41 thoughts on “You Know What I Really Don’t Need?”
If I ever want advice from Barack Obama I’ll blow my brains out.
Good thing he wasn’t giving advice to you. He was giving advice to the Executive Branch of government, which reports to him.
Maybe Rand is a secretly a government employee 🙂
My wife works for the Executive Branch of the federal government, and she doesn’t need advice from Obama about how to commemorate 9/11 either.
The Gerbil doesn’t get it. Yawn.
It’s no secret. Everybody earning a wage is a govt. employee by virtue of taxation. You don’t own what you can’t keep. Commander in Chief thinks that title also applies to non military and we are all serfs.
I do not mean this all literally other than the part were we don’t own what can be taken away. I do suspect he’s not quite clear on CinC either.
Hmmm… perhaps I was being literal?
Ken,
[[[Commander in Chief thinks that title also applies to non military and we are all serfs.]]]
Funny, I was able to change jobs and move from California to Nevada without asking any permission, as a serf would have to.
Gazooks, me thinks you have no idea what a serf really is…
Thanks Thomas, I always thought CA and NV were in the same national realm. You’ve certainly disabused me of that idea.
You’re not just a serf Thomas. You’ve become blue from drinking the koolaid. Hmmm… that makes ya a smurf!
Actually Thomas, thinking about it, serf is actually a better term than my more usual slave. A serf actually does have ‘ownership’ of land. However, that ownership is closer to slavery than not. Today, unlike a few hundred years ago in America. Ownership is a lot closer to that of serfs than free people.
You think travel is the defining attribute? Typical. Now tell me what the meaning of is, is.
Hmmm, this is site is eating comments again. But to follow up on a Thread in March telling how smart PIMCO was for dumping treasuries.
Well Bill Gross at PIMCO is now “crying in his Beer” for being so stupid. It basically ruined his fund’s performance for the year… So much for his foresight.
1. A member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights.
2. An agricultural laborer under various similar systems, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Russia and eastern Europe.
3. A person in bondage or servitude.
Serfs didn’t own the land, the land owns them. When the Lord sold his estate, they were part of the property, just like horses and plows that went with it.
And unlike a Serf, if you think life is better elsewhere in the world and you don’t wish to be under President Obamam anymore you do have the right to leave the USA anytime you wish. And no one will stop you or chase you, or even care if you do leave.
So to be clear you are not a Serf or a Slave, but a shareholder in the USA. But if you don’t want to be a shareholder you are free to divest yourself of the burden anytime you want. There is no Berlin Wall to keep you locked in.
You, Thomas, clearly have no idea what I know.
Freemen, Villeins, Bordars, Cottagers and Slaves were all serfs.
Serfs didn’t own the land, the land owns them. Wrong, they were (except for slaves) RENT PAYING TENANTS, a large percentage did actually own land. Some were even quite wealthy.
What they owed was labor for the lord to produce crops. That labor was usually on separate land from that which they used to support themselves. When a new lord came in, that labor was owed to the new lord.
Serfs were tenants and unless slaves could move to other locations to serve other lords. Only slaves were legally property. The rest were tenants. Poverty might prevent most from going anywhere, but that doesn’t change their legal status.
That you would be so ignorant actually surprises me that I am so surprised.
Serfs were tenants and unless slaves could move to other locations to serve other lords.
Let me clarify. A freeman did not require a lords permission to move. The others did because of contract. However, they could generally buy their freedom.
That you can’t see my analogy to taxation is the real problem here.
When “Il Dufe” gives advice, I always figure he’s relaying it from either Darth Soros (“What is your bidding, my master?”) or the ghost of his mentor, Uncle Frank the Red.
Ken,
I think you are confusing Serfs with Peasants. Serf were the lowest class of Peasant who were allowed to work a specific piece of land, but it belonged the Manor. The Serf had no right to sell it since it belonged to the Manor.
No I’m not. Nobles and peasants are the only two classes. Serfs were peasants (some quite wealthy, non intuitively.) Freeman, Villiens and Slaves were all serfs. Today serfs are confused with just Villiens which were the largest sub class.
The serf (villien) was contracted to the lord. That contract was for the lord to protect and the serf to provide farm labor on the lords land. The serf normally worked two different pieces of land. One was the lords which product went to the lord. The other provided for the serfs family and was either owned or rented.
The lowest class of peasant was the slave. Villiens would be considered middle class.
The confusion is that the serf could not break the contract without the lords permission which usually came by buying freeman status. It may be considered a distinction without a difference, but it is a distinction.
Like our govt. today, lords tend to acquire land rather than sell it (Michelle Malkin has lots of good articles on this.) So a peasant might only be able to rent land as a tenant to provide for their family since no land might be available for ownership.
Nothing but the names have been changed. We have a larger sub class of freeman peasants than the middle ages.
Not particularly fond of trying to turn 9/11 into a national day of service to progressive causes but the angle that Islamism is a threat to everyone and not just American, is great.
Ken,
Do you have documentation for your claims? And proof that the reference I listed was wrong?
Or is that what you learned at some Tea Party meeting?
: a member of a servile feudal class bound to the land and subject to the will of its own
Origin of SERF
French, from Old French, from Latin servus slave
First Known Use: 1611
Again, you seem to be referring to the entire Feudal system they are part of, which is not the same thing as Serf.
Serfs were some of the richest factory owners in Russia prior to the Russian Revolution. They were also the most brutal of owners, possibly due to their childhood as serfs, whose abuses of their fellow serfs fueled much of the communist’s outrage.
Officially the Russian serfs were freed during the US Civil War (by coincidence), but they were still serfs. Much of the reason for their incredible poverty was that they were already socialist, and had been for centuries. The community allocated each serf land to farm according to his needs and abilities, and the allocated land would usually change yearly. The allotments were often multiple small strips that weren’t close to each other, so a serf would have to spend much of the day moving between plots. Each serf also had a disincentive to impove any part of the land, because it would likely be given to someone else in the following season.
Oh, and to commemorate 9/11 my boss is going to give me one of his chickens, which I’ll bring home to roost, just like Reverend Wright said it should.
If Thomas look up serf and peasant on wikipedia, he’d find that his view, arrived at via dictionary definition, isn’t nearly nuanced enough.
Thomas, when I was young I used to read (I promise you do not comprehend what I mean by that.) My view is an amalgamation of that reading. You’ll have to do some reading of your own. I do understand that your position is the simplistic version usually presented for purely lazy reasons. Read actual histories.
People have not changed. We are still separated into peasants and nobles.
Rick,
Dictionaries reflect how words are used today, not how they were used a couple a centuries ago…
Also I pointed out how Ken is trying to use the Feudal System to redefine it versus what Serfs actually were seen as within that system. I seriously doubt a Freeman would consider himself a Serf.
George,
You do know that Serfdom ended in Russia in 1861 long before the Revolution in 1917…
Someone might be the vassal of one person, but the lord of another.
Thomas, do understand that a serf could become a freeman and a freeman could become a serf? I’m using your definition of serf here. All were of course, still peasants.
What makes a freeman a serf is they still served a lord that they expected to protect them.
Agree with wodun. Some of the things derided at the link didn’t really bother me. I think noting that terrorist activities are still happening across the globe is important for the government to remind it’s employees of. After all, we tended to ignore such attacks prior to 9/11.
And the link author suggested the veterans weren’t being recognized right after a passage that asked remembrance of the military.
I don’t need instructions on what to do, but it is Obama’s branch to instruct for now. He’s done far worse than these instructions.
Thomas, many, if not most Russian serfs were independent prior to their official emancipation, as their nominal lords had abandoned them as worthless properties decades and centuries before. Russian serfdom ended in 1861, but serfs didn’t explode or disappear. They were still serfs, or wish they had stayed so. Their condition got much worse as the decades wore on, as more and more of their crops were seized by the government to trade to Germany and other European countries to raise government revenues to pay for major government projects (this may sound somewhat familiar).
They started as serfs, shockingly poor even by East European standards because of small scale socialism. Then they got even poorer paying outrageous taxes to fund big government (Winning the future!). So they revolted against both aristocracy and their new borne serf capitalist brethren and put in place huge socialist government. Needless to say, they were starved to death en masse. Then German socialists invaded and slaughtered them, until the Soviet socialist government rolled the German armies back, killing yet more of those few that remained.
If they’d have known what was coming, they’d have overthrown the Czar in 1861 to restore their official serf status. At least as independent serfs they didn’t have to stand in line for five hours to find out there wasn’t any bread.
An old Soviet joke goes, there was a man slogging through the mud in a bare sock and only one boot. His neighbors cried “Ivan, you poor soul. You’ve lost a boot in the mud!”
“On the contrary! I have found one!” came the delighted reply.
Ken,
Yes, a Serf could earn his freedom while a Freeman could decide to become a Serf, pledge allegiance to a Manor and give up his freedom, becoming a Serf and dooming his descendants to being Serfs.
Again, how does that apply to a citizen of the United States?
George,
You know, that comes very close to the old southern argument that slaves were better off as slaves and President Lincoln did them a disservice with emancipation. Honesty, I would be surprised if Serfs, as poor as they were under the Russia system thought they should have stayed Serfs.
a Freeman could decide to become a Serf
You think it was a choice do you? The middle ages are the definition of hard times. Freeman became serfs(your limited definition) for the same reason people became bond servants at a later age… survival. Bond servant is a slave like a serf that could buy a different status.
how does that apply to a citizen of the United States?
You mentioned that a freeman might not consider himself a serf. That’s actually a very good observation. Now if you combine that with the fact that they actually were serfs the light might go on.
Taxation means you do not own your own assets regardless of any argument of justification. Let’s all agree that taxation is a wonderful good thing that makes the birds sing. It still means you don’t own your own property.
You don’t own the property you work on… Isn’t there an old name for that… oh, yeah. Serf.
Thomas, if emancipation had been followed by periods of intentional mass starvation, punctuated by pogroms of black extermination, all resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of them, then yes, the majority would’ve been better off as slaves. We didn’t do that, nor did we have a Czar during reconstruction. Of course now we’re up to our ears in czars, with the predictable suffering to go along with it.
Since Thomas, you only believe what you read from strangers (a lot like my ex wife)…
I realize that anyone trying to find a logical argument in the posts of Thomas Matula is on a futile quest, but maybe someone else can clarify? Is Matula saying serfdom is good or bad? If he sees serfdom is bad, he certainly seems blase about our continuing march down the road to it.
Ken,
If paying is your definition of being a Serf then even the Nobles of the Manor were Serfs.
George,
If I recall the KKK and Jim Crows laws made life for African American pretty bad after they received their freedom. But if you ever spent time with folks who escaped dictatorships or communism you would realize that no how bad things get it’s better to free then a slave.
Bilwick,
Being a Serf is bad which is why it’s great Americans are not Serfs.
Ken,
Sorry for the delay. I have been traveling.
Your link is merely to one of those question and answers threads. But if you follow the link it provides to the Encyclopedia.com you find this statement.
[[[While the majority of peasants were serfs during the Middle Ages, free peasants continued to exist and in some regions whole villages did not come under the rule of a lord.]]]
i.e. When a Serf bought their freedom they were no longer Serfs, they were Freemen, although they were still peasants. As Freeman they were no longer the property of the Manor as Serfs were.
If I ever want advice from Barack Obama I’ll blow my brains out.
Good thing he wasn’t giving advice to you. He was giving advice to the Executive Branch of government, which reports to him.
Maybe Rand is a secretly a government employee 🙂
My wife works for the Executive Branch of the federal government, and she doesn’t need advice from Obama about how to commemorate 9/11 either.
The Gerbil doesn’t get it. Yawn.
It’s no secret. Everybody earning a wage is a govt. employee by virtue of taxation. You don’t own what you can’t keep. Commander in Chief thinks that title also applies to non military and we are all serfs.
I do not mean this all literally other than the part were we don’t own what can be taken away. I do suspect he’s not quite clear on CinC either.
Hmmm… perhaps I was being literal?
Ken,
[[[Commander in Chief thinks that title also applies to non military and we are all serfs.]]]
Funny, I was able to change jobs and move from California to Nevada without asking any permission, as a serf would have to.
Gazooks, me thinks you have no idea what a serf really is…
Thanks Thomas, I always thought CA and NV were in the same national realm. You’ve certainly disabused me of that idea.
You’re not just a serf Thomas. You’ve become blue from drinking the koolaid. Hmmm… that makes ya a smurf!
Actually Thomas, thinking about it, serf is actually a better term than my more usual slave. A serf actually does have ‘ownership’ of land. However, that ownership is closer to slavery than not. Today, unlike a few hundred years ago in America. Ownership is a lot closer to that of serfs than free people.
You think travel is the defining attribute? Typical. Now tell me what the meaning of is, is.
Hmmm, this is site is eating comments again. But to follow up on a Thread in March telling how smart PIMCO was for dumping treasuries.
Well Bill Gross at PIMCO is now “crying in his Beer” for being so stupid. It basically ruined his fund’s performance for the year… So much for his foresight.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/bill-gross-debt-treasuries_n_941107.html
Bill Gross: I Feel Like ‘Crying’ For Betting Against U.S. Debt
8/29/11 06:38 PM ET Updated: 8/29/11 06:38 PM ET
One of the problems is that is often takes months for events to prove folks wrong, which doesn’t fit with blog posting cycles..
McGehee wins this thread.
Ken,
Since you clearly have no idea what a serf is, here is a definition.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/serf
1. A member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights.
2. An agricultural laborer under various similar systems, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Russia and eastern Europe.
3. A person in bondage or servitude.
Serfs didn’t own the land, the land owns them. When the Lord sold his estate, they were part of the property, just like horses and plows that went with it.
And unlike a Serf, if you think life is better elsewhere in the world and you don’t wish to be under President Obamam anymore you do have the right to leave the USA anytime you wish. And no one will stop you or chase you, or even care if you do leave.
So to be clear you are not a Serf or a Slave, but a shareholder in the USA. But if you don’t want to be a shareholder you are free to divest yourself of the burden anytime you want. There is no Berlin Wall to keep you locked in.
You, Thomas, clearly have no idea what I know.
Freemen, Villeins, Bordars, Cottagers and Slaves were all serfs.
Serfs didn’t own the land, the land owns them. Wrong, they were (except for slaves) RENT PAYING TENANTS, a large percentage did actually own land. Some were even quite wealthy.
What they owed was labor for the lord to produce crops. That labor was usually on separate land from that which they used to support themselves. When a new lord came in, that labor was owed to the new lord.
Serfs were tenants and unless slaves could move to other locations to serve other lords. Only slaves were legally property. The rest were tenants. Poverty might prevent most from going anywhere, but that doesn’t change their legal status.
That you would be so ignorant actually surprises me that I am so surprised.
Serfs were tenants and unless slaves could move to other locations to serve other lords.
Let me clarify. A freeman did not require a lords permission to move. The others did because of contract. However, they could generally buy their freedom.
That you can’t see my analogy to taxation is the real problem here.
When “Il Dufe” gives advice, I always figure he’s relaying it from either Darth Soros (“What is your bidding, my master?”) or the ghost of his mentor, Uncle Frank the Red.
Ken,
I think you are confusing Serfs with Peasants. Serf were the lowest class of Peasant who were allowed to work a specific piece of land, but it belonged the Manor. The Serf had no right to sell it since it belonged to the Manor.
No I’m not. Nobles and peasants are the only two classes. Serfs were peasants (some quite wealthy, non intuitively.) Freeman, Villiens and Slaves were all serfs. Today serfs are confused with just Villiens which were the largest sub class.
The serf (villien) was contracted to the lord. That contract was for the lord to protect and the serf to provide farm labor on the lords land. The serf normally worked two different pieces of land. One was the lords which product went to the lord. The other provided for the serfs family and was either owned or rented.
The lowest class of peasant was the slave. Villiens would be considered middle class.
The confusion is that the serf could not break the contract without the lords permission which usually came by buying freeman status. It may be considered a distinction without a difference, but it is a distinction.
Like our govt. today, lords tend to acquire land rather than sell it (Michelle Malkin has lots of good articles on this.) So a peasant might only be able to rent land as a tenant to provide for their family since no land might be available for ownership.
Nothing but the names have been changed. We have a larger sub class of freeman peasants than the middle ages.
Not particularly fond of trying to turn 9/11 into a national day of service to progressive causes but the angle that Islamism is a threat to everyone and not just American, is great.
Ken,
Do you have documentation for your claims? And proof that the reference I listed was wrong?
Or is that what you learned at some Tea Party meeting?
Ken,
Merriiam-Webster has the same definition.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/serf
: a member of a servile feudal class bound to the land and subject to the will of its own
Origin of SERF
French, from Old French, from Latin servus slave
First Known Use: 1611
Again, you seem to be referring to the entire Feudal system they are part of, which is not the same thing as Serf.
Serfs were some of the richest factory owners in Russia prior to the Russian Revolution. They were also the most brutal of owners, possibly due to their childhood as serfs, whose abuses of their fellow serfs fueled much of the communist’s outrage.
Officially the Russian serfs were freed during the US Civil War (by coincidence), but they were still serfs. Much of the reason for their incredible poverty was that they were already socialist, and had been for centuries. The community allocated each serf land to farm according to his needs and abilities, and the allocated land would usually change yearly. The allotments were often multiple small strips that weren’t close to each other, so a serf would have to spend much of the day moving between plots. Each serf also had a disincentive to impove any part of the land, because it would likely be given to someone else in the following season.
Oh, and to commemorate 9/11 my boss is going to give me one of his chickens, which I’ll bring home to roost, just like Reverend Wright said it should.
If Thomas look up serf and peasant on wikipedia, he’d find that his view, arrived at via dictionary definition, isn’t nearly nuanced enough.
Thomas, when I was young I used to read (I promise you do not comprehend what I mean by that.) My view is an amalgamation of that reading. You’ll have to do some reading of your own. I do understand that your position is the simplistic version usually presented for purely lazy reasons. Read actual histories.
People have not changed. We are still separated into peasants and nobles.
Rick,
Dictionaries reflect how words are used today, not how they were used a couple a centuries ago…
Also I pointed out how Ken is trying to use the Feudal System to redefine it versus what Serfs actually were seen as within that system. I seriously doubt a Freeman would consider himself a Serf.
George,
You do know that Serfdom ended in Russia in 1861 long before the Revolution in 1917…
http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Eman.html
The reality (no different today)…
Someone might be the vassal of one person, but the lord of another.
Thomas, do understand that a serf could become a freeman and a freeman could become a serf? I’m using your definition of serf here. All were of course, still peasants.
What makes a freeman a serf is they still served a lord that they expected to protect them.
Agree with wodun. Some of the things derided at the link didn’t really bother me. I think noting that terrorist activities are still happening across the globe is important for the government to remind it’s employees of. After all, we tended to ignore such attacks prior to 9/11.
And the link author suggested the veterans weren’t being recognized right after a passage that asked remembrance of the military.
I don’t need instructions on what to do, but it is Obama’s branch to instruct for now. He’s done far worse than these instructions.
Thomas, many, if not most Russian serfs were independent prior to their official emancipation, as their nominal lords had abandoned them as worthless properties decades and centuries before. Russian serfdom ended in 1861, but serfs didn’t explode or disappear. They were still serfs, or wish they had stayed so. Their condition got much worse as the decades wore on, as more and more of their crops were seized by the government to trade to Germany and other European countries to raise government revenues to pay for major government projects (this may sound somewhat familiar).
They started as serfs, shockingly poor even by East European standards because of small scale socialism. Then they got even poorer paying outrageous taxes to fund big government (Winning the future!). So they revolted against both aristocracy and their new borne serf capitalist brethren and put in place huge socialist government. Needless to say, they were starved to death en masse. Then German socialists invaded and slaughtered them, until the Soviet socialist government rolled the German armies back, killing yet more of those few that remained.
If they’d have known what was coming, they’d have overthrown the Czar in 1861 to restore their official serf status. At least as independent serfs they didn’t have to stand in line for five hours to find out there wasn’t any bread.
An old Soviet joke goes, there was a man slogging through the mud in a bare sock and only one boot. His neighbors cried “Ivan, you poor soul. You’ve lost a boot in the mud!”
“On the contrary! I have found one!” came the delighted reply.
Ken,
Yes, a Serf could earn his freedom while a Freeman could decide to become a Serf, pledge allegiance to a Manor and give up his freedom, becoming a Serf and dooming his descendants to being Serfs.
Again, how does that apply to a citizen of the United States?
George,
You know, that comes very close to the old southern argument that slaves were better off as slaves and President Lincoln did them a disservice with emancipation. Honesty, I would be surprised if Serfs, as poor as they were under the Russia system thought they should have stayed Serfs.
a Freeman could decide to become a Serf
You think it was a choice do you? The middle ages are the definition of hard times. Freeman became serfs(your limited definition) for the same reason people became bond servants at a later age… survival. Bond servant is a slave like a serf that could buy a different status.
how does that apply to a citizen of the United States?
You mentioned that a freeman might not consider himself a serf. That’s actually a very good observation. Now if you combine that with the fact that they actually were serfs the light might go on.
Taxation means you do not own your own assets regardless of any argument of justification. Let’s all agree that taxation is a wonderful good thing that makes the birds sing. It still means you don’t own your own property.
You don’t own the property you work on… Isn’t there an old name for that… oh, yeah. Serf.
Thomas, if emancipation had been followed by periods of intentional mass starvation, punctuated by pogroms of black extermination, all resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of them, then yes, the majority would’ve been better off as slaves. We didn’t do that, nor did we have a Czar during reconstruction. Of course now we’re up to our ears in czars, with the predictable suffering to go along with it.
Since Thomas, you only believe what you read from strangers (a lot like my ex wife)…
http://answers.encyclopedia.com/question/were-different-types-serfs-133647.html
I realize that anyone trying to find a logical argument in the posts of Thomas Matula is on a futile quest, but maybe someone else can clarify? Is Matula saying serfdom is good or bad? If he sees serfdom is bad, he certainly seems blase about our continuing march down the road to it.
Ken,
If paying is your definition of being a Serf then even the Nobles of the Manor were Serfs.
George,
If I recall the KKK and Jim Crows laws made life for African American pretty bad after they received their freedom. But if you ever spent time with folks who escaped dictatorships or communism you would realize that no how bad things get it’s better to free then a slave.
Bilwick,
Being a Serf is bad which is why it’s great Americans are not Serfs.
Ken,
Sorry for the delay. I have been traveling.
Your link is merely to one of those question and answers threads. But if you follow the link it provides to the Encyclopedia.com you find this statement.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/serf.aspx#1-1E1:serf-full
[[[While the majority of peasants were serfs during the Middle Ages, free peasants continued to exist and in some regions whole villages did not come under the rule of a lord.]]]
i.e. When a Serf bought their freedom they were no longer Serfs, they were Freemen, although they were still peasants. As Freeman they were no longer the property of the Manor as Serfs were.