Narrator, audiobook producer, podcaster, writer, editor/producer for the JimFear138 YouTube Account, editor/co-producer for Laughably Dapper, and Project lead for Dramatically Dapper, co-founder of Dimension Bucket Magazine, and host of the Dimension Bucket Magazine Podcast. This site is meant to be a collection of my work so everything is nice and accessible.
Disclaimer: Opinions here do not represent the opinions of Laughably Dapper or Dimension Bucket Magazine. They are purely my own.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast! Sorry this one took so long but I think you'll realize why when you look at the length. This is officially my longest podcast to date! It's an absolute marathon with my friend J. E. Bennett, currently working on his own ttrpg called "The Pulp Trip", wherein we go over everything from tabletop rpg's, to the pulps, to Robert E. Howard, to H. P. Lovecraft, to dice, to Steemit, and god only knows what other topics! If you can get all the way through this one, you've earned something. I'm not sure what it is, but something at the very least! Thanks again to J.E. for coming on the show, and as usual he is welcome back any time! Hope y'all enjoy! MP3 Download of this episode: https://ia600408.us.archive.org/25/items/jimfear_audio_productions/ep80.mp3
In the wake of the tragedy in Florida there's been a lot of talk about gun rights in the United States, as there always is after a tragedy like this. Most of this is uninformed and philosophically and morally bankrupt, and we have several examples demonstrating why this is a fact and not mere conjecture or opinion on my part. So in the interest of facilitating a better discussion on gun rights, I'm going to tell you a true story as well as I can manage. This actually did happen, and here's the wikipedia page for anyone who'd like to check my accounting or do independent research. Remember, Wikipedia is not a source, but they list their sources, so you can do further reading if you want. On that note, though, the wikipedia page is actually a pretty balanced and faithful accounting. I'm going to be taking a little poetic license with my retelling. I'm not Howard, or even Tolkien, but I'll try to keep this more interesting than reading a history book. I should also mention that I'm not a credentialed historian, I'm just an enthusiastic student of history, so anything I say can and should be independently corroborated by interested parties who don't want to just take my word for it, hence the linking of where I'm getting my information from. I'll keep it as factual as possible, with no embellishments or taking one conflicting account over another, but this is a blog post, not an article in a historical academic journal, so I reserve the right to inject invective when I see fit. All that said, let's get on with it. We're going to have to go back to the late 1930's to start with, and this story starts slow, but picks up towards the end, and I have a larger point, so bear with me here. In the state of Tennessee in the late 30's, a political machine was making the rounds attempting to install toadies into positions of power in various counties and towns, even to the point of gerrymandering districts to improve their chances for election. These people were horribly corrupt to start with, and it only got worse as the years went on. Eventually, in 1936, a man named Cantrell was elected Sheriff of McMinn County, Tennessee, where the town of Athens lies. In the years of '38 and '40 he was re-elected, and there is speculation this was due to dishonest tabulation of votes, among other methods. However in '42 he was elected to the Senate, and one of his cronies was put in his place, Pat Mansfield. Mansfield delivered an unprecedented level of corruption to McMinn County. This is when the gerrymandering of voting precincts occurred, as well as fiddling with the legal system to reduce the numbers of justices of the peace to a more manageable number that the Cantrell side of things could control effectively. Moreover the Sheriff and his deputies worked on a fee system, where they made money not on salary but on the amount of people they arrested and processed, guilty or not. During this time the United States Department of Justice investigated allegations of voter fraud in the elections of the years listed, but took no action against anybody. Because of the refusal of the DOJ to act on this egregious situation, vote control and fraud kept the situation largely in the pocket of Cantrell and his higher-ups. But something happened that they did not intend or plan for. Now if you're not a student of history, or even mildly familiar with the timeline we're discussing here, you might not know that a fairly large conflagration was going on overseas that went by the name of World War II. Many of the boys of McMinn County were out fighting that war in several theaters, including the African and Pacific. Well, the war ended and these veterans came home to find their county and town under the grip of this tyrannical tinpot dictator that was extorting the citizens of their beloved home for money and power. The GI's were also well paid at the end of the war, and had quite a bit of cash on them. You can see where this is going, but I'll continue. The deputies and Sheriff began shaking down the GI's and essentially stealing money from them for crimes real or imagined. It was extortion, plain and simple, and it went on for a while before the veterans got sick of this treatment and decided to do something about it. This, however, is not where things got violent. They attempted to use the system to correct these abuses of power first. McMinn county had about 3,000 returning GI's, 10% of the total county population, and around 400 of them got together in a bi-partisan coalition to oust these criminals and thieves from power and install a Sheriff that would enforce the law as it was meant to be enforced. They nominated people for offices, campaigned, and at last it came down to the election. But how did the current Sheriff and his deputies react? They went full dictatorship on the county, hiring 200 thugs from neighboring counties and towns as deputies to enforce their will, and paid them a princely sum to do so. It adds up to about $630 a day in 2017 dollars, so of course these men were eager to take the job and do whatever the Sheriff told them. These men, some of them ex-convicts, patrolled voting stations and poll locations to prevent certain people from voting, control the votes of those they allowed to vote, and attempted to steal the ballots to count them in secret. What this led up to was the execution of an elderly black farmer, Tom Gillespie, for the crime of attempting to vote while black. Let me say that again, for emphasis. These men executed an American citizen for attempting to exercise his civil liberties and vote in what should have been a free election, because he was black. They shot him in the back as he was fleeing the polling station, and he died from this wound. This needs particular emphasis because it needs to be made clear that in American history the attempt to restrict the right to bear arms has been used against black people to restrict their ability to defend themselves. It is not, at its fundamentals, a racist policy, but it has absolutely and frequently been used for racist ends, primarily against black people in America. So if you truly do care about the rights of minorities, you will stop trying to disarm them. Because then they will be unable to defend themselves against people like these evil men trying to cement power for themselves, and will prevent the murder of more people like Tom Gillespie. Now the murder in cold blood of Tom Gillespie for the crime of attempting to vote while black ignited a firestorm that lasted the rest of the night and well into the morning of the next day. The veterans, along with some citizens, armed themselves and decided to fix this problem once and for all. Polling places were raided by the GI's, deputies were detained and beaten, ballot boxes were collected, and votes were tallied. There was an overwhelming majority for the bi-partisan coalition of the GI's. The Sheriff's boys, meanwhile, had absconded with several of these ballot boxes and taken them to the jail, where they were intending on counting out the votes to their benefit, regardless of what the actual count was. This didn't sit right with the GI's, who were mainly armed with pistols at the time, which they'd legally purchased and personally owned. They laid siege to the prison, but were unable to get inside and liberate the ballots. The Sheriff and his men were also not amenable to surrender or negotiation. This was when the GI's, who were well and truly coordinating things on their side now, hit upon a wonderful idea. They raided the National Guard Armory, in force, took the key from the watchman, and distributed the weapons there among themselves. This included 60 .30-06 Enfield rifles, two Thompson sub-machine guns, ammunition for all of them, and dynamite. With these they set up in a bank across the street from the jail, as well as in the Post Office, and laid proper siege to the building full of tyrants and thugs. However, they did not kill by choice. They gave them hourly notice that if they surrendered the Sheriff and his men would not be killed, and at one point an ambulance showed up which they did not molest in any way because they thought it was to carry away the wounded. It turned out that this was a ruse to allow the Sheriff and Cantrell to flee to safety as they abandoned their men to save their own hides, like true dictators, who are always craven and cowardly sons of bitches. But fight they did, and many people were wounded, and the fighting went on into the early morning of the next day. The GI's knew that if they did not finish this by morning, they would all be arrested, for they had indeed broken the law. If this were not finished before the National Guard and the State Troopers were deployed, they would have nothing to show for it and all their work would be for nothing. This was when they hit upon the use of the dynamite. They made many bombs, and blew up several cars with them, until one man who had been in charge of a group of GI's this whole time, name of Bill White, a true hero, sneaked up to the jail and planted a bomb on the front porch. This bomb exploded, blew off the front of the building, and broke the will of the Sheriff's forces. Many of these thugs escaped out the back door, the rest were captured and many of them were beaten. The escapees phoned the neighboring town for help, but this was denied. The Battle of Athens was well and truly over at this time, and in the aftermath only one person was charged with a crime. This person was C.M. "Windy" Wise, the man who shot and killed Tom Gillespie. After the battle, they tallied the votes up properly, and it was a clear landslide for the GI's bi-partisan coalition. They had broken the back of the corrupt Sheriff and Senator's forces, and rescued their town and county from the tyranny that had been forced upon them. This is one of the most significant and important events in American history, and now I'm going to explain why. Something that people don't seem to understand is that "Tyranny", as a concept, does not have to be large to be tyrannical. Tyrants come in many forms, at all levels of power. I'm sure we've all been on websites that have tyrannical moderators that abuse their power. We've all been subject to unjust laws on the local, state, and federal level that were instituted by tyrannical politicians attempting to increase their own level of power. This is something we should all be familiar with by now, but at higher levels such as the federal it becomes too abstract to feel, and at lower levels like moderators of a subreddit (or other forum online) it's too small to really matter because you can always find or create another forum. This example of the Battle of Athens should hit literally every single American right where they live. Because we're all familiar with stories of police brutality. We've all heard the tales of unjust cops doing things they shouldn't. Many of us have even experienced it ourselves. The issues behind the Battle of Athens are, to be quite honest, what many on both the left and right side of politics complain about on a daily basis. Corrupt politicians in a feedback loop with corrupt police to parasite and prey on the "helpless" citizens of their districts and jurisdictions. But because this is America, and we have the right to bear arms in this country, "helpless" will always be in quotation marks. Because we are not helpless. Understand that government is a monopolization on force. That's what it is, that's what it does, that's what it always has been and always will be. Because of this basic, fundamental truth, if the government is not checked by a comparable force, it is open to doing the most horrific and unconscionable things to its citizens. Demographically homogeneous or full of majorities and minorities, none of these people are safe if the power of government is not checked. But because the relationship that we have with government is that we accord it a certain level of power to arbitrate things, this makes it more powerful than any one citizen or small coalition of citizens. So how do you check that power when it has become so great? You fucking arm people. This argument goes far beyond the right and ability of self protection and protection of loved ones and property. Indeed, the latter is the consequence of the former. By granting ourselves the ability to protect against government tyranny in this fashion, we also as a consequence grant ourselves personal protection against thieves, murderers, and the like. If you allow people to arm themselves, they will protect themselves from tinpot dictators like Cantrell and Mansfield, and will have the ability to protect themselves from more mundane dangers as well. But because government is what it is, it is always seeking more power for itself, more control over the citizens it is meant to protect, and more direct authority over the life of the individual. This is not mere conjecture, this is absolute fact. And to see that we merely have to look at the United States. The United States began as the greatest experiment in liberty ever conducted by human beings. It had a small government that barely paid its officials and merely kept itself to basic infrastructure, law enforcement, and national defense. Over time it has grown into the bloated monstrosity we see before us today, despite the best efforts of the founders to write in contingency plans and preventions for that kind of thing. Because that is the nature of government. Once you give it a power, it never, ever gives it up, and that power must be taken from it by force. And the entire history of the American founding is predicated on liberty from an overly controlling government. "No taxation without representation" wasn't just a pithy slogan for some colonists. They meant it, and they were willing to kill to get England off their backs. Because the government of England was overtly, evilly tyrannical at the time. It could be argued that it still is. If the Americans of that day had not had guns privately owned by individual citizens, they never would've stood a chance against the greater forces of the English army. Because they did have guns privately owned by individual citizens, a bunch of backwoods-ass colonists in the ass-end of the world kicked the absolute shit out of the greatest military force in the world at the time. This is why Americans know for a fact that private ownership of firearms as a right for every citizen is absolutely necessary for personal liberty and freedom, and the two concepts cannot be divorced from one another. Our country literally would not exist without it, and we are intimately familiar with the need for it. You will never be able to convince a proper American that he or she should give up the right to bear arms, whether or not they personally feel it necessary to own a gun. And, moreover, Americans are not stupid, regardless of what other countries think of us. Especially in the day of the internet and social media, the world is more connected than ever. We know what's happening in other countries, and this is to the detriment of the gun control narrative. We see people like Count Dankula and 6oodfella being arrested over tweets and joke videos in the UK. We see Canada restricting the right of its citizens to speak as they please. We see people in Germany being arrested for expressing dissatisfaction with government immigration policy. We see France finding it necessary to deploy what piddly little military they have on their own streets to maintain order because the unruly migrants they've welcomed with open arms are running roughshod and killing French citizens. We see this, and we know. Tyranny is quite literally all around us, even here in the US. We have looped back around to banning books like To Kill A Mockingbird, not because it questions the racial dogma of the day, but because it has "bad words" in it that might hurt people's feelings. We see the gun grabbers telling us that they are willing to kill us to take our guns away because of the actions of crazy people that are in no way representative of your average gun owner. We see the people who want to make "hate speech" illegal so that we suffer the same fate of those poor Germans, Scots, Brits, and Irish toiling under the yoke of their speech codes. And we, because we are Americans and our country is fundamentally founded on liberty, are not going to have it. We will not put up with this. And we don't have to, because we are armed. And if there is a single gun-grabber who has read this far and has not been inspired by the tale of the Battle of Athens to change, or at least think about, their position, I have bad news for you. You are going to have to kill us. People love to ask the wonderfully emotive question, "How many children's deaths are worth your right to have guns?" And the only proper answer to that is, "Of course it is sad whenever one of these tragedies happens, but all of them." Because if we allow emotion to rule our reason, and give up our fundamental right to self protection not only from criminals but from government tyranny, we will inevitably put the yoke back on, and become slaves again. And, because we have tasted the sweet air of freedom, we are not going back to that without an incredibly serious fight. So here's the standoff: We have our guns. You want us to give them up. We're not going to. Force is the only option you have left. And when you apply that force, we will apply greater force back until you stop. And this in and of itself proves my point. You want to restrict our liberty and must apply force to do so. We have our liberty and merely want to be left alone because we're not hurting anybody. You are the dictator, and if you go too far, we will stop you. And you can count on that, because that is what Americans do. It's ingrained in our cultural DNA, and cannot be mewled away with sympathetic tales of tragedy or celebrities crying crocodile tears on television. So the gun grabbers have two options right now, and only two options. 1. You can do what we want, which is leave us the hell alone, and go about your lives unmolested because you are not molesting anybody else. Or, 2. You can initiate a conflict that will end in rivers of blood with a death toll you cannot imagine, because we will not bow to your tyranny. And before you make your choice, remember what #1 is conditional on. Leaving us alone and minding your own god damned business. If I were to give friendly advice, I'd suggest you learn how to do so. Because something you have to understand is that liberty, freedom, rights, come with risk. One risk of an armed populace is that occasionally a madman will get his hands on a gun and kill a few people. This is, of course, horrible beyond imagining. But even worse is the horror of a tyrannical government, because that doesn't effect random small numbers of citizens. It effects quite literally all of them, by definition. And this is what gun grabbers don't get. Their side of the argument is, by its very nature, evil beyond description or the limits of the human imagination. It's putting unprecedented power into the hands of uncaring politicians who are fundamentally flawed human beings that will abuse it. People like to pretend that the U.S. government would never become tyrannical, that it will always be a benevolent government. There is no such thing as a benevolent government. If the government and the governing officials are not deathly afraid of the citizens, that government will abuse those citizens. History bears this out, it shows it time and time again, even in our modern era in countries like Canada and the U.K. And these are facts that I would encourage every gun control advocate to absorb and chew on. Because the gun rights advocates have been giving and giving for over 100 years now, and we're reaching the end of our patience. You people are about to go one step too far in infringing on our personal liberties, and it is not going to end well for you if history is any indication. The rivers of blood in the streets I mentioned earlier is not a joke, nor is it any kind of hyperbole. So think very hard about how far you want to take this kind of thing. Because unfortunately, it looks to me like shit is about to get violent, and I don't want that. As I said, the incredibly vast majority of lawful gun owners, we're talking upwards of 98%, just want to be left alone. We just want you to stop trying to fuck with us. But you can only poke a bear with a stick so many times before it turns around, rips you shreds, and eats you. Food for thought, as I continue my habits of peaceful gun ownership. For further food for thought, I recommend the YouTube channel of Justicar. He's former military and police, and one of the most knowledgeable gun rights advocates I know of. He's also where I found out about the Battle of Athens, wherein as you can see a dictator was stopped before he could really get going. He has a lot of videos about guns and gun rights, and I recommend the entire channel for those interested. He also deals with other topics, but if you're looking for honest gun talk, he's one of the best on the entire site, and is criminally undersubscribed.
If you've been paying attention to the news cycle lately, one thing should be abundantly clear to you, and that one thing is that these people are self-evidently the enemies of the American people. And I'm not repeating some Trump talking point, anyone who's actually been looking, listening, and reading can tell you this. After the Nunes Memo debacle and the absolute shitfit that has been the Winter Olympics coverage of North Korea, anyone who still trusts these organizations is not paying attention, or is being willfully ignorant. So what precisely happened with the Memo? Well, if you either watch corporate media (God help you), or watch a media commentator like Hard Bastard at the Hard News Network, and have actually read the memo yourself, you will know that the corporate media systematically and without exception lied their asses off about the contents. If you want to know about the actual contents of the memo, you can google it and read it (it's only four pages long), or you can check out my last podcast wherein I read the entire thing with commentary, and also provide a link to Hard Bastard's coverage of the memo wherein he does the same. The reason I read the memo out in my podcast is that HB is literally the only person I'd seen do so, and I wanted to inform people about what the contents actually were. He also covered Memo Day quite extensively, and read articles and commented on videos from all kinds of media organizations, from David Pakman, to The Young Turks, to CNN, to MSNBC, and others. Not a single one of these read the actual memo live on air to inform their viewers of what was in it. They interpreted the memo for their viewers, and I imagine desperately prayed to their heathen gods that nobody in their audiences would develop a brain and go find the thing themselves. There were, coincidentally, only two interpretations. On the one hand, this was a nothingburger, it was blown way out of proportion, it didn't prove anything, and was a big waste of everyone's time. On the other hand, this was an apocalyptic level event that absolutely required violent revolution to overthrow this tyrannical dictatorship that is undermining our trust in beloved law enforcement organizations like the DOJ and FBI. Now both of these can't be true at once, and it looks like some wires got crossed between the handlers at the top and the toadies on your screen. So which is the truth? Neither.
They are both lies. Bullshit media spin to misdirect the American people and either keep people complacent and stupid with their "Dems & Hillary dindu nuffin!" narrative, or to actually inspire violent revolution in the dumber parts of the American populace. I'm not sure where they expected this to go, but I don't think it went where they were planning. Either way, we can say with total confidence that anybody who told you either of these things are liars and should not be trusted. At this point, if these people tell you the sky is blue and clouds are white you should probably get up and have a look out the window to see for yourself. What the memo contained in actuality was information regarding a FISA warrant issued for Carter Page, former Trump campaign employee. In order to get this warrant to spy on Mr. Page, the FBI and the DOJ conspired with the Clinton campaign and the DNC to use false information created from whole cloth by Christopher Steele for his infamous and discredited dossier, as well as a Yahoo news article based on information that Steel himself leaked to the press, to lie to a FISA court judge! It also mentions that Steele was fired from the FBI because he was talking to Mother Jones and Yahoo news and revealed his association with the FBI, which they view as a serious breach of security. But don't take my word for it, go read it yourself. All the links necessary are in that link above to the last episode of my podcast. This is why it's so important to stay abreast of what's going on in American politics, especially if you're a citizen of this country. These people, who are supposed to be trusted to deliver information clear of bias to the American people, have blatantly, flat-out fucking lied to everyone, and did it with a smile on their faces as they collected their paychecks. It has become clear from this alone that none of these people can be trusted to read a fucking thermostat, let alone deliver proper news coverage to the average citizen. "Journalist" has become synonymous with "Professional Liar" at this point. And what of the Winter Olympics? Well I can tell you right now that I don't give a flaming fuck in space about the games themselves. I don't watch any Olympic coverage, because I'm not interested in sports and don't care who won the gold medal in competitive underwater basket weaving. What I do care about, however, is the way the American media covered the country that the games are being held in this year. Because North Korea drew the lucky straw this time, and the US corporate media outlets have been tripping the fuck over each other to praise a genocidal, monstrous, utterly evil regime that regularly tortures its own citizens to death. This is one of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen the US media do. They praised the cheerleaders, who are literal slaves that will be imprisoned and have god only knows what done to them if they perform badly. They praised Kim Jong Un's sister, almost as bad a tyrant as the fat tub of shit himself, who orchestrates tortures and the slaughter of innocents. There are so many examples of behavior like this that I would be here all day if I tried to list them all. Merely go and check the twitter feeds of these media outlets and you can see instance after instance of US media praising a Communist dictatorship that currently, while these games are going on, is running torture camps where they execute pregnant women by cutting the babies from their stomachs while the women are tied to trees. The media had a perfect chance to show us, the voters, the American people, that they weren't our enemy. That they condemn the monstrous human rights violations committed daily by the Kim regime, that they do not support Communist dictatorships and are, in fact, on the side of the average person with more than two brain cells to rub together. And they completely squandered it. Not only did they squander it, they did the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Rather than condemn this evil regime, they tried to turn the dictator's sister, a vile monster in her own right, into a "yass kween sley" diva. This kind of behavior is unconscionable, and reveals the true purpose and attitude of the media.
Think about it. What do they do all day? They castigate Donald Trump and all his plans, policies, and appointments, despite the fact that his policies are making America better. Lower immigration, forced integration of those already here, and lowered regulation on businesses alongside lower taxes has brought jobs back to this country and boosted the economy. Say what you like about the man, he seems to be trying to do what he said he'd do, and that's Make America Great Again. He hasn't taken a single right away from women, the LGBT, Muslims, non-whites, or anybody else these people spent two years claiming that he'd immediately throw into concentration camps on Inauguration Day. And what's more, he's said publicly several times that he doesn't intend to. And when it comes to a country that is being run into the ground by a regime that I don't even have words to describe the horror of, what do they do? They paint it in the most positive, glowing light possible! A Communist dictatorship where they imprison people for less than nothing, as well as imprison their family members for three generations for the infraction of one, feed people alive to rats, cut the babies from pregnant women's bellies, use rape as a punishment, have actual concentration, work, and death camps, and force so much propaganda on their remaining people that they are convinced that "Dear Leader" is actually some kind of deity. This they glorify, while someone who seems to be trying to make his own country better gets nothing but vitriol and lies spread about him. It has become monumentally clear that the US media are our enemies. They've turned into propaganda outlets for North Korea, for fuck's sake. If that doesn't make them traitors in deed and intent if not legally, I don't know what will. If you actually trust the mainstream US media after these two incidents, I don't know what to tell you. Go see a neurologist, and have them take a look at your brain, because you might be missing your frontal lobe. These people are self-evidently the enemies of every American, and this is not an attack on our democracy, or our Constitution, or anything else to say that. If someone acts like your enemy, treat them like an enemy. Trust nothing they say, suspect everything they do, take nothing on faith, verify whatever they tell you, because if they've lied to you once (and they have, many times) they'll lie to you again. I would go so far as to say that this behavior is demonstrably evil, and there is no excuse they could make that would make it okay to cover up what's in that memo, and praise North Korea. Not a single thing will ever make that okay, or right, or good. So the next time you see a report from a mainstream media organization, or someone paid by a mainstream media organization, or someone who wants to be a mainstream media organization, don't trust a fucking word of it until you've verified it for yourself. They are very likely lying to you. That seems to be a thread with Communists, doesn't it?
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast! This time I go over the Nunes memo in detail so that everyone who listens to this show knows what's up with this thing, talk a little about Elon Musk's short foray into flamethrower vending along with a discussion about zombies more generally, and the last third or so of the show is taken up by gushing about Dark Souls, as I've recently started playing it again and remembered how much I love that game. Hope you guys enjoy! MP3 Download of this episode: https://ia800408.us.archive.org/25/items/jimfear_audio_productions/ep79.mp3
