We have a troll. His name is Zen. He opines at length about how terrible it is to port one’s ideas and values to any state of the union other than, presumably, the one in which one was born.

Zen writes, “I’m even more turned off towards [sic] this [whole annoying citizen initiative and helping others thing] then [sic] before. You come into a state, hire some goons to bug people for petition signitures [sic] (if they don’t just fabricate them), and get the laws changed to your liking, then leave the state. Democracy at it’s [sic] finest!” (For more of this, click into his comments here and here and here.)

Given his goonishly Orwellian rhetoric, it’s doubtful that Mr. Zen “even more” dislikes the right of citizen initiative than before he was exposed to the light of reason.

In any case, I suppose it would be asking too much of Zen-san to ask him to consider the fact that the work of all petition circulators is being made ever more arbitrarily difficult by a political establishment which does not want Oklahoma citizens to exercise their constitutionally protected right of citizen initiative at all. I suppose it would also be asking too much to ask him to consider the fact that only registered Oklahoma voters get to vote on a question that makes it to Oklahoma ballot–which means that if elections are properly conducted it can only be registered Oklahoma voters who ultimately change the law in exercise of their citizen initiative rights, regardless of how much assisted they may be in their exercise of that right by Oklahoma residents who previously resided somewhere else. I suppose it would also be asking too much to ask him to peruse the background of the Oklahoma TABOR effort as laid out by Mr. Jacob on this very site. But perhaps it would be asking too much to ask the Zenster to consider any pertinent facts and meaning of the case whatsoever.

In addition to offering the penetrating insights that persons who peacefully abet democracy are “goons,” and that the aims of the anti-initiative-rights political establishment of Oklahoma are coextensive with those of the general public who would seek to exercise those rights, Zen declares (proudly?) that he’s “the kind of person that believes it’s not really any of my business how Oklahoman’s [sic] go about conducting their business in whatever ideological form they choose to do so in so long [sic] as it doesn’t cause me or my community direct or indirect harm.” Thus, we are supposed to believe that there are no potential connections whatever between what Oklahoma politicians feel entitled to do to persons in Oklahoma and what out-of-state politicians, emulating their example, may feel entitled to do to persons in whichever state of the land Zen resides (a belief belied only by all political-cultural history). We are also supposed to believe that it is only right and just that love of liberty and regard for the well-being of fellow humans stop on a dime at the edge of a political or geographic border; that it is incontinently hegemonic to ever seek to influence for the better the political future of any region beyond one’s own immediate turf.

Well, why? Why were the American revolutionaries wrong to travel between Philadelphia and Boston, and vice versa? Why was Lafayette wrong to come to the newly united States (from France, Zen) to aid the revolutionary cause? Why was Martin Luther King wrong to help organize civil rights protests in areas of the South outside his own state (and should he have stayed in Georgia where he was born…or in Alabama where he became pastor)? Why is it wrong for any advocate of ideas he believes in to either a) travel or b) say anything to anybody about what he believes once he gets where he’s going? Why is it wrong, even, for a politician in one state to hire as a campaign manager someone living in another state at the time of hiring?

Why, for that matter, is it wrong to publish ideas and advice in newspapers and journals and books that might be read by and hence influence somebody living in some other place or time? It would be sad if Zen’s reading matter were by his own logic confined to authors who live right where he lives, writing only on political topics immediately affecting only local denizens, via words printed and delivered only locally.

But if Zen-troll is so scrupulously determined to abstain from influencing any matters political beyond the boundaries of the block or town or state he grew up in–and if, as he implies, he is also no resident of Oklahoma–why then is he seeking to influence the political debate in Oklahoma in the direction of more emphatically stomping the citizen initiative rights of Oklahoma citizens? And in particular in the direction of ending the liberty of Paul Jacob, Rick Carpenter, and Susan Johnson, whom he takes pains to stipulate deserve neither his sympathy nor his support?