Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7BSgwtNNS8]
Tag: Philosophy
That’s It in a Nutshell
From New Jersey, no less!
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1
Via email from my brother.
May Victims of Communism Day
Today is the fifth annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is the beautiful dream lie. R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people. For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million. And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omlette.
Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them. “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated. But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.
The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes. Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea: That we can make people better.
Why do I own guns? For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? — Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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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. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.
I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog. This is the fourth time I have put it up.
Two years ago, Sipsey Street Irregulars had a post to go along with this one. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.
UPDATE: This year, Not Clausewitz has a worthy addition.
Quote of the Day – GeekWithA.45 Edition
From the comments to one of my older pieces on education that I have had reason to link to recently:
I’ve long held that the darkest truth I know is that men are enslave-able.
It is a detail of this fact that their bodies can be beaten and broken, molded into a twisted parody of their rightful glory. We rightfully hide far from our daily awareness, in a special place of screaming horror the fact that their minds can be warped into a place where gibberish replaces reason.
Humanity celebrates the man whose spirit triumphs over such abuse, who rises above the physical and mental infirmities imposed upon him to know and live his own mind and spirit, and desperately wants to believe that this is the norm, and not the exception.
Surrounded by proof to the contrary, we are thus presented with a painful dichotomy. What is man? Is it the transcendent, triumphant glory of spirit that strives against all adversaries on behalf of its own autonomy? Is our being entirely conditional upon the forces that mold and warp it, some occasional victories being contingent upon some lucky factor? (And what of the adversaries? Are they also not men?) Can we avoid splitting the camp of mankind, into those men who would rule only themselves, those are/will/can not be, and those who would rule others? How shall we regard the many flavors of Failed, who may have never even understood the need to lift a finger in their own defense, or who, having strived, failed of strength or endurance?
I submit that we can hold the Failed in compassion, but that compassion would be misplaced if applied to those who would Rule us.
ANOTHER Book for the Pile
I have listened to a speech given by Evan Sayet, and watched a couple of things on YouTube by him, but I just last night found this interview of him conducted by Bill Whittle last year:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61BhYPdIlao?rel=0]
I’m going to have to buy his book.
Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition
This was also found in yesterday’s link to that Larry Correia post, but it’s from a June, 2012 column, Dissent is the Highest Form of … No, Wait:
I hate to bring up other “mid-century notions” but intellectual diversity on the left is increasingly indistinguishable from Tupperware night with the Stepford Wives.
Mark Steyn is another national treasure.
Demoralization
In the comments to a post at Say Uncle on massive failures from police crime labs in Massachusetts and Texas, Lyle said:
Part of the overthrow of the U.S. is demoralizing the population. Part of demoralizing the population is having incompetent buffoons in critical positions, such that we lose trust in the system. Eventually, so the idea goes, we’ll be so fed up and disgusted that we’ll cry out for a “strong man” who will “do something” by getting past all the politics and red tape, i.e. a dictator.
In the comments to a post at BoingBoing that Uncle linked wherein a Brit berated a man for “taking the law into his own hands” and taking a gun to check on the welfare of his daughter instead of calling the cops to do it, another commenter responded:
Call the police and they might just kill you
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-50…Police escalate car chase to deadly conclusion
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a…Even the mayor isn’t safe
http://www.seattlepi.com/natio…Police helping the mentally-challenged
“With his dying words, he… never understood why the defendant had beat him. He said ‘All I wanted was a Snickers bar.'”
http://digitaljournal.com/arti…Newly-Released Surveillance Video Shows Police Officers Brutally Beating, Suffocating, and Tasing Kelly Thomas to Death
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2…Sure, a lot of cops, maybe most, are there to help. I’ve met some of them. But in this country, it really is a crapshoot. You don’t want to call the cops unless you absolutely have to.
There are a lot more of those, too.
Where have I heard the term “demoralization” before?
UPDATE: The Kelly Thomas link goes to a different homicide-by-cop. The video of Kelly Thomas getting beaten (not tased) to death is here: Full, unedited video.
“STOP DIGGING!”
Reader Phil B., the Brit expat now living in Middle Earth, sent me a link to a wall-o’-text essay, Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell, by one Scott Alexander. Aside from being a tremendous source for Quotes of the Day, it’s an absolutely outstanding piece of work I cannot recommend strongly enough.
But it is, absolutely, an überpost. Get a beverage and a snack before you sit down to savor it. Excerpt:
Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s not suggesting there’s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it’s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.
And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don’t like. Having only things you don’t like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.
The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell.
And that’s just for openers. Go. Read.
Quote of the Day – Sultan Knish Edition
Via email from Unix Jedi:
But now you are a liberal in 2013 and the society is already very liberal. You are the product of liberal professors who learned at the feet of other liberal professors for 3 or 4 generations. You grew up in a liberal community to parents whose grandparents were already singing red campfire songs. Like them, you came of age as a member of a natural elite.
The newspapers you read, the textbooks you studied, the movies you watch, the professors who taught you and every adult you grew up with all reflect your point of view. You have no sense of being marginalized or out of step. Nor do you have any sense that there is another point of view out there. Only ranks of ignorant teabaggers paid for by corporate money who are about to be swept away into the dustbin of history as soon as the multicultural youth of tomorrow put together another Hip-Hop Against AIDS protest.
You live in a bubble and you see no need for an open society or for maintaining the integrity of institutions such as journalism or the scientific community. The very idea of objectivity is at odds with your entire way of thinking because it presumes that there is some higher truth than the one propounded by the progressive reality-based community. And you know, with the casual faith of any born believer, that this is not possible.
Dilbert Explains Government
“Evil is the cure for incompetence.”
Yup, that’s pretty much the diagnosis.