Do freemen have gardens?

[arayder]

I'm not sure if this is thread-worthy.

To their credit freeman talk a lot about independence and personal responsibility. But when you visit their forums there is very little discussion of self sustaining, off the grid endeavors like organic farming, back yard and urban gardens.

I think the WFS forum used to have a forum section dedicated to such activities.

To be fair it is possible that freemen get their discussion of such things on other parts of the web like survivalist forums. I have visited a few such forums and when the denizens get around to talking politics a lot of freeman-like stuff gets said.

Or is it the case that freemen just go down to the corner cafe and spent their fiat money (money gotten from selling the Fiat)?

[NYGman]

Good ole' Bertie Burt was big on canning. He actually did a very interesting radio show all about it. Canning meat and veg was a love of his, and something he talked passionately about. He was fun to listen to with his west country accent and all. Shame he didn't just stick to that.

[Chaos]

they only have gardens of hopes and dreams.

[Burnaby49]

Rob in the Page family has been working away for almost a decade trying to survive on hard-scrabble farming;

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=9407

[Hanslune]

My impression is that they are urban parasites. Gardening, especially gardening to produce enough food to live on can be a bit of work.

[The Observer]

Harry, Harry
Quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With sovrun trash
and a lack of cash
It seems to be real slow.

- with apologies to Mother Goose.

[bmxninja357]

there are a few that are great gardeners. magpie on wfs for example. she does a lot of her own food. many pictures of this on wfs if you dug around.

jackieg claims to be a farmer but in actuality has a couple acres at most and i dont believe him to be a winning farmer. in an argument about potatoes he made claim to growing greater than the record amount so i think he is full of it all the way around.

theres some gmo threads that show how little most know about food. most drink the kool-aid hard on matters of agriculture. many still believing all the anti gmo, natural news crap.

there is a few who tried aquaponics which can be good if you have a properly working system. there is one place near edmonton where i am that pumps out a good amount of food but i havent seen anyone in the opca crowd with a properly working system. i think the time and cost might still be prohibitive.

i think it comes down to where the opca folks live and how seriously they take there food. i would go so far as to say the gardens per person would be about the same as society in general.

and who has time for gardening with all that word salad to send off registered mail?

peace
ninj

[eric]

Deano tried growing a few things... More serious note, most Canadian Fmotl types appear to be in a situation in life (living in a slummy apartment in the city) that they don't have the resources to do anything more than a backyard vegetable garden, probably in the same proportion as the rest of the population. They talk a good line, but haven't practiced what they preach. Semi-serious home gardeners on an acreage with FMOTL leanings are a pretty quiet lot, usually they have learned the practical aspects of what they are doing growing up and they have the advantage of picking up a few bucks from a pension, etc from the evil gumm'int. "Real Farming" as practiced in the modern age is totally beyond the average FMOTL sympathizer's intellectual capacity or physical grasp. Yes, I know, and interact every day, with real farmers who have OPCA leanings. Modern farming is not wearing a pair of coveralls, chewing on a straw, while spending a few hours watching Ol Bessie in the field, and then going home to a homecooked supper from GMO free, locally produced food, and spending 6 hours on the net discussing the intracicies of avoiding paying my mortgage. Hint: - for the cost of a decent tractor, I wouldn't even want to calculate out a combine, I could buy a half dozen BMW's.
...Eric the pig farmer, who I admit just finished off a fine roast chicken purchased from a FMOTL sympathizer. I need my nutrition since tomorrow I have to re-organize roughly 100 pregnant ladies, worth 1000 dollars net each when they farrow to the farm and it's something I do every Wednesday with a new group of weekly breedings of one hundred girls. Welcome to modern farming....

[Wake Up! Productions]

Deano tried growing a few things...

I was wondering when someone was going to get around to mentioning Dean Clifford's "garden" !!!

[notorial dissent]

The REAL big problem with having a "garden" or growing things the way you are talking about is that it has to have space to do it to begin with, and then it takes a LOT of work, usually hard work to get anything much to happen. It isn't something that can be done in a spare 15 minutes, it is constant and continual work. Something that the short attention crowd would find hard to maintain. Hydroponics is not a bad idea if space is at a premium, but the technology has its own level of work involved and we are back to my last comment.

[arayder]

The REAL big problem with having a "garden" or growing things the way you are talking about is that it has to have space to do it to begin with, and then it takes a LOT of work, usually hard work to get anything much to happen. It isn't something that can be done in a spare 15 minutes, it is constant and continual work. Something that the short attention crowd would find hard to maintain. Hydroponics is not a bad idea if space is at a premium, but the technology has its own level of work involved and we are back to my last comment.

Not to change the subject from gardening, but independence from the society and government is also enhanced by solar panels, reusing everything, compost piles (a part of the garden), rain barrels, a bicycle and a simple debt free life style.

I don't want to imply that any freeman who doesn't live like a hippy farmer isn't a real freeman. The life just doesn't work for everyone.

I'm just saying being off the grid, or nearly so, means less reliance on "the corporate government".

[notorial dissent]

No argument with anything you've said, and in fact all quite true, and not necessarily a hippy thing either. The kicker though, is that that lifestyle requires a fair amount of real hard work at one point or another, and usually a lot of it in order for it to really work. Or to put it another way, being off grid can really be a lot of work unless you are going to go hide in a hovel or cave somewhere and beg for a living.

[arayder]

My sense is that a few gurus and wannabe gurus have sold the rank and file on the notion that there is no such thing as a halfway, halfhearted type of freeman. I think this is due to the competition that goes on between the gurus to develop the most outlandish and all encompassing theory.

Woe be to the guru who tells the troops they are just going to have to come to grips with having a SIN so they can have bank accounts. . .or that their job is going to require them to get some sort of license.

In the one-ups-manship of the guru competition none of the freeman elite dares tell the rank and file that growing a garden and getting solar panels is a start.

The competition between the gurus is so great that the battle of bad ideas has escalated into a game to see who can develop the most popular version of the notion that the government is supposed to financially support freemen.

Ironically it's the furthest thing from the original notion of what a freeman was supposed to be.

[netnaznav]

Where I live there's a rather large Amish community. Basically their own self-contained economy, they do interface with the rest of the world but are certainly well-equipped to make a go of it alone should they have to. Their society is held together not by internet forums or youtube videos, but by blood and religion built on a solid foundation of agriculture. An Amish barn-raising is quite a glorious event, and they get it together without social media.

This may be prejudicial, but I severely doubt that the freeman community (at least as it appears on the internet) could pull off a stunt like that, not to mention everything that has to happen after the barn is raised.

[Burnaby49]

I once wrote that most of them couldn't organize a one-man pub crawl. My opinion hasn't changed.

[arayder]

I once wrote that most of them couldn't organize a one-man pub crawl. My opinion hasn't changed.

Some of 'em can organize this much. . .the freeman guru, tells the freeman mark, who has a little ready cash, that he can get a piece of the world's wealth (which has been stolen by NWO, Jewish bankers, Vatican shape shifters) if he just pays for a membership in the guru's group.

We all know that trying to mine the meager wealth of freeman wannabes isn't a lucrative business, but it's the best the guru can do.

As the scam starts a couple of marks help out by bragging about the seeming success of the A4V, 96 fix or WeRe check. Hey, the lights are still on and the landlord hasn't thrown them out. . .yet.

When it all goes bad the guru finds somebody to blame, maybe the mark himself, and moves on.

The guru's take can't be much more than a McDonald's check. . .but at least he's "free in his mind".

[notorial dissent]

netnaznav, I don't think there is any question that the Amish contingent are doing exactly what the Freemen would like to pretend to do, the defining difference, is that what the Amish are doing requires a real and tremendous amount of serious, continual hard work.

I once wrote that most of them couldn't organize a one-man pub crawl. My opinion hasn't changed.

I don't think there is any question about it. They can't agree with each other well enough to keep a forum really alive, and I don't think could manage to qualify for the big table at Denny's if they tried. They are a movement and lifestyle in their minds only.

I still question if most/any of the gurus actually believe the nonsense they are spewing. I think some of them do to a degree, but if they really believed it they would be living it instead of trying to sell to the reality challenged. As was pointed out, it has to be a pretty much hand to mouth existence considering that most of the faithful can barely feed and cloth themselves let alone support their newest and greatest guru.

[arayder]

I am reminded of Meta, who used to post over on the WFS forum.

He lived about a 120 miles north east of me in Covington Kentucky, right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He used to endlessly spout obscure freeman theory and seemed incapable of doing anything other than bitching about the powers that be and making a public nuisance of himself.

If memory serves he managed to get into it with the power company, the public housing authority, veterans affairs and finally the public library were he got arrested for verbally abusing a staff person who wouldn't let him use a restroom that was being cleaned.

I commented at the time that there were plenty of small towns in northern Kentucky he could go to in order to make his benefits check stretch, grow a garden, hunt, make himself useful and improve his health. The county sheriff wouldn't have given a rat's arse about his craziness as long as he behaved half as well as the other good ole boys.

I think he just chose to be a pain and freemanism was his little weapon of choice.

[grixit]

I watched about 3 seasons of Survivor a while back. And i noticed a few commonalities. Despite knowing what kind of conditions they were heading into, i never saw a participant who had learned how to make fire. In fact the only time anyone ever made fire before the producers gave them a flint was when someone happened to have thick glasses and thought of using them to focus sunlight. Only a few participants were accomplished swimmers, while a large proportion couldn't swim at all. Many of them had impractical clothing. Many of them couldn't cook, fish or make the simplest shelter. A lot were out of shape but some who were otherwise in good shape didn't know how to pace themselves or monitor their sun exposure.

I think those are the kind of people who want to join one of these no sweat communes.

[arayder]

I watched about 3 seasons of Survivor a while back. And i noticed a few commonalities. Despite knowing what kind of conditions they were heading into, i never saw a participant who had learned how to make fire. In fact the only time anyone ever made fire before the producers gave them a flint was when someone happened to have thick glasses and thought of using them to focus sunlight. Only a few participants were accomplished swimmers, while a large proportion couldn't swim at all. Many of them had impractical clothing. Many of them couldn't cook, fish or make the simplest shelter. A lot were out of shape but some who were otherwise in good shape didn't know how to pace themselves or monitor their sun exposure.

I think those are the kind of people who want to join one of these no sweat communes.

There is a set of skills that one needs to make a go of it in 21st century western democracies.

IMHO they break down into:

Having a useful or marketable skill. This is a skill somebody will pay you for, or you can use to put food on the table.

Maintenance of health and good personal relationships. The ability to be healthy, drug free and have supportive friends and family.

The building and maintenance of personal wealth. The avoidance of debt and the wise investment of savings. Planning for the future.

The development of a sane, heathy spiritual and emotional core of being. Learning to be happy, resilient and hopeful.

The commitment to contribute to the betterment of your family, or neighborhood or community. You might run for mayor. Or you might simply help the 90 year old next door get to his medical appointments.

Your milage may vary.

For the life of me I don't see how sitting around bitching about the state of the world and developing convoluted theories about how the world got in that state does one ding dang thing to help somebody develop any of these skills.