Priceless.

Oleg Volk, in his infinite kindness, has forwarded me a letter sent to him by a certain person who was offended by his site. Here is that letter, name omitted to protect the [insert here].

> Name:
> Location: i am a phlebotomist. i found it
> E-mail:
> Homepage:
> Picture URL:
> Link: Do not have a link
> Best: existentionalism
> Worst: guns
> landscapes: on
> abstracts: on
> Frequency of Visits: First time
> Other Advice: OK, Dude...first of all. You are a talented
> photographer, and it seems you have skills with a CPU. I like the way
> your site is built and organized. Logical, simple enough to
> understand, yet it conveys complex ideas. However, one thing that I
> do not like is all the guns. I mean, have you heard of the columbine
> high school shootings? Also, let me give you a disclaimer: all this
> is my own biased opinion. However, the photograph of you with the M16
> lookin' rifle in a flak jacket is pure psycho. And what the hell is a
> "pocket weasel"????? You name your guns???? Do you also have a name
> for your penis? It is stated that you are single, lookin for a female
> to date. Well, it seems that if you don't find one soon, you'll start
> picking people off from a clock tower with a sniper rifle. Don't get
> me wrong, there's nothing wrong with guns, I celebrate the US
> constitution, the first (I am happy you express yourself) and second
> (you have your guns) ammendments. But c'mon...one or two images of
> you with guns would be good. Not a freaking hundred. Once again, I
do not mean disrespect, and hope you can take this constructively.
> :

I mean, hey, people. Oleg Volk, “picking people off from a clock tower with a sniper rifle”? I felt pissed. Very. And, having what the worthy Kim du Toit terms an RCOB moment, I replied [given in italics]:


Hello Mr. S.!

Mr. Volk, in his infinite kindness, has forwarded me this message. While
certainly you are entitled to your opinion, I am also entitled to mine. Here
is my opinion on your letter: OF COURSE Mr. Volk's [excellent] site has
pictures of guns. It is *about* protecting the right to keep and bear arms
in the first place. What do you expect to see on a site like that? Teddy
bears? Even more interestingly, you say that posting such images is wrong
because of Columbine. What does that have to do with anything? How does the
act of two young boys, driven homicidally insane by social pressure and
psychiatric drugs [look it up], committed via a mixture of guns,
incendiaries, and propane, have any relevance on the posting of images of
firearms on the Internet? [I understand from your letter that you agree with
the ideas expressed in the Second Amendment, thus I will not insult your
intelligence by thinking you actually believe it was the "availability" of
weapons that caused the massacre]. You also claim that the naming of weapons
is an unhealthy habit. Would you, then, call the authors of the Lay of
Roland, the Legends of King Arthur, and the Last of the Mohicans unhealthy?
Would you call Rudyard Kipling unhealthy? As to calling the affection with
weapons itself unhealthy, I will merely note that, to the experts, it is the
dislike of weapons that is unhealthy:

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
~Sigmund Freud, "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis"

Sincerely yours, Boris Karpa, Ashdod, Israel

P.S. Here is some poetry for you. I hope you enjoy it:

www.scotwars.com/html/poem_brown_bess.htm

One would think the man would not reply. But he did.

>Indeed it is Mr. Karpa. Our right to keep and bear arms. Or arm (teddy) bears, for >that matter. God bless america. Or, run refugee camps over with tanks (I'm sorry, >that just slipped out, do forgive me).
>Also, I do not view Mr. Freud as a 100% valid authority. Too many of his theories >have been proven unbased by modern psychology and sociology. I mean, not >everything is a penis, for crying out loud.
>As far as your reference to ancient warriors naming their weapons. They did. They >also happended to be very knot-headed, "red-nekked", even for their times, not to >mentioned ours, male chauvinist pigs. They treated women, serfs (in applicable >countries, those were slaves, as you know), people of other race, creed or ethnicity >like shit. I do believe we, as a group of people living on this planet have move past >that, at least a little ways. I hope.
>God bless america for giving me the right to express my opinion (and yes, have >guns. >I own guns. I am not against or afraid of them) without fear of being >decapitated.
>Thank you for writing to me.

Oh well. Shrug.

Dear Sir!
I frankly don't know what "ancient warriors" you're talking about - I referred to sources diverging from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century, and certainly Mr. Kipling is no 'redneck' [whatever that means in the first place]. Your description of the treatment of women by such people doe by no means reflect the complexity of the reality of the Middle Ages or of the more modern times. Let me, for a moment, divert your attention to certain example of how an aristocrat was supposed to treat women in the days of the past.

"An insult directed at a woman is not answered by her, but by the man protecting her, which becomes the insulted party, while the insult becomes a degree graver than if a man where insulted." V. Durasov, The Dueling Code, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1912, reprinted in Y.A. Gording, "Duels and Duellers", St. Petersburg, the Pushkin Fund, 1996.

Why am I quoting it? You see, the various codes of behavior - which, in transformed form, influenced such late imitators as the famed Jim Bowie and the Alamo defenders - did exist, and they were based on the perception of the woman as a superior, rather than inferior, to a man, being. In truth, intolerance and hate were not the only fragment of those cultures and it would be a mistake to abandon them altogether [suffice it to say that the Anglo-American legal system takes its root in the medieva/feudal system as practiced in Britain in the 12th century. G.M. Trevelyan's "History of England" is a good guide to the society of the time].
So no, we are not in all ways superior to our ancestors. As you remember, in no other century were people of other "race, creed or ethnicity" treated more "like shit" than in the 20th. Not every moment forward in time means movement towards progress. It often does, but it is not necessarily so.

Sincerely yours,
Boris Karpa

Did you post that on your blog yet?

ALT="Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign"
HEIGHT="76" WIDTH="112" BORDER="1" ALIGN="MIDDLE" />


Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign!


 

Horrible News

Terrible News From The Front

U.S. Army Sergeant Adam J. Plumondore is dead. I never knew him, nor did I donate to the Walter-Adam Fund, but Kim made me feel he was alive. A person, rather then another number in an endless rank of troops. And it was to go he was on my side in a way.

Goodbye, Sergeant Plumondore. I don’t know if you liked poetry, but I find those lines, by R. Brooke, to be strangely fitting. Let him do the talking.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The Cities of Nationstates – an Overview [part I]

The cities that a civilisation builds are it’s face. In a very real sense, the methods used by a group of people as they congregate together are a product of it’s culture and technology. From the sprawling megasuburbs of Port-Allanea, to the hive-like towers of Griffin, to the green domes of Pilon, cities are the highest expression of a nation’s architecture, engineering, and government. The following cities are examples of their own cultures, thus included here as part of our Nationstates city tour.

Allanea – Port-Allanea shares many of the features of Vinyatirion of the elves, however, the architecture is less advanced, and the teleportation circles. This both because the Allaneans have extremely varied tastes of architecture, and because they lack the magical expertise of the elves. The other main difference is the lack of tall buildings favored by elves. With the exception of the main business district, Port-Allanea features little skyscrapers, rather looking like miles and miles of urban sprawl.

This is even further augmented by low fuel prices and lack of automobile and property taxes on one hand, and absence of government subsidies on the other. Traffic problems are partially solved by the presense of Moller-type vehicles, and also extremely wide roads and intracity vehicle carrying trains run by Taggart Transcontinental.

The Allaneans have no laws regulating business from an ecological standpoint. This means Allaneans often resourt to civil suits against companies whose pollution is outright harmful to others, this serving as de-facto regulation. Still, factory chimneys are a part of the Port-Allanea landscape, poking up from among the cottage roofs. Allaneans do not consider this ugly, rather viewing that as a symbol of national productivity.

Of course, as with everything Allaneans do, there’s an exception to every rule – some subgroups of Allaneans do favor tall buildings, and Trek-Town, a small part of Port-Allanea near the business district inhabited by various Star-Trek fans – about 10-25 thousand in population – is testimony to that fact.

Pilon – Pilon, being entirely a Martian nation, houses most of its population in monstrous domed arcologies. The expertise of the Pilonese in applied genetics lead to that the domes are grown rather than built, and so are their vehicles. Due to the fact Pilon invests money and research in diversifying it’s population. Everybody from elves to orcs it present in the cities, and while Pilonese pretend not to care, they do point out how tolerant they are to any foreign visitor that cares to listen.

The Pilonese expertise in applied genetics has also solved to eliminate the problems of pollution in their cities – nearly all personal vehicles and power sources used are biological in nature and, of course, are gengineered not to pollute.

The Ctan – The subjects of Mephet’ran, like the Allaneans, enjoy great freedom, and see no need to shove into megacity complexes themselves. Rather, they spread out across the homeworld, making themselves very comfortable, utilising antigrav transportation tecnology to become the near-ultimate free state.

Owen's Law in Action

How does a clique work?

Right now, I discovered this wonderful comment on my blog. I decided to post it here – just so I could demonstrate some things about cliques:

“Someguy You Know said...

Ya know...it wasnt anyone. But it was everyone. The CIA was out to get you and they post on NS for the sole purpose of putting you down and making you feel bad. They did it to Kennedy. Now they're after you.”

Greg, yes, I know you. I do not respect you. That is my right.

Anyhow, in this post of yours, you were right about one thing:

Ya know...it wasnt anyone. But it was everyone.

A clique – like the one our dear NYNJ belongs to – operates not by individual will, but rather like a hivemind, supplementing or replacing individual will, responsibility, and thought by ‘B… b… but everybody else does it, too!’

And about conspiracies, Greg: L. Neil Smith, in his book ‘Lever Action’, which I suspect you have never bothered to read, refers to Owen’s Law:

"Whenever it looks like a conspiracy, consider the possibility that it's only because they're stupid."

I believe this is the case here, too.

P.S. On a happier not, here's another Nationstates Blog

Nanakaland's Opinions

I leave Nationstates.

Well, I left Nationstates. Temporarily, at least. Why? Well, two things happened. First, New-York and New Jersey pressured California and Alaska into ignoring me. Not by any rational argument of course. Bare “ignore Allanea or my army runs you over” stuff. Not even an ESUS member with meningitis would have pulled that, of course. During the same DAY, players have used wanton peer pressure on Nanakaland to make him ignore me. Give me a break, here.

Nationstates – or at least one of it’s forums – is overrun by a childish group of players, which I believe is, to the exact words of the player behind Abu-Dhabi Khrishtatata, a high-school clique, where ‘what everybody else’ thinks is more important than what any given individual does. Dozens of players told me they only ignore me because everybody else does.

I feel, personally, that Rping in this climate is not conducive to anything positive. If they enjoy this circular brown-nosing procedure, let’em. I will rather sit here and observe. Let us see where it goes next.

Imagine Freedom

Help keep the Fiery Blog Alive! Donate to my karpa@netvision.net.il PayPal account.

A Call for Action

This is an urgent request for all those who cherish freedom. If you believe in increasing individual rights, repealing the useless and murderous provisions of the war on drugs, gun control laws and censorship acts (whether under the guise of "election reform" or "public decency"), this one is for you. I will not be asking you to call your representative, donate money to a pro-freedom group of my choice, or to go out and talk to people, preaching the One True Path (as defined by me). I ask you to do something truly dangerous.

I am asking you to devote five minutes – just five minutes – of every morning to freedom. Sit back in your favorite chair. Pour a glass of your favorite drink. Look out of the window. Sip on your drink. And imagine freedom.

Imagine the day when the speaker of the House (Knesset, Parliament) declares that "today, by a majority of XYZ votes, this Repeal Bill passes". Imagine that anti-freedom law you hate most swept away, broken down, erased from existence by a single vote. Imagine the joy of your friends at the gun club or the local Ale-Yarok headquarters as they struggle to hear on someone's ancient pocket radio the solemn, defeated voice of the anchorman say "Today, at 12:00 AM, the legislature has voted to repeal the Firearms Control Act". Imagine the posts on every single Internet forum you visit: "England legalizes marijuana!".

Imagine the thousands of people walking out of the prisons they were thrown into by the unfettered cruelty of the prohibitionists. Visualize the millions who would never again, in their lifetime, face the threat of a decade in prison over the possession of a small bush – or, as a matter of fact, over the possession of anything short of a nuclear weapon. Envisage the Colombian cartels and the Afghani terrorist rings broken up and destroyed through the sheer lack of money. Look, with your mind's eye, at those responsible with the Waco massacre and see them in orange jumpsuits and handcuffs.

Imagine the people who fight for freedom – the people who bring about change. Those people need not be – and usually are not – a majority. All is needed is a minority active enough to remain visible and to continuously effect change through it's visibility itself. Most of the great freedom fighters of the modern era were not supported by the majority. From George Washington to Martin Luther King to Binyamin Hertzl, those people never started out with a majority. The key, the main ingredient to victory is willpower. Your willpower.

Think of it. All that separates today's reality, with it's ATF, MI-5 and GSS, from what you have just imagined, is your mind, that little spark that needs to be sent from your brain to your buttocks for them to get detached from the chair and do something. And when you decide not to write to that editor, not to go to that rally, not to vote, you are the reason it does not get done.

Now open your eyes and go call your representative.

Falujah Delenda Est!

Help keep the Fiery Blog Alive! Donate to my karpa@netvision.net.il PayPal account.

Falujah Delenda Est!

Those people who call themselves "champions of the downtrodden" are now complaining that the War on Terror declared by America is phony, that president Bush has arranged the war out of some low personal reasons (winning the election, the Haliburton Contracts, or even The Oil). And you know what? They might be right. It might be even that George Walker Bush personally is full of bitter desire to drink the blood of Muslim children. But, and this is what the BPL’s desperately wish to avoid, another thing is also true: the war on Iraq is justified. Regardless of what Bush’s personal reasons are. Regardless of whether or not there are WMD. Regardless of whether Saddam did personally plan 9-11 or just provide some “minor weapons expertise” to Al-Quaeda on other issues.

Here’s the reason it is justified for the Coalition to go into Iraq – and if they wish to, into Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Lybia while they are at it. The reason is simple: those nations are enemies of the Western world. All of them are ruled either by Islamic fundamentalists or socialists, or some mixture of both ideologies – ideologies intrinsically opposed to what the West – and America especially – is all about. Sure, the West has it’s failures (the Patriot Act, for example.) and there’s some very good things coming from Iran (like Omar Hayam), but the point remains: the so-called Axis of Evil is about slavery. The West is about freedom.

And, behind all the little disputes, behind the oil, the gold, the power, herein lies the rub: our cultures are different. Their leaders – the Khomeini’s, the Bin Ladens, the Kim Il Sungs of this world – consider us morally depraved. Worse, they know, in the murky depth of their evil, tyrannous souls, that the very example of America’s existance is proof positive that, unlike what they say and think, their killing fields, prisons, and whips are unneccessary for the well-being of their people, and in fact are only standing in it’s way. Those two reasons are why they hate the West more than anything, and it’s freest nation, America, more than any other nation of the West.

We must destroy their regimes. We can’t get to all of them (China, for example, is out of our reach), but we must get to those we can. The libertarians among us will bring us will bring up the zero aggression principle. I will reply that not only do most of those nations either plot aggression against us or aid those who do, but they constanly commit aggression against their own people. The Kurds. The Maronites. The Sufis. Doesn’t the fabled zero-aggression principle allow defending others?

There is no place for multiculturalism in this debate. It is possible to discuss the tolerance by us of Sufism – the more tolerant and humane version of Islam. It is possible to discuss the equal value of the culture of France or Germany. But even to suggest that the culture represented by those to whom we habitually refer to as “those countries” – the strange, blighted lands that give us Khomeini and Saddam and other such creatures – is somehow of “equal value” to the culture of the West is madness. Let me demostrate:

“Lacking the equipment to open secure passages through Iraqi minefields, and having too few tanks, the Iranian command again resorted to the human-wave tactic. In March 1984, an East European journalist claimed that he "saw tens of thousands of children, roped together in groups of about twenty to prevent the faint-hearted from deserting, make such an attack." The Iranians made little, if any, progress despite these sacrifices. Perhaps as a result of this performance, Tehran, for the first time, used a regular army unit, the 92nd Armored Division, at the Battle of the Marshes a few weeks later.”
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...r/iran-iraq.htm

Does anybody honestly believe that (using the United States and Iran as an example) that the nation that gave us Jefferson and Toreau and MLK is the moral and cultural peer of the people who did that? Do we believe that the United Kingdom, with all its misgivings is the moral cultural peer of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Do we believe, in all seriousness, that Canada is the moral peer of North Korea? Thank you. I know your answer.
Those who now plot hatred and destruction against the Western world say: "You might havethe better weapons, but we are better than your, your depraved society and habits". They are wrong. The military superiority of America and the western world in general hinges exactly on their moral superiority. It is the West that allowed Browning to experiment with his tools in Utah and the Wright's to play about with strange devices at Kitty Hawk. It is the West's culture of individualism - the very culture that allows Britain's magazine covers to picture nude 16-year olds and America's streets to feature men with automatic handguns that allows the existance of F-16's and Daisy Cutters.

Those who practice oppression are rarely capable of creating anything at all. Bin Laden's videos, wheere he stands in a camoflage uniform holding a rifle and prophesying our destruction are vivid proof of that -for he is preaching his destruction on a Japanese camera, waving a Russian rifle, and wearing a uniform his henchmen probably bought for him at WallMart. Look at the pictures of Bin Laden’s wives and children. Of Afghanistan’s villages, where the only implements of civilisation are made from abandoned Soviet tanks. Of the North Koreans reduced to about 125 gram of rice daily. The leaders of the Axis of Evil – for indeed, it is an Axis of Evil – believe they are morally superior to us. For, indeed, there is an Us and Them here. Socialism and religious fundamentalism of all stripes are on one side. Freedom is on the on the other.

Those people who would like America's culture of freedom to be replaced with a world where cutting off a woman's clitoris is standard religious practice, deserve no peace. Those who wish to forcibly replace America's First Amendment with a culture that pours molten lead down the throats of Christians deserve no mercy. Those who wish to violently replace America with a place where homosexuals are stoned and then stomped to death by a mob, deserve no freedom. For them, there is only the whine of incoming bombs, the clatter of heavy machineguns, and the long, merciless, howl of an incoming A-10 Avenger.

Osama Bin Laden and his cronies got it right. This is indeed a Holy War. And in this particular Holy War, if there is a god, may God bless America.

Language of the Enemy

Here's the deal... for those who are reading this. I have a PayPal account at karpa@netvision.net.il
Given that I am an IDF draftee, and get paid $60 a month, it would be nice if you donated.

And here's my newest rant.

Language of the Enemy

Using leftist rhetoric to promote the RKBA

The following two statements are taken among the pro-gun community as gospel truth: First, that 'anti-gunners' tend to be emotional, rather than logical, and vice versa for 'pro-gunners', and second, that leftist liberalism goes necessarily hand-in-hand with anti-gun beliefs. The sooner we shed those beliefs, the better.

Even a brief survey of the ranks of anti-gun activists – and even more so, the rank-and-file believers in Sarah Brady's "holy cause" – will yield the simple truth that quite a few anti-gunners are quite sane, logical souls, if not for their outlandish beliefs on the issue. Just as well, there's quite a few pro-gun leftists out there (unfortunately, they are currently a minority in the Democratic Party's elite). Just to note a single example, Alaska's current carry law (Alaska is one of the two states of the Union that allows concealed carry without any license – just like the Founders intended) was crafted and sponsored by Democrat Eric Croft. (One of the founders of the NRA-ILA, similarly, is Congress' oldest-sitting Democrat, John Dingell, otherwise famous for coining the term 'jackbooted storm trooper').

The real difference between a conservative and a liberal – or, to that end, a pro-gunner and an anti-gunner – is not whether they operate logically or not. The difference is that both sides operate on different premises and speak different languages. It is rarely possible to transition a liberal to a conservative or vice-versa through logical, structured debate – ever tried to use logical, structured debate to convert an atheist? – because what is in question is not a single point, but rather the very language in which the opponent thinks.

It is, however, possible to get the opponent to yield his ground on a key issue like the RKBA – if you use his language. Assuming for the purposes of the discussion that you are a 'conservative' and your opponent is a 'liberal' – and that he is not fanatical enough to be totally impervious to debate – here are some guidelines to what you can do or say to sway him to your cause.

· Point out that word 'liberal' itself – in its dictionary definition – implies tolerance for alternative lifestyles and support of, well, liberty. The hunter, the AR-15 collector, the CCW licensee – how are those not pursuits of alternative lifestyles? To pursue this train of thought further, perhaps it would be better if we refused to refer to the Feinstein-Boxer wing of the Democratic Party as 'liberals' and used BPL – 'blisninny pseudoliberal' – or something of the sort. Reserve 'liberal' for John Dingell, Eric Croft, and other similar legislators. Give credit where credit is due.

· Point out that gun control policies, such as the Sullivan Act, where originally invented to – and still do – mainly impact racial and social minorities – African-Americans, Italian immigrants, and so forth. Often, they were actually supported by unsavory groups like the KKK. In fact, Martin Luther King has applied for – and was refused – a concealed carry license at one point. The NRA, conversely, provided African-Americans with rifles and training during the 1960's.

· Point out that 'white males' are the people who least need guns for self-defense (though they certainly do, as well). Those who most need the equalizing effect of firearms are women, homosexuals, and people who otherwise are either more likely to be attacked or who are unable to resist an attacker through sheer force of muscle.

· Point out that the defense of gun rights is not solely the realm of the 'white male'. Groups like 'Pink Pistols' (www.pinkpistols.org) and similar will be excellent examples of this.

The regular arguments for gun rights – the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and so forth - won't do you much good – they are part of your language rather than a common language shared by both you and your opponent. A 'liberal' is likely to see the Constitution as merely another means to the establishment of civilized society, while a 'conservative' is likely to see it something valuable in itself. Similarly, appealing for studies like John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" is pointless – as you know, for every statistic, there's a counter-statistic. Use statistics only to decry your opponent's patently false statements – for everything else, they are useless.

By using the arguments described above, you are going to score a double victory for the right to keep and bear arms. Not only will you gain another supporter for your cause, but you will help to de-monopolize the issue. Today, a Republican legislator or candidate knows perfectly well that he doesn't need to be too good on RKBA to win – all he needs to do is to be less anti-gun than his Feinsteinite opponent –which usually isn't too hard.

If we could create more pro-gun 'liberals' that would put pressure on their party to stop trying to ride the dead horse of gun control, we could replace the Republican's monopoly on the issue with something more like free-market competition – and as we know, free-market competition primarily benefits the consumer. Us, that is.