Saturday, June 4, 2011

Alternating current

I have heard someone in the shull today, at the farbrengen, say: "You know how goyim say 'BC' — 'before Yoshka'. And Jews say 'BCE' and 'CE' — 'before common era' and 'of common era'. Well, for a while I thought that they said 'before common error'. As in 'before the period when everyone en masse bought into the same shtuss'."

The thing is: the year 1 CE was computed retroactively by some monk a bunch of centuries later as the year when Yoshka must have been born. It had later been shown that the monk used flawed assumptions about the presumed life of Yoshka and events surrounding it in his calculations (plus, his abacus would freeze up and produce the Blue Screen of Death from time to time), and even if Yoshka had ever lived, and one were to use the same calculations as the monk did, but entering the correct data, the mamzer's birthday would end up being some fourteen years BCE. So, besides the fact that Christianity is, as Rabmam calls, one of the biggest stumbling blocks ever invented by civilization, the current year is literally the year 2011 of common error.

I wonder if it's possible to calculate when the masses bought into the concepts of modern liberalism (or pseudo-liberalism as I have started calling it) and start calculating years "of common error" from that time point. I would reckon it would have to be at some point in the 19th century, when Herbert Spencer was writing:
The laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that the “Liberty and Property Defense League”, largely consisting of Conservatives, has taken for its motto “Individualism versus Socialism”. So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by-and-by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot.
Or, if you want to see when it was made official in the United States, we could say 1913, the year when the income tax has been written into the Constitution, making the document an oxymoron.

7 comments:

e said...

What's oxymoronic about having income tax in the constitution?

e said...

subscribing

Anarchist Chossid said...

because clearly it violates people's rights. it is stealing. i have a right to my property. somebody can take my property only if i agreed to give it away. you cannot claim that you have a lien on my property, unless you performed a service for me or have given me a product (and even then, i must agree for you to do it).

Anarchist Chossid said...

meaning, i must have agreed to the exchange. if you just wash my car without me having asked for it or agreed on the price and then tell me i owe you a million dollars, and then take my money from me at a gun point, that's not business — that's robbery. yet, that's what us government is doing with income tax. in fact, there is no difference between us government charging money for its "services" (such as they are) and a mafia family charging for "protection".

e said...

You have presented a convincing argument why income tax is bad. But you have not shown how it makes the constitution oxymoronic.

Anarchist Chossid said...

Because Constitution recognizes people's rights. I can find the exact line and verse if you want, later.

Saw your father and grandparents yesterday. Your grandfather received as a present a letter from the FR which your uncle was supposed to give him a while ago but didn't, because he didn't want to part with it. It was very freilach.

e said...

1. Apparently the constitution only recognizes some rights. Amendments are allowed to be unconstitutional. That's why they're amendments.

2. Oh. What was the letter about?