OSD 294: Self-reliance as community service
After Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern US, reports started coming out that some government officials were blocking self-organized locals from jumping in to respond. You need to take any news out of any emergency situation with a grain of salt. They’re always complicated and fast-changing, and in this case you’re talking about the efforts of tens of thousands of people across millions of acres and private and government entities of all shapes and sizes. So there isn’t any one set of facts, there are thousands.
One theme that came out of those facts is this one:
People who outcompeted the government at helping victims found themselves, in some cases, being punished for it. Or prevented from continuing. To be clear, many — probably most — government officials helped where they could, got out of the way where they couldn’t, and were positive contributors to the situation. But sometimes, as we see in other emergencies, they got in the way.
Gun ownership is not so different from flying a helicopter in to rescue a stranded neighbor after a hurricane. One means protecting yourself and your loved ones from violence. The other means protecting yourself and your loved ones from a natural disaster.
There’s a totalizing mindset that views self-reliance not as community service, but as an affront to the community. Partly because it will just get in the way of the “authorized” rescuers, and partly because it does not grant the assumption that the authorized rescuers are the only legitimate rescuers. You can see where that totalizing mindset comes from. If it is all people have ever known, then someone who stands up and says, “I don’t trust this thing. I don’t trust that it’s going to work well, and I don’t trust that it won’t be used against us” doesn’t seem like they’re helping build a community. They seem like they’re undermining a community.
But that’s the opposite of how self-reliant people actually view themselves. If you’d like to invite more people into gun culture, this is your greatest tool — and forgetting it is your greatest pitfall. Self-reliance means retaining the capacity to preserve the things you love under even the worst circumstances. And for almost everybody, “the things you love” is, first and foremost, life and community.
So by inviting people into gun culture, you’re inviting people to a love of life and community. Even pro-gun-rights people sometimes accept the framing that gun rights are about you versus society, or the gun as some bulwark against a coming Hobbesian winter. And sure, guns are a last line of defense in that sense. But that’s not you versus society — that’s you pro society.
It’s not you being paranoid that society won’t have your back. It’s you stepping up to say that if push comes to shove, you’ve got society’s back.
Keep it positive and keep it up.
This week’s links
Can your 3D printer refuse to print a gun?
A normie 3D printing site talking about the recent executive order that floated this idea. Notable that ~all the comments are basically “from my cold dead hands”, even on a non-gun-oriented site.
Thai girl EDCing an airsoft gun to protect her lunch from monkey thieves
WSJ: Feds backdoored Verizon and AT&T, then China backdoored the backdoor
A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.
From “OSD 292: For whom the pager tolls”, emphasis added:
If the Mossad can pwn a multinational supply chain to secretly make 5000 pagers into remote-controlled bombs, what are the odds that the NSA, Mossad, Chinese intelligence, MI6, and a half-dozen others can’t backdoor your phone? Not to do anything spectacular, and maybe not to do anything at all. Just to retain the ability to take a little peek if they ever really want to.
Play it out further. Think about remote kill switches in all new cars. Or 24/7 location monitoring, with the ability to dispatch a drone to your location. Or the ability to shut off your banking, or your comms. That’s all already doable today, and the rabbit hole only goes deeper. The incentives are just too strong, and the chokepoints in the hardware, software, and services are just too numerous. If you don’t worry about your government doing it to you, worry about a foreign one doing it. And vice versa.
Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms
Thanks to Discord subscriber Sawa D for this one. It has good practical advice on how to get your content out there when not all platforms are hospitable to it.
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I am in Black Mountain, NC. It looks like a bomb went off throughout most of Buncombe county that I've been able to see. For the first 3 or 4 days, there were no roads into our area and us locals had to do it all: clear trees and cars out of roadways, prop up downed power lines so traffic could drive under them, get people and pets out of demolished homes, deliver food and water to our neighbors, etc.. I assure you that anyone who saw what went on here will tell you that "authorized rescuers" are not the only legitimate rescuers.
There are going to be 2A stories that come out of this disaster, like this "News Max" guy that tries to explain/justify why some North Carolinians "mountain men" might have had a bad experience with FEMA.
“And they are also the kind of people who exercise their second amendment rights to bear arms. It is perfectly normal for them go to a FEMA aid station while carrying a firearm.
And if they get some FEMA employee who grew up in San Francisco or New York City, that city boy is probably going to be terrified when some mountain man with an AR-15 on his back just walks through their tent door."
https://youtu.be/brDbMhkxVd4?&t=205