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Remember On Guillotines and Gibbets?.

An essay I wrote back in December? Part of what it was about was the cockroach-like endurance of bad Leftist ideas:

If it is so blindingly obvious to many of us that the ideologies behind, for example, gun control and welfare are so fundamentally flawed, why are these ideologies not dead? Not only are they not dead, in many ways, still flourishing? Why is the demonstrably erroneous ideology of the Left still advanced by people who just want to keep turning up the power, with the resultant escalation of failure?

And I answered my question:

I submit, it is because the Left has never been significantly checked as it strives to spread its flawed ideology. Leftists occupy the majority of journalism positions, both as reporters and editors.

—

Leftists make up an overwhelming majority of educators and administrators in both primary and secondary education. Through these vectors of media and public education the Left has spread its ideology largely without any effective opposition for literally decades. Bear in mind also, I’m not attributing this occupation of media and education to some “vast Left-wing conspiracy.” It’s a natural outgrowth of a philosophy that builds unquestioning “true believers” who take their flawed ideology as gospel and are thereby inspired to evangelize. A fundamental tenet of Socialism is to proselytize the proletariat so that it recognizes the oppressive bourgeoisie and can then take steps to pull it down. The two places to best accomplish this are media and schools, so the evangelical migrate there, and steadily chip, chip, chip away at the proletariat, spreading the “hate the bourgeoisie” meme that produces women who tell mayors, in all seriousness, “It’s my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them.”

Well I just came across a July 27 Theodore Dalrymple piece that illustrates my point, The Triumph of Reason? An excerpt:

In Australia recently, I shared a public platform with an educationist, who had won awards for social innovation in the field of education for disadvantaged minorities. I was looking forward to what she had to say.

I was soon in a towering rage, however. She uttered some of the most foolish cliches of radical education theory, now about 40 years old – theories that I had fondly thought were now behind us, such as the harmful effects upon the children of disadvantaged ethnic groups or families of an emphasis on education as learning, with particular reference to the damage done to their self-esteem by the dominant culture’s fetish about reading and writing.

—

This was all said with such smugness, with such an expression of beatific complacency and self-content, that I wanted to get up and strangle the innovator there and then. As a believer in the necessity of self-expression, she would no doubt have understood.

In Guillotines I wrote:

We’ve not had much success (at defeating bad ideas) because we’re not “true believers.” (M)ost of those of us who recognize the flawed ideology of the Left have to earn a living. The efforts we make in fighting them are on or own time and on our own dime. The Left is getting paid to evangelize, often on our tax dollars. We shine the light, but when it passes they come back out and keep on going. It’s tiring, soul-sapping, and we’re overwhelmed by the media and education vectors.

—

When (or if) the Left finally achieves unbridled control, it will continue in its cognitive dissonance, and keep turning up the power until guillotines are erected in public squares or mass starvation is seen again as a regrettable but necessary step towards Utopia.

Dalrymple:

Halfway through my own reply, however, I suddenly became bored. Why do I spend so much time arguing against such obvious rubbish, which should be both self-refuting and auto-satirizing the moment someone utters it? Why not just go and read a good book?

The problem is that nonsense can and does go by default. It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference. And the reward of monomania? Power.

It’s nice to know that we’re still on the same frequency, though I too am getting to the point where the idea of physical violence as a solution is getting to be less and less abhorrent.

Quote of the Day.

From Ian Hamet:

Once, we were a nation of competence. We’ve become, I’m afraid, a nation of bureaucrats, middle-managers, and video game obsessives, with a few competent people holding it all together.

Please Give.

As I write this, I’m waiting for the Salvation Army’s secure server page to load so that I can donate toward disaster relief. I’m taking the slow loading as a good sign that their servers are overloaded by other people doing what I’m attempting. For reasons I won’t get into, I’m not a big fan of the Red Cross (as always, YMMV) so I want to give to organizations that I believe are trustworthy and will use the money well. The Salvation Army seems to me a good one, but by all means pick your own. They are myriad.

(Whoops! Server timed out. Gotta try again…)

If you’ve been near a radio or TV or on the web in the last couple of days, I know you know that tens of thousands of families are now homeless, jobless, and quite probably possess only that which they can physically carry. These aren’t people in some third-world country on the other side of the planet, these are our fellow citizens (who probably dug into their own pockets for the victims of the tsunami just a few months ago.) These people need our help. They’ve got next to nothing. Anything helps. There’s a couple hundred million of us. No need to give ’till it hurts.

Just give ’till it twinges a bit.

(Server timed out again. Guess I’ll try the old-fashioned way. I’ll use the telephone.)

UPDATE: Phone lines were overloaded, too. Finally got through via internet.

UPDATE, 9/1: James Lileks today:

FEMA’s list of charities is here. Note anything about what sort of organizations are doing the hard work? I keep looking for the Objectivist Mutual Aid Society, but it never pops up.

Of course not. The free market is supposed to take care of all that. The root of all evil is altruism, you know. See what I mean about James’s sense of humor?

To Louisiana and Nearby Parts: Good Luck

Y’all? Get the hell out of there. And I hope like hell that when you come back, everthing will still be upright and tight. As for New Orleans: I hope that y’all still have a city after this, and not just a bigger salt-water Lake Pontchartrain with some interesting places to fish.

It looks like that storm-from-hell has finally arrived.

Sunday Ruminations, or “Hey Garçon! (Ego) Check, Please!”

A few days ago commenter Lucian Samosata wrote:

As a student of philosophy and political theory, I must say I honestly believe that you are one of this century’s foremost thinkers on those subjects. I hope that your value becomes more widely appreciated. Have you thought about writing a book?

Flattery will get you everywhere nowhere, Lucian. (Suckup!) ( j/k!)

I replied:

I’ve thought about it, but I doubt I could sell it.

I’ve thought about it a lot more than that, though, so I’ve decided to expound on the topic a bit today.

I’ve been studying the topic of individual rights, with special emphasis on the right to arms of course, since about 1994. I’ve read dozens of books and easily thousands of essays, articles, trial decisions and dissents, web-posts, and papers in that time. From 1995 through 2000 I played around in the Usenet newsgroups; mostly in the napalm-splashed mosh-pit of talk.politics.guns. In late 2000 I was one of the early posters to the now-defunct Themestream.com, where I wrote a couple dozen essays, and even had a couple reprinted at EnterStageRight.com and KeepandBearArms.com. I’ve been a member of AR15.com since Themestream folded. In 2002 I invested eight months and over 1800 posts at DemocraticUnderground.com (link left cold on purpose). I’ve been running this blog for over two years now, starting a little over a year after DU’s administrator “Skinner” personally kicked me out of his approved-members-only groupthink echo chamber. All told, I’ve written probably well in excess of a million words on the topic (with side trips to education, current affairs, and other sundry matters).

You’d think it would be fairly easy to assemble a book out of all that. Maybe. If some university somewhere offered a Master’s program in the 2^nd Amendment, I’m willing to bet I could sit down and whip up a qualifying thesis in fairly short order, but the thing I’ve discovered is that this subject is pretty complex, and consequently pretty dry. On the surface, of course, it’s very straightforward, but decades of propaganda, of urbanization, of changing demographics, have altered the beliefs and perceptions of a large proportion of the population. And therein lies the rub.

Sure, I could write a book, but who would read it? I’ve noted before that TSM is largely preaching to the choir. I view my time spent at DU as some of the most challenging and educational (though I often felt as though I needed to be wearing a pressurized biohazard environment suit). Being challenged to defend your beliefs and to defeat another’s using verifiable fact and accurate citations is very educational, even when it’s an obvious exercise in futility. I haven’t had much of that recently, so when I stumbled upon Alex at Ian Hamet’s Banana Oil! blog I felt like I had the opportunity once again to actually argue a point or six, futility be damned.

Alex said this at one point in our ongoing exchange:

This entire blog is written to demean, make fun of, belittle and generally harass those who don’t agree with you.

Nope. It’s written to illuminate, expose, correct and educate. The demeaning, belittling, and harassing is just an extra added side benefit. Dr. Michael S. Brown wrote one time that the anti-gun crusade has been a decades-long slow-motion hate crime against guns and gun owners, and I for one am just a bit weary of it. Giving some back is occasionally cathartic.

But it wouldn’t make a very good book, I think. Too much of that is too off-putting. And too much dry exposition is as well.

I’m well aware that I am nowhere near as eloquent as Bill Whittle. Nor am I as wickedly humorous (or quick) as James Lileks, or as surgically observant as Theodore Dalrymple, or even as technically precise as Steven Den Beste. But most of all, I’m starkly aware that even if I wrote a book, the people who most need to read it would be those least likely to.

Writing a book on “philosophy and political theory” would be a huge amount of effort with very little return on investment. I’m mostly a technically proficient essayist. I can live with that. Apparently so can the two or three hundred or so of you who read this blog on a regular basis. (And most of you wouldn’t buy the book anyway!)