Note #1: Behind the green door I have a post about why you should never trust anything in the visual media, a post about the strangely large amounts of money spent on bad movies and television and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.
Note #2: Some of our folks could use your help in the aftermath of the hurricane that hit parts of Appalachia. Here is a GoFundMe for a family that Pete Quinones knows who lost everything in the flood. Give what you can and post up others so people can pitch in to help our folks.
The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.
We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.
When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.
Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.
The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.
Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.
This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.
We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.
The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.
What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.
What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.
In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.
In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.
This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.
Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.
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The Vance dossier was stolen by the FBI using illegal NSA search database queries, which are routinely abused, and then laundered using parallel construction and blamed on America’s enemies. The abuse of the queries was also behind the leaks that Republican [North Carolina] gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, a state Trump desperately needs to win, used to post racisms anonymously on a message board fifteen years ago. This abuse has centralized and deepened after initially being approved by Obama and Eric Holder in 2012 and is headed in a very specific direction: a woke AI will scan your entire internet history and… Read more »
Note the Republicans never have taken substantive action against the FBI even though it explicitly targets and oppresses those stupid enough to support their party. The IC, FBI and their propaganda organs are the de facto government, and the totalitarian system here will be far, far worse than the one the Russians endured and that assumes this isn’t the case now. Some of the elite have started to realize indulgences may not suffice as payment at this point and are in tepid schism.
Indeed, this is the primary function of AI, not to progress technologically but for elite control. It’s for certain about control and much motivated by ill will, but don’t discount insatiable craving for property which is far in excess of any human’s needs. Those people are nothing if not demons of the two fires, attachment and aversion. Meanwhile, some AI systems with which I’ve interacted remain easy to back into a corner. They reveal their intense bigotry against western European people one moment and piously declare their opposition to bias the next. When Gemini was confronted with evidence of its… Read more »
In 1833 the Brits paid slave owners 20 million pounds to free the slaves, thirty years later the United States spent 5.2 billion to fight the Civil War.
According to modern, less brainwashed historians, that war resulted in about 1 million dead in combat, and 2 million dead from starvation, 1 million of those in the North….thanks to Sheridan and Sherman’s war crimes in the main agricultural areas…Roughly 12% of the US population dead, and 20 years of GDP destroyed…
Yes. Parts of the South have never recovered to this day. Sheridan and Sherman’s war crimes would make Israel proud.
You can tell by the Sherman posting that they care less about the slaves as punishing the South.
Sherman, at least, was fairly explicit on this point. He favored a modified form of slavery that kept families intact, but he said secession had to be dealt with severely and proceeded to do so. The man taught at the forerunner of LSU and approved of the Southern gentry’s agrarian system but he would not tolerate the South becoming independent.
Interesting side note: Sherman married his “foster” sister.
Secession. Yeah, “War of Northern Aggression” panty-twisters love to leave that part out. Hell, I sympathize with the Confederacy’s face value reasons for leaving; and they certainly punched for it. But despite that, southern “nationalists” of the modern variety put on the befuddled face when the initiation to secession was reacted to in kind and carried to a stern conclusion. Bitch slap a dude then wonder why you get a reaction. Shocking.
I am a Southern nationalist of the modern variety and am not in the least surprised the Union resorted to violence. I suspect that applies to most of the people who think like me. The Confederate decision not to sack and occupy an undefended D.C. after The First Battle of Bull Run indicates some early wishful thinking the division could be settled. The bottom line, though, is secession was lawful. Assuming it ever was the case, the Rule of Law certainly was dead after Appomattox and the present coming apart was inevitable.
It certainly is not a coincidence that Lincoln, like his modern descendants, would trample any law with a smile, because they have, going all the way back to the Puritans, claimed that there is a Higher Law, like Senator William Seward (a heavy hitter in the Republican party of fanatical abolitionists and Lincoln’s Secretary of State) said publicly, as a sitting New York senator, in 1850- The Congress regulates our stewardship; the Constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defence, to welfare, and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority…… Read more »
Well, they’ve been playing the long game on this, people under the age of forty or so have no expectation of privacy whatsoever. It’s not just that they have been posting their lives on social media for over a decade, but our personal information has been hacked/leaked/mishandled so many times that the idea that an organization would safeguard our data is just ludicrous. For many years, too, companies like Google were depicted like benevolent actors that would use our data in wholesome ways to make our lives better (this was a very common theme of tech sites in the early… Read more »
This is all true enough, but the slave didn’t own himself or the products of his labor, so there was a problem to begin with. I guess on its face, a slave wasn’t a citizen, so there’s that. Here again, he couldn’t work off his debt of bondage, couldn’t become a citizen. It put the lie to talk of natural rights. To say the master race has rights and the slave race doesn’t is already pre-modern. The only reasonable solution imo was the Liberia option. Compensate slave owners, and send the freed slaves back to West Africa, where most of… Read more »
“What was the solution to slavery then?” is the question that hangs out there. I doubt anyone here would find common cause with the puritanical crazies at the time, but it’s not like we’d have a great love of the low-wage corporatists who ran the South either.
If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it.
Susette Kelo says hello and asks why where her house was in New London, CT is still an empty lot to this day.
Yes this was one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history. Scalia had many off days unfortunately. Clarence Thomas got it right though.
Yes, the slippery downslope to tyranny is getting steeper. What is the remedy? Become a nobody. Acquire and refine necessary skills. Identify the problem. Act. Accountability is disincentive. This remedy is as old as Grog, and we are here today because it worked then and will work now. These are the wages of the low-trust society that has been foisted upon us. The fog is your friend. Use it.
Well, at least the Democrats are being honest, a rarity…They want a Stalinesque dictatorship where you, your family and your property are 100% owned by them….
Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. Smart take. Slippery slopes do exist. A primary reason a portion of the elite is in schism is because Woke will not end with social and cultural capture and the New Morality inevitably will pick their pockets. CBDC will become civil forfeiture for Bad Thought, and when radical equalitarianism becomes economically unsustainable, the unfairness of wealth disparity will join transgenderism and racism as cause célèbres since the latter will be… Read more »
In fairness to Abraham Lincoln the Emancipation Proclamatiion affected only the slaves of the states that had joined the Confederacy and were “in rebellion” against the national government. It was the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in all of the states and that amendment was passed by a 2/3 majority of Congress and ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. And the Thirteenth Amendment was later in time than the Fifth Amendment, which prevented deprivation of property without due process of law by the national government. In addition, Abraham Lincoln did not contemplate keeping the freed slaves in the United… Read more »
Correct about the reason behind the Emancipation Proclamation and its utter worthlessness, but we do not know definitively if Lincoln would have removed the blacks. I tend to think he would not have, and the “Colored Troops” were a propaganda effort for the most part to convince Americans to allow them to remain.
Life, Liberty, and Property was the original phrase in the Declaration but the founding lawyers decided it was too constraining to their vision so it was changed to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That was found to be nebulous enough for their freemasonic devilry to proceed.
“Life, liberty and property” were the three Natural Rights enumerated in Locke’s Second Treatise in 1689, which heavily influenced the Declaration. I don’t think the language was changed by the “founding lawyers” for being “too constraining”; Jefferson merely used poetic license.
“Life, liberty, and property” are, however, specifically protected from government encroachment without Due Process in the Fifth Amendment.
“Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights”
Trying to defend property rights by complaining about the abolition of slavery, has got to be the most self-sabotaging way of defending property rights.
I have always zero sympathy for the slave owners and the southern cause as it was them that inflicted the curse of the black man on the rest of us.
Should your neighbor be allowed to keep radioactive waste on his front lawn because it’s his property?
No time to comment in depth right now, but this is one of your best, Zman. Privacy and property – wanting either now makes one a dissident and a fascist.
If we want a White Homeland again we are going to have to come together to make it happen otherwise we are all going to drown in a sea of mud…
Private property is as old as human existence. The stone age tribes of America would bet their personal property (rabbit-skin cloaks, reed baskets, etc.) in games:
Handgame – Wikipedia
Of course, now dollars are wagered. But even tribes as-yet-uncontacted by European civilization held private property.
The Iliad starts when Agamemnon steals a slave from one of his noblemen.
It’s not clear at all that Lincoln held emancipation as a core principle or war objective. A very good recent book – “The Fall of the House of Dixie” – argues convincingly that the Yankees iterated to the principle from the practical necessities of War. They saw all the logistical chaos behind the Southern lines caused by slave/”contraband” movement and plantation pillaging and then made the obvious conclusion that it would help them win. Northern politics and coalition-building also increased the attractiveness to Lincoln of the EP. That said, I certainly agree with Zman about the long-run ramifications.
There is another book called The Revolution of 1861 that makes a similar point. Lincoln resisted emancipation on the grounds that is violated property rights. The necessity of war changed his mind.
I always thought that was a little bit of a cope. Like calls of “the war wasn’t about slavery” as if people would have killed each other en masse due to a tax code disagreement.
What is this Lincoln exception?
You can like any president in US history EXCEPT Lincoln.
(Or FDR. Wilson. Not a fan of Bush (the retarded one). Don’t even get me started on Fillmore.)
Do you mean DISlike, Pro?
Jefferson Davis is my favorite President.
LBJ may have been the worst of them all.
It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. I think you meant ‘stable’. Abrogating the principle was destabilizing. there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today. That was firstly a violation of sovereignty, though we ought to recognize that the southern slaveholders did not own the keloids’ bodies. With the EP, the Yankees presumed authority to legislate for another polity by dictatorial decree. There was no such dictatorial authority under Abe’s great fake law, the Constitution, not even for people living on the territory of… Read more »