The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
In the wake of the Vanderboegh letter, to one degree or another, armed revolt has been treated as a legitimate policy answer to popular gun control measures by one blogger after another in the gun community – rather than denounced as immoral or as street-corner gibberish uttered by one who wears a tinfoil hat. – “newswatch” at The Brady Blog, 8/6/08
Personal sovereignty scares the hell out of them, doesn’t it?
This is what licensing and registration are for, and we know it.
New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world panty-waists’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his seventy-dollar TV. A North Country non-gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non-gun owner just like him: Washington, D.C., say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and a security camera. – Mark Steyn, America Alone
Interestingly, a search of “New Hampshire” in Clayton Cramer’s Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog garnered no hits.
Once you decide that most soldiers are upstanding, decent, intelligent people, and every soldier you’ve met nicely supports that assumption, how do you go back to thinking they are children who can’t think for themselves and are being exploited by the neocons?
Once you decide that the bigger government is, the more inefficient and greedy it becomes, how do you go back to thinking that all social problems would be fixed if we properly funded them?
Once you decide that the problem with education isn’t lack of funding — see the schools in DC — but a screwed-up union and an ossified system which disregards merit, how do you go back to “It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”?
Once you decide that affirmative action is generally not a good idea because race preferences are generally not a good idea, no matter what the context, how do you go back to supporting ethnic preference in government contracts? (Clarence Thomas is the uber-perfect example here; I railed at him for decrying affirmative action when the only reason he had gotten on the Supreme Court was to be The Black Justice. It NEVER crossed my mind that perhaps he was QUALIFIED for the job. Witness my soft bigotry.)
Once you decide that some people — NOT ALL PEOPLE, NOT MOST PEOPLE, but some very small percentage of people — are poor because they won’t work hard enough to get un-poor, how do you go back to believing that, because there are poor and hungry in our country, our nation has failed?
(Note: These aren’t strawmen. The ideas to “go back to” are ones that I believed, truly.) – Lissa in A “mindset” continued at lookingforlissa
(h/t to Tam for the pointer – and read Part 1 of Lissa’s conversion story as well.)
Quote of the Day
Bread and Circuses is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader–the barbarians enter Rome. – Robert Anson Heinlein To Sail Beyond the Sunset
America is the most benign hegemon in history: it’s the world’s first non-imperial superpower and, at the dawn of the American moment, it chose to set itself up as a kind of geopolitical sugar daddy. By picking up the tab for Europe’s defense, it hoped to prevent those countries lapsing into traditional power rivalries. Nice idea. But it also absolved them of the traditional responsibilities of nationhood, turning the alliances into a dysfunctional sitcom family, with one grown-up presiding over a brood of whiny teenagers — albeit (demographically) the the world’s wrinkliest teenagers. America’s preference for diluting its power within the UN and other organs of an embryo world government has not won it friends. All dominant powers are hated — Britain was, and Rome — but they’re usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it’s controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell’s Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you’re against, America is a prime example of it. – Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
I owe Mike Vanderboegh an überpost today, but I’m taking the M1 Carbine to the range this morning. Don’t expect it before tonight some time.
(Weird) Quote of the Day
Skydivers: If you are at all like me, and if you are at all like me then you regard thirty-minute home pizza delivery as one of the fundamental characteristics distinguishing truly civilized societies from those inchoate masses of culturally benighted heathen hearts who put their trust in reeking tube and iron shard and English muffins with mozzarella and tomato sauce on them, then it necessarily follows that you must also regard the now almost constant loss of various and sundry body parts by skydivers as they plunge towards the Earth as an especially irksome phenomenon and one with disturbing implications for the long term electoral viability of the Republican Party. – Akaky Bashmachkin, Skydivers – at The Passing Parade, in a rather odd but fascinating (in a fatal traffic accident rubbernecking kind of way) rant on . . . I’m not quite sure what.
When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said “Praise the Lord.” And when the young leader said, “I will be for change and I’ll bring you change,” everyone yelled, “Viva Fidel!”
But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner’s guns went silent the people’s guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to Third-World status. By the time the change was over more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes. You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans. – Manuel Alvarez Jr., “Beware Charismatic Men Who Preach ‘Change’ ” letter to the editor of the Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch found at Liberal Morality
RTWT. He has a pertinent question at the end.
On Revolution
…revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror.
—
Organization must be no larger than necessary – never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. Nor seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views. He’ll share them when the time comes . . . or you’ve misjudged the moment in history. Oh, there will be an educational organization but it must be separate; agitprop is no part of basic structure.
As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal – since there always are betrayals. – Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Another one from Heather MacDonald’s The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society. But first, a quote from philosopher Eric Hoffer from an interview he did with Eric Sevareid:
I have no grievance against intellectuals. All that I know about them is what I read in history books and what I’ve observed in our time. I’m convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.
In my new book I elaborate on this and I offer an explanation why. You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.
Now, from Chapter 1 of MacDonald’s book, The Billions of Dollars that Made Things Worse:
If the practical visionaries who established America’s great philanthropic foundations could see their legacy tday, they might regret their generosity. Once an agent for social good, those powerful institutions have become a political battering ram targeted at American society. You can instantly grasp how profoundly foundations have changed by comaring two statements made by presidents of the Carnegie Corporation just a generation apart. In 1938 the corporation commissioned a landmark analysis of black-white relations from sociologist Gunnar Myrdal; the result An American Dilemma, would help spark the civil rights movement.
An aside, it was Myrdal who wrote in 1942 that America is “conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”
Yet Carnegie president Frederick Keppel was almost apologetic about the foundation’s involvement with such a vexed social problem: “Provided the foundation limits itself to its proper function, Keppel wrote in the book’s introduction, “namely, to make the facts available and then let them speak for themselves, and does not undertake to instruct the public as to what to do about them, studies of this kind provide a wholly proper and . . . sometimes a highly important use of [its] funds.”
Three decades later, Carnegie president Alan Pifer’s 1968 annual report reads like a voice from another planet. Abandoning Keppel’s admirable restraint, Pifer exhorts his comrades in the foundation world to help shake up “sterile institutional forms and procedures left over from the past” by supporting “aggressive new community organizations which . . . the comfortable stratum of American life would consider disturbing and perhaps even dangerous.” No longer content to provide mainstream knowledge dispassionately, America’s most prestigious philanthropies now aspired to revolutionize what they believed to be a deeply flawed American society.
That was the lead-in for today’s QotD, the next paragraph:
The results, from the 1960s onward, have been devastating. Foundation-supported poverty advocates fought to make welfare a right – and generations have grown up fatherless and dependent. Foundation-funded minority advocates fought for racial separatism and a vast system of quotas – and American society remains perpetually riven by the issue of race. On most campuses today, a foundation-endowed multicultural circus has driven out the very idea of a common culture, deriding it as a relic of American imperialism. Foundation-backed advocates for various “victim” groups use the courts to bend government policy to their will, thwarting the democratic process. And poor communities across the country often find their traditional values undermined by foundation-sent “community activists” bearing the latest fashions in diversity and “enlightened” sexuality. The net effect is not a more just but a more divided and contentious American society.
On that note, I invite you to read a post of mine from last October, Hubris, from which the Hoffer quote came.
And which of our two presidential presumptives was a “community activist“?
Quote of the Day
Your idea is presumptuous and self-centered. You want everybody to do what you want, and you’re willing to use the power of the state to enforce it. That is the ultimate in self-righteous egocentric claptrap. You assume that your way is morally superior and everyone can fall into line.
I’m in favor of freedom. Freedom to choose your own path. Freedom to volunteer if I want to. America was made great because we were a nation where free men could choose their own way, their own path. Our government was created to protect our rights, not to tell us what to do, not to make up morality, or tell us what to do with our time, energy, and property. That was nice while it lasted. – Larry Correia, I’ve been taken to task by an Obama disciple. Bring it on.
It was very difficult to choose a pullquote from this piece because it’s all just so damned good! RTWT!