And you’re absolutely right. There’s nothing about altruism in what I’m doing. This is about getting me right with me first and foremost. Where others find value, inspiration or even the faintest glimmer of new thinking in looking and my actions and what I’ve written, I have only gratitude for having found a way to really touch a few minds.

I totally agree. I left, but I’ve two sets of papers in my purse- I don’t have the guts to do what you did, and I’m too careerist to allow myself to lose any possible aid to mobility.

Kudos. Anyone who calls this immature should be told that denial of the reality of an empire with the blood of millions on its hands is a worse error than immaturity.

In an era in which it is utterly crucial for the world to consciously identify what is happening in the United States as totalitarianism, but without disastrously misidentifying the uniquely individualist American sense of life as the source of this evil, gestures such as yours start recalling names like ‘Sakharov’. We must save the Declaration of Independence from the same plague spots which will forever stain the Communist Manifesto. You’re stepping forward to do that. And not as a gesture of altruism(=), but as a gesture of integrity and responsibility for human history. If the future does indeed belong, as Rand believed, to those who choose to take the effort to shape it, then we are all in your debt, and the prospects for what is looking to be a stormy century coming are that small bit brighter.

And if the bastards do try to make you pay a price for this act of defiance, I suspect that more than a few of the people intellectually surrounding you have been moved enough not that voices will be raised in your defence.

Motion for Browncoat B.D.H. Award. Second?

(=) Totally agree with you that Preston’s call amounts to a demand for self-sacrifice. Oh, technically, it’s the emotionally abusive stoic doctrine of denial of all feelings or at least all ‘soft’ feelings as a virtue(!?!?), filtered through obvious layers of uberpatriarchal masculine toughness games with a heavy dose of cold ‘die for the cause’ Leninish vanguardism. He’s technically a Stirnerite amoralist egoist, or would be if he didn’t confuse the White tribe with his selfhood, and if I read him rightly, and if he’s not lying on this particular issue at this particular moment. Whatever. This deliberately sick lack of human empathy is the essence of what Riane Eisler identified as a ‘dominator’ as opposed to ‘partnership’ psychology, and it amounts in practice to a demand for altruism on the level of a Hitler or a Stalin, both of whose followers Keith seeks out, logically enough, as kindred spirits.

I believe that those who want U.S. citizenship for anything more than its utility are yearning for something which that label cannot and will not give them.

and

And if they are looking for freedom, then let them find it as best they can, but recognize that that freedom exists in spite of, not because of, that label. Being freer than neighboring governments is not a justification. Even the least harmful cancer is a disease.

Bravo, Mike A. Segal! And bravo to Mike Gogulski for leading by example!