Liberty, Liberally June 2023

Liberty, Liberally

I’m writing about this here, in Liberty Liberally, because child sex trafficking is modern-day slavery. Slaves have historically been treated as sex objects by those who traffic and control them. Considering that child sex trafficking is a real issue, not just a political football, it seems that we should take the time to educate ourselves about grooming, and to look at the available information about grooming apart from biased or skewed usage of the term.

into their partisan camps.

This issue, this real issue, should not be reduced to yet another preprogrammed debate for Republicans and Democrats. It should be something that transcends trending topics.

Peter Flaherty, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, has not been accused or convicted of abusing children or any related crimes. He is a shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, and at a May 2023 shareholders meeting he spoke candidly from the stage about the connections between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein. His microphone was silenced and he was arrested for criminal trespass. Again, this shows that power attracts those who lust after power. Bill Gates’ history with Jeffrey Epstein is well-documented, but his influence over the entire globe means that if you speak out about it, even as a shareholder at a shareholder meeting, you can be arrested and removed by force. We need more people like Peter Flaherty.

I asked ChatGPT about child predators and grooming tactics that they use, since “groomer” is getting tossed around more frequently lately. Here is how it responded, including six ways that groomers groom their victims:

Protecting children from predatory behaviors is crucial, and awareness of common grooming behaviors is the first step. Here are some signs parents should be aware of:

1. **Inappropriate attention**: Predators may show an unusual amount of interest in your child, often seeming overly friendly. They may also give excessive compliments or gifts.

2. **Secrecy**: They might encourage the child to keep secrets from their parents or guardians, or have conversations and activities that they insist remain between them and the child.

3. **Boundaries testing**: They could

regularly invade the child's personal space or discuss inappropriate topics, slowly normalizing this behavior.

4. **Isolation**: Predators may try to separate a child from their friends, siblings, or parents, either physically or emotionally.

5. **Online activity**: They often spend a lot of time interacting with children online, using social media, games, and chat apps. They may also try to send or request inappropriate images or videos.

6. **Role confusion**: Predators often blur the lines between the roles of adult and child. They may share inappropriate personal or emotional information with the child, or try to involve them in adult decisions or issues.

It's important to note that not everyone who displays these signs is a predator, but these behaviors warrant attention and careful action.

Simple Rudder

By Joshua Fryfogle

Consider what the simple rudder can do Beneath the surface, hidden from view

Consider that the course is corrected, While the means of direction remain undetected

The bow moves first, before the stern There where the rudder makes the turn

The ship runs ashore with no captain to Consider what the simple rudder can do

Jeffrey Epstein was a real individual who really was convicted of sex crimes against underage kids. He really was connected to other powerful people who were also suspected or convicted of similar crimes. There really are people who do this, but because of partisan politics, this issue has become fodder for the endless back-andforth debate that makes most of us just want to avoid it entirely. This is a tragedy for the young people who are being victimized by these criminals, because child sex crimes should be universally condemned, without any nuance. Instead, rightwing and leftwing partisans, who create the parameters of public discourse, have made it into yet another contrived controversy that repels the majority while corralling those who identify as partisans

Study these six behaviors, and don’t let partisan talking points skew your perception of this issue. The internet and the dark web have allowed these criminals to not only connect with vulnerable children, but also created opportunity for these predators to coordinate their efforts. It really is a real problem, and it’s getting worse. Don’t lose sight of that fact, simply because it’s been forced into a partisan playbook.

Some predators are Republicans, some Democrats. Some men, some women. Some old, some young. Some straight, some gay. The standards by which we measure predatory behavior doesn’t differ for any of these groups. We shouldn’t overlook this behavior because someone is a priest or because they are LGBTQ+. It’s wrong no matter who does it, and it’s not anti-Catholic or anti-gay to question these behaviors.

William Dale Zulock, 33, and Zachary Jacoby Zulock, 35, were arrested after they were exposed for not only molesting their own adopted sons, but also pimping these children out to a pedophile ring. The fact that they were gay or Democrat activists is not indicative of their crimes, and focusing on those characteristics can only distract from our society dealing with the problem.

Dennis Hastert was the longest-serving Republican Speaker Of The House of Representatives in history. In court submissions filed in April 2016, federal prosecutors alleged that Hastert had molested at least four boys as young as 14 years of age during his time as a high school wrestling coach. At a sentencing hearing, Hastert admitted that he had sexually abused boys whom he had coached. The fact that he was a high-ranking Republican leader should not be seen as a reflection of the Republican party, but again points to the predatory tendency of these abusers to seek out and achieve positions of influence and trust.

John Geoghan, an American Catholic Priest, raped over 150 boys during his assignment over multiple parishes in the Boston, Massachusetts area. He was convicted and sent to prison, where he was later killed by another inmate who had been victimized by Geoghan as a boy. The fact that he was a pedophile is not indicative of Catholicism or the Priesthood. It is indicative of the predatory behaviors of these abusers, seeking out positions of power and trust.

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Fickle & Foolish Bosses

Once I made a public post on social media acknowledging that Trump didn’t start any new wars. This made a lot of people angry, and there were several comments painting me as a Trump supporter, even though I’ve been an outspoken supporter of Libertarian candidates in both 2016 and 2020. I gave him credit where credit was due, that he was the only president in my lifetime that didn’t start a new war. Honestly, I posted it out of surprise. I even waited until he was officially out of office, because I half expected him to start one on the way out - but he didn’t. While Trump failed to deliver on his promise to end the wars, at least he didn’t start any new wars.

Recently I posted on social media about Tucker Carlson’s measurable success on Twitter, after leaving Fox News. I compared what was happening with Tucker on Twitter to what happened in the 1990s, when the band Nirvana started a process of displacing all the flashy pop metal acts like Poison and Def Leppard with their simple, flannelclad sound. It wasn’t an endorsement of Tucker Carlson, but I didn’t say mean things about him, so several folks responded as if I was singing his praises as a commentator.

As a third party voter, I don’t experience the emotional push and pull that those who vote in the two-party paradigm do. For them, it’s an all or nothing situation. Since my candidates never win (or very rarely, I should say), I never experience the sense of impending doom that the “other” candidate will win. I don’t experience the team sports mentality about politics that many people do. I don’t see a big difference between CNN or Fox News. To me, they’re just two sides of the same corporate coin. But for millions of people, they think of the “other” candidate, the “other” side, as the embodiment of all that is evil, and the side that they’ve identified with as being noble and good. And when their team fails in some way, they conveniently

Abracadabra! Conflating Corporations With People

blame the “other” team. It’s a perfect con that can be carried on forever.

I’ve never liked sports, either. It always seemed pointless to me, and polarized politics is just another kind of game. It’s not real, campaign promises are lies, and in the end you’ve given them a lot of money.

We should be able to acknowledge when a public servant, like the President, does something that we like. This is how we can encourage other public servants to do things that we like, by giving them public approval for those things. But we can’t, because we’ve been polarized to the point that we will be publicly shamed if we do. We should be able to criticize our own preferred candidates when they do something we don’t like, but we’ll be attacked by our own team as not being a team player. This is why we, the People, can’t get what we want from these public servants, because we can’t tell them when they screw up, or when they do good.

It’s perpetual insanity.

This tribal politics is toxic. Politicians work for us, under the law, but in reality they don’t. And they know that they can’t be criticized by their team, and they can’t do anything to make the “other” side happy, or they’ll lose their team’s support. But the truth is, even though we have the freedom to associate, there’s nothing in our Constitutional form of government that requires that we even have political parties. Political parties came about after the fact, and are not necessary to the function of our selfgovernment.

I should be able to tell my employee when they do good, and when they don’t. But I can’t, and neither can you. That undermines the entire premise of selfgovernment. We have some terrible employees who can’t cooperate, and can’t even get along, but we are fickle and foolish bosses.

“Capitalism” isn’t what you think it is. But words are magic, that’s why they call it spelling. Let’s break down that spell...

First of all, “capitalism” is a loaded term from the start. If you look back at its usage over time, you see that it was popularized by Karl Marx in his work, ‘Das Kapital’. This is an important piece of the puzzle.

distinction between human individuals freely exchanging their labor for goods and services and a corporation pretending to be a person, exploiting the freedoms that human beings are guaranteed under the Constitution.

I’m of the opinion that corporations don’t exist. Like Santa Claus doesn’t exist. It’s a lie we tell ourselves, as a society, that we can create a person, ex nihilo. This is a throwback to authoritarianism, the idea that we can ‘author’ an entity by fiat. Author-itarianism is the belief that those in power can simply summon an entity, a body (‘corporation’ literally means ‘body’) and that makes it real. Legally these corporations are called ‘juridical persons’ or ‘legal persons’.

“Capitalism” is often conflated with the free market system. But I see them as two different things entirely. Marx avoided calling the Western economic system the free market, for obvious reasons.

“Free Market” clearly communicates freedom. The freedom to exchange goods and services appeals to everyone, because controlling the exchange of goods and services is literal slavery. If you can’t freely exchange your labor, the only alternative is that the government, or someone else, tell you when, where, and how you labor and spend.

Today, when people complain about “capitalism”, they’re not usually referring to the everyday economic interactions of individuals. They’re complaining about big businesses and corruption. They’re talking about big banks getting bailed out, they’re talking about golden parachutes for CEOs, they’re talking about corporatism. Most people who complain about “capitalism”, if you talk to them for a while and really listen, you realize that they’re talking about corporations, not individual humans freely trading their goods and services.

The problem is that “capitalism”, as it’s historically defined, does in fact include the free exchange of labor of individuals, along with that of corporations. So I always make sure that I use the word “corporatism” instead of “capitalism”, because that’s what they’re really critiquing.

Ironically, even those who defend the free market with their words - mostly Republicans and Libertarians - are more likely to refer to the free market as “capitalism” than they are to call it the free market. They, too, conflate the two. Sometimes out of habit and ignorance, but sometimes because they really believe in corporatism. Those who truly, knowingly support corporatism also like to conflate it with the free market by calling it capitalism. They draw no

Republicans and Marxists have this in common. They conflate the free market with corporatism, when they both call it “capitalism”. But it was Marx who popularized this now common conflation; he died before his political philosophy killed over 100 million human beings.

Mortality is something that humans have to reckon with. We know, each and every day, that we are mortal and that we will one day die. We can’t avoid it. Corporations do not have to die. They continue, on paper, in perpetuity. This gives these “legal persons” a distinct advantage over real human people. The law treats them as equals, despite the fact that human beings have to die, while corporations can continue.

I would go so far as to say that there is no negative part of “capitalism” that has anything to do with the basic freedom to exchange goods and services. Everything negative about so-called “capitalism” is really rooted in corporatism.

The word “capitalism” conflates the free market with corporatism. It posits that corporations are persons, legally, and therefore should have all the freedoms that an individual is guaranteed under the law. But a corporation is not an individual, and if it’s anything at all, it’s the opposite. It’s a collective. Still, both Republican leaders and Democrat leaders continue to use the word “capitalism” for both the principle of free exchange between individuals and the many machinations of international corporations.

Individuals, we human beings, are the true inheritors of the Rights that were endowed to us by a Creator. The Declaration of Independence declares that we inherit these unalienable rights, meaning that it’s impossible to remove these rights. They cannot be taken away, only infringed, because they are part of our individuality. This concept is the fundamental foundation of our Constitutional Republic. Nowhere does the Declaration make mention of these imaginary persons, these corporations. Human beings have many Rights, but we do not have the power to create as we speak - abracadabra!

Das Kapital, was published in 1867. You can see from the Google N-Gram (included below) that the word “capitalism” only emerged in the public discourse following its publication.

can respond to what you’ve read, or write what matters to you.