Category Archives: History

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Right To Bear Arms

…is not up for debate:

When debating the wisdom of the Constitution’s Second Amendment, the media tends to start from the presumption that the question is purely scientific, and that the answers can — and should — be derived from statistical analyses and relentless experimentation. This approach is mistaken. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is not the product of the latest research fads or exquisitely tortured “data journalism,” but a natural extension of the Lockean principles on which this country was founded. It must be protected as such.

…Reacting to this argument, we often hear advocates of gun control propose that the Founders’ observations are irrelevant because they could “not have imagined the modern world.” I agree with the latter assertion: They couldn’t have. As well-read in world history as they were, there is no way that they could have foreseen just how prescient they were in insisting on harsh limitations of government power. In their time, “tyranny” was comparatively soft — their complaints focused on under-representation and the capricious restriction of ancient rights. In the past century, by contrast, tyranny involved the systematic execution of entire groups and the enslavement of whole countries. The notion that if James Madison had foreseen the 20th century he would have concluded that the Bill of Rights was too generous is laughable.

Nor could the Founders have imagined the entrenched tyranny that would arise in their own country. Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Company were hypocrites, certainly — like so many at the time they spoke of equality and liberty while indulging slavery — but the generation that met at Philadelphia did at least consider that the institution would die out peacefully. Instead, it was abolished only by bloody force, and then transmuted into something almost as abhorrent.

And as he notes, proposals for gun control have always been profoundly racist, and remain so.

[Update a while later]

Related: The historical African-American tradition of firearms.

[Afternoon update]

No, the right to bear arms isn’t absolute. So what?

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Mean People Are Lying About Hillary Again

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Remember in the 90s when those lying women were accusing poor Hillary’s husband of sexual harassment and rape?

Well now those terrible Benghazi families are lying about what she told them on the tarmac:

“I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said ‘we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son,’” recalls Tyrone Woods’ father, reading directly from his written record from that day. Sean Smith’s mother and uncle remember the same thing, as does Glen Doherty’s sister. Now watch Hillary’s performance from this past Sunday. Note how anchor George Stephanopoulos, to his credit, asks a very specific question, preceded by clips of statements from several of the aforementioned family members.

I’ll bet Woods’ father was lying to his diary, like that guy in the Clinton administration. It must be terrible to be a Clinton, and always have people telling lies about you.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Loretta Lynch And The New York Times

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How they made me join the NRA:

I wouldn’t doubt the editorial board of the NYT is also aware that the policy of the Nazi party was pretty close to what they are recommending, the confiscation of guns — for the National Socialists so that they could be sure they were only in the hands of those deemed acceptable (not Jews, etc.). To use Orwell’s term this time, that would make the NYT “objectively pro-fascist.”

But perhaps less harmful than our own government. Reacting to the San Bernardino Islamic ideology-based terror rampage… er, workplace violence… the first thing out of our attorney general’s mouth was to warn James Comey, director of the FBI, that the real danger from this event was anti-Muslim backlash and to watch his language. In other words, don’t call a duck a duck. According to DCWhispers, the order had come down from Obama and Jarrett to Lynch, in which order was unspecified, that Comey’s statements should be bowdlerized. It was.

Okay, I’ve had it. Mr. LaPierre, as I told you, I’m in. You’ve got another one-time Jewish lefty in the NRA. That should make at least one of us.

If these people want a civil war, they should be careful what they wish for, and shouldn’t delude themselves that they’ll win it. I don’t know if America will survive, but they sure as hell won’t.

[Update a few minutes later]

Barack Obama is getting what he wanted:

We now know from media reports that the President intends to call for gun control. He may even try by executive order.

This was the plan all along. Just like Europe.

Get Americans worried and fearful about terrorism, show that the government is incapable of dealing effectively with it, then declare that the only solution is to round up guns so terrorists cannot get them.

It is all by design. The President never had any intention of working aggressively to stop domestic terrorism. He needed it to fester and call it something else, just as he needs problems with Obamacare to fester to get to single payer, in order to curtail our freedoms.

Many of us saw this coming eight years ago. But more didn’t, or did and were cheering for it.

[Update a few minutes later]

The New York Times is calling for immense expense and a political civil war to reduce gun violence a negligible amount.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Richard Posner

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…and the Constitution:

This has implications that go far beyond the judiciary. The only reason for not tarring and feathering any government official for effrontery when they tell us what to do is that their power to do so is somehow legitimate. But that legitimacy comes from the exercise of constitutional power. If the Constitution doesn’t mean anything, well, then, maybe it’s time to go long on pitchforks. Because without the Constitution the angry mob is just as legitimate as the perfumed princes of the state.

Here is Josh Blackman’s take down of Posner.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Brussels

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The present of “the city of white sepulchres” present is the future of the West, if we continue to allow it:

Brussels’ failures are emblematic of Europe’s failings. The city that hopes to govern a post-national Europe has been made impotent by the petty jealousies and nasty rivalries of two ethnic groups barely large enough to qualify as tribes in much of the world. Brussels is in some ways a satire of the European project: committed to transnational goals, hobbled by unresolved ethnic spats. A city dedicated to universal secular human values is now threatened by fanatical death cults that have grown up in its miserable, insecure slums.

The West as a whole these days is cursed by moral grandiosity and failing performance. Our self-esteem has seldom been more robust, or our performance more pitiable. We busy ourselves with what we think is the last unfinished work of implementing universal egalitarianism, by for example tending to high school students who identify with a gender other than that into which they were born, ensuring that they can use the restrooms toward which their aspirations lead them. We see ourselves as courageous warriors even as the foundations of our world are beginning to crack. We claim that tolerance and diversity are the touchstones of our civilization, and have raised a generation of weaklings who cannot bear to be exposed to unorthodox ideas or to the bustle and collisions that life in a diverse society inevitably brings. To cite another of Jesus’ condemnations of hypocrisy, we ‘tithe mint and dill and cumin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law.’ That is, we busy ourselves obsessively over small bore issues, and ignore the graver challenges that face us on every side.

Because reality is too harsh.

[Afternoon update]

Related: When will our “leaders” own up to the fact that the EU is a giant scam?

I think that ISIS has fatally exposed it.