Thoughts on societal entropy:
Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?
We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.
I will make a wild leap and suggest that a vast majority of Americans are reaching the point where they accept that the blue statist paradigm is reaching its logical end and simply cannot go on any more, given that it is antithetical to human nature itself. There is not always a Germany for every Greece.
That which cannot continue, will not.
A couple of years ago, some teenagers were tried in connection with a death. Can’t remember if they were tried for murder directly, or something else. Anyway, their direct crime was stealing a stop sign. Later, a family, having driven the route many times, proceeded into an intersection expecting a truck to stop. The truck kept on, without a stop sign of warning, and struck the family vehicle and killed some of the passengers.
Now we have some thugs stealing cooper wire from electrical poles. I’m sure that could cause all sorts of problems. Will they be held responsible for untended consequences?
Interesting reading the comments of #59 Rick NYS who admits that, yes, he is a public sector employee (PSE), yes, he belongs to a union, yes, he has a comfortable pension, and yes he is better compensated than were he to switch to the private sector, and also yes, he is part of society’s thin response to VDH’s chain-saw thief, and given the level of crime in our society and the nature of our criminals, his isn’t really an easy job.
Equally interesting is the response from “jarmo” to the effect “Must be nice living off the fat of the taxpayer. ”
#59 Rick NYS is not some dumb “artist” collecting an NEA grant to dip a Christian cross into bodily fluids, he is not some radical Weather Underground leader turned college professor indoctrinating our youth with some claptrap, and he is not some science dude fudging weather data to advance a radical social agenda. For goodness sakes, people, he is a prison guard.
The Right Blogosphere has run off the rails as it were if a public-employee prison guard is equated with a chain-saw thief? “Jarmo” is not one of us here on Rand’s site, but I have heard words to his effect before. What did this prison guard say to merit “jarmo’s” snarky response? If “jarmo’s” words are not your words, then stand up and say so.
I don’t know what Andrew Cuomo is doing, but the same prison guard in Wisconsin is getting his pay-cut-only-it-isn’t-a-pay-cut-it-is-a-fair-contribution-to-benefits-generous-beyond-what-I-am-getting-and-you-get-no-sympathy-from-me-Bud, losing his collective bargaining, with a pension benefit that we all think is generous but really rather uncertain given the movement to cut costs, and that guy is probably going to soldier on guarding prisoners and accept these changes as being necessary to the fiscal well being of the state.
The hate directed at people like Rick NYS — what do we want from our next Republican or Tea Party leaders, something like one of Chairman Mao’s periodic revolutions where in addition to the cut in compensation and personal insults, Rick and all other PSE’s will have to stand in public before jeering crowds of Tea Party activists, hang their heads, and publically confess to having fleeced the taxpayer all of these years by having above-market wage and benefit packages?
Rick seems like the kind of guy who back in the day was a Reagan Democrat, and by the time the Right Blogosphere is through with his kind, he will be pulling the lever of Obama in 2012, and people on the Right Blogosphere will be saying, “What happened, how were the voters that stupid?”
pay-cut-only-it-isn’t-a-pay-cut-it-is-a-
fair–fiscally-responsible–contribution-to-benefits-generous-beyond-what-I-am-getting–can-be-payed-for–and-you-get-no-sympathy-from-me-BudChanneling Deepak Chopra today, Paul?
http://deepakchopra.com/2011/06/sarah-palin-my-president/
You get the hate you deserve, apparently. People are fed up with entitled leftists sucking on the teat.
Channeling Deepak Chopra today, Paul?
http://deepakchopra.com/2011/06/sarah-palin-my-president/
You get the hate you deserve, apparently. People are fed up with entitled leftists sucking on the teat.
I always turn to Professor Hanson whenever I feel too cheerful and optimistic. Works like a charm.
Anyway, he’s certainly right that Central California is descending to a miserable squalid outpost of Mexico, complete with the suicidal culture. And he’s amusingly right about the nature of the elite modern left, particularly in California, in living like aristocrats and spouting pious power to the people shibboleths while being supported in their ease by oceans of brutally exploited serfs around them. They really are the modern version of the medieval clergy. You, varlet! Give me half your corn, for I must labor night and day for the salvation of your soul in my scriptorium, perusing the writings of Christ and attempting to understand the mind of God. What? I don’t care if your children are starving. You shouldn’t have had so many. Just hand it over, my good man.
But I think he’s handicapped in pondering the culture of theft, wondering frustratedly why these people don’t see that it cannot end well — that ultimately the thief himself will be destroyed by a culture of theft. They don’t see it because they’re stupid, Professor. Their brains don’t work well enough. It’s like trying to teach a horse to obey the bridle by holding hearings and fining him half a bushel of oats if he doesn’t. I don’t think he can quite wrap his mind around that.
“You get the hate you deserve, apparently. People are fed up with entitled leftists sucking on the teat.”
Oh, I know I get all of the hate that I justly deserve because I am a sinner in the eyes of the Lord.
But why is Rick NYS the prison guard the object of that level of hate? Cutting his salary and benefits may be a necessity to close whatever budget gap they have in New York. But in addition to cutting his pay, what purpose is served by hating him so? Will this help get a Republican President elected in 2012?
The Right Blogosphere is envious of PSE’s and the Left Blogosphere is envious of anyone with a (married, joint return AGI) of $250,000. Mr. Obama, I guess, hated the Chrysler bond holders, many of them (get this!) being PSE’s or PSE pensioners (weren’t they also teachers?) in the State of Indiana through their pension fund. Maybe the Right Blogosphere and Mr. Obama are converging on hating the same people, namely anyone who isn’t completely destitute.
Because Jarmo is an idiot and if you have to make more of it than there rightfully is you’re going to Outrage yourself into an early grave.
“The hate directed at people like Rick NYS — what do we want from our next Republican or Tea Party leaders, something like one of Chairman Mao’s periodic revolutions where in addition to the cut in compensation and personal insults, Rick and all other PSE’s will have to stand in public before jeering crowds of Tea Party activists, hang their heads, and publically confess to having fleeced the taxpayer all of these years by having above-market wage and benefit packages?”
You could direct the fears of a communist revolution and all the joy that would flow from one, toward the unionistas and the protesting class of the left that are actually advocating one.
@Paul Milenkovic: what do we want from our next Republican or Tea Party leaders, something like one of Chairman Mao’s periodic revolutions where in addition to the cut in compensation and personal insults, Rick and all other PSE’s will have to stand in public before jeering crowds of Tea Party activists, hang their heads, and publically confess to having fleeced the taxpayer all of these years by having above-market wage and benefit packages?
Sounds great. Add some cute teenage-girl Red Guards and I’m in. Floggings might also be administered as appropriate.
Better yet, fire all but the base-level “PSEs” and reduce the government to essential functions only, public service to be provided by ordinary, non-unionized employees.
I read this stuff, and I assume others read such things too, not just those from the right. As the days go on, we sink lower and lower, away from a law abiding society, and yet, people ask ME why I carry a gun.
Someone who steals tools from a drive way, as they drive by, or someone who will steal from an empty house or someone who will steal from an honest farmer, has ALREADY crossed a line of civility that most of us, hopefully, still see as the only way to live. What’s the next line though? Car theft? Bank robbery? When will they cross that line? Will they cross it as you are entering or leaving the bank or 7-11?
Do the honest people left, not understand that the opportunistic sneak thieves of today, are the rioting, raping, pillaging fools of tomorrow? How will the chain saw, copper wire, refrigerator thieves act WHEN they are too sober, or in need of drugs, or simply but miserably hungry? Do the law abiding citizens assume someone will call the police and the LEOs will have the time stop the criminals BEFORE they, the citizens, get shot or robbed?
When seconds count, the Police are only minutes away, right?
I got a hair cut today, (in a shop inside a Super Wal-Mart) and the guy who cut it said he was “…a little freaked out that I was carrying SUCH a LARGE gun!”
(his words and inflection) (it’s a 9mm Ruger, and not all that large)
I asked him if he thought everyone who came in there was unarmed.
He said he thought some people are bound to be carrying guns in there, “…it just sort of stands to reason, but I try not to think about it…”
(he was taking my money and the cash register was open here)
I asked him if he thought LEGAL gun owners carrying in the store would be a help to store patrons and employees if someone tried to rob the store or if some other situation arises where illegal gun holders started shooting.
He said, “…I’m from NYC, so I never thought about anyone using a gun, except for a crime…”
I asked him if he thought we were becoming more or less civilized and if he had read about ‘flash mob robberies’ or such stuff.
“…oh, man, if I worried about that sort of stuff…I’d never leave my house!”
He’s unarmed, uninformed and unthinking by my estimation. And, he’s typical I think, given that this is about “Conversation # 5,311”, like this that I’ve had in the two years since I got my permit. Hell, I’ve got MY part memorized like it’s from a play or movie, and I’m playing the Joe Friday part.
I don’t leave my house, my shop, my tool boxes or my vehicles unlocked. I don’t leave tools or anything worth stealing laying out where someone could be tempted, even for a few minutes.
Everyone who lives in my house carries a pistol or a stun gun / taser type unit. I don’t think it’s possible for the LEOs to stop much crime any more, they spend a lot of time writing reports. There just isn’t time for them to do otherwise.
And if large groups of people break across that civility line, due to hunger or anger or both as in Greece or the UK, the LEOs will be at home, protecting THEIR OWN lives and property, which means I will have to protect me and mine. It will be too late then, to get take a class, wait on a permit and find a gun, so I got ahead of the curve.
I didn’t make these devolving civilization rules, but I do have to live with them. Anyone who has the ability to, but does not prepare for a (possible) coming nightmare, is just not thinking straight IMO.
Paul Milenkovic said,
Actions like this.
Why Do Prison and Alcohol Lobbies Oppose Drug Treatment?
Der Schtumpy,
In Old West movies, wasn’t it normal to keep a pistol cocked and aimed at the barber while he shaved a gunfighters neck with a straight razor? Surely they cover that in barber school.
I always turn to Professor Hanson whenever I feel too cheerful and optimistic. Works like a charm.
You got that right, sport!
I’m wondering when this crap is going to come to the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington) as well. Or maybe we will get lucky and learn from the collapse of California. The only problem with this scenario is that no one ever seems to learn anything.
Take the bubble for example. Japan had its bubble in the 1980’s followed by a crash. I thought we would learn from this and never have any kind of bubble in the U.S. Stupid me. Of course we had not only one bubble, but two. The dot-bomb bubble and later the real estate bubble.
This is why I’m not convinced anyone ever learns from anyone else. Perhaps we really do need that AI singularity or whatever it is that the transhumanists believe in.
George,
Yeah, I’ve seen and read that too.
But I have a full beard, so I keep my gun in the holster when they just trim or cut my hair. So that’s not why he was freaking out. I think he’s just a product of the leftist indoctrination.
Guns are EVIL!
Guns KILL!!!
Anyone who wants a gun, is EVIL and wants to KILL!
He’s proof that the lying rhetoric, from the left, works. If you tell a lie often enough, loud enough and tell it to enough people, it WILL become truth to a large number of those people. They will cease to think about “X” Subject, and accept the lie.