Month: February 2011

Quote of the Day – History Doesn’t Repeat Itself

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…But It Does Rhyme Edition:

I am more convinced now … that the West has gone over the tipping point in its terminal decline. That intelligent people, or people who claim to be intelligent, (I have in mind the talking heads in the U.S. media such as Chris Matthews or Fareed Zakaria) cannot make the difference between the sham of the Muslim Brotherhood talking about freedom and democracy and the generic thirst in man to be free. These are the people who have like the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They are glibly about to put the Lenins of our time into trains heading for Moscows of our time….

Salim Mansur as related by Claire Berlinski

(h/t: Instapundit)

RTWT.  There’s still hope, but it’s fading fast.  Billy Beck’s Endarkenment comes ever nearer.

Renormalizing the Gun Culture

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…or “Scaring the White People”?

I think I first ran across the “Scaring the White People” meme at Say Uncle, and again a bit later. I took up the theme myself.

As I see it, there are essentially three “gun cultures” in this nation: the criminal gun culture, the genteel gun culture, and the gonzo gun culture.

The criminal gun culture is self-explanatory. It exists everywhere, even (perhaps especially) where gun ownership by individuals is heavily restricted or forbidden. The genteel gun culture is the culture of what many of us term the Fudds, the people whose only interest in firearms is for hunting, for example,  or who only shoot sporting clays and see “no reason” for any type of firearm other than what they themselves own.  “Nobody needs” type X gun, as far as they’re concerned.

The gonzo gun culture is the one that encompasses all other forms of shooting and collecting, from those of us who shoot IPSC and USPSA to those who spend literally thousands of dollars annually just feeding their Class III habit. We’re the ones who shoot a lot, and like pretty much anything that goes “bang!”  True, there is some overlap between groups, but we still hear from the genteels from time to time.

Then there’s the two groups who are not gunnies:  the ones who don’t think about them, and the ones who are afraid of them.  And there are a lot more of those than there are of us.

For years the only attention that firearms really got in the media was either crime reports on the news, or the occasional hunting show. Perhaps Wide World of Sports would do a piece on pheasant hunting in Montana, or elk in Wyoming. (Robin Williams did a funny riff about “hunting the monarch butterfly with the .44 Magnum” in one of his routines years ago.)  With the explosion of cable and the need for more content, we got shows like Jim Zumbo Outdoors, but Jim was a member of the genteel gun culture, as evidenced by the Great Zumbo Incident of 2007.

We also got shows like American Shooter with Jim Scoutten, and now his Shooting USA, both arguably a much broader-based view of the shooting sports and recreational shooting in general. Still, Jim isn’t what I’d call an avid supporter of the gonzo gun culture.

Now we have shows like the Outdoor Channel’s Wednesday night lineup of Shooting Gallery (which recently did an entire show on Joe Huffman’s Boomershoot event), Best Defense, the aforementioned Shooting USA, Sighting In, American Guardian, American Rifleman, Impossible Shots, and Cowboys. (Michael Bane is definitely a member of the gonzo gun culture!) Last year brought us History Channel’s Top Shots, about to begin its second season. We’ve actually begun to see some relatively fair treatment in the print media. What there is is overwhelmed by the rest, but still, it’s a sign that the times have been changing.

Well, maybe not the Times.

The renormalization of firearms in American culture is proceeding apace.

Tonight I watched my first episode of the Discovery Channel’s Sons of Guns, another “reality” show, this time about a Class III II SOT (Special Occupational Taxpayer) manufacturer in Louisiana. I haven’t seen that many short-barreled, suppressed, full-auto firearms in my life, and especially not on TV.

It must give Joan Peterson, Paul Helmke, Sarah Brady, Josh Sugarmann et al. nightmares.

And I can’t help but wonder if it “frightens the white people.” The show I saw did indicate, once, that you can’t just walk into a gun shop, buy an NFA restricted weapon and walk out the door with it, but it gave that impression at least one other time. The show I watched involved the assembly of a full-auto Browning M2 “Ma Deuce” machinegun from a parts kit, including the milling of the sideplates to convert the kit from semi- to full-auto.

It never mentioned that only licensed manufacturers can do that legally.  No mention of the 1986 ban was made.  No mention of NFA registration was made.  Just buy a ($6,000) parts kit, and put it together!

It showed the owner’s daughter making sales of multiple quantities of short-barreled suppressed “assault weapons” at “dealer pricing,” without bothering to mention that those sales were going to other licensed dealers. It showed her selling two short-barreled folding-stock suppressed 10/22 rifles, and knocking $500 off the price in exchange for a guided bowfishing trip. No mention of an NFA delay on that one.

This show, I think, could be a treasure-trove of propaganda for The Other Side. After all, remember what the Violence Policy Center wrote in its effort to ban “assault weapons”:

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.

(Bold emphasis mine.)  They’ve made it clear that lying to the public in order to frighten them into passing gun bans is perfectly acceptable, and we’ve seen that tactic used more than once.  It’s been a staple of this blog and several others pointing out incidents where it’s done.

My point is, we shouldn’t be helping them.  Personally, I like the show, but I know what’s being left out.  Joe and Jane Average haven’t got a clue.

Discuss.  I’m interested in what you think.

UPDATE:  It’s a topic of discussion at AR15.com.

If the Bush Administration Did This, There’d be Rioting

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Sedition (noun): incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government.

Karl Denninger of Market-Ticker.org ruminates on the Obama administration’s reaction to the federal court decision finding Obamacare™©® unconstitutional. CBS reports:

The White House officials said that the ruling would not have an impact on implementation of the law, which is being phased in gradually. (The individual mandate, for example, does not begin until 2014.) They said that states cannot use the ruling as a basis to delay implementation in part because the ruling does not rest on “anything like a conventional Constitutional analysis.”

Regardless of whether that’s true or not, the fact remains that a decision has been handed down by a duly authorized court, and that ruling has force of law.

Denninger expounds:

So now we have a White House that has declared its intent to ignore a declaratory judgment.

The Administration has no right to do this.

Obama’s White House has exactly two options:

*Comply with the ruling. This means that any and all activity authorized or mandated by the Statute cease now.

*File an appeal and ask for a stay pending its hearing. If said stay is granted, then the ruling is held pending consideration.

That’s it.

Folks, this is clear.

And then he cites the relevant portion of the decision.

This is how “rule of law” works.  But we’ve seen from the Holder Justice Department, the Obama administration believes there’s one rule for some groups, and different law for other groups.  We’ve seen from the Sebelius HHS department that there’s one rule for most of us, and waivers for other groups.  This is just an extension of the same mentality:  “The law?  The law doesn’t apply to us.” 

Let me repeat the words of 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski from his dissent to the denial to re-hear the Silveria v. Lockyer case en banc:

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

With each passing day that contingency seems less and less improbable.

Hat tip to Weird and Pissed Off for the pointer.  That’s two in a row.

Quote of the Day – Education Edition

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Americans have an instinctive understanding of the economic contradictions of collective farming on the Soviet or Maoist models. We understand why socialist enterprises such as Venezuela’s state-run petroleum companies are destined to failure. But we fail to recognize that many of our own systems — using central planning to implement the public provision of non-public goods — are organized along precisely the same lines. The outstanding local example of this is the American public-school system.
—

The aim of public education is, and has always been, to make members of the public more standardized and thus better suited for incorporation into The Plan. It is unsurprising that socialists have taken up the cause with verve.

Kevin D. Williamson, Socialism is Back, National Review Online

RTWT.  I think I need to add his book to my pile.

The Comprachicos

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In 1970 Ayn Rand penned one of her signature essays, The Comprachicos, beginning it with her translation of an excerpt from Victor Hugo’s 1869 The Man Who Laughs:

The comprachicos, or comprapequeños, were a strange and hideous nomadic association, famous in the seventeenth century, forgotten in the eighteenth, unknown today …

Comprachicos, as well as comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word that means “child-buyers.” The comprachicos traded in children. They bought them and sold them.

They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is a different industry. And what did they make of these children?

Monsters.

Why monsters?

To laugh.

The people need laughter; so do the kings. Cities require side-show freaks or clowns; palaces require jesters …

To succeed in producing a freak, one must get hold of him early. A dwarf must be started when he is small …

Hence, an art. There were educators. They took a man and turned him into a miscarriage; they took a face and made a muzzle. They stunted growth; they mangled features. This artificial production of teratological cases had its own rules. It was a whole science. Imagine an inverted orthopedics. Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint. Where God had put harmony, they put deformity. Where God had put perfection, they brought back a botched attempt. And, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it is the botched that was perfect …

The practice of degrading man leads one to the practice of deforming him. Deformity
completes the task of political suppression …

The comprachicos had a talent, to disfigure, that made them valuable in politics. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was the iron mask, but that is an awkward means. One cannot populate Europe with iron masks; deformed mountebanks, however, run through the streets without appearing implausible; besides, an iron mask can be torn off, a mask of flesh cannot. To mask you forever by means of your own face, nothing can be more ingenious …

The comprachicos did not merely remove a child’s face, they removed his memory. At least, they removed as much of it as they could. The child was not aware of the mutilation he had suffered. This horrible surgery left traces on his face, not in his mind. He could remember at most that one day he had been seized by some men, then had fallen asleep, and later they had cured him. Cured him of what? He did not know. Of the burning by sulphur and the incisions by iron, he remembered nothing. During the operation, the comprachicos made the little patient unconscious by means of a stupefying powder that passed for magic and suppressed pain …

In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.

I ran across a post at Dr. Sanity today, YA GOTTA DO WHAT YA GOTTA DO, where she expounds on the end-product of today’s “postmodern educational system,” concluding:

I think we are witnessing the consequences of having the best minds of several generations systematically hobbled and and mutilated by the gurus of political correctness and moral relativity. I think that the essential nihilism of the postmodernism intellectual craze is coming to full fruition and that the decline of leadership is just one obvious symptom. Even more insidius is a steep decline in the ability to think that is coupled with a real contempt for reason, truth and objective reality.

Joseph Stalin once pointed out that, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Our children have been deliberately targeted for decades; they have been in the crosshairs of the dead-end philosophy that drives the postmodern progressivism of today’s ‘intellectual’ elites. Sadly, those elites have scored a bullseye.

No, there are no psychological breakthroughs on the horizon for these reality-challenged minds, or for their mentors. There is only the mindless parroting of the dysfunctional ideology for which they have gladly sacrificed their souls.

I was immediately reminded of Rand’s Comprachicos.

Please, read Dr. Sanity’s post and all its related links, then read The Comprachicos. Rand called it all the way back in 1970. It had already been going on for decades (Rand blamed Kant), and she knew exactly what the outcome would be even then:

It is the educational establishment that has created this national disaster. It is philosophy that has created the educational establishment. The anti-rational philosophic trend of the past two hundred years has run its course and reached its climax. To oppose it will require a philosophical revolution or, rather, a rebirth of philosophy. Appeals to “home, church, mother and tradition” will not do; they never did. Ideas can be fought only by means of ideas. The educational establishment has to be fought—from bottom to top, from cause to consequences, from nursery schools to universities, from basic philosophy to campus riots, from without and from within.

This last is addressed to the many intelligent youths who are aware of the state of higher education and refuse to go to college or, having gone, drop out in revulsion. They are playing into the comprachicos’ hands. If the better minds desert the universities, this country will reach a situation in which the incompetent and the second-rate will carry the official badge of the intellect and there will be no place for the first-rate and independent to function or even to hide. To preserve one’s mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. The time spent in college is not wasted, if one knows how to use the comprachicos against themselves: one learns in reverse—by subjecting their theories to the most rigorously critical examination and discovering what is false and why, what is true, what are the answers.

As to the drugged contingents of hippies and activists, I should like to address the following to those among them who may still be redeemable, as well as to those who may be tempted to join their hordes.

The modern comprachicos have an advantage over their ancient predecessors: when a victim was mutilated physically, he retained the capacity to discover who had done it. But when a victim is mutilated mentally, he clings to his own destroyers as his masters and his only protectors against the horror of the state which they have created; he remains as their tool and their play-thing—which is part of their racket.

It hadn’t quite “reached its climax” in 1970, but she wasn’t far off. It’s taken another generation to really play out.

Edited to add this, via Instapundit on “Tiger Mothers” and their end product (regardless of their ethnicity), the crème de la crème of Ivy League university graduates:

But here’s the thing. And here the point has been made easier to make by the curious fact that Tiger Mom is a Yale Law School professor and as Professor Bainbridge has pointed out, it seems almost an epidemic among faculty parents in New Haven. My fear is that little tiger kittens are not being groomed to make things that you and I can buy if we feel like it. I’m afraid, call me paranoid if you like, that those little achievers will want to grow up to, well, rule. . . . Then I worry that all this fierce intelligence, all this ambition, all this work are going toward the building of world in which my children will be mere, well, what do you call the people who support those who so intelligently manage things from on top. Not to mention the unbelievably well educated 35 year old who will tell me someday I didn’t score well enough in some algorithm I can’t even understand to get my arteries bypassed or my prostate cancer treated. I want to live in a world, and I want my children to as well, where we are free individuals, and geniuses can sell us stuff if we want to buy it. When I suspect the little elites of tomorrow are just being made more formidable still, it excites not my admiration as much as my anxiety.

Tom Smith, The Right Coast – The last thing I have to say about Tiger Mothers I hope

Remember Stalin: “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

It’s no laughing matter.