Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether our government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant; American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do. Saudi conservatives know that whatever geopolitical arrangements the Saudi princes make with the American government, the American people are busily undermining the core principles of Saudi society. It’s not just our NGOs educating Saudi women and civil society activists; it’s not just the impact of American college life on the rising generation of the Saudi elite. We change the world even when we aren’t thinking anything about global revolution — when Hollywood and rap musicians are just trying to make a buck, they are stoking the fires of change around the world.
A revolutionary nation cannot make a conservative foreign policy work for long.— Walter Russell Mead, The Conservative Revolutionary
Tag: QotD
Quote of the Day – Do It Your Own Damned Self Edition
I like Palin insofar as she makes the right people’s heads explode. She’s playing the MSM like a fiddle and they’re dancing to her tune every single time. The woman can give the talking heads on TV the vapors by just ordering a value meal from McDonalds. When she was running as the VP, I read a lot into her tenure as Alaska’s Governor and her record was fairly decent. She had faults and failures which meant she was human, but overall it did appear she ran a much more conservative governorship than anything I’ve ever seen. But, I don’t really see her as some sort of American Savior.That job falls to the Americans.We need to stop letting these idiots who can’t even keep their privates off of the Internet run our country into the ground. We need to stop bending over with each new unconstitutional law they pass and start ignoring them. The key word there is WE, not some politician (and make no bones about it, Sarah Palin is still a politician) who will come in with a magic wand and make all the bad things go away. It’s that false belief in ‘Hope & Change’ that got us here today, and I’m not just talking about Obama.YOU do it. Don’t want for someone else. That’s the problem.Robb Allen, Sharp as a Marble, One of the Reasons I Have Very Little Hope for the Future
Can I get an “AMEN!“?
Quote of the Day – “Yes, Exactly” Edition
Jennifer asked her readers to explain “How did that happen? How did you become gunnies?” The answers have been fascinating. I’ve left my own tale in a post below this one, but today’s QotD comes from Big Smart Human‘s story:
My husband & I discussed getting an NRA bumper sticker — not actually joining the NRA, mind you! Just having the bumper sticker on our car. We thought about what to do to make it appear that we are armed.
And then I realized: the way to appear armed is to be armed; the way to appear dangerous is to be dangerous.—
That was three years ago. It has been a slow and steady escalation of knowledge, skill and firearms ever since.
—
Now I love the Second Amendment and fully understand why citizens may feel very wary about all this “reasonable gun control” blather certain folks like to throw around.
Now, in fact, I see myself as a citizen. Before guns, I never really thought about citizenship, beyond voting at every opportunity.
Along the way, the hardest lesson has been that I can trust myself.
EXACTLY! (All emphasis mine, all links in the quotation are mine also.) What she describes is exactly what the Left fears most about an armed populace – that they can be an empowered, confident group of citizens that trust themselves, and can tell their self-annointed “betters” to go to hell. She exemplifies what I’ve been writing about here for eight years now.
Quote of the Day – Late Conversion Edition
The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others. — David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
Found at City Journal. I am going to have to get that book.
Quote of the Day – Thomas Sowell Edition
I think we’re raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy. They’re not a decade old, and they’re being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they’re being taught that it’s important to have views, and they’re not being taught that it’s important to know what you’re talking about. It’s important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it. — Uncommon Knowledge, Economic Facts and Fallacies interview, Part V
Thomas Sowell is now 80 years old. I get the feeling that he’s glad that he won’t be around to see the worst of what’s coming.
Quote of the Day – Realist Edition
(T)here is no reforming our government. There is no fixing it. There is only the hope that one can survive it. – Robert McDonald, My Tumultuous Adventure, I’m Shocked, Shocked I Tell You!
Yup.
Where do I vote for the syphilitic camel?
Quote of the Day
(W)e’ve passed myraids of regulations, so much so, that no one can possibly know all of them; and we resort to “Living Constitutions” so that we don’t have to follow the actual laws we find inconvenient. And given that the purpose of the Constitution was to secure liberty this generally means that we find more ways to destroy liberty, in the guise of preserving it. — Reader “Alpheus” in a comment to Saul Cornell Turns Up Again
I am reminded of something Rob Smith (RIP) said once, in connection with Saul Cornell:
Why is it that the more imaginary “rights” people invent, the less personal freedom I have?
Because that’s what they intend.
Quote of the Day – Tam Edition
You’d think that Obama would be relieved to see that there are still some forces on the planet more effective than the Democrat party at destroying businesses and leaving people homeless.
If there were any justice in the world, that would leave a scar.
Quote of the Day – Mencken Edition
It is not a fact that all men are created equal, it is not a fact that they are able to choose their rulers wisely, and it is not a fact that their judgments on public matters, taking them in the mass, are prudent and valid, or even worth hearing. But it is a fact that they are better off, the stupid with the intelligent, when the scope of government is rigidly limited, and its agents have no prerogative outside the narrow and clearly marked bounds. — Henry Louis Mencken
Found via Van der Leun at The Clairemont Institute.
This quote will also appear in the next überpost, but it was too good not to use now.
Quote of the Day – Tactical Children Edition
Last night at Say Uncle’s, along with the eight other bloggers who showed up, Ry Jones brought his girls to play with Uncle’s kids. About 8 o’clock, Uncle came in and announced that all four of them were in the back yard playing, and all of them had tactical flashlights – Surefires and the like. “We have tactical children!” somebody said.