The Smallest Minority |
|||
|
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. - MaxedOutMama I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. Kim du Toit
|
. . . and so are you  Wahabism Delenda Est      Hey, FEC!  BITE ME! I'm a Member of the McCain-Feingold INSURRECTION!    "Jeez, Kevin... calling you an asshole would be a huge understatement, wouldn't it?" -Jack Cluth, The People's Republic of Seabrook (Coming from you, Jack, it's an honor.)  email: gunrightsAT comcastDOTnet INVITATION: If you have never shot a firearm, regardless of your position on the right to arms, and if you live near or visit the Tucson, AZ metropolitan area, I invite you to go shooting for a day. I will provide the arms, ammunition, targets, safety equipment, range fees and instruction. All you have to do is show up. 6 Takers To Date DO YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE and want to try shooting? Click HERE  Proud Gun-blogging member of the Pajamahadeen since May, 2003!
Debates: "The Commentary" A OLD discussion on gun control between me and an Irishman living in London Start here. UPDATED! Now with archive! Post #1 by Alex, a Guest A multi-post discussion hosted here at TSM My short exchange with Professor Saul Cornell of the Second Amendment Research Center Best Posts: The "Rights" Discussion: What is a "Right?" What is a "Right"? Revisited, Part I Part II Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part I Part II Part III Part IV The United Federation of Planets Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection? Part I & Part II 1975 in Washington, D.C. vs. 2004 in Canton, Ohio Go Ahead, Rely on the Government for Your Protection The Other Side Liberal vs. Conservative: Both are Necessary The Mystery of Government The Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie Updated and restated as: Of Laws and Sausages Militias A Mistake a Free People Get to Make Only Once The George Orwell Daycare Center This is NOT What I Wanted to Read TRUST The Lying "News" Media, Pt. II Say WHAT? Bias? What Bias? Agenda? What Agenda? The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation Let's See if I Can "Germinate an Intelligent Thought" Here The ACLU Hasn't Changed its Tune They Never EVER Stop It is Not the Business of Government Five Reasons Why It ISN'T They Keep Making Better Fools Five Month Investigation, 10 Tracer Rounds, Two Felony Convictions That Sumbitch Ain't been BORN! On Guillotines and Gibbets England Slides Further Towards Bondage Pressing the "RESET" Button Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothin' Left To Lose A Terrible Resolve The Courts Will Not Save Us Trilogy: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions "Game Over, Man. Game Over." An Important Question And the denouement: Hudson Was Wrong The Dangerous Victims Trilogy: "(I)t's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can" Violence and the Social Contract Governments, Criminals, and Dangerous Victims In the same vein: Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them The True Believers Trilogy: True Believers March of the Lemmings Reasonable People Also in the same vein: Tough History Coming The Culture Trilogy Culture Hubris Weltanschauung And its follow-on: In Re: Culture Technical Dissertations Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (And Won't) Work Spin, Spin, Spin Speaking of Teddy Kennedy... This is the Kind of Thing That REALLY IRRITATES ME Questions from the Audience?
BLOGROLL:
PROTESTWARRIOR Some people who are taking the fight to the Left. And some GREAT T-shirts, too. DAILY READS I need a longer day! Day by Day InstaPundit Lileks' The Bleat Mostly Cajun View from the Porch Of Arms and the Law TFS Magnum Ravenwood's Universe Irons in the Fire Say Uncle The Adventures of Roberta X TRUE EXCELLENCE American Digest The Belmont Club Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper The Volokh Conspiracy Michael Yon Varifrank Eject!Eject!Eject! Eternity Road Oleg Volk ON INDEFINITE HIATUS USS Clueless The Safety Valve Ipse Dixit The Lopsided Poopdeck Acidman (RIP) Skywritings Publicola D.C. Thorton Kim du Toit Personal Effects Smoke on the Water OTHER GUN/RIGHTS BLOGS Airborne Combat Engineer AlphaPatriot Alphecca American Dinosaur A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver The Anarchangel Mrs. Anarchangel The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Argghhh! The Bitch Girls Boots and Sabers The Breda Fallacy Gun Nuts Media Carnaby Fudge Clayton Cramer Cogito Ergo Geek Countertop Chronicles Cowboy Blob Critical Mastiff Cryptic Subterranean Found: One Troll FreedomSight From the Heartland Fun Turns to Tragedy!!! The Geek with a .45 Gunwatch Heartless Libertarian Hecate's Crossroad Hell in a Handbasket Individ Justin Buist's Blog The LawDog Files Lead and Gold Les Jones Live from the (upper) Texas Gulf Coast Mad Ogre The Michael Bane Blog Moral Flexibility Mr. Completely Murdoc Online The Munchkin Wrangler Ninth Stage No Looking Backwards No Quarters Oscar Poppa Outrageous Malfunction Pass the ammo Posse Incitatus Random Nuclear Strikes Reasonablenut Resistance is Futile! Sandcastles and Cubicles SlagleRock's Slaughterhouse Snowflakes in Hell Surly Curmudgeon Texican Tattler The Ten Ring South Park Pundit Triggerfinger The View From North Central Idaho Vox The War on Guns Weck Up To Thees! Wince and Nod Xavier Thoughts .45 Caliber Justice BLOGGERS I'VE MET A Keyboard and a .45  
|
Tuesday, February 21, 2006 Hubris. hubris, noun: Overbearing pride or presumption; arroganceIn the late 1960's and early '70s Eric Sevareid interviewed a number of noteable people, and those interviews ran in hour-long television specials under the title Conversations with Eric Sevareid. A collection of the transcripts was published in 1976. Among the people Sevareid interviewed was American philosopher Eric Hoffer. Hoffer was interviewed twice; once on September 19, 1967, and again on January 28, 1969. In the opening to the first interview, this is how Sevareid introduced Hoffer: Between the ages of seven and fifteen Eric Hoffer was totally blind. He never went to school. He has worked at manual labor all his life, the last 25 years as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks. The University of California tried to hire him as a full professor. Publishers compete for his books, which are translated and read over half the world. His big body feels the twilight now, but his mind remains young as sunrise.I just wanted to establish some bona fides for Mr. Hoffer for those unfamiliar with him. Not too long ago, I was. Consider the following exchange: Eric Sevareid: You seem to have a fear about the rise of intellectuals in political life and power. Why are you so frightened of them?Thomas Sowell wrote a book published in 1995 entitled The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. From the introduction: The views of political commentators or writers on social issues often range across a wide spectrum, but their positions on these issues are seldom random. If they are liberal, conservative, or radical on foreign policy, then they are likely to be the same on crime, abortion, or education. There is usually a coherence to their beliefs, based on a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world - a certain vision of reality.Theodore Dalrymple's 2001 book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass carries this passage in the introduction: (M)ost of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia. Of nothing is this more true than the system of sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate (a figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent).I think my older brother went to that school. I'm fairly certain that my step-daughter did too. I know my granddaughter started out in one like that. Thankfully, I did not. But the ideas of the intelligentsia go far beyond sexual mores and rules of grammar. Eric Hoffer, in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, wrote: The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce, or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme -- the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectible humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.Are you beginning to see a pattern here? A week ago, I wrote an essay entitled Culture in response to comments and commentary on an earlier piece, Questions from the Audience?. One commenter in particular prompted that second essay, "tgirsch" from the blog Lean Left. Mr. Girsch left several comments to Culture and one, somewhat related, post at Lean Left in the interim. I've waited a week to write this piece just to make sure that all that was going to be said about and because of Culture had been said. (WRONG! Mr. Girsch posted his response to Culture, More on Culture, Race, Economics and Violent Crime on Wednesday morning.) The comment that prompted this post was made by Mr. Girsch in response to questions from reader Eric Sivula, which I will excerpt from: You still have offered no evidence that Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid have not hurt the economy. According to the Social Security Budget for 2004, it collected 668 Billion dollars in taxes for that year. The World Bank projected the US GDP at about 11.6 Trillion dollars. So Social security taxes equalled 5.7% of US GDP, based on those numbers.The key part of Mr. Girsch's response: Eric:The somewhat related post Mr. Girsch put up at Lean Left during the week after I posted Culture is a "Me, too!" link entitled Dissing Libertarians. It links to the blog And Doctor Biobrain's Response is... to the post Liberal Libertarians. The opening of that piece is what Mr. Girsch quoted in his post, and it begins:You still have offered no evidence that Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid have not hurt the economy.And you have offered no evidence that Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid have hurt the economy -- just a bunch of anecdotal "ferinstances." So where does that leave us? Libertarians. I can’t stand them. Even worse, I think they serve no useful purpose in our political system and really put a big drag on everything; and yes, that does presume that mainstream Republicans serve a purpose. The libertarian position sounds good, but that’s it. It’s just useless sloganeering and toughguy talk, with no real basis in reality. And there are two basic types of libertarians: Pie-in-the-sky jokers who haven’t thought any of it through passed [sic] the toughguy talk, and relatively intelligent Republicans who enjoy bashing libs but hate having to defend their own party. Both categories are dangerous in their own way, though the second is the more dangerous of the two. And both are entirely fake positions that are easy to defend, just as long as they can keep the topic on rhetoric and theory; and away from the thorns of reality.My instinctive response to that was, "Pot? Meet Kettle." My second response to both that and Mr. Girsch's comment that "the majority of the people would piss away that extra money" was, "Hubris." Leftists. I can't stand them. Even worse, I think they are destructive to our political system and really put a big drag on everything; and yes, that does presume that mainstream Democrats serve a purpose. The Leftist position sounds beautiful, but that’s it. It’s just useless sloganeering and utopian talk, with no real basis in reality. And there are two basic types of Leftists: Pie-in-the-sky jokers who haven’t thought any of it through past the utopian talk, and relatively intelligent Democrats who enjoy bashing libertarians but hate having to defend their own party. Both categories are dangerous in their own way, though the second is the far more dangerous of the two. And both are entirely fake positions that are easy to defend, just as long as they can keep the topic on rhetoric and theory; and away from the thorns of reality. There, see? I can do it too. There is a (vast) difference between being liberal - dedicated to individual liberty, and being a Leftist - dedicated to controlling the behavior of people towards socialist utopian ideals through the coercive power of government. There are liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans (both of whom are overwhelmed by what I think are loud (even screeching) minorities in those parties) and liberals who probably make up the overwhelming majority of the population that is not politically inclined. Liberals are like that. Mostly liberals want to be left the hell alone. Most libertarians are, in fact, liberal. Most Leftists are not, though they're convinced they are. Leftists want to control other people so that Utopia can be achieved, and Mr. Girsch's outburst "the majority of the people would piss away that extra money", illustrates that position vividly, as did his response following my comment (to wit: "SO?"): And this is where we're going to differ. You don't perceive a greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands -- which is inevitably what would happen without a social safety net -- as a problem. I do. And this is where libertarians and, well, the rest of us, will simply never agree.Ah yes. The power of government is there, not to secure the rights of Man, but to prevent the "greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands." Mr. Girsch also said, a bit later: If we were talking strictly about people making bad decisions and suffering for them, I'd be inclined to agree. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking, in many cases, about parents whose children in many cases will be poor, neglected, and disadvantaged through no fault of their own. I'll be the first to admit that "liberal" solutions don't do as good a job as they could here, but it beats the holy shit out of doing nothing. And last I checked, we as a nation could afford it.And the only valid solution Mr. Girsch can endorse is a government solution, where the coercive power of government ("we as a nation") is used to redistribute the wealth of that nation, according to the dictates of the powerful. Whither "democracy?" Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once said: A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it [...] gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.Touché, Mr. Friedman. And no one fears democracy more than the intellectual. Hoffer defined his meaning of the word "Intellectuals" in his second interview with Sevareid: I talk of a specific type of person when I talk about an intellectual. [...] To me an intellectual is a man of some education who considers himself a member of the educated elite, who thinks he has a God-given right to direct affairs. To me an intellectual doesn't even have to be intelligent in order to be an intellectual. He looked down upon the masses as if they were dirt.From Hoffer's 1967 interview: Sevareid: Why do intellectuals hate President Johnson?Perhaps radio waves, electron beams and phosphor screens, liquid crystals and laser printers may preserve it. For most of history the Intellectuals have been conservative, maintainers of the status quo ante. However, following the Russian Revolution and proceeding through the Second World War the Intellectuals became, more and more, Socialist. Why is this? Clinical psychologist Robert Godwin wrote: We are wrong to think that the difficulty lies in the uneducated and unsophisticated masses--as if inadequate education, in and of itself, is the problem. As a matter of fact, no one is more prone to illusions than the intellectual. It has been said that philosophy is simply personal error on a grandiose scale. Complicating matters is the fact that intellectuals are hardly immune to a deep emotional investment in their ideas, no less than the religious individual. The word "belief" is etymologically linked to the word "beloved," and it is easy to see how certain ideas, no matter how dysfunctional--for example, some of the undeniably appealing ideas underpinning contemporary liberalism--are beloved by those who believe them. Thus, many liberal ideas are believed not because they are true, but because they are beautiful. Then, the intellectual simply marshals their intelligence in service of legitimizing the beliefs that they already hold. It has long been understood by psychoanalysts that for most people, reason is the slave of the passions.Socialism is a beautiful idea, but its irridescent bubble bursts when it encounters the thorns of reality. But, true to form, the intellectuals have permeated media and education in order to proselytize. Godwin continues: (F)or the person who is not under the hypnotic psycho-spiritual spell of contemporary liberalism, it is strikingly devoid of actual religious wisdom or real ideas. As such, it is driven by vague, spiritually infused ideals and feelings, such as "sticking up for the little guy," or "war is not the answer." On the other hand, conservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there. It is actually refreshingly free of dogma, and full of dynamic tension. For example, at the heart of conservatism is an ongoing, unresolvable dialectic between freedom and virtue. In other words, there is a bedrock belief in the idea that free markets are the best way to allocate scarce resources and to create wealth and prosperity for all, but a frank acknowledgment that, without a virtuous populace, the system may produce a self-centered, materialistic citizenry living in a sort of degenerate, "pitiable comfort." Thus, there is an ongoing, unresolvable tension between the libertarian and traditional wings of the movement.Columnist Charles Krauthammer put it this way: To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.To quote Mr. Girsch one more time: (L)et's be frank about what most opponents of the social safety net are really after. Most of them don't believe that gutting such programs would truly make the country a better place; they just think that doing so would make things better for them.And, of course, selflessness is "sticking up for the little guy," and selfishness is evil. And that, gentle readers, is hubris. (For another example, I direct you to read this post at Alphecca.) | | |
