…does not make them allies.
The notion that it might is clueless to politics, history, and human nature.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
The Intrinsic Violence Of The Left
Andrew Klavan, with some thoughts on the invisible (and voluntary) versus the very visible hand of the Left, as most recently demonstrated by L’Affaire Chris Dorner:
The left has never bought into the central revelation of the Enlightenment: things are made to work perfectly fine without much control from above. This Enlightenment insight was inspired by the earlier work of Isaac Newton who discovered that God didn’t have to move the stars around in the sky or cause the apple to fall to earth. The Big Dude had cleverly put machinery in place that worked pretty much on its own. The economist Adam Smith translated this insight into economics when he pointed out that individuals working in their own interest frequently promote the interest of everyone as if by an invisible hand. The founders translated the idea into politics by creating a system in which individuals could act without too much government interference. These geniuses didn’t trust in individual goodness, not at all. They trusted in the handiwork of the Creator — that is, they trusted the overall human system was built to work without kings and aristocrats — or a democratic mob — forcing people to do what they wanted.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founding saint of modern leftism, rejected that Enlightenment wisdom. He hated the modern world and thought humanity had been better off in a state of noble savagery. In that state, Rousseau believed, men were truly free because their laws naturally followed the general will. If people in the corrupt modern age violated the general will, they had to be “forced to be free.”
The logic of Rousseau led to the guillotine.
As it led to the deaths of tens of millions over the past century. And of course, it is one of the reasons (but of course by no means the only one) that they don’t want us to have guns. They assume that they are as willing to kill for their ideology as they are, and we (or rather, they) can’t have that.
[Monday morning update]
More Huffpo readers who support mass murder. See, he’s got a grievance, so it’s perfectly understandable why he’d kill innocent people.
Boba Fett
Sorry, Gen-Xers, but not everything, or everyone, has a back story. And that’s particularly not the case with one of the most overrated movie franchises in history.
Han Solo you might be able to make a movie about, but Boba Fett? Really? If so, it’s just a final demonstration of cultural and moral decline.
A Worthy Cause
Go help out the Sun News. Richard Warman is one of the most vile, illiberal people in the west.
Not that I want you to not care about my lawsuit, but this one is even more important that my foofaraw with the disgustingly litigious Michael Mann. Warman is at war with the enlightenment itself.
A Crisis I Don’t Care About
A potential coffee shortage? It grows in a lot of other places.
I could happily live in a world without coffee, except for having to put up with all of the grumpy undercaffeinated whiners about it.
Is There Anything Global Warming Can’t Do?
A CNN anchor wonders if it causes asteroids.
And they say that skeptics are at war with science.
The Memory Hole At NPR
What strikes me about this story is that it’s supposed to be taken as a given that the NRA and Wayne LaPierre should be remorseful and contrite about Newtown, even though it and he had nothing to do with it.
Ed Markey
…and his idiotic war on roller coasters.
The Union Of Confused Scientists
…is apparently unacquainted with the difference between revenues and profits.
[Update a few minutes later]
And then there’s this:
The economic illiteracy continues, both at UCS and at Wired. “Fuel efficiency is really what’s going to put more money back in your pocket and put more money back in our communities,” Goldman tells Wired, and Newcomb worries that “very little of the remaining cash goes into the local economy.” Can we please lay aside the primitive superstition that in the developed world in the 21st century there is such a thing as the “local economy”? Let’s say we took the Brooklyn farm coop approach to gas, and a quaint little store on my corner had a oil well in the back, a DIY-refinery in the garage, and a hand-lettered chalkboard outside advertising its artisanal gas. The bearded hipster inside runs the whole thing. Local economy, right? But I assume he lives in a house or an apartment, which is bound to be made of concrete and steel not locally sourced. He probably has a cell phone and a computer and may even shop at Trader Joe’s or Whole Food or — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — Walmart, thus sending the money I spend at his shop far and wide. You know who has a “local economy”? North Koreans and hunter-gatherers. Autarky is no way to live. Somebody should explain comparative advantage and gains from trade to these gentlemen.
Idiots.
America’s Car Culture
Four reasons it’s dead or dying.
Amen especially to number two. I was looking in the shop manual for what’s involved in tuning our BMW 323i, and I couldn’t see that there was anything I can do to it other than changing plugs. And there’s just no room to work under the hood. I remember when I was a kid, you could almost walk around in the engine compartments.