demands, alarms will go off and they will defy the reasoning. It's some kind of ego I think.

I think a big part of it comes from learning in school that "X means Y" and then having to avoid forgetting it until you've used it on a test. Any kind of thought about how X and Y might have a different kind of relationship is just going to make the test harder. Be a parrot and a robot, and you'll get out for Summer with praise for your grades to boot.

I feel the same frustration you do. We are impatient because for us, a logical conclusion is compelling immediately, and in the face of information that changes or gets superceded by new facts so quickly, we can't afford an ego. We let the evidence on both sides pile up and when we have to decide, we re-examine the two piles without reference to what we decided before.

I don't have a good solution, but I've developed a kind of protetive mechanism: First I explain my reasoning. If we disagree, so be it, but I still explain that I will follow my understanding, and "conventional wisdom" is for suckers as far as I'm concerned - unless I happen to agree with it. I explain my plans and I explain that I'm open to them changing their mind about any of it, if they want to join me or help or whatever. I haven't yet figured out how to make it obvious that "I see your ego as a horrible and ugly defect, so if you change your mind, I'll have more respect for you." Most of what I come up with seems to invite a "fuck you". So I'm still tinkering with it.

I laughed openly at work once when a marketing guy said "that's just not the way it's done." He asked why that was funny and I explained that the reasoning basically means we should never innovate or invent or progress. That was a few months before I quit - maybe 5 years ago. So anyway, let's have more creative ideas about how to reach them, rather than the zombie-attack-scare-tactics.