The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
By complete coincidence I was pointed to a fascinating interview of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua on the topic of her book Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall. It runs about 55 minutes:
If this topic piques your interest, it’s well worth your time. I’ve got to get a copy of her book.
Spock has a Beard!.
I stumbled upon an alternate universe!
There’s a blog named The Largest Minority! Unsurprisingly, the authors are liberal Leftist “Progressives.” Ah, the hell with it. Let’s call a spade a spade – they’re Leftists.
Just remember – It is far easier for we as civilized men to behave like barbarians than it is for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men! š
I LOVE AMERICA!!.
I swear, you could only do this here. From AR15.com, a report that a retired airline pilot has built himself a full-scale Spitfire replica. With pictures! Here’s the description:
One of my best friends decided he wanted a Spitfire – so he built one!!
This is an actual 100% full scale Spitfire built from plans.
The internal fuselage is constructed of a 2.5″ chrome moly tube “birdcage”.
The exterior fuselage is bulkhead formers bolted to the birdcage and then covered with aluminum.
The wing is one piece and constructed entirely out of wood – Spruce.
The wooden main spar is massive, almost 18″ square at the center section and weighs about 600lbs just by itself.
The vertical/horizontal stabilizers as well as the elevators and rudder are also constructed of wood.
The canopy is an actual salvaged Spitfire canopy.
The lower forward engine cowl is constructed of carbon fiber while the top engine cowl is aluminum.
The engine is an aircraft 1400HP Allison V12 (originally from a P39).
The propeller is an overhauled DC3 prop.
Took him and a friend many years to build but it is a work of art
That it is!
Click on the links for the pictures.
Photo 1, photo 2, photo 3, photo 4, photo 5, photo 6, photo 7
The best thing about it? It’s based here in Arizona!
Couldn’t Happen to a More Deserving Guy.
Ex-Sheriff Ken Jenne of Broward County Florida has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison:
Fla. Sheriff Gets Prison for Corruption
By CURT ANDERSON
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) ā The former head of the largest sheriff’s office in Florida was sentenced to a year and a day in prison Friday after pleading guilty to federal corruption charges.
Ex-Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne, 60, had pleaded guilty in September to tax evasion and mail fraud conspiracy charges involving a series of questionable transactions, including getting money and favors from Broward Sheriff’s Office vendors and payments made on his behalf for a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Jenne was taken into custody immediately and will likely serve his term at a minimum-security prison camp, possibly in the Miami area, said his attorney, David Bogenschutz.
With good behavior, Jenne could be eligible for release in as little as nine months, his attorney said.
Federal prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas to impose a two-year sentence, the maximum possible under sentencing guidelines, saying Jenne had done immense damage to the office.
Two years? Is this all they could stick him with? From everything I’ve read Jenne was the most blatantly corrupt political hack since Torricelli.
“The people of Broward County shouldn’t have to choose between leaders who are effective and those who are law-abiding. They are entitled to both,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Axelrod said.
But Jenne, a former state senator and long one of Broward County’s leading Democratic politicians, sought a lenient sentence involving no prison time. He has already agreed to pay the IRS about $46,000 in back taxes, interest and penalties and has spent most of his life doing good works for Broward County, Bogenschutz said.
At least we don’t have to play “What political party does this criminal belong to?” Though they did wait until the sixth paragraph.
“Like no other public official in this county’s history, Ken Jenne has left an imprint that will be felt and enjoyed by generations to come,” Bogenschutz said in court papers.
Jenne was praised during Friday’s hearing by a who’s who of public figures, including former state Attorney General Bob Butterworth, former Senate president Jim Scott and many others who asked for leniency.
Every damned one of them should be investigated, too.
In arguing for no prison term, Jenne said he didn’t take taxpayer money, just got help from friends and associates. He noted that pleading guilty had already severely damaged his reputation and career.
I hope it’s ruined you.
But Dimitrouleas said Jenne’s crimes, committed by the county’s chief law enforcement officer, deserve at least some prison time.
SOME?!? They ought to throw his ass UNDER the jail.
“It’s a sad day for Broward County,” Dimitrouleas said. “It doesn’t promote respect for the law if the public views someone as getting a slap on the wrist.”
Although Dimitrouleas insisted on jail time, he also gave Jenne a break because inmates must serve every day of a one-year prison term. By making it a year and a day, the judge made Jenne eligible for release in as little as nine months for good behavior, Bogenschutz said.
“Judge Dimitrouleas did a very kind thing,” Bogenschutz said.
Dammit, they ought to make him serve it ALL.
My first introduction to Ken Jenne came in 2003 when he either duped CNN or they collaborated in making several pieces about the “Assault Weapons Ban.” In my opinion, CNN was a willing player. Since they I’ve payed attention to what was going on in his department.
About damned time.
Speaking of P-38’s…
Via Theo Spark (NSFW!) comes this interesting story of a crash-landed P-38 that was recently uncovered – literally.
Must be Globular Warmering.
Somehow I don’t think this one’s going to get the “Glacier Girl” treatment:
(Click for full size)
Damned shame. According to the story, “about 32 complete or partial airframes are believed to still exist.”
And how many Mustangs are still flying?
A Meme I Can Grok.
NRAhab asks “what are your five favorite airplanes, and why?”
I’m a fighter enthusiast. As someone once said,”There are only two kinds of aircraft: fighters and targets.” Here’s my list:
#5: The North American F-86 Sabre. Coming off possibly the best all-around fighter of WWII, the P-51 Mustang, North American reset the bar with the F-86 Sabre. Immediately after the war the first turbojet aircraft were brought into the military’s arsenal, but until the F-86 they were, at best, stopgap measures. The F-86 had speed, range, maneuverability, and firepower all in one package. The aircraft might have been slightly outclassed by the MiG-15, but the training of our pilots proved better than theirs, and the performance of the aircraft was up to the task. Besides, the little thing is just beautiful. (This was a tossup between the F-86 and the Me-262. The F-86 got the nod because it saw far more combat. But I am given to understand that the post-war tests of the Me-262 showed that it was superior to everything the Allies or the Soviets built up until the MiG-15 and the F-86. One wonders what a third- or fourth-generation Schwalbe might have been like.)
#4: The McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II. It started off life as a Navy all-weather fighter-bomber, but proved so good that the Air Force bought it. Remember, Navy aircraft have to be tough enough to survive controlled crash-landings on carriers, over and over and over again, so they tend to be built heavy to survive the abuse. The Phantom used titanium in its structure to give strength with (relative) lightness. Initially built without an on-board gun, this was rectified by the addition of a 20mm six-barreled Gatling, making it a real fighter. The F-4 held a number of speed, rate of climb, and other records for a long time. The F4G Wild Weasel variant was in service as recently as 1996. Not bad for an aircraft that entered service in 1960. Big, tough, fast, deadly, versatile, and beautiful. Check out that triangular tail and the cranked wings!
#3: The Fairchild-Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II aka “Warthog.” An aircraft designed around a 30mm armor-shattering six-barreled Gatling gun powerful enough to slow the aircraft down when fired? An aircraft with eight underwing hardpoints and three under the fuselage with enough lift to carry the same bombload as a B-17 bomber? An aircraft designed to take severe damage from ground fire and still get the pilot home? An aircraft home-based right here in Tucson? Not a fighter, per se, (even though two have shot down helicopters) but a ground-attack aircraft par excellence. Gotta go with this one.
#2: The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Not a fighter, but no fighter could touch it. In an era of analog gauges and slide rules, Kelly Johnson – creator of the P-38 – designed and built an aircraft that no one has touched (publicly) since. Constructed almost entirely of titanium (never done before), using fuel almost impossible to ignite, wearing radar-absorbing paint, designed to leak like a sieve until the aircraft reached operating temperature from the air friction of Mach 3 flight, able to fly faster, higher, longer than anything else, this thing is the epitome of aeronautical engineering. And it looks wicked. Nicknamed “Habu” by Okinawan residents near Kadena AFB due to its deadly appearance, how can you NOT love it?
#1: The Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It’s so different from anything before it that even as a child I found it fascinating. It was incredibly fast for its time. It was designed to carry four .50 caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon in a time when four .30 caliber machine guns was considered “heavy armament,” and they didn’t have to be regulated to intersect at some point in the distance – they were all in one group aimed directly ahead. This meant more rounds on target more easily. It had “long legs” – a nine hour combat range once Charles Lindberg got his hands on it. It was the aircraft in which America’s top two aerial aces flew. It was the plane used to kill Admiral Yamamoto. Fast, beautiful, deadly. Everything a fighter should be. And unique!
Or: “Language Manipulation” is a Very Old Tool
Since the last couple of major posts have been, at least partially, about the comment threads here at TSM, I want to make what I feel is an important point that is glossed over by the modern vernacular. As I noted previously, when I find someone who says something better than I can, I let them, so the majority of this post will be other people’s words – but they’re important words.
The first is a quote from the introduction to David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our Republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”
I think Myrdal was on to something there.
The second quote will be a long one. It is from the introduction to Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, first published in 1962. Note the date of the quote contained within this excerpt:
It is extremely convenient to have a label for the political and economic viewpoint elaborated in this book. The rightful and proper label is liberalism. Unfortunately, “As a surprise, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label” (Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis New York: Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 394), so that liberalism has, in the United States, come to have a very different meaning than it did in the nineteenth century, or does today over much of Continental Europe.
As it developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the intellectual movement that went under the name of liberalism emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society. It supported laissez faire at home as a means of reducing the role of the state in economic affairs and thereby enlarging the role of the individual; it supported free trade abroad as a means of linking the nations of the world together peacefully and democratically. In political matters, it supported the development of representative government and of parliamentary institutions, reduction in the arbitrary power of the state, and protection of the civil freedoms of individuals.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially after 1930 in the United States, the term liberalism came to be associated with a very different emphasis, particularly in economic policy. It came to be associated with a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as desirable. The catchwords became welfare and equality rather than freedom. The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom. In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which the classical liberal fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!
The change in the meaning attached to the term liberalism is more striking in economic matters than in political. The twentieth-century liberal, like the nineteenth-century liberal, favors parliamentary institutions, representative government, civil rights, and so on. Yet even in political matters, there is a notable difference. Jealous of liberty, and hence fearful of centralized power, whether in governmental or private hands, the nineteenth-century liberal favored political decentralization. Committed to action and confident of the beneficence of power so long as it is in the hands of a government ostensibly controlled by the electorate, the twentieth-century liberal favors centralized government. He will resolve any doubt about where power should be located in favor of the state instead of the city, of the federal government instead of the state, and of a world organization instead of a national government.
Because of the corruption of the term liberalism, the views that formerly went under that name are often labeled conservatism. But this is not a satisfactory alternative. The nineteenth-century liberal was a radical, both in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in the political sense of favoring major changes in social institutions. So too must be his modern heir. We do not wish to conserve the state interventions that have interfered so greatly with our freedom, though, of course, we do wish to conserve those that have promoted it. Moreover, in practice, the term conservatism has come to cover so wide a range of views, and views so incompatible with one another, that we shall no doubt see the growth of hyphenated designations, such as libertarian-conservative and aristocratic-conservative.
Partly because of my reluctance to surrender the term to proponents of measures that would destroy liberty, partly because I cannot find a better alternative, I shall resolve these difficulties by using the word liberalism in its original sense – as the doctrines pertaining to a free man.
Friedman doesn’t come out and say it, but what he described was the co-opting of a term by the forces of socialism. This co-option was described by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom in 1944, Orwell in his 1984 in 1949, and Eric Hoffer in The True Believer in 1951. But the point of this post is that Friedman was right. “Conservatism” isn’t a satisfactory alternative. I am against the War on (Some) Drugsā¢, against the criminalization of abortion, in favor of gay marriage (but less sanguine about adoption into such pairings). I am unconcerned about what two (or more) consenting adults do sexually in the privacy of their own homes, and even less concerned about any devices those adults may use to stimulate their sexual organs, but I think pedophiles should be shot and their bodies disposed of in the nearest dumpster. I think far too many “environmentalists” in actuality hate humanity, and are disillusioned socialists looking for another attractive mass movement to attach themselves to. So too for far too many animal “rights” activists.
I am NOT a conservative. And “liberals” are NOT liberal. Nor are they “progressive,” except as the term pertains to income tax rates.
(or so they have convinced themselves)
Since mid-March of this year this blog has been visited by and commented on by Markadelphia, as I noted below in the post The Mystery of Government. Mark was first attracted here by comments I left at his blog Notes from the Front on a post about the Zumbo incident, Great Bunch a Guys. It was a civil, if short, comment thread, and in my last comment to him there, I said this:
Having perused your site I can see that we’re not at all on the same plane philosophically or politically, so I’m going to disagree with you on a lot of things. This is good, because you learn much more arguing your case with someone who disagrees with you than you do preaching to the choir.
—
If you want a discussion, I’ll be more than happy to provide it. I don’t throw ad hominems, and I provide research and citations to support my positions. It’s a lot of work. I expect the same in return. “I feel” or “I believe” isn’t enough. “This is what I believe, and here is why I believe it” constitutes a valid argument.
Though that invitation was to discuss the topic of gun control specifically, Markadelphia declared himself at least somewhat converted on that topic in a later post, which I will quote from here, but not link to quite yet:
It just so happened that when I wrote a column about the Jim Zumbo deal a while back, a blogger by the name of Kevin Baker came to the defense of the gun lobby. He posted some comments here that made me think and, I must admit, altered my view. I came to the realization that, while I will never get off on guns, they are, in fact, a personal liberty just as anything else is in this country and if I am going to be against things like the Patriot Act, then I have to be against gun control. Besides, it’s not guns that are the problem anyway. It’s Americans that are the problem. And Americans like Kevin, and the others that post on his site, are very responsible gun owners.
He wrote on here:
I’m going to disagree with you on a lot of things. This is good, because you learn much more arguing your case with someone who disagrees with you than you do preaching to the choir.
I agree completely. You know that I love all of you but the most interesting discussions are when PL, Crab, Dave, Sarge, the rev, and joe Anonymous get in the mix. I believe with all of my heart and soul that raising the level of debate in this country gets people to think. That’s why I think it IS polite to talk about politics. Preaching to the choir is a fucking bore and I would have shut down this site long ago if we didn’t have the wonderful ragers we have had here.
So, it was with that spirit I began posting on his blog…the only other blog I post on regularly other than this one. I really felt like if we could come together on the gun thing maybe there could be other things on which we could find common ground. I was buoyed by Kevin’s (and others that post there) intelligence, unbiased interpretation of facts and law in regards to the gun issue so I really felt there might be some hope.
That’s not the heart of that post, but it’s the part pertinent to this essay at this point. I will return to it forthwith.
It is true that you learn more from people who disagree with you than those who echo your beliefs. Sometimes, however, what you learn is only a reinforcement of your beliefs. Markadelphia is a self-confessed liberal, and, from the tone and content of the majority of his comments here, insofar as I can tell he is at minimum a closet socialist – someone who won’t quite admit it to themselves. Just one example:
There is a pervasive, Randian view on Communism on this blog, though….
He says that like it’s a bad thing. š
With the sole exception of gun control, Markadelphia has exhibited every characteristic of the stereotypical urban Leftist (big “L” on purpose) . I’m not complaining! Since he started commenting, the traffic here is up and the comment threads have been generally interesting, informative, and refreshingly free of invective and insult. While Mark argues that everyone is ganging up on him, and we’re all just a part of the right-wing echo-chamber, the fact remains that his posts have inspired some very insightful, thought-provoking comments, and I appreciate that.
But as to Mark himself, I think the attraction is wearing off, and I want to speak as to why that is.
My normal blogging style is the essay. Some idea inspires me to write; some thing(s) I’ve read generally ruminate in my mind until they jell into a coherent theme about which I will ramble for five or six thousand words or more. The ongoing discussion threads here are just that kind of thing. Some recent comments from The Mystery of Government:
Nothing kills the urge to debate in me faster than realizing I could be arguing the other guy’s position better than he’s doing it. Absent the possibility of changing someone’s mind, either my opponent’s or the audience’s, the good I get out of it is practicing; if I could be doing better talking to myself, why bother? – LabRat
—
We’ve been trying to talk sense to Mark, to lead him to water, but he just can’t drop his loaded ways of thinking, his overloaded “meanings” of words (to mean what he wants them to, no more and no less). Perhaps we’ve gone too far.
I’m tired of it right now – He’s left tons of questions I’ve tried to ask him unanswered, and shown he can’t see the world but through his view, he’s incapable of trying to see it through any other lens, which means he fails to understand. – Unix-Jedi
—
You don’t answer his questions because you plainly don’t like the answers to his questions. You spend endless barrels of ink dancing around the answers, but as I stated before, you just can’t get the peanut butter out of your jaws. You spend time by the fortnight pounding your keyboard here, and so your available time is not the issue.
Yet again, Mark, you are a phony, and nothing more. You don’t fool anyone here….
No, Mark, you are not a slave to anyone in any way except to your own inability to admit it when you are shown to be wrong. – DJ
These kinds of comments have been getting more common of late. Markadelphia has made several comments pertaining to what he sees as Conservative groupthink here as well. What has all of this reminded me of? Reasonable People – the essay I wrote back in December of 2005. Specifically, I was reminded of an essay I quoted extensively from, Dr. Bob Godwin’s How I Cured Myself of Leftism. Once again (big excerpt):
At this point in time, I am more inclined to think of leftism as an intellectual pathology rather than a psychological one (although there is clearly considerable overlap). What I mean is that it is impossible to maintain a priori that a conservative person is healthier or more emotionally mature than a liberal. There are plenty of liberals who believe crazy things but are wonderful people, and plenty of conservatives who have the right ideas but are rotten people. However, this may be begging the question, for it is still puzzling why people hold beliefs that are demonstrably untrue or at the very least unwise.
One of the problems is with our elites. We are wrong to think that the difficulty lies in the uneducated and unsophisticated masses–as if inadequate education, in and of itself, is the problem. As a matter of fact, no one is more prone to illusions than the intellectual. It has been said that philosophy is simply personal error on a grandiose scale. Complicating matters is the fact that intellectuals are hardly immune to a deep emotional investment in their ideas, no less than the religious individual. The word “belief” is etymologically linked to the word “beloved,” and it is easy to see how certain ideas, no matter how dysfunctional–for example, some of the undeniably appealing ideas underpinning contemporary liberalism–are beloved by those who believe them. Thus, many liberal ideas are believed not because they are true, but because they are beautiful. Then, the intellectual simply marshals their intelligence in service of legitimizing the beliefs that they already hold. It has long been understood by psychoanalysts that for most people, reason is the slave of the passions.
Underneath the intellectual’s attachment to the dysfunctional idea is a more insidious fear that their entire intellectual cathedral, carefully constructed over a lifetime, will collapse in ruins. Religious people are not as prone to this same fear, because they accept it that their religion is ultimately based on a leap of faith. One can see how this is playing out, for example, in the intelligent design debate that has philosophical materialists frothing at the mouth. Intellectuals live under the illusion that their system is based solely on facts and logic, which is easily disproved, even with regard to mathematical knowledge (for example, Godel’s theorems prove that there is no formal system that does not contain assumptions unwarranted and unprovable by the system). For most intellectuals, understanding actually precedes knowledge. In other words, they have a certain feeling about the world, and then only pay attention to knowledge that confirms that feeling-based view.
But wait! We’re not done!
As Jonah Goldberg has observed, “Like many spiritual movements, liberalism emphasizes deeds and ideals over ideas. As a result, when liberals gather thereās a revivalist spirit in the air, with plenty of talk about fighting the forces of evil and testifying about good deeds done.” The philosopher Eric Voegelin coined the phrase āimmanentizing the eschatonā to describe the messianic liberal impulse to remake mankind and to create heaven on earth. Goldberg cites several examples, such as “the spiritual nature of the environmental movement; the quasi-messianic treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bill Clintonās invocation of ‘covenants’ with the American people; Hillary Clintonās ‘politics of meaning,’ which claimed to redefine what it meant to be a human being in the postmodern world ā all of these are examples of what Voegelin would describe as the neo-Gnostic effort to make the hereafter simply here.” Similarly, “It should be no surprise that Hillary Clinton justified her Senate candidacy on the claim that she was more ‘concerned’ about the issues than her opponent. And of course her husband won the presidency by arguing he was better at ‘feeling’ pain.”
At the same time, for the person who is not under the hypnotic psycho-spiritual spell of contemporary liberalism, it is strikingly devoid of actual religious wisdom or real ideas. As such, it is driven by vague, spiritually infused ideals and feelings, such as “sticking up for the little guy,” or “war is not the answer.” On the other hand, conservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there. It is actually refreshingly free of dogma, and full of dynamic tension. For example, at the heart of conservatism is an ongoing, unresolvable dialectic between freedom and virtue. In other words, there is a bedrock belief in the idea that free markets are the best way to allocate scarce resources and to create wealth and prosperity for all, but a frank acknowledgment that, without a virtuous populace, the system may produce a self-centered, materialistic citizenry living in a sort of degenerate, “pitiable comfort.” Thus, there is an ongoing, unresolvable tension between the libertarian and traditional wings of the movement.
There is no such dynamic tension in liberalism. Rather, it is a top-down dogma that is not dictated by what works, but by how liberals would like reality to be. This is why liberalism must be enforced with the mechanism of political correctness, in order to preempt or punish those who deviate from liberal dogma, and see what they are not supposed to see.
What reminded me of that piece? This comment by Markadelphia:
I know I have been evoking Kennedy a lot here but basically if you want to sum up the way I feel about government, this is it.
“I am an idealist without illusions.”
Having read his comments here since mid-March, that line literally caused me to laugh out loud, and the memory of Bob Godwin’s diagnosis tickled at the back of my brain until it surfaced today. (Read the rest of Bob’s piece – I excerpted probably two-thirds of it. When I find someone saying something better than I can, I let them.)
The complaints of almost every critic of Markadelphia here have centered around his inability to do more that talk about what he feels and what he believes – without being able to debate about what does or does not work. He embodies “sticking up for the little guy” and “war is not the answer” (at least not war in Iraq). Everywhere in his comments he constantly emphasizes ideals over ideas, intention over results, rosy projection over historical record, and is constantly called on the carpet over it. He repeatedly misuses language, but accuses his opponents of “framing the debate” and using “conservative language manipulation,” but when his errors are pointed out to him – often emphatically – he acknowledges them and continues the misuse. Perhaps most frustrating of all, one of his apparently favorite tactics is comparing apples and oranges; in that latest comment thread he equates slavery and commerce. Previously he has called the U.S. an “empire” – and had the term explained to him specifically. Hasn’t stopped him.
But what really inspired this essay? That blog post of Markadelphia’s that I quoted from at the beginning of this piece – a post that absolutely disproves his “idealist without illusions” assertion. From Sept. 11, 2007, A Profound Divide, and this quote that illustrates exactly what I’m talking about:
Six years ago our country stood as one. Every American stood together proud and strong, not weak and bickering like we are now. The world, aside from the usual crazies, was markedly pro-American and they had our backs. People loved us and we loved each other.
He really believes that. It is a key talking-point of the Left. As I pointed out to him in the comments, that unity was an illusion (and Steven Den Beste said it better than I could, so I let him), but the facts don’t affect his belief, his personal reality.
Markadelphia is an idealist, yes, a self-admitted one. But he is so full of illusions about how the world is and how the world works that it is literally impossible to reach him. As Bob Godwin spelled out plainly, Markadelphia lives under the illusion that the Left’s system is based solely on facts and logic, and he believes that mankind can somehow be remade if only the right people were put in charge. Their ideas are so beautiful, they must be true, never mind all the previous failures, all the evidence of history. He cannot acknowledge these facts, for doing so risks the collapse of the entire cathedral of belief. Instead, if he can just get enough others to believe, the world can be remade!
And therefore Markadelphia is the poster-boy for the modern Left – idealists full of illusions.
(And Mark, if I haven’t offended you too much, may I suggest you read all eleven pieces of Neo-Neocon‘s A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change? Start at the bottom and work your way up.)
I Take a Few Days Vacation…
And Algore is given the Nobel Peace Prize and Aaaahnold signs a microstamping bill?
What, do I have to do everything???
No News is Not Always Good News.
Well, it’s been a week and no response from my last email to Laura Washington. I guess she’s not going to respond, and there’s no chance for Reasoned Discourseā¢ with her. And I’ve heard nothing back from James Hupp as of yet, after two emails and another comment on his blog. I get the feeling he’s tied up in TSA hell after venting at an airline employee or six. It would be understandable. I’m hopeful this discussion will still occur, but that hope is beginning to wane.
Anyway, I’m back from my business trip, and I’ve got to get ready for Reno next weekend, but I’ve got to service my truck, load some ammo, and I’ll be working on Sunday trying to get caught up before I hit the road, so blogging will remain sparse.
I’d like to thank everybody who linked to my post on reloading. There were a lot of you. I had no idea that the subject would be so popular!