Tag: Dueling

Making The Noose Great Again: Punishing the bad guys with capital punishment

In reaction to many of the things I have been saying and predicting about our present society, people are strongly inclined toward Making America Great Again by Making the Noose Great Again.  The courts have been shown, which I would argue they never were properly working, to be only good for leftist Marxist ideology.  Frontier justice, where hanging for crimes committed against a community, gave people a level of satisfaction that satisfied communities, and their work toward a justice-driven society is being yearned for.  Even though we may look back upon Western expansion with reverence and ideas of romance, in living freely, there were a lot of problems that are much better in our present conditions.  We don’t have to worry about Indian attacks or picking up unknown diseases every few feet.  Our lifespan today is much longer than they used to be.  We have considered that we are much more sophisticated now than when capital punishment was as common as a sunset.  But, the general feeling is that people behave concerning each other if something they might do might come across as an offense that could lead to their untimely death.  If a criminal was caught before Western expansion had traveling judges to enact law and order, hanging the bad guys, happened all the time.  And without it, there would have been no ability to have a growing society.  When people talk about the evils of Western expansion, again, it’s the political left, the same losers who are behind pornography, international financing, abortion, pot smoke, and welfare programs who were against it and think the Indians should still be in charge of a teepee and dancing in some field to make it rain.  Much of what they have brought the world through the pages of Karl Marx has been ridiculously stupid, and people are slowly admitting to just how bad it has been.  And they are ready to make some changes.

https://gettr.com/post/p363cad6cf8

I’ve been to court many times and have known many lawyers and judges.  I want to like them.  I like the idea of a courtroom to be respected.  I love our various state and federal constitutions and think a law-and-order society is the only way. Strict enforcement of the law is how you protect the kinds of values that make a society work.  But, and this is a big butt, a suburban mom who votes for tax levies for corrupt leftist government schools big, we were a better society when we had dueling.  I think of Alexander Hamilton’s duel with Aaron Burr and the many duels that President Andrew Jackson had over his lifetime; we were a much more respectful society when bad behavior was called out to satisfaction and carried out with seconds there to represent the effort.  If people hadn’t worked out their differences before one of them ended up dead, they may have ended up friends for life.  That was a much better way to solve conflicts than what we have now, where crimes are punted to the state, and the state processes their punishment through the legal system.  The state, what happens to most things the government touches, messes everything up, and the only people who benefit are the state in confiscating wealth and redistributing it to people who don’t deserve it.  The courts and their lawyers make all the money off conflict resolution.  Then, the worst thing that can happen to a criminal is they are locked up in prison, which then makes them parasites on society for that duration.  Someone has to feed them, and the general hope is that they might be reformed and let out to inflict crime in the future.  That is the best that our court systems are offering us.  And even that is a rare occurrence. 

These people have no idea how much anger is coming in their direction, for what they have been doing to us for years. De Niro has no idea how much the game has changed.

Most of the time, court cases drag out too long, and it’s always the wrong people getting punished.  These days, as we have seen with President Trump and many others, the courts have been weaponized.  Two local cases in my community, the Darbi Boddy school board case at Lakota and the Roger Reynolds case, were clear examples of a weaponized court system that had nothing to do with justice but political power intent to rob voters of their picks for political office.  It was utterly corrupt, and lawyers were the only people who benefited from those cases.  Replacing gun battles with foes with pinheaded lawyers arguing with words, and not bullets, has turned out to be stupid.  And the bad guys know it.  There is nothing about our present system that inspires people to behave themselves.  So why not rape that innocent person?  Or steal from a family and their efforts at hard work?  Why not be a louse, a drug addict, or an abuser of alcohol?  What in our society inspires people not to be losers, criminals, and leeches off society?  The answer is nothing.  The works of Karl Marx from the early 1850s on, and spread through Masonic orders all over Europe and America, have not been satisfactory, and people have given it a chance and have been left wanting.  We are not a better world because of our courts and a lack of capital punishment.  We have empowered the criminal-minded to abuse innocent people in the pursuit of some great society as the radical left envisioned it.  And we have been left with a society of disaster. 

As I have said many times, I have traveled extensively, and one thing that I do while traveling is pick up books from those areas to read.  While traveling in my RV, I commonly get up before anybody else and read outside in the portable office, which travels with me everywhere I go.  I have read many books from exotic places like Deadwood, South Dakota, Jackson Hole, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Texas—everywhere, about law and order and the attempts during Western expansion to solve these problems.  The conclusion is that society was worse under court systems than frontier justice.  Once the criminals realized they could hide their acts of villainy behind bureaucratic courts and their processes of pinheaded lawyers and corrupt judges, there was nothing to fear from society, so they performed more crimes as a result.  At least with this Marxist-inspired court system, they were promised a free meal every day and didn’t have to work in society to get it.  Once we stopped hanging people for crimes in our communities and shooting them to defend private property, the criminals started to run our society which is a massive problem to this very day.  And people are beginning to admit how unhappy they are about it.  Crime thrives in a society where courts get in the way of justice and where the courts are used as weapons, which is happening now in our daily news.  A better way to handle many of these cases would be through capital punishment. Nobody wants to see innocent people killed and hung for crimes they didn’t do.  But the fear of getting caught doing something wrong kept a lot of criminals from crossing the line, and we became a much better society.  As people think about it, Making the Noose Great Again makes a lot of sense. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Honor of Dueling: We had a better and more honest society when fighting to the death was important

I often talk about the books I keep right next to my reading chair. The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers are a few that I look at often as I think about Constitutional applications to modern society and the vast history of human achievement that brought us all to this point in history. Because of my study of those books, I think of the American Constitution as the most outstanding philosophy for a mass society ever put to paper. It could have only occurred under the unusual circumstances of America’s creation and early evolution. But with those books, I have another one that I glaze through several times a week just for the pleasure of it. Of course, I’ve read it many times, but the frequent visits to its contents have a nobility to them that I get nowhere else. John Lyde Wilson’s little guidebook for dueling was written in 1838 called The Code of Honor. Wilson had been governor of South Carolina and felt a guidebook for dueling needed to be put to paper because so many people had gunfights to solve personal matters. Wilson, like President Jackson, would eventually feel dueling to the death to be an unfortunate thing to do. But, they also understood the premise of the personal possession of the concept of the words “I” and “My.” In their time, “my reputation” had meaning, significant meaning, and it was worth fighting to the death to defend it. Understanding this little nuance of intellectual philosophy helps to understand the premise of the American Constitution as it was written at the time to reflect this necessity of protecting personal virtue. 

As I have pointed out in Ayn Rand’s work, specifically her dystopian novel, Anthem, the word “I” was pushed entirely out of their culture and replaced strictly with “we,” and society devolved along the known Vico Cycle to the point where they had to discover the light bulb once again, literally. In that future society, The Council of Candle Makers ran everything. The nature of that collective-based society was to do everything for the greater good as interpreted by those in charge of that interpretation. All personal needs and values are surrendered to the mass of culture in general, which means that the direction of the entire society gets dumbed down to the weakest links of social discourse instead of the best and brightest. That is why those societies always fail, as they are in our present time. Ayn Rand provided significant warnings about these collective philosophies because she came from the Soviet Union as a young woman and saw up close and personal the results. As the last century evolved, we watched communism spread through most of the Asian world coming out of Russia, and it is to this day, the influence is seeking to conquer the West. China is not shy about their statements, and they have bought off many of our political class with stolen wealth to do precisely as Ayn Rand warned about in her book Anthem. That is why there is more of an emphasis on “teams” and “teambuilding” over individual development. Such emphasis is a process in erasing individual effort for the good of the whole, and it is the biggest challenge of our present time.

Clearly, to achieve their goals, the foreign and domestic forces that are the enemies of our Constitutional law desire to “progress” beyond such a concept into a world of global governance ruled by the United Nations. Study history, as I often do. You can see the apparent path of achievement by the international governing class that has been trying to undermine the American Constitution since it was written. English nobility was never crazy about the Magna Carta in their society. They indeed found it preposterous that the American colonies Declared Independence from them during the Revolution and that a new country was formed in the wake. Among the aristocracies of Europe, they never understood the concept of “I” and “My” to the level that it developed in the vacuum of power, when people were far from their overly controlling governments, how people tended to evolve into personal virtue instead of concern for collective based reasoning. And it was in such a breakaway environment some of the best forms of government have ever been created by mankind, starting with the democracy that was invented in pirate societies in the Caribbean then evolving into the Republic of America. In both cases, pirates helped topple the powers of Europe, first with John Paul Jones during the Revolution, then when England tried to take New Orleans during the War of 1812, it was Jean Lafitte who joined with Andrew Jackson to defeat the British forces, who were much more superior. The unregimented individualism of America, with all its variety and creativity, continued to win out over the old forces of collectivism from Europe eventually Asia, time and time again. And that attitude then went on to create the greatest economy the world has ever seen, and it still outpaces all the ruthless mechanisms to bring it under the control of Europe and Asia to this present day. 

Much of that magic came from discovering and protecting the self that the American Constitution afforded people everywhere, including the European concept of slavery. Free people simply outperformed those under the team concept of collective-based societies. Dying for the Queen or an emperor did not match the efforts of gunfighting for the right to a good life and all that could be built with it under the premise of the self. And when the honor of that self was questioned, it meant more to the people who wrote the Constitution to defend their honor to the death than to surrender that concept over to mass society and the bureaucracy of an administrative state which we find ourselves in now. Clearly, we were a better society of law, order, and economy when we fought to the death to preserve our individual honor than when we punt that honor to lawyers and governments to fight on our behalf. We have found that corruption tends to seep into such a society at a maddening pace because there is no individual honor to check it at the door. Without any fear of individual judgment and death by dishonor, there is nothing to keep a criminal class from rising out of chaos and forming right under our noses since honor and personal satisfaction of all concepts of the word “I” have been abandoned in favor of collective rule. When the criminals seek to hide their actions behind the “team” concept, there is no mechanism to identify the evil as individual achievement. Therefore, nobody is ever punished for committing the crime. The crimes then become collective-based because individual judgment can’t be applied to mass culture. That is how criminals are flourishing and why they see to it their best strategy of getting rid of the American Constitutional altogether and thinking of it as archaic. Yet looking back over history, it is clear that we were a better society when individuals could call on each other to have a duel to the death if the value of “I” and “My” needed to be defended. History shows us that protecting “we” has no meaning if the value of personal responsibility is surrendered in the process. And with that in mind, perhaps we should bring back dueling in America and worldwide. I think we would find the behavior of the criminal class that seeks to hide their malice behind rules and regulations under the protections of inefficient mass governments suddenly at a severe disadvantage. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Merits of Dueling

The Merits of Dueling:

As I have said, I have been working on a new book called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and I’m about halfway through it.  For my readers of a long time here who have been sending me a lot of emails missing the daily articles, they will return.  But I offer this little sample of this “gunfighter” project to give a taste of what is to come.

The concept of getting “satisfaction” from a personal insult went a long way to establishing honor and proper conduct among business transactions, in the time before modern rules as we know them today. As we have seen often where various religions and their value are not unified, and therefore cannot be expected to hold up in a court of law, there needs to be a mechanism that brings about honor and to hold it into the context of moral conduct where villainy will quickly grow like a weed in a garden of dreams. Dueling in the classic sense, especially in the New World during the time of the American Revolution was an answer to this problem. And if there is an argument against the American Constitution for changes, it was in the original rules of the nation that mechanisms of honor were already established before the courts were needed.

In doing business in the orient, particularly in Japan where honor is still a respected trait, business transactions are accelerated because the interactions mean something with one another. This is obvious at the airports around Tokyo among men and women as respect is a universal language that makes interactions between people start on common ground. In the West we have allowed our own culture of respect to drift away into the more centralized regulation of the state which outlawed the practice of dueling essentially so that lawyers could profit off the instillation of justice. The cost was that individual satisfaction for an insult did not get the respect it deserved while the emphasis was on protecting society from itself by settling matters in a court of law. This has led our culture to adapt into a more passive aggressive society where trust isn’t always easy to find in other people. It could be argued that we were all better off when we tried to openly kill each other to protect a slight against our individual names.

Dueling was so common at the start of America that the governor of South Carolina wrote a book on it to make sure everyone did it right called The Code of Honor: Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Second in the Art of Dueling in 1834 by John Lyde Wilson. Dueling in the time of the Revolutionary War was quite common. While it was slowly going out of style at the start of the invention of a republic form of federal government once George Washington took office, in the South, particularly in Charleston, South Carolina where so many important battles occurred in defining freedom during the start of the new nation, dueling was so common that the governor felt compelled to create some legal means of settling disputes, which sounds barbaric compared to our modern legal system, but in hindsight seemed to generate more responsible people on an individual level. This certainly helped in business commerce, because if a business deal went bad, the parties may find themselves in the streets fighting to the death to obtain their satisfaction.

The important aspect of satisfaction is that the emphasis was on the individual reputations of the participants. It wasn’t some third party “state” that decided justice, it was the people at the heart of the conflict, and in many ways, society was more honorable. People had to treat each other individually better as a result. The more the states intruded on management of the affairs of people the more passive aggressive disputes have become leaving business conduct to suffer greatly. After the Civil War it was particularly immigrants from the South who moved West in search of gold and other opportunities, and they took with them the concept of dueling that had been very much a part of early American life. Dueling with fast draw had with it a way of bringing honor where there wasn’t yet law and it forced people to treat each other better and more honorably which is why there is still reverence for it.

At the state level we can all see today that the concept of taking honor and responsibility for good conduct away from individuals has been a mistake. While dueling was a violent concept the amount of people who died from it were arguably much less frequent than the kind of violence we see in modern times. That is why thinking in the way of the gunfighter is better than in the modern context of leaving disputes to be settled by those not directly responsible for the conduct, such as lawyers and the state as a legal entity. These days instead of getting satisfaction for an honor tainted we say “see you in court” instead of settling the matter right then and there. Then of course those who can pay for the best lawyer become the winners in most cases and the state enjoys the revenue and job opportunities that come from settling disputes. But what is lost is the individual responsibility for the actions taken and the merit of an honorable exchange. Taking the example of the famous duel between General Gladsten and General Howe in 1778, both Generals in the Revolution and were in a dispute over troop possession. They took to the streets of Charleston, South Carolina where many such duels were taking place at the time and when the time came stared each other down waiting for the other to make a move. After taunting each other for a good bit of time finally General Howe fired his pistol and clipped the ear of Gladsten. Gladsten in response, who was thought to be the John Adams of the south and inventor of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag deliberately fired his shot into the ground inviting Howe to try again. Eventually the two men shook hands and that settled their dispute with only a minor injury occurring to Gladsten’s ear. Otherwise, the business between two major Revolutionary War figures was settled respectfully, something that certainly wouldn’t have occurred if the two had fought it out in court with lawyers acting as their pistols and fancy words spoken in legal jargon as bullets.

The point of the matter is not that dueling is a desired trait, or even that we should bring it back in the form that it was. Killing another person isn’t a desirable outcome for any dispute, but the finality of it tended to put in the participant’s minds the seriousness of an issue and this mindset certainly set the West and its expansion ablaze with activity that couldn’t have been regulated by any legal system at the rate that human ambition was expanding at the time. Honor was preserved by the potential for dueling and this threat allowed for proper respect when a nation needed it most. We could learn a lot from this period today where honor among business transactions is desperately lacking, particularly within the American borders. Other countries have their honor driven rituals and it is noticeable during business transactions. In the United States however, we have allowed our laws to be governed by lawyers and judges who take away the responsibility for personal conduct and place it in the hands of the state, and many of our businesses have followed. The impact has been a loss in honor among business interactions that has not been desirable. Yet honor could be restored if only we stepped back into hindsight and dusted off the values that did emerge from dueling and upgraded that sentiment for our modern needs which starts in thinking like a gunfighter.

Rich Hoffman

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