Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – Sultan Knish Edition

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This is a long one:

The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?

To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli.

You wouldn’t blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been “liberated” to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

(My emphasis.)  Read the rest, Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control.

Then read (if you haven’t) That Sumbitch Ain’t Been BORN!

Quote of the Day – Geekwitha.45 Edition

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Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

Barack Obama, 12/16/2012

There was a time when an American leader that suggested that freedom was the root cause of evil committed against innocent children would have booed off the stage, and possibly ridden out of town on a rail.

You know, there are very constructive things that could be done, that meaningfully address the issues and are consistent with a society that is both formidably armed and free, which is what I would expect of a true leader.

But we all know that’s not where he’s going with this. He’s going to do something else, driven primarily by ideological agenda, because this crisis presents far too good an opportunity to waste.

Obama hears the blood lust of his increasingly grief unhinged base screaming for the heads of the NRA and their members, and senses his time has come, which for a man of hubris like him it is a time of great peril with respect to his decisions. Pride goeth before a fall, and pride is never more manifest than in a man who deems himself imbued with epic destiny having arrived at his moment in history.

Have no doubt: Had Lanza driven his mother’s stolen car in bloody zig zags through the school yard, no one would be screaming for the head of the chairman of the AAA, no one would be accosting car owners at lunch or on their facebook walls demanding that they justify their car ownership in the face such tragedy.

$DEITY bless this wretched nation, for it stands with thunderous applause at the precipice of a monumental stupidity.

A comment from yesterday.

And now, Judge Alex Kozinski:

The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles – that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth – born of experience – is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people.

—

All too many of the other great tragedies of history – Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few – were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Quote of the Day – Andrew Klavan Edition

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But in order to tell you that, first I need to tell you this.

From a comment to my post How We “Lost the Culture War” by our very own Markadelphia:

This is why I am a Democrat and not a Republican. Democrats aren’t perfect and they do fail at times but at least they stand for something. They wanted to lower poverty in the elderly so they passed Social Security. Poverty in the elderly was above 50 percent when SS passed and now it is under 10 percent. The Democrats wanted a national Civil Rights Act because of abuses to minorities in the South. They passed it and look where we are today as a result. In short, they produce.

Got that?

Good.

Now, Andrew Klavan from How Ben Afflek’s Argo Screws with History:

The imagination is the only nation where Democrats get it right. We need to conquer that country.

Quote of the Day – Geekwitha.45 Edition

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I’m getting old.  I thought I’d done this already, but I screwed up the Autopost setting.  From a comment to How We Lost the Culture War:

Liberty always implodes on its own internal contradiction: Freedom means you have to let the other guy choose his own values…and where liberty gets wrapped around the axle is that it supports the other guy’s liberty killing choices as vigorously as any other set of values. We are loathe to actually collect the minimum ante necessary to play the liberty game, and the thought of defenestrating those who don’t pay up strikes us as abhorent.

Consequently, we get played like fiddles.

Can I get an “AMEN!”?

Quote of the Day – The Destruction Principle

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From Captain Capitalism:

It is easier to destroy something that already exists than build something of genuine value up from scratch.

This is key to understand the psychology Crusaders and Crusaderism because when given the choice of:

“Work hard, study something rigorous, and put in the effort into a long and demanding career”

or

“Find something in society that already exists, villianize it and declare it evil, then wage a campaign against it”

the lazy, mathophoic, work-fearing leftist crusader will ALWAYS go for destroying institutions and pillars over doing something that requires effort.

And you must understand how arrogant and truly evil this is. The crusader doesn’t target these pillars or institutions of society because those institutions and pillars are evil. They target those things because the crusaders are evil.

An Accurate (if ominous) Prediction

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Mark Steyn as interviewed by Ed Driscoll, Sept. 17, 2012:

DRISCOLL: So with all of that as prologue; with the ongoing collapse of so many aspects of what make up Barack Obama’s worldview, why is Mitt Romney seemingly flailing in the polls as of the time of this interview?

STEYN: Yeah. That bothers me too, because this guy ought to be losing by ten points at least. And I know people say well, it’s a fifty-fifty nation and it’s going to be a tight election and all the rest of it. If it’s tight this time around that says something very alarming. You know, a lot of people don’t — simply don’t get the numbers. The word trillion doesn’t really mean anything to people; it has no relation to their lives. And at a certain point it takes on a bit of unreality because if you can spend trillions of dollars you don’t have and you do it for one year and you do it for two years and you do it for five years, people think well, why can’t we keep on doing that. So that doesn’t seem like a real problem to many people.

And then I think there’s something even more worrying. That if you go back to 2008 — and we all did this at the time — we said basically those of us, you know, who however reluctantly supported McCain. When he lost we said well, the guy gave the impression he wanted to lose and people were exhausted by war and people were tired of the Bush administration and the Republicans hadn’t covered themselves in glory in the previous couple of years and this guy would be the first black president and everyone’s saying he’s the greatest speaker of all time and he’s a real glamorous celebrity figure.

You know, McCain did the thing where he was mocking Obama as the celebrity. Now we’ve had four years of him. He’s a crashing bore. He’s not a great speaker. He’s got nothing new to say. He staggers around doing the same — giving the same leaden speech as the economy flatlines, as the jobs market shrivels, as people in their early fifties go on disability and people in their late 20s move back with their parents.

If he gets sort of elected as the nonglamorous failure, what that would mean is that America is essentially saying there’s no prospect of recovery. We’re sticking with big nanny Obama because at least he’s guaranteeing our food stamps and our disability checks. And they would essentially be accepting — they would be accepting, I think kind of — a European nanny state view of America that would in effect spell the end of this country. They’d be basically saying there’s no possibility of an American dream.

Yes, we could vote for Romney, but who wants to take a flyer on economic recovery. At least if we go with Obama we have the certainty of the food stamps and the certainty of the disability checks. That’s a — there’s no hope — he’s basically offering them the hope — the certainty of no change. And he’s saying when everything gets bad, and it’s going to be bad for as far as the eye can see, vote for me because you’ll get your food stamps.

I think he called it.

Quote of the Day – “You’re the MAN Now!” Edition

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From a comment over at Joe’s:

Note that those on the far Left have the delusion that they are besieged, when in fact they control the state, they control the vast civil service bureaucracies, they control the news and entertainment media that force the rest of us to swim in a sea of agitprop all our lives.

They tell themselves that they want to “speak truth to power,” but in fact they speak power to truth, all day, every day.

Anonymous

And on this holiday, may we be truly thankful for all we shall be receiving over the next few years….

Quote of the Day – Curmudgeon Edition

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From Adaptive Curmudgeon:

The arc of history is not always upward and onward. Sometimes it stagnates. I don’t like the merest hint that I might be in a period of stagnation. But sometimes it looks like it may be coming. People without adequate technology to program PacMan flew to the moon. They flew to the moon with sliderules! Decades later I can have satellite TV but we collectively lost our shit and never went to the moon again. Yes to “Bridezilla TV” but no to “space, the final frontier”? Really? Why?

On a smaller scale I’ve seen computers pop up everywhere but simultaneously dumb themselves down. I used to meet geezers that had never seen a mouse and I found that understandable. Now I meet kids who have never been without a smart phone that can call Hong Kong, yet they can’t swap their own batteries or understand where they’ve saved a file. I find that reprehensible.

I don’t like sliding backwards. I was promised hovercars and space flight, I got Twitter and Starbucks. I demand a recount!

RTWT, and watch the video.