Category Archives: Social Commentary

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?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Democrats And Gun Control

11 Comments

This is what it looks like when the tide is turning:

Everyone sees that Obama and his minions not only cannot protect us, but that they will actively seek to stop us from doing it ourselves.

Everyone sees that Obama is simply trying to not let this crisis go to waste by stripping real Americans of their ability to protect themselves from Islamist murderers – and from his fascist dreams.

Everyone sees that we are on our own.

Bill Clinton definitely gets it; for all his myriad faults, he knows Americans and he knows “Give me your guns even though I’m utterly incompetent” won’t sell outside of Manhattan. It is even dawning on Hillary, a woman so dumb that she failed the District of Columbia bar exam. And it’s dawning on the down-ticket Dems who had been dreaming of retaking the Senate in 2016, but now get to run in red states on the platform of “Let’s bring in more Muslim immigrants and take your guns!”

But they can’t help themselves. They’re imploding.

[Late-morning update]

The Democrats have become unhinged and ugly on gun control.

To be fair to them, that’s not really anything new.

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

Loretta Lynch And The New York Times

8 Comments

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.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Political Correctness

6 Comments

Jonathan Chait has decided he’s been mugged enough by the campus fascists:

The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)

American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).

Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Cutting The Cost Of College

7 Comments

Four tough things the schools could do (but won’t):

“The American university is a grand political accommodation,” says Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist and founder of the Center for College Productivity and Affordability. College presidents, he argues, appease faculty members by giving them control over what and how they teach. They appease students and parents with high grades and good facilities. They appease alumni with expensive sports teams. They appease politicians with shiny new research centers. “The idea is to buy off any group that might upset the political equilibrium,” Vedder said.

I was particularly struck by the worthlessness of the majority of research, as judge by the number of citations.

By “won’t,” of course, I mean they won’t until they are forced to when they run out of other peoples’ money. That day may be approaching.