From Kurt Schlicter:
“People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.”
This follows on from my earlier post about that little shit Dick Costolo.
Tag: Evil Bastards
Just Like The Bloody Romans
Those who remember Monty Python’s Life Of Brian will be familiar with the line “What have the Romans ever done for us?” followed by the recitation of roads, laws, plumbing, a supply of potable water, etc.
So whenever some stupid Marxist [redundancy alert] suggests that eliminating capitalism will help the Pore & Starvin, we should use one of their own arguments against them by saying: “So really, what you want is for 80% of the world to live in poverty, again?”
But logic has never been a particular strength of the Left, especially when it contradicts dialectic.
Acceptable Risk
The inimitable Heather Mac Donald takes the Nannies to task, in her inimitable way. This paragraph in particular struck home for me:
We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.
Bill Whittle once said more or less the same thing about accidental gun deaths: while even one such death was tragic, the plain fact of the matter is that some freedoms come with risk, sometimes deadly risk; and the overall benefit to our society is far, far greater than the danger that may (or may not) ensue. Using statistics of “gun deaths” (even correct ones) to bolster calls for gun control / -confiscation is likewise irrelevant.
It’s called the price of freedom, and We The People have been balancing those freedoms against the collateral harm to individuals ever since our Republic was formed and the Constitution and Bill of Rights promulgated. All individual rights are potentially harmful, whether it’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion, gun ownership, privacy or any of the others.
And to Heather’s point above: driving isn’t even a right protected by the Bill of Rights. How much more, then, should our First- and Second Amendment rights (and all the other rights for that matter) be protected, even when we know that some tragedy is bound to follow thereby?
“If it saves just one life” sounds great on a bumper sticker, but as a basis for public policy, it’s not only foolish but in many cases more harmful in the long run. Heather again:
We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.
The current wave of totalitarianism and loss of freedoms caused by State overreaction to the Chinkvirus needs to be rolled back, and fast. It just sucks that we have to rely on judges — many of whom, to judge from their records, are not especially friends of freedom — to hold back the mini-Mussolinis in their totalitarian quest for absolute power over the governed.
And just so we know what kind of “acceptable risk” we’re talking about, comes this from Fox News:
Alternative Actions
Just who the fuck do these glorified debt-collectors think they are?
Congress should find out exactly how much the I.R.fuckingS. paid for this data, and reduce their operating budget by 100x the amount. Unfortunately, as the House is under the control of the Socialists (for now), this isn’t going to happen.
Thus stymied, my thoughts run a little deeper than Stephen Green’s tar and feathers.
ROPE, TREES
and
WALL, BULLETS
…all come to mind, but no doubt someone is going to have a problem with this.
Stuff We Already Knew
From Ammo.com I get an email which serves to remind us of one of the consequences of a Biden presidency:
According to Joe Biden’s own website, he plans to put [Ammo.com] out of business:
“End the online sale of firearms and ammunition. Biden will enact legislation to prohibit all online sales of firearms, ammunition, kits, and gun parts.” We’re not telling you who you should vote for, but we do want to inform you of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s current position on these Second Amendment issues from the candidate who proudly proclaims:
“In 1994, Biden – along with Senator Dianne Feinstein – secured the passage of 10-year bans on “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines. As president, Joe Biden will defeat the NRA again.”
Like the title of this post says, we all know what these pricks want to do to the Second Amendment: gut it and do everything they can to make it irrelevant. (They can’t repeal it, but they can emasculate it with regulation after regulation to render its freedoms moot.)
What saddens me the most — just a little — is that all this new buying of guns by our citizens has drained the shelves and pipeline of ammo and related supplies to the point where National Ammo Day (Nov 19th, mark yer calendars) is going to be really difficult to observe. (Reminder: 500 rounds or more of rimfire, or 100 rounds or more of centerfire, or reloading supplies sufficient for 500 or more rounds, all to be purchased or ordered on that date.)
It makes me think of this conundrum:
Fantasies
From the former CEO of Twatter:
Ummm I’m just going to make a hypothetical situation here, but I would think that another kind of revolution (with different initiators, if you get my drift) could easily see media shitstains like this guy being among the first to be led to the helicopter pad.
Everyone’s all excited about curtailing something called “eliminationist rhetoric” from the public discourse, but I disagree. Let these twerps show their asses enough, for identification purposes, and we’ll see how the biscuit breaks.
Even arch-eliminationist Che Guevara eventually found his own wall to be stood up against:
Just sayin’…