Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

We expect ideas to go away when they are proven to be bad, much as we tend to expect that the pinnacle of human evolution is really someone that resembles Doc Savage. We can understand why an idea spreads under force of threat, but we scratch our heads when the same thing that failed spectacularly before keeps getting picked up, brushed off, and tried again by purely persuasive and even democratic means. We usually explain this by deciding that some bad ideas won’t die because of their pure emotional appeal, but this isn’t quite adequate either after a certain scale of failure.

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(M)ore than a hundred million deaths are credited to the destructive meme of communism- which are probably very much underestimated, as we only tend to get figures from relatively well-organized regimes- and god alone knows how much lost productivity and wealth can be credited to its milder cousins. The various strains of collectivism in practice have ranged from merely a dubious idea that results in countries with chronically sclerotic and declining economies, to a truly catastrophic one that kills off half a population. And it remains an extremely successful meme that seems to require no threat at all to perpetuate itself; well-educated people around the world who have read all that history persist in insisting it’s a brilliant idea that has always been somehow poorly implemented. As memes go, it is incredibly robust and fit. No matter how many people it impoverishes or kills, it still seems like a good idea to so many people that it not only keeps being tried, but winds up as fashionable iconography for t-shirts and political campaigns. – LabRat, Parasite memes and monkeyspheres

More Boumediene v. Bush

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This time from Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent:

Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation. And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date. One cannot help but think, after surveying the modest practical results of the majority’s ambitious opinion, that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.

A control the JUDICIAL BRANCH is not supposed to HAVE.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. – John Adams

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From the moment anyone becomes involved with a terror group and devoted to the murder of a country’s citizens to the moment they sever all such links, they have a right to life only in so far as their opponents see advantage in granting it. The killing of terrorists, like the hiring and firing of bureaucrats, is a proper function of the state. We all need to start saying so. – Peter Cuthbertson

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I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free. – Rev. Donald Sensing

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I should start the day with a profound urge to vomit more often. – James Lileks

And, finally, one hopeful quote:

This phenomenon — legal victory that leads to cultural and political defeat — has a long history. In the 1850s, slaveholders collected some huge legal prizes: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision. Those victories produced an anti-slavery movement powerful enough to elect Lincoln and win the Civil War. Sixty years later, the temperance movement won its long battle for national Prohibition. Within a decade, the culture was turning against temperance; Repeal came soon after. In America’s culture wars, the side with the law’s weaponry often manages only to wound themselves. – William J. Stuntz, The Academic Left and the Christian Right, Part II, Tech Central Station 1/4/05

Perhaps. But I’m now more concerned than ever about D.C. v. Heller.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Rome did not fall over a long weekend and our age has had a lot more history to learn from than did they. The ramparts you must man are the most difficult sort: metaphorical ones. Far less blood and thunder, far less thud and blunder and even the most heroic incur but little physical risk and garner little recognition. But if these battles are not fought — or if they are engaged too foolishly, with the wrong weapons and on unfavorable terrain — future generations will pay the price.

That’s why I’m not “voting from the rooftops” and why I am voting in the more-traditional manner. And it’s why I bother to blog. – Roberta X, Wall? Head. Rock, Paper, Scissors

Distilled to His Elemental Essence

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Our beloved country, freedom’s last redoubt, civilization’s only power capable of resisting the advancing tide of barbarism, keep of Castle Earth, is seriously contemplating elevating to the presidency Barack Obama, an effete academic weakling, a messianic soothsayer, perfervid followers in tow, who believes America’s collective soul is broken and that He has been called to mend it, a caricature Euro Statist whose voting record and public utterances reflect passionate belief in all the discredited far leftist critiques of America (and their attendant fixes), a dreamy naïf with a permanently adolescent world view born of lifelong refusal to work in the real world, a thinly disguised leftist revolutionary who for decades eagerly immersed himself in a vile crowd of crypto-Marxists, quislings, racists, domestic terrorists, and antisemites, and who now simply says, calm as you please, he never really shared their views, a twenty-eight carat tyro whose resume of accomplishments would fit neatly on the back of a Visa card, a man whose scary wife (whom the candidate himself seems to fear) dislikes the country that has showered her with great good fortune. – James Edmund Pennington at American Thinker from “Obama and his Next Goal”

Touché, sir. Touché! If there were any justice in this world, that would leave a livid mark.

Via Van der Leun

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged….Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can’t fulfill – that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope? Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start…. But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest…. They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n. In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes. They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho. Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves. The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything. – H.L. Mencken

What concerns me, this time around, is what an ObamaNation might actually deliver.

I shudder to think.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

We do not have to demonize the other side in order to have persuasive arguments. We don’t need to do it to feel right, because we’re not advocating that people’s freedoms be taken away. We’re the people who want to be able to keep shooting competitively with an AR-15s. We’re the people who don’t want to have to wait 10 minutes for the police to show up when seconds count. We’re the people who think our constitution means something. I think we ought to have the courage to be able to stand up to the other side, as fellow citizens, and say “Sorry, you’re wrong, and here’s why.” That is our power. The other side can’t do that, and it shows in how they approach the issue. – Sebastian, Snowflakes in Hell, The Root of Reasoned Discourse™

RTWT.

A Teacher Responds

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In a comment to The George Orwell Daycare Center, one Ray De La Torre responds:

I am a teacher of history and civics. I have taught for well over 20 years in both private and public schools. I have to say that this essay hits the mark dead on.

I’m afraid that the situation may be worse than you believe. The general direction public education seems to be heading is to insure no student fails. This is surely reflective of the “fairness” doctrine as well as the notion that all must be equal. What is occuring(sic) in schools is the further erroding(sic) of student responsibility and accountability. My take on this is that eventually we will have to do their work, write their essays, and take their exams to ensure their success.

Those of us who still demand excellence from our students are few, and becoming fewer. The consequences for failure do not fall on the students as they are moved along regardless of how many courses are passed or failed. Rather, the consequences fall on those of us who expect students to learn before moving on to the next level. The stories of meeting after meeting with administrators are legion.

Unfortunately, the young teachers entering the profession are as you describe. Most are filled with good intentions and the desire to help children. Most are woefully ignorant of the subjects they teach. Far too many rely on textbooks and materials that espouse socialist ideals. Most are unaware of this simple fact.

We few will continue to fight the good fight and try to reach as many students as possible.

As I said in I Must’ve Struck a Nerve, I know it is still possible to get a decent education out of many, possibly most school systems in this country – if you want one. This is due to those teachers who really do know their subjects and how to teach them, and students willing to do the work necessary to learn them. Both still exist. But it does appear that the ratio of such teachers and students to the general population is getting continually smaller.

Today’s Must Read

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Today’s Must Read…

…comes from Free Frank Warner. I will add only two more quotes for your consideration, one from Milton Friedman:

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

And one from Ayn Rand:

The truly and deliberately evil men are in a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, uninformed, vacillating characters of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

If the Dems had run one of their “political whore” candidates, maybe even the lovely and talented Hillary Clinton, I might have opted to vote Libertarian, where my heart is, rather than for a man I particularly dislike who champions a morally and ethically bankrupt political party of weasels and morons.

But that’s not what the Dems have done…they’ve played the scary card. – Michael Bane, Hunters vs. Shooters

RTWT.

No Higher Praise

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No Higher Praise

By the way, the blog itself is a pretty good read… I don’t visit as often as my husband, but I’ve never found something that’s not thought-provoking, even if I don’t agree. – “C” from “life, love, and the pursuit of sanity” in her post, Civic Literacy

(My emphasis.)

Now I’ve got a swelled head!