Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – Primary Source

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From a post at Samizdata:

At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten – required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.

Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress”. Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.

The author is Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA.

RTWT. And note the title of his piece.

Quote of the Day

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In its entirety, a rant of beauty by LabRat right here in my comments:

I just finished reading this whole thread after looking at it once when the number of comments was 3.

UJ and others are doing quite all right at the quote-fisk game. They have that covered.

So far as I can determine from having read Round XIV of Markadelphia versus everyone else including, apparently, Fox News and an imaginary army of slavering violent right-wing neojihadists who will begin mutilating the genitals of women, blowing up school buses, introducing compulsory Christianity on pain of death, and outlawing nonBiblical education just as soon as, um, they finish their beers or something, the following is the grounds for argument. I provide so we can understand each other better, and as we all know all conflict stems from a lack of understanding.

Furthermore, any and all dishonest or incompetent thing that any liberal does- especially Mark himself- is just fine because unidentified conservatives do it all the time only more betterer and Dick Cheney said something about it just last week and by the time you finish watching the obvious violent enemy of all that is good in the world by watching Fox News we’ll have entirely forgotten whatever thing Mark the liberal did because LOOK A PONY

Conservatives are bad, terrible people that hate freedom and anyone different from them and education and intelligence and success and the beautiful flower of human reasoning and hope and we will all be better off just as soon as we’ve gotten rid of them. Oh, and the worst thing about them is they try to fool you into seeing your normal fellow Americans with different opinions as stupid and evil.

If you have ever agreed with a Republican about anything you obviously LOVED it when Bush spent like a drunken trophy wife with no plan for debt and you’re a HUGE HYPOCRITE for disapproving of Obama spending like a drunken Imelda Marcos with no plan for debt. Also you hate doing ANYTHING about ANY problem and you just want problems to continue because you hate change. Any sputtering about how you actually want to overhaul most of American government, just not the same way Obama does, IS VICIOUS LIES. So stop lying, dammit! It gets us nowhere.

Obama has proved forever he’s nonpartisan because he’s kept basically the entirety of Bush’s evil antihuman terror policies also Republicans never have useful plans except when they do only it’s evil but not after Obama redeems it SO DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD WATERBOARD DEMOCRATS OR WHAT? HUH, YOU LIBERTY-HATING SECURITY FREAK oh hey pony

We will spend our way out of this recession even though I said that was lies and foolishness when it was the Bush administration and we should believe Obama utterly on this because he’s said he’ll make mistakes. The economy will turn around under his policies because the Republican policies I will now make up wouldn’t work.

And now I’ll make a prediction. One week from now, in a distant other thread of the FUTURE:

“Taxes? Economy? Torture? Libel? Stop waving all those links to sourced information. What the hell do you people want from me, I have a life, I don’t have time to feed your goddamn pony.”

LabRat, I am not worthy. Thank you for that inspired response. I hereby tag this post with the coveted “Moment of Zen” tag.

Prophecy

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Given President Obama’s recent Middle-East Apology Tour speeches, I am reminded of a Quote of the Day from last October, and the prediction of another damned fine intellectual, Thomas Sowell:

“There is such a thing as a point of no return,” he says. If Obama wins the White House and Democrats expand their majorities in the House and Senate, they will intervene in the economy and redistribute wealth. Yet their economic policies “will pale by comparison to what they will do in permitting countries to acquire nuclear weapons and turn them over to terrorists. Once that happens, we’re at the point of no return. The next generation will live under that threat as far out as the eye can see.”

“The unconstrained vision is really an elitist vision,” Sowell explains. “This man [Obama] really does believe that he can change the world. And people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians.”

Ran across that perusing the archives for something else, and thought it bore repeating.

What Your Kids are Actually Learning in School

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What Your Kids are Actually Learning in School

Quote of the Day:

If you want to understand how that leftist tactic has penetrated deeply into the culture, let me tell you a personal story. Recently, I was involved in an animated discussion with my daughter about her schoolwork. Things got a little heated, and in typical teenage fashion she became flustered when I pointed out some facts about her study habits that she did not like.

“Yeah?” she yelled, “Well you’re a….racist!”

Somewhat taken aback at this insertion of this word into our conversation, I must have momentarily appeared deeply shocked, because she abruptly started laughing and the tension was broken. Which, of course, made me laugh too at the ridiculousness of her words.

Still laughing, she said that she had learned at school that the best way to end a discussion you did not like was to accuse the other person of being a ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobe.’ “Calling someone one of those names is a sure way to end the discussion,” she explained with a smile. “Kids at school use it all the time.”

Dr. Sanity, Like His Grandmother, Perhaps?

Oh, and check the cartoon at the link. Classic!

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Every nation has a number of founding myths. Britain’s principal myth is that it is the birthplace of modern democracy and a land where the law is supreme. The shocking realization that “the mother of parliaments” may have been acting as the rudest of street sluts is not easy to stomach. Some of the same politicians who go around the world lecturing others, especially in the “developing world”, against corruption, have been exposed as practioners(sic) of petty larceny. – Amir Taheri, Coming Soon: An English Revolution

Great. When do we get ours?

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Instapundit commenting on a story where “the Tennessee Firearms Association is seeking to publicly identify each law enforcement officer and prosecutor who attended Gov. Phil Bredesen’s veto of a bill to allow people with handgun carry permits to take their weapons into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol”:

If government officials do it to citizens, it might be an effort to chill people’s speech. But when citizens do it to government officials, it’s called political accountability.

Damned straight.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Has it ever occurred to malignant and thuggish do-gooders like Nancy Pelosi, I wonder, that she and the other idiots in Congress were elected to take responsibility for dealing with lunatic regimes like North Korea and Iran–and NOT for regulating every aspect of the lives of those who elected her?

WHY WHY WHY are we electing people like this?? It’s suicidal in more ways than one….

Dr. Sanity, THE SUICIDAL IMPULSES OF THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE