Are some people confused about what a government is?
Not all institutions that call themselves government actually are. Governments are supposed to fight crime, deter invaders, adjudicate disputes, promote order and foster security. Therefore, any institution that…
- Threatens innocent people to extort their submission
- Initiates force
- Treads on personal conscience
- Commits crimes
- Fosters disorder….
…CANNOT be a government.
- Initiating force negates the very function of government
- Legitimate government only uses force defensively
Thus, when any so-called government routinely initiates force it will be more accurate to put the word “government” in scare quotes. Better yet, use the alternative name we suggest in our Mental Lever titled The State.
Promote empathy and Zero Aggression through linguistic clarity. Define government correctly. Do not confer the name government on institutions that are unworthy of the name.
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By Eva Kosinski August 12, 2015 - 10:23 am
Linguistic clarity huh? Great, now the Libertarians have decided to use the weapons of choice of the major parties — memes and linguistic redefinition. I find this completely dismaying. Not so much using actual definitions to counter all the BS out there, but referring to these strategies as “mental levers.” While we’re being so careful about definitions, look up lever — it’s a way to maximize FORCE. Sure it’s rationalizeable by claiming it’s force of argument but it’s a serious sidetrack. And for those used to playing with language on the left it’s trivial to refute and leaves us in a worst state (being hypocrites about working differently from the other parties using spin and language memes to manufacture support). At a time when our support in thè general populace is higher than ever we are shooting ourselves in the foot. I thought ZAP was a great idea but if this is the direction it’s taking, I want off the bus.
By Perry Willis August 12, 2015 - 4:00 pm
Hi Eva. A lever is indeed a tool that applies force. There are many types of force — the electromagnetic force, the force of gravity, defensive force, initiated force. Only one type of force is wrong — initiated force. And, in point of fact, using the idea of levers as a metaphor works quite well in this case. I know of few cases where levers are used to initiate force. Levers are most commonly seen as a way to be constructive — to build things. That’s how we’re employing the metaphor. We want to build a sound, coherent, internally consistent approach to thinking about political issues. We hope this clarifies things.
By Dave August 13, 2015 - 6:13 pm
It’s a metaphor.
By De McClung August 14, 2015 - 3:50 pm
Here’s the thing for those of you who are having a hard time understanding English and the correct function of language. Words mean what they mean. It’s that simple. There is no RE-defining of words in this case. “Government” means The State. Nothing new here! It’s always meant that. The Mindbenders and Thoughttwisters have been pushing their agenda for a very long time in America. Nothing new there either. Manufacturing consent is not a new idea. Indoctrinating and conditioning the population by word manipulation and doublespeak is a tactic of the Neocon-Socialist Alliance. The Neocon-Socialist Collective Agenda has been very successfully using those tactics for generations. It is time WE counter those tactics [Which create hysteria, a mental illness, insanity, and promote mob rule, irrational democracy.] by using language and words “correctly”. By applying the correct meanings of words in our discussions [which means “debates”] and conversations. BTW, some of the comments here reflect just how successful the Mindbenders have been in indoctrinating the People. It is unfortunate that people who have been afflicted and contaminated [read : damaged and diseased] fail to See just how much they have been duped by the Mindbenders of the State and the Media.
By De McClung August 14, 2015 - 4:20 pm
A short list of words that are misused and intentionally miss-applied in America by the State and the Media, and, hence, by the general population [out of ignorance perpetuated by the Mindbenders]
Traitor, treason, equal/equality, underage child [a fetus], “person” [“For the purposes of the income tax the word “person” means a corporation…” This is a direct quote from US Tax Code], United States citizen [refer: 14th Amendment], pedophile [It doesn’t mean what you have been indoctrinated to believe it means], marriage [A Natural Unalienable Human Right] State marriage [A fraudulent government “program” having nothing to do with marriage! A criminal scheme to incorporate you and your spouse.] same-sex marriage [Sex is an ACT, the correct word is “gender”], income [When used by the State it means “corporate profits” Refer: U. S. Tax Code.], child [A human being under the age of puberty, pre-pubescent, universally acknowledged and accepted as being under 12. The word child has recently been miss-defined by the State to mean any “minor”, under the age of 18, which is a fabricated and arbitrary “fiction” invented out of thin air and codified in title 18 of the US Code. Title 18 makes us ALL felons for legal [State controlled system] purposes.], national security, which means the securing of State power over the country and the People, and has nothing to do with OUR security or the safety of the country.
By voluntaryist August 14, 2015 - 7:07 pm
Oh yes, it’s refreshing to find someone who appreciates the importance of being clear. Words are essential for precise communication. If you leave a sophist an opening by sloppy definitions, he will ignore context and misrepresent a concept to confuse and mislead.
Thank you De McClung.
I want to point out a trend (conspiracy?) I detected about 2000 involving the word “feel”. I started to see it used wrongly, in place of “think” or “believe”. Since I know brainwashing relies heavily on emotions, I was sensitive to this misuse. As time went on the misuse of “feel” became widespread and more egregious. Now it is used as if it is a synonym for think. This is very useful to those who want to bypass the thought process and sell the lie that if one has an emotion associated with a belief, then that belief must be correct, in fact, is self evident because of the emotion.
By Dex November 5, 2019 - 6:37 am
Only one meaning per word?
I’ve “run” into many beginner students (of whatever language I was teaching at the time) who had the same impression. Monoglots. “Those who know only one language don’t know even that one well”. Pardon me if I “run” a bit of a language lesson here.
Sticking to just Engish for the moment, one source lists 645 different meanings for the word “Run”. There are many other words that can be fun to look up and count in a good unabridged dictionary, for example try Take, Break, Turn, Set, Go, Play, Up.
For every different meaning of whatever spelling we’re counting as one word, we must translate the Meaning, not the Spelling. When I use a book or an online translate service to extend my knowledge, I ALWAYS back-translate it to the source language. If it comes back with what I started with, it’s USUALLY safe — but not always. Sometimes for fun I follow it out for more than a dozen iterations before it finally grounds out and stops changing — each step (usually) seeming to make perfect sense, but even the first stop back at the source language can be radically unrelated to where it started.
Ash can mean the fragile remnants of something that has burned. Or a type of tree.
And that’s just present day word meanings. If english had not changed in the last few thousand years, it would still be an odd mix of old german dialects, with full declension. It wasn’t even called English untii not many centuries ago. Something as recent as Shakespeare is hard for many current native speakers. The word “Stink” used to refer to any aroma, including pleasant ones. And try asking a shy girl what a “bare bodkin” is. She might blush. Or hate you. A bodkin is a type of knife. (Hamlet was borderline suicidal — tube B, or knot two Bee). Bare has nothing to do with human nakedness, it just meant the knife was not in its sheath.
Each year, major dictionaries still publish lists of new words, whether complete neologisms, or re-definitions of old words. If they can be easily recognized from context in ways that don’t damage the established meanings, I generally don’t have any quibble with that, but I find it quite annoying when it causes confusion. I’d most often rather make up a new word, than make things ambiguous.
And words keep migrating between languages; Mario Pei once pointed out six completely different words of English, with different meanings, that had each migrated from the same original French word at different times. (If anyone remembers what those seven words were, please remind me).
If things never changed, wouldn’t we all be speaking the same language? How do we explain “Red”? In English, any of a range of colors (often mistaken for just one color). In German, red is a form of the word reden, to edit. In Spanish, red is net. (Red Mexico is an old hub for a Fidonet computer network). And of course Red means communist. (Oops, I already did English).
As for words that have already been hijacked, I sometimes do favor rescuing them. I sometimes point out that “Hacker” in reference to computers, is an honorific referring to high skill, as in “Can you hack it, man?”; which means the same as the older expression “Can you cut the mustard?”. That is, are you capable of performing a task that others would consider diffcult or impossible. A computer (a mainframe) used to fill a room the size of an auditorium (or later one wall, the new-fangled “mini-computers), and took maybe weeks to calculate a trajectory that could be done on a 1970 era pocket calculator in a few seconds or minutes); and cost so much that only someone with the budget of a medium sized nation coulld afford one — and the sizeable staff to replace vacuum tubes on average once each seven minutes; 24/7, and write and maintain the proprietary programs that would run on only that one individual computer, because they were NEVER shared with rivals. Those were huge institutional machines, and were not quickly getting smaller, faster, cheaper.
Then along came hobbyists, who could REALLY HACK IT! Those hardware hackers typically hacked together machines that could do something, for about three hundred dollars. And of course some of us were software hackers, hacking together code, at first from scratch, to make the darn things do something USEFUL — because without instructions, they couldn’t even understand instructions from a keyboard, nor any other input device, nor output those instructions to a screen nor other output device, where we could see our errors and correct and customize and update them. So how could we teach them to understand our instructions so we could teach them to understand our instructions, so we could give them instructions? Of course, we had to get them to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. And I’ve booted many more machines than I’ve bothered to count. Which has NOTHING to do with applying footwear to them.
And unlike those old institutions, we shared some of those programs; wherher completely giving them away (PD), allowing free use but with restrictions (freeware), or try before you buy but then pay for it on the honor system (Shareware).
So don’t call computer vandals (vandal used to mean a particular germanic people), don’t call system crackers “hackers”.
Hackers Make, Crackers Break.
It takes a Hacker to catch a Cracker.
And that ain’t just idle cracker barrel talk.
PS: Noam Chomsky (whatever you think of him politically, he’s still a seminal linguist), is of the opinion that we create language pretty much every time we say or write something. The vast majority of what we say or write has never been said before. By anyone. Ever.
Meaning without context is meaningless.
By Erne Lewis August 12, 2015 - 2:05 pm
I love your organization and all you do BUT distinguishing between government and state works only if you insert the word legitimate before the word government whenever you use the word government.
Most government everywhere is not legitimate. That includes much local and state government everywhere. Under unlimited democracy it is nearly impossible for government to be legitimate.
Defining your terms works in a person to person conversation. It does not work when you attempt to change the commonly understood definition.
By voluntaryist August 13, 2015 - 6:35 pm
I agree with Erne. Since no legitimate govt. exists, or has ever existed, your new type of govt. might be difficult to explain as people keep shifting to the old definition. Making matters worse, no existing govt. would be fixable or changeable to your legitimate govt. That was tried in 1776. We need a completely fresh start, a new paradigm. So why not a new name for our new system of social interaction?
A “voluntary” for voluntary governance of voluntarists.
By Perry Willis August 14, 2015 - 3:35 pm
Hi voluntaryist. Do you still think government is illegitimate if it does NOT initiate force? Please notice that the Founders did NOT try to give us that kind of government.
By voluntaryist August 14, 2015 - 6:44 pm
An institution that called itself “government” but on principle forbid coercion would be very confusing. It might even be good cover for existing government. Just as there is no good word for initiated force, although “coercion” is now used because it is short, and very close, there is no word for an institution that governs by voluntary interaction, unless you think using the word “private” as an adjective is a good indicator of voluntary. However, private is used to describe many monopolies, and quasi-monopolies. Monopolies exist by the indirect use of coercion, e.g., govt. excluding or limiting competition. It might be argued that no business that needs a permit is private. The act of applying for a permit implies the acceptance of a state’s authority to deny, as if the activity was not a right.
That is why I suggested a new name for a coerce-free governing body. This is what statists fear. They fear a clear distinction because it makes it easier for people to discriminate between voluntary and coercive organizations, especially those that govern. But the new word must be carefully chosen so that it is difficult for statist/collectivists to misrepresent it.
Doesn’t it make sense to coin a new word for a new form of governing. You may say, “But the old form did not govern.” I agree. We can go there. Or we can skip that step and go straight to introducing a new public form of interaction.
By voluntaryist August 14, 2015 - 6:49 pm
By the way, your comment program does not allow editing. I put a period where a question mark should have gone. Also, I would change the word “good” to “perfect” or “exact”.
By voluntaryist August 13, 2015 - 6:37 pm
As a subscriber of “The Voluntaryist” (notice the spelling) for over thirty years, I wonder who came up with the new spelling of this word? Who started it? I’m going to ask Carl.
By voluntaryist August 14, 2015 - 6:15 pm
Carl doesn’t know who used it first, but Auberon Herbert, an Englishman, used the spelling “voluntaryist” in the late 1800’s.
By Jonathan N Appling March 18, 2017 - 12:27 pm
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/add-usa-constitutional-amendment-defines-and-applies-non-aggression-principle-law-enforcement-procedures Hope that I could get some signatures on this petition I just made recently. I believe this group would understand this concept .
Presently, law enforcement can violate rights, make arbitrary accusations, hold people in jail in private prisons that require bail money without going to court, kill and brutally assault people on the street .
If the Non Aggression Principle is applied to law enforcement, it would change the precedence of force that government applies to not allow them to make an arrest or give a citation unless a victim has been violated, there is evidence to support the claim.
Example: A driver gets a speeding ticket. Instead of getting a speeding ticket because of a rated speed, there would need to be a victim whom was actually harmed because the driver was speeding at the rated speed determined. So, there would have to be an accident, injury, vehicle damage, death, property destruction to prove they caused harm to a victim.
It enables self responsibility and freedom without fear of false accusation, wrongful arrest, violation of privacy, confiscation of property.
By Perry Willis March 22, 2017 - 11:27 am
I agree Jonathan. I’ve signed your petition. — Perry Willis