The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
From her post Malice or Incompetence?, on American public education:
So – how do you take most of the youth of a country, a country, moreover, rich enough that most kids have no major developmental disabilities, and make them functionally illiterate?
You WORK at it.
Yes. Exactly. And my point all along.
RTWT.
I mean it.
…The Closing of the Liberal Mind that I took a QotD from on Tuesday? Here’s another:
As a scientist, you formulate a conclusion that will lead to a healthier society, and then you build a hypothesis around it, and then you declare it to be science. Your science, like your journalism, consists of the progressive narrative that proves whatever you want it to prove, whether it’s that capitalism will melt the icebergs, homosexuality is genetically fixed or oil is about to run out. Scientific objectivity has no more meaning to you than it did to the Caliph who torched the Library of Alexandria. If science is worth anything, then it’s progressive. And if it doesn’t, then it’s worthless.
And PowerLine has a recent example of exactly that.
Of course, the whole history of gun control is an example of exactly that, but….
Via email from Unix Jedi:
But now you are a liberal in 2013 and the society is already very liberal. You are the product of liberal professors who learned at the feet of other liberal professors for 3 or 4 generations. You grew up in a liberal community to parents whose grandparents were already singing red campfire songs. Like them, you came of age as a member of a natural elite.
The newspapers you read, the textbooks you studied, the movies you watch, the professors who taught you and every adult you grew up with all reflect your point of view. You have no sense of being marginalized or out of step. Nor do you have any sense that there is another point of view out there. Only ranks of ignorant teabaggers paid for by corporate money who are about to be swept away into the dustbin of history as soon as the multicultural youth of tomorrow put together another Hip-Hop Against AIDS protest.
You live in a bubble and you see no need for an open society or for maintaining the integrity of institutions such as journalism or the scientific community. The very idea of objectivity is at odds with your entire way of thinking because it presumes that there is some higher truth than the one propounded by the progressive reality-based community. And you know, with the casual faith of any born believer, that this is not possible.
A couple of months ago, while attending a play group with my four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, another little two-year-old girl lashed out and hit another child. Her mother, ripe with indignation, swept the girl into her arms and scolded, “No! It is NEVER okay to hit people.”
My skin crawled. The scenarios flowed through my head and I couldn’t restrain myself.
“Would you tell her that if she was being abducted?” I asked.
The mother stopped and blinked a few times and then stuttered, “Well… that’s different.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “But you just told her that it was never okay to hit people. That’s not entirely true. There are times it’s okay to hit people and to hit them hard.”
That’s from Limatunes’ Range Diary, Yes, My Son, It Is Okay To Hit People. Read the whole thing. Good mom.
Geek WithA.45 left this in a comment:
The reality is that a segment of our society abuses the mechanisms of democracy to seek the authority of law to destroy the lives of honest men who offer harm to none, but who reject ideological compliance. Apparently, “comply or be destroyed” is now an acceptable American modus operandi.
How can that be characterized as anything but evil?
How, indeed?
Via Oleg Volk:
From Boris Karpa, a man who was an American born elsewhere by accident: “Let me be clear about this: background checks for private transfers is gun registration.
“Not ‘could lead to gun registration’, it literally IS gun registration.
“It does not matter if they put in a little sentence that says ‘the government is not allowed to keep records’ – that sentence will go away at the next mass-shooting – and then the government will simply start hitting the SAVE button after it processes your next gun purchase. We’re in the world of computers now. Keeping terabytes of data only costs a few dollars.
“If Tom Coburn argues that putting a little proviso in there to say ‘you are not allowed to keep records’ makes it anything other but gun registration, that only helps us know who Tom Coburn is.
“What this will decide is nothing less but the answer to the question – is America a unique nation, that trusts its citizens to own weapons – not ‘hunting implements’, not ‘sporting firearms’, but weapons – or it is just another country, and jut like everywhere else, the gun control movement wins battle after battle, and the gun rights organizations are only fighting a delaying action.
“Because if this passes, it will never be repealed. The NRA is not capable of, and does not have the stomach for – attacking existing Federal gun laws. They will promise to work to repeal it. They will lie, just like they lied about the Hughes amendment, where they made some symbolic move to try and strike it down and then surrendered too. But they will not repeal it if it passes.
“If they win this fight, then the gun rights movement in America is over, and everything else is a long delaying action.”
I do not disagree with a single word there.
Publicola has written an excellent piece, Resolve, that I strongly recommend you read. Today’s QotD comes from it:
We have to be more determined than our enemies, but our focus does not have to be on them exclusively, or rather not on who we think our enemies are. Bluntly, our enemy isn’t flesh and blood – that’s just a manifestation. Our enemy is the idea that our culture is not worth saving. Our enemy is the notion that our culture can compromise on its values. Our enemy is the practice of appeasement.
From the Investor’s Business Daily article, The disturbing pattern: Obama rids America’s military of yet another top general:
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a special ops veteran who was McKiernan’s successor. He resigned when his staff was quoted making derogatory comments to an embedded journalist about the administration in general and VP Joe Biden in particular. If mocking Megamind Biden is worthy of resignation, then most of America needs to step down by lunch today.
It’s a pretty serious piece, though, and I recommend you read the whole thing.
Via email from Firehand, Michael Z. Williamson has today’s QotD:
First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I’m not black.Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I’m not gay.
Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I’m an atheist.
When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I’m a legal immigrant.
Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.
Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong. So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.
~~~
Or you can commit seppuku with a chainsaw. I really don’t care anymore. This is the end of my support for any liberal cause, because liberals have become anything but.
Go, Mike! (RTWT)
From the first comment to this Newsbusters piece on Bill Maher:
Maher is a constant reminder that discussing anything with liberals is like playing chess with a pigeon……..they just crap all over the board and then strut in it as if they won something. — “chazzykc”