Share your coming out story

General Discussion
#1

Maybe not a good title, but it probably caught your attention.

For those who are advocates for freedom, what made you find the principals of Liberty? What is your coming to Jesus moment.

Mines was very simple, my father is a hardcore libertarian. He was the one who actually showed me Free Talk Live. You can say I was born in Liberty, molded by it, consumed by its nature lol I honestly started taking libertarnism seriously after high school when I got a job. I was so addicted to Alex Jones at the time, that I wanted more “Liberty” content so I started listening to free talk live again. I wasn’t into FTL so much before high school, but after high school and after finally acknowlaging that Jones was a crack head free talk live became my obsession. I wish I would have taken it more seriously earlier, I would probably be living in Keene by now.

So what’s yours?

#2

Mine was probably when the IRS seized the business I’d taken my car to for an oil change. Instead of contacting the owners of all the cars, they put on a note on the door telling us when we could come (next week) to claim our vehicles! I thought this was a pretty obvious fourth and/or fifth amendment violation, with my property being seized along with the business owner’s.

In short, I protested, and was told to leave. I was arrested for continuing to protest. When I was arrested, the cop pulled some stunt to put me on the ground when he was arresting me, and got a hangnail or something (he was fidgeting with his finger after cuffing me.) I was charged with battery on a peace officer, though I had never done anything to threaten or hurt him.

$3500 attorney retainer later, the charge was reduced to a disturbing the peace infraction. I wanted to fight it, but the attorney said it would cost tens of thousands, and of course, the plea offer was not a crime.

There were other incidents, but that was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back, and when I started identifying as libertarian. I’d already be a hater of most politicians.

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#3

Dang man! That’s really a crazy story. I feel your story could have happened to anyone. Any person in that situation I could see protesting. How many tagged along with the protest?

I’ve never been arrested. The closest thing I’ve come to police were speeding tickets on my motorcycle- and even then they were quick to give me my ticket. What’s funny to me is that each ticket I’ve gotten, they have never asked me to take off my helmet to see my face to match my ID card.

#4

Everybody else was a bunch of pussies. Not a single other person said or did a thing. Then again, this was Southern California. The place is lousy with slaves to the state. #49 on the freedom scale.

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#5

So it’s safe to assume you don’t live there anymore lol

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#6

It’s a very safe assumption. Colorado since '98. That was in the 90’s, right after I finished college. Signed the FSP pledge about 10 years ago, but it may be difficult to uproot. The more people move here from California, the easier it gets, though. People used to tell me “you don’t seem like you’re from California,” and it was meant to be a compliment. Colorado was #2 on the index. It’s about halfway down now.

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#7

I have no “coming out” story. I’m just your run of the mill data hoarder and digital archivist. Everything that is digital is free and if it’s not, I’m sure I have it somewhere so it can be.

Let me spin you a yarn about my old day. A friend and I got a 486 from his dad and a massively heavy 10MB hdd. We played around with it a bit and decided we needed to run our own BBS. So, we built an acoustic coupler. Sadly, it sucked real hard. got about 100bps and if someone looked it, it would drop signal. But hey, it was our first foray into making. Next, we soldered on some more ram (no simm slots just the trances on the pcb board so we had to solder them on). After that, we had a HUGE BBS in our area. Remember 10MB was a ton. We stored thousands of games, txt files, art, you name it. It was all open to be had.

Around that time we would trade computer games. I had X disks with games and we would make copies and trade them like baseball cards. We were kids, we had no understanding of this being “bad”. After a while we found that walking though other systems was quite a joy. So we did that for a few years, copying info, putting it out there, etc…

All of that went on until about 16 or so when I was just wasted 24/7 until I got bored with it at about 22. Got into an open source scene and hung around there for a few years. After that, I sold my soul to an MMO (DAoC). Now, during the days of DAoC, Bittorrent was released. I had be using xdcc bots on IRC for years so this was something new.

At the time I had a very small hoard as hdds were super expensive but I shared what I had. As people that I knew started getting knocks on the door by the fbi I started to look into what was going on.

To keep their strangle hold on an old, overpriced, outdated system of CDs, the RIAA was going nuts and suing and having arrested anyone they could find. This included a lot of people that I considered close friends online. That was my wake-up call to dig into all of this as much as possible. A bunch of us started going dark and creating some of the first truly anonymous identities and starting up backstops for them. Slowly building on them over time.

Since then, we have championed IP reform, pointing out the hypocracy in copyright law, finding holes in what others would consider to be safe (bitcoin, tor, etc…) and keeping up with all of the BS that the MPAA/RIAA and their overseas arms do.

So, I guess I just started a free thinker. I try not to pigeon hole myself into a political belief as it puts a stranglehold on what you can believe. I have a simple way of thing about things. Information needs to be free and I’ll help it along.

Not sure if this was the answer you were looking for but it’s a brief summery of my other wise boring self.

[edit] words are hard. Also, If my posts are too long or I’m posting too much (seems to be a rather lax board in speed) let me know and I’ll just hop in from time to time. I tend to be chatty and jump into conversations I find intresting.

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#8

Don’t worry, I read everything you wrote, and kept up with it. Very interesting story. It really blows my mind already hearing two very interesting stories on this post.

I remember selling my soul as well. Maple story was my addiction… not as realistic as dark age, but I was into anime at the time so it fit.

Just wanted to say thank you for your service. Thank you for doing the hard work for others. Hopefully it’s not a thankless job, because I’m grateful.

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#9

Took me back to the good old times when I used to run a BBS and trade software with the guys in my area while in college. I bought this massive 6MB Corvus hard drive from a guy I did work for. The thing was about the size of two standard shoeboxes side-by-side, no kidding. Plugged into the Apple II, it served up 38 143k volumes. Hard disks were like alien technology then. Started out with a 300kbps Hayes Micromodem, and went to a friend’s 1200kbps AppleCat modem, back when that was like the speed of light. Being able to transmit text faster than you could read was quite the novelty!

Mostly, it was about trading software, because there wasn’t a lot and it was still very expensive back in the early 80’s, and gaming. Looking back, though, I think there was already a natural libertarian attitude amongst computer geeks.

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#10

I guess I have always been anti-authoritarian. Around 2006 I started studying up on politics a bit more and figured out I identified with anarchism. Growing up with the internet I really got to see how great things were when unregulated and free. In college 07-08 I read every anarchist book in the library. I then came across FTL again and actually gave it a good listen, which I had scorned in the past, and really fell headlong into voluntaryism.

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#11

Why anarchism? There needs to be some order. That is why a lot of us gray hats exist. There is no need for complete society breakdown. Government? Maybe. Society? No.

What leads me to say this? Societies as a whole change and morphs over time. Governments fall and are reborn. Social large scale memes, beliefs and, morals change. Just now the idea of “pirating” is changing. A recent study has shown that a meme of “This isn’t really morally wrong.” is taking hold. That is a massive shift in the minds of the public as a whole. Anarchism would destroy that as it devolves society along with governments.

Yes, the internet and pre-internet (BBS, fidonet, x25 dialups) were free and lawless but we soon learned that total chaos was bad. We lost information, connections to systems, forced them to harden their servers and encrypt their data. What was once free was now locked away again.

#12

I personally believe government should be voluntary and there should be no force given- unless you had a contract with that government to agree to it.

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#13

Let me reply to this with a question. How many people do you think would sign onto a government. Any government from any country currently. I have an answer in mind but I’m wondering what you think.

#14

I became a minarchist fairly easily and without incident. It took another 6 long, unnecessarily complicated, and painful years to become an anarchist.

I always hated cops and most government. I just never had a good explanation so I thought I was wrong for that, and had some weird religious stuff going on at the time. When I was 18 (the internet was a thing, but not necessarily as accessible. And I turned 18 a little over a month before the election, so that didn’t give me a whole lot of time to set up non-essential services) I knew I would be voting, so I figured I should find out about these people. So I watched all the debates on the news thinking that was all who was running. I had heard of third parties, but I also knew there were primaries, which I wasn’t 18 for, and I thought that the Ds and Rs just always won the primaries.

I walked into the ballot and I was MAD. There were like 15 people on the ballot. I was never going to trust the media again. I was so mad that I waited 4 years until the next election to look up all the candidates. So 4 years later I Google every political party there is to read their platform, even the ones I know I’ll disagree with. I get to the LP and they had something about the NAP and a good enough argument against victimless crimes. Made sense to me.

So I Google the NAP. I found the Philosophy of Liberty video. Accepted it immediately. But spend the next 6 years trying to figure out if government per se violates the NAP. It was pretty clear to me that the US violates the fuck out of the NAP, but that didn’t mean that anarchy was the only moral alternative. I made weird arguments about taxation and the free rider problem for National “Defense.”

I wanted anarchy to be “true,” but I couldn’t make a case for it. I couldn’t figure out if minarchy was right because it only used defensive force for crimes with victims and taxed you for services used- and if randomly killing state agents was aggression then that meant that the State per se was NOT initiating force. (It’s a conversion story; it contains crappy arguments.) Or if anarchy was right because it left everyone alone, but to achieve it you’d likely have to kill State agents and that was a NAP violation.

I watched a few people- Adam Kokesh, Molyneaux (this was back in like 2008), some of Derrick’s videos. And they all made good points but they didn’t address what I needed to figure out. I tried to discuss it with people in Fb groups but they weren’t having it.

So I went to law school to fix it from the inside as a minarchist aka I surrounded myself with the most statist people possible. I wasn’t really even looking for anarchist philosophy at the time (I was preoccupied); I was looking for someone to hate on cops with. (Lots of heinous stories about cops in law school and lots of students defending the cops.) Well I accomplished that. In 2014 after I had graduated Chris wrote Violently Overthrow The Government, which made it clear to me that the State is a per se aggressor. Which meant I could be an anarchist. :slightly_smiling_face:

Tl;dr The LP told me that victimless crimes are bad. The Philosophy of Liberty told me about the NAP and I accepted it but didn’t quite get anarchy. Chris told me that LEOs are aggressors and I became an anarchist.

Disclaimer: Don’t shoot cops- it’s a bad time.

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#15

WOW you became one enlightened person. If only others had the same resction when voting.

It’s cool to see some anarchist here. I might start a ask me anything thread for the anarchist, because they seem to have the most controversy and I want to learn more.

I’m a voluntayrist, I haven’t made the full leap to anarchist because there could be some government if you voluntarily agree to it, and if you can choose to opt out as well. I even heard in some circles that that very thing some anarchist believe in. Strange…

#16

You should; I’d participate.

How do you distinguish voluntaryism from anarchy?

I don’t see that there is a difference between voluntaryism and anarchy. I do see a trend in the different details the people who identify either way believe, but I treat them as synonyms.

How I define it, a government is just an entity that initiates force, so a government could not exist in anarchy. Theoretically, some weird ruling agency could exist, but from a practical standpoint I don’t see people coming from a free society signing that. And if they do, then they are probably unwell enough that anarchy would be unsustainable anyway. If a pre-existing State tried to convert into a consent based organization, then everyone would have retaliatory on it, and so they could violate the “contracts” without violating the NAP because they’re just retaliating against their aggressors- you can not, consistently with the NAP, aggress against someone until their only choice is to sign your contract. Even governments recognize this, as typically contracts signed under duress with a party that created that duress are legally invalid.

#17

This is where we differ. I believe most people would sign onto it for the simple fact that that is what they are used to. Comfort would quickly take precedence over true freedom. It would take 10’s of generations of slow reform to reach that point. I believe that it has started but will still take a long time to the tipping point.

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#18

Then we don’t differ because I said people in a free society??

#19

What I’m saying is, if all of society was free and there was a choice to stay free or “join” a government, they would choose the government.

#20

If they had the choice to start over from scratch, I suspect most would pick Christian micro-community socialism-like organizations. Like Mormons, Orthoxdox Jews, and Muslims already do now here.

A very small percentage of the population is actually Athiest, so let’s stick with what would happen in reality.

American culture was founded by Orthodox Protestant Christians practicing socialism, after all. They even had price controls on goods. And you thought Puritans just burned witches…

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