Statism is the very paradoxical idea that people are inherently greedy and self-interested and therefore we should pick a handful of them and give them all the power.
Category: Libertarianism
Friday Quote – Greg Lukianoff
Words are supposed to hurt. That’s considered a legitimate way of fighting things out. And what did it replace in the historical scene? It replaced actual violence. Words are supposed to be free so we CAN actually fight things out, in the battleplace of ideas, so we don’t end up fighting them out in civil wars. If we try to legitimately ban anything that can hurt someone’s feeling, everyone is reduce to silence.
Friday Quote- Thomas Jefferson
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Friday Quote – Thomas Sowell
Insulating people from reality produces unrealistic people. It doesn’t matter whether they are welfare recipients, spoiled rich kids, tenured professors in the ivy league, or federal judges with lifetime appointments.
Clearing the Browser Tabs
This week’s kind of a big one at the Ward household as we’re closing on the new Ward Estate of Northern Rural Suburbia. Yeah, I’ll explain that later. Today, it’s links.
From Military.com comes an older article on Sig delivering its final prototypes for the new Army SAW. Including chambering in a new 6.8mm cartridge. The article expects new individual rifles in that chamber next year.
In the “Yes, Please” category, Variety reports that the Justified crew are looking to bring Raylan back in a new series. Still need to get The Wife through that series.
The title of this NY Post story kicked over my giggle box. Cancel culture is out of control – and Gen X is our only hope. Considering how overlooked the Gen Xers, I find this highly amusing.
I’ve got two articles from The Wirecutter. The first is how to clean your ear buds.. The second one is on why many of The Wirecutter’s picks are on the expensive side. These are good principles when looking at any purchase.
I’ve got an article from the Mises Institute on why everyone is so more freaked out about the riot at the Capitol. I refuse to call that an insurrection any more than I’d call a violent BLM an insurrection. It was a violent political protest, not an attempt to take over the government.
Finally, The Firearms Blog has a look at the 1986 Miami Shootout. This is one of those seminal gunfights that people who are serious about using guns in self-defense should study. How to stay in the fight when you’re hurt, nothing seems to be working, and everything around you is going to hell.
Friday Quote – Alice Cooper
When musicians are telling people who to vote for, I think that’s an abuse of power. You’re telling your fans not to think for themselves, just to think like you. Rock and roll is about freedom, and that’s not freedom.
A Year of COVID
A lot of us are looking back as this is the week COVID hit. Yeah, the virus was in the US back in January of 2020, but March was when things started shutting down. It was when people started to work from home. It was when toilet paper and hand sanitizer vanished. It was when our government officials lied to us about masks because they didn’t trust us – and then got upset because we no longer trusted them.
I’m disturbed how quickly both sides turned a pandemic into a political football. Trump was the biggest factor in that. It was either everything he said was brilliant and the other side was trying to kill people by denying it, or he was deliberately doing the wrong things to kill people. The noise made it so hard to get reliable information. Even those “independent” voices found themselves swayed one way or another by the Trump tidal wave.
Just as with 9/11 twenty years ago, COVID’s impact has changed the world. I’m seeing this and there are scary parallels to the decades before the fall of the Roman Republic, as well as the time before the French Revolution.
I really hope I’m wrong.
There Is No Pie
Lately in my FB feed has been advertisements for the company where I like to buy my geeky t-shirts. Most of the time, they display merchandise that I would normally want – Robotech, Tramsformers, Firefly, etc.
One that has been cropping up essentially proclaims that if someone else gets their civil rights, then you don’t lose yours. The kicker is that civil rights are not like pie. Which is true, but I very much doubt the author of this bromide would translate that to the economic side of civil rights.
Because at the end, we have to abolish the very idea of the pie when discussing rights. Any rights – at least in the Lockeian sense of the word.
Let’s all say it together – when it comes to rights, there is no pie.
Friday Quote – Ron Paul
It’s sad that our republic is in such a state that so many Americans see their freedoms as being dependent on a single Supreme Court justice. Federal judges were never meant to wield the tremendous power that they do in modern America. Our founders would find it inconceivable that a handful or unelected, unaccountable federal judges can decide social policy for the entire nation.
Friday Quote – Frederic Bastiat
IF the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of makind?