Your identity

belongs to you

“You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy. I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.” ~ GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, Anno Domini 1908

You need to be aware of your identity. You should consider what it is, what it means, how it is represented, what are its substitutes, and whether you are the legal fiction that bears your name, last name first, in all caps. You should also think about your children. Do you do them any favours by having them born in a state-licensed institution such as a hospital, issued a birth certificate, given a slave number, foot printed or finger printed, chipped or otherwise tracked?

Your identity belongs to you. It isn’t you. You are an entire person, not merely a name and some identifying information. You are mostly a soul - your personality isn’t in your body itself but in your soul in the eternal realm. You are not a body which has a soul, you are soul that animates a body. When your time here is complete, your soul continues in the eternal realm. The resurrection of the body means that your body continues as well, as God wills. Praise God. Amen.

You

Inigo: Who are you, really?

Dread Pirate: No one of consequence.

Inigo: I must know.

Dread: Get used to disappointment.

Inigo shrugs, and the swordfight proceeds.

Who are you, really? You are a human being. You were born somewhere, you were raised by some other people who loved you. You were helped by some, betrayed by others. You were educated a little, taught reading and arithmetic. You educated yourself because at some point you wanted to know more than you were being taught. You had experiences. You went places. You came to the place you are now. You are here for a while. You’ve had jobs, tasks, chores, obligations, duties. You’ve done well at some things and poorly at others. You have had a varied experience of divers activities.

You are who you choose to be. Your past is gone. So you don’t have to be who you were. You are not only not the things that happened to you, but also you are not the things you made those events mean. You are free to make those past events mean other things. You are free to find a meaning for those events that empowers you. Probably those events served to help you understand the world around you, the people you were with, and the content of their characters. Maybe those events broke your heart, so you could find some better places, better people, and have better events to bring your heart back together.

You were given a name. Maybe you were involved, but very often people in our culture are not involved in the name given them. You might like your given name, you might not. You were also called some names that you liked and other names that you didn’t like. You were complimented and insulted. So you may have a nickname based on how you looked at the time it was tendered, and you may have embraced that name, gone with it. It might even be appropriate to you today.

Names have meanings. Words have meanings. But we speak English. So, although the character “Butch” in the film “Pulp Fiction” isn’t really correct in saying that American names don’t mean anything, we do have a lot of meanings assigned to some words. Grab a dictionary and look up “run” sometime. There are fourteen categories of meanings, each with multiple usages in various contexts, in one online dictionary I just consulted. Do that with any of the short words with three or four letters, and you will find a wealth of options. Jet might mean spurting water, an aeroplane, the engine of such a plane, or dark black, depending on context.

English doesn’t have any official authority. We are better off for the absence of official authority wherever it is absent. We are burdened quite often by persons who claim authority over us, especially as they often have no idea what they are doing, what they want, what is best for them, and never ever have any idea what is best for you. Authoritarians are evil and horrid and demented and often depraved. Stay away from them, they’ll rip your lungs out, Jim (to quote from Warren Zevon).

So how does that matter? Sure, it means that bi-annual is defined by usage. Some users use it to mean twice a year, ignoring the perfectly sensible word semi-annual. Others use it to mean every two years. The people who write dictionaries will insist that they don’t have any authority to define words, and there is no official authority for English to do so. There is only usage. A dictionary is a report on how people are using words. Don’t like a usage? Don’t use it that way.

People will tell you things that are really stupid, like “there’s no such word as unalienable.” Um, yeah. There is. I just used it in a sentence. That makes it a word. You may prefer to say inalienable, and that’s Kool and the whole gang, but that’s you.

The same thing applies to your name. If someone calls you “tiger” and you don’t want to be called “tiger” then say so. And don’t refer to yourself by that noun. But don’t imagine that you have any power over what others say. You don’t. And you shouldn’t. You really don’t want to have power over what others say because if you do, you will find that there is someone else who has power over what you say, and pfffft! You stop being “allowed” to say things.

That’s part of the inherent problem with pronoun assertions. Sure, you are free to refer to yourself by xe/xim if that makes you feel better. I have no idea why it would. But you have absolutely no power over me. I won’t refer to you by pronouns you choose. I will refer to you, if I choose to refer to you at all, by names, pronouns, and identifying characteristics as I see fit. If you don’t like it, maybe ask Buffalo Bill for some thicker skin. Rumour has it he has some in the sewing room.

The mElon is on record saying that using someone’s preferred pronouns is a courtesy people should provide one another. I disagree. I believe it is discourtesy to encourage someone in a manifestation of mental disorder. Further, God made mankind and made us men and women. God did not make a larger set of genders for us, and for you to assert that you are better at defining yourself than your Creator, you have some hubris.

While we’re on the topic, let’s refer to the first chapter of Genesis in which God says to His creation that we should be fruitful and multiply. People who engage in the brutal rape of children often try to get those youngsters to pretend to like it, and to propagate the cycle of violence to other children, presently or after some years. Men and women are able to procreate and produce children, which is a great blessing. Having children fulfils God’s commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Homosexuality is wrong, and if you don’t understand that it is wrong, you should feel free to open up the topic in the comments.

Your identity

Them: Do you have ID?

Me: Yes.

…

Them: I’m going to need to see your ID.

Me: I don’t agree.

You should not confuse your identity with the papers issued by some other group to convey information about your identity. Your driver licence is not your identity. Your passport is not your identity. Your tribal identity card is not your identity.

There was a time when people in America would go to the cinema and loudly boo the communists and the fascists on screen who asked for “papers please.” After a while this tradition declined. So did America.

If you’ve ever seen the film “Casablanca” you should be aware that not having current papers was a crime that could result in detention, torture, and death. The system has always hated freedom, individual sovereignty, and free will. God made you free, God made you sovereign over your own affairs, God gave you free will. The demon worshippers hate God and hate God’s greatest creation. So they want to deny that you have a right to be wherever God has put you, do the things God has shown you to do, and be the person God wants you to be. You shouldn’t be too concerned about what they want. Obey God, not men.

There was a time when identity was a community feature. You were known in your community as “John the blacksmith.” During the time of evil nasty ugly William the Conqueror there was an enumeration of the people. As was the enumeration ordered by David of the Israelites, it was wholly wrong and evil. But people did it. And the shire-reeve who was in charge of reeving the shire, or gathering the taxes from anyone who was found to have anything of value that could be taken, would note down on a paper, “John Smith.” A great many English men came to be known as John Smith. Shire reeves came to be known as sheriffs.

A long time ago Josiah Stamp said that you shouldn’t take government statistics seriously. The things written by the government bureau rat came from compiling the reports of the watch men in various communities. And the watch man would write in his notebook whatever he pleases. Similarly the Domesday book is of no authority. It is simply a compendium of what the evil filthy tax collectors found when they went from village to hamlet to town and asked people to be counted. Some were. Some were not.

Not so long ago there were people in Somalia who got tired of being ruled by a dictator who borrowed $333 million from the International Monetary Fund and about $1.3 billion from other sources, and used the money to slaughter tens of thousands of men, women, and children in Berbera, set up Dahir Riyale as a torturer atop a secret police structure, and otherwise harmed a lot of people while living in luxury. So they got rid of their government.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the evil mass murderer, was persuaded by Boutros Boutros Ghali, the Egyptian ambassador to Somalia who went on to become secretary general of the Untied Nations, to send the US Marines to Mogadishu. There was allegedly a famine. There was not. When the reports came back in the Spring of warehouses all up the Juba and Shebelle river valleys full of food, the commandant of the Marines withdrew the men. Clinton hated that, so he had some attack helicopters send TOW missiles into a peaceful meeting of the Habr Gidr and ramped up the war. But you won’t read about any of those events in the gooferment accounts of events.

Anyway, after a few years of war, the USA military air lifted Mohammed Farah Aideed to a conference in Nairobi, Kenya. There he was told about the new airport, new shipping port, and new embassy that would be built if he became president and taxed the people to make payments on the debts incurred by the past dictator. Aideed agreed. Within two weeks the elders of his clan had met and Aideed was killed by his bodygurds.

A little later, there was a conference in Djibouti City. Somehow the conferences about Somali affairs are never held in Somalia. Go figure. Anyway, a guy named Salad Hassan (I kid you not) became the Untied Nations appointed president. And he went to the presidential palace in Mogadishu with some military support from various national governments in the region. After a while, he sent census takers around the city to enumerate the people.

The people were having none of it. A census means taxes are coming, and the census takers are looking for who to tax and how much. So the census takers were killed. It is this sort of thing that causes the people in gooferment to call places like Somalia “failed states.” But successful people, huh?

Your name

There was a kind of music when I was growing that we called “punk.” One of the groups which might be identified as indie or punk is the Ting Tings. They have a pretty good song, “That’s not my name.” It has a beat. You could dance to it. “They call me hell, they call me Stacey, they call me her, they call me Jane. That's not my name.”

What is your name? I say that your name is whatever you choose to be called. It may or may not appear on a birth certificate, a socialist insecurity slave card, a driver licence, a tribal membership identity card, a passport, or some other papers. But it doesn’t have to be.

My name is Jim Davidson. It doesn’t appear that way on various documents. I don’t care. My name is Jim.

One time I had supper with a gentleman named Jim Davidson who has published several books with William Rees-Mogg such as The Sovereign Individual. On the title page of his books he goes by “James Dale Davidson.” We met in 2002 at the Eris Society gathering of Doug Casey's Crisis Investing author Doug Casey in Aspen, Colorado. My namesake told me that there were, last time he was in town, over 500 people named Jim Davidson in the phone book in Inverness, Scotland. That’s quite near Tulloch, where my lot come from.

He also told me that his lot were transported for life to Botany Bay. I told him that my lot were transported for life to Virginia in 1746. We got along very well.

Does it bother me that there are hundreds of men running around the world doing various things and having the same first and last name as me? Nope. Not a bit. Some are actors. One is apparently a somewhat grotesque comedian in England. Doesn’t bother me a bit. Nothing to do with me, none of my business if ye do.

What’s my age again?

Did you know that the full name and date of birth of anyone is more thoroughly identifying than their socialist insecurity slave number? It is true. Quite a few people are “in the system” with identical numbers because when they are asked for their slave number they rattle off an appropriate number of digits, or an inappropriate number, and it gets put in the system as they say it.

You can transpose digits. People do it all the time.

When I say, “in the system” I mean the system that Elwood Blues identifies as SCMODS. “State, county, municipal, offender data system.” The pigs have these laptops. Every few weeks, a pig on a laptop will be looking at his screen during a high speed pursuit and smash into pedestrians, stranded travellers, or cross the median and slam full speed into a passenger vehicle. Pigs are evil. They are also unnecessary and should be sent home.

Anyway, the system will keep a record of the purported socialist insecurity slave number of everyone detained, questioned, or arrested. Which is how your number may be emitted by someone else and you may not even know it. Further to this point, your age is important information, because combined with your full birth name, it pretty uniquely identifies you. Even with a very common name like William Jones or John Smith, there just aren’t that many people born with that exact name on any given day in a particular year.

Again, there is a group that I would loosely identify as punk, Blink 182, which has a song, “What’s my age again?” Its lyrics make fun of the idea of being told to act my age.

You see, the culture I grew up in rejected authority. We were called punks so we embraced being punks. We were told that we should register for the draft so we didn’t. We were told we couldn’t get student loans if we weren’t registered, so we didn’t. We were told a lot of things by people who hated us. Lately those same people have more power and hate more people.

You are called deplorable, a bitter clinger, and garbage. You may as well embrace these labels. The ladies on “The View” were talking, I saw on an other Substack, about “uneducated white women” who are, apparently, the only reason Trump won the presidential election for the third time in a row. Uneducated, white, bitter clinger, deplorable, garbage, these are the things that are used to identify you. They are used to identify me, and I’m not even sure if I’m white. I mean, I tan pretty good and there’s some curl to my hair. “My teeth are pearly” as the pianist Sam sings in “Casablanca,” speaking of anti-war films.

The truth is that the depraved and discontented feeble persons of bad character are jealous of anyone who can think, speak, and act independently. They have crying rooms, safe spaces, and other places to reinforce their courage, of which they have nearly none. They have established an enormous edifice of authority, an enormous number of agencies, and millions of bureau rats to eat out our existence. Six and a half trillion dollars in fiscal year 2024. And if you believe that the mElon who wants you to respect pronouns and Ron Paul are going to establish a new cabinet level agency to reduce the size and scope of government, you may want to share what mind altering drugs you are ingesting.

Those who have power and authority hate you. They have made it clear that they want to murder seven billion people and enslave the rest. You should not consent. I wrote about your consent in my last essay. The topic is likely to come up again.

Anonymity

Recently Naomi Brockwell of NBTV Media and a very useful YouTube channel on privacy started using “priv/acc” in her Twitter profile. It refers to “privacy accelerationist.” She also solicited essays on privacy during the sad anniversary of the passage of the USAPATRIOT act. I wrote one essay on “Data security and communications privacy” at the time. No idea if it has been promoted even a little bit by Naomi or her fans.

But I have done quite a bit of work in the subject area. I could be called upon to testify as a subject matter expert. It would be fair to say that I know all about it, as such things go. I know about the apps that claim to be private and are not, the encryption that doesn’t keep your keys in your hands and isn’t your privacy, and many of the people involved in such delights as the Hursti hack, the 2600 hertz phone phreaking incidents, and many episodes of adventure involving the forces of “the law” such as it purports to be in these deviant times.

I believe in anonymity. I have been anonymous. I have worked with Anonymous. I have worked on a great many projects in my own name and in pseudonyms and in no name at all. I don’t believe you have any moral obligation to tell anyone anywhere ever at all what your name is.

Your identity is your property. It belongs to you. And if you are using apps that don’t respect your identity, they very likely also don’t respect your privacy. So you might want to stop using them.

For a very long time I have been primarily published under my name. Since age 14 I have been a published author. I’ve written many hundreds of essays under my own name. Many of them are published at L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise and some are in the books which collect my essays. I’ve also written a novel not yet published (and still a work in progress). This substack and another, SpacePriveNews, are published under my byline. My ten thousand follower Twitter account, now stifled for reasons that I have not been told, has my name, Jim Davidson as the profile name.

So it is possible to write about freedom, about taxation is theft, about how gooferment is evil, how the absence of the consent of the governed prevents it from being government, and many other topics, in your name. I’ve done so for a very long time, decades in fact, and never been prosecuted for the things I’ve written.

There was this one time when a group of feral circuit court judges decided that the “curtilage” of a property was not private property. So, according to their ruling, anyone was free to go onto their property, the driveway of each of the judges, and put a GPS tracking device on their vehicles to follow them around remotely. I felt it was incumbent upon me to look them up on the Interwebz and so I posted an essay on El Neil’s web site sharing their physical addresses (from the white pages of their local phone books) and aerial views from Google maps of their homes, indicating in several instances their cars parked on the street or in their driveway curtilage.

One of the nastier readers of The Libertarian Enterprise reported the matter and the US Marshalls service shut down the entire web site. Seized control of the domain! GoDaddy didn’t require a court order, and never does, because they are rat fink scum, in my direct personal experience. Anyway, I was contacted by Neil and agreed that it was a delight, a great thing, to have my essay banned by the US Marshalls service. So Neil agreed to take down the essay and the Marshalls agreed to let the domain go back into service. Isn’t that nice? Don’t you feel protected by the “law” enforcement goofs in the gooferment? Pigs.

Anyway, you get the idea. If you want to be identified, you should be aware of how your identity is used. And if you want to associate your devices with your fingerprints or your retina pattern, those seem, to me, like really bad ideas. I went over some of the reasons in my previous essay, which see.

No, I don’t think I’ll include any links. You’re an adult, or precocious enough as a yout’ to be looking into these matters for yourself. Besides, if you go do your own research, you should find the things you need to find. That ought to be more persuasive to you than following a bunch of links from me. Besides, I don’t feel called to generate scholarly papers and footnote the things I say. So you can do your own research, or not, as you think best.

Be who you say you are. Keep your word. Further more deponent sayeth not.

Remember, when they ask you questions, you have a right to remain silent. You know what they call a person who won’t give his name? A Glomar responder. After the Glomar explorer incident. You could look it up.

---

That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.