From the InstaProf:
Gun control is a culture-war effort to rub middle America’s nose in the fact that the world is run by its betters. Any actual improvement in public safety is of no concern at all.
Tag: QotD
Quote of the Day
From Robert Avrech:
Yes, we eager students studied history, literature and art. But soon enough it became clear to me that a massive amount of time was spent on Marxist theory, a material view of the world. Still observant, still wearing a yarmulke, I would ask about religion, about the spirit. With deep condescension, my professors informed me that we live in a post-religious world. Religion, I was lectured, was the opiate of the people.
I wondered, but never had the courage to suggest, that perhaps Marxism was the opiate of the elites.
Quote of the Day – “We’re from the Government” Edition
Honestly, I ought to just reproduce the whole piece, but from Roger Kimball’s Wall Street Journal column This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit, I have selected this excerpt as QotD:
In “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek noted that “the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”
And how. But what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It’s just that they’re cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control.
It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing “a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules” that reduces citizens “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” The sobering thought is that we’re all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.
RTWFT.
I would say “unbelievable,” but it is, in fact, all too believable.
Quote of the Day – Thomas Sowell on Education
From his Townhall piece, The Role of Educators:
Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education — one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas.
John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.
A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions. The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America — and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.
If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers’ attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn’s book.
That book has sold millions of copies, poisoning the minds of millions of students in schools and colleges against their own country. But this book is one of many things that enable teachers to think of themselves as “agents of change,” without having the slightest accountability for whether that change turns out to be for the better or for the worse — or, indeed, utterly catastrophic.
A People’s History has even made inroads into popular culture. I wonder how many books that clip sold?
“Agents of Change” explains things like The George Orwell Daycare Center, too.
Here’s another little example, a worksheet from a fifth-grade Scholastic Teaching Resources mathematics workbook on the distributive property of multiplication. Check the graphic:
Tell me, what does “distributing the wealth” have to do with the distributive property?
Quote of the Day
Found here:
Let’s look at what we have learned from this election: Twenty-one of 22 incumbent senators were re-elected, and 353 of 373 incumbent members of the House were re-elected. The American people have re-elected 94 percent of the incumbents who were running for re-election to an institution that has an approval rating of about 9 percent. This indicates, as an electorate, we are a nation of idiots.
100+ years of Publik Edumacashun FTMFW!
Quote of the Day – Taki’s Mag Edition
Wherein the editors tell us how they really feel:
Trying to rein in Leviathan is somehow depicted as “obstructionist.” One must never obstruct the bloody beast. One must continue tossing raw meat into its maw. Anyone who stands in the beast’s way is full of “hate” and “anger.” We know who the problem is here, right? It’s those Tea Party redneck rural paint-huffing Bible-thumping cousin-humping bigots who aren’t like we are and whose chief sin is that they don’t like people who are different than they are. We all know it’s a scientific fact that those people are only against abortion because they prefer the taste of newborn babies.
The average naïve and uninformed American seems to believe that a politician’s main role is to care about his or her feelings. As long as the words sound vaguely compassionate and the soundtrack is uplifting, they’ll swallow whatever ball of honey-coated dung that politicians feed them. In truth, politicians care about us so much, they even indenture the unborn to lifetime financial servitude.
If you oppose taxing the lifeblood out of the people until their bodies are dried-up like beef jerky, well, you’re obviously a racist. Not that there’s any correlation. There doesn’t need to be a correlation in a world where feelings trump facts.
Quote of the Day – Astute Observation Edition
In a sane nation, “Contempt of Congress” would not be a crime. It would be a Pulitzer Prize category. – Jim @ The Travis McGee Reader
Or a Nobel Prize category….
Just sayin’.
Quote of the Day – Rachel Lucas Edition
Rachel starts the year off right with the title to her post, which I made QotD:
Thank God our heroic president spent more than three million dollars of our money to heroically help our heroic Congress heroically do exactly shit-all.
After the title, she really gets going.
Read it all, and all the links. Quoting Rachel again:
When I encounter people in conversation who acknowledge the set of facts about what’s happening in the Western world right now and then say, “Meh, bah, blah blah, there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just going to enjoy my life,” I literally – I do mean literally – almost burst into tears because it feels so hopeless and frustrating if even the most reasonable of us flat-out do not give a shit. I actually have burst into tears when certain people very close to me have offered those rhetorical shoulder-shrugs.
Sorry to be so pessimistic. Last thing I want is for this blog to become depressing for anyone who likes it. It’s just that I read all that insanity about the fiscal cliff “deal” today, and then a trainload of terrifying anti-2nd Amendment rhetoric by fascists dressed in sheep’s clothing, and then two pieces by the excellent historian and writer Victor Hanson Davis, and I’m ready to offer a cash reward for anyone who can convince me that America as we’ve known it is not irretrievably gone.
I’ve got nothin’ else for you today.
Quote of the Day – Nuke it from Orbit Edition
It’s obvious that the way to end school shootings is to forget about the “shootings” part and focus on the first word instead.
We need to abolish schools.
—
Decades hence, our offspring will listen in disbelief when we tell them we used to pay billions of dollars to warehouse children in “gun-free zones” overseen by morons; that 21st-century kids were groomed for 19th-century jobs and came out functionally illiterate but experts nonetheless on the subjects of Kwanzaa, “safe” sex, and something called global warming.
Kathy Shaidle, Ban Schools, not Guns. Taki’s Magazine
RTWT. And the comments.
h/t: Vanderleun
Well Said!
Today’s Quote of the Day from a Forbes piece, Gun Control Tramples On The Certain Virtues Of A Heavily Armed Citizenry.
Excerpt:
Hard cases make bad law, which is why they are reserved for the Constitution, not left to the caprice of legislatures, the sophistry and casuistry of judges or the despotic rule making of the chief executive and his bureaucracy. And make no mistake, guns pose one of the hardest cases a free people confronts in the 21st century, a test of whether that people cherishes liberty above tyranny, values individual sovereignty above dependency on the state, and whether they dare any longer to live free.
RTWT.