John Wayne on Liberals

Strange to hear John Wayne talking about Keynesianism and socialism on the horizon, as he dissects modern liberalism/leftism.

Democrats Like Taxes

In other news, water is wet.

From WaPo, easily summed up by their graphic:

WaPo tries to come up with some explanation for this strange phenomenon that no one has ever realized before:

What explains that massive disparity between Democrats and Republicans/Independents when it comes to the tax system?

Part of the answer may well be that Democrats are broadly supportive of the idea that government can and should collect taxes in order to provide services for the American public while Republicans and independents are more skeptical about giving money to the federal government to spend.

Another part may be that the tax question winds up being read by partisans as a broader test of their feelings about the federal government. Democrats, with President Obama in the White House, are more likely to feel favorably (or at least express a favorable opinion) about the government. Republicans are not.

Democrats liked big taxes under other administrations, they just liked them for their programs.  Under Obama, the well-meaning but foolish Democrats get more of their pet “save the world” projects, and they get plenty of self-serving plunder to boot; and the ill-meaning collapse-the-system Democrats get to hurt the “evil” producers in order to create “social justice”.  The power to tax is the power to destroy, and they use the power to tax to target people they want to destroy.

It’s more than simply viewing the government as a nanny state that takes care of everything and the feeling that money comes from nowhere.  It’s also viewing the government as a benevolent wonderful provider of a utopian state that can only be realized once all the evil people who hate utopia are eliminated… through taxation driving them away.

The tax system is a weapon, and they wield it as such against perceived class enemies.  Nothing really new here to those in the know, just confirmation.  (Sort of like how every year at Christmas a study comes up showing conservatives give more to all charities because liberals think they “gave at the office” through taxes.  Liberals are amazed, conservatives go “yeah, and?”)

Born Alive Infanticide

Via HotAir and Weekly Standard:

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion.

Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor.

This isn’t really new.  It’s also nothing like what conventional pro-choice folks think they’re supporting… but they are.

Just a month or so ago, a Salon Leftist made the argument that “All life is not equal… a life are worth sacrificing.“  And last year, the Journal of Medical Ethics argued for post-birth abortion… that is, infanticide.

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

This isn’t a new idea.  The core of it is getting rid of unwanted humans, who are unwanted for whatever reasons.

If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all. So, if you ask one of us if we would have been harmed, had our parents decided to kill us when we were fetuses or newborns, our answer is ‘no’, because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the ‘us’ whom you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, then no harm occurred.

Margaret Sanger would be proud.

Leftist: “All Life Is Not Equal”

The title and conclusion from this Salon piece, entitled “So what if abortion ends life?”:

I believe that life starts at conception.  A life worth sacrificing.

…

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

The thing is, leftists are death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers.  They make judgements against those who truly bear no responsibility for their condition (grandma and babies), while defending those who are responsible for their own problems (terrorists and murderers).  The left wants their lives to be consequence-free.  That someone would argue an innocent life has no rights is a very telling position to take.

But we make choices about life all the time in our country. We make them about men and women in other nations. We make them about prisoners in our penal system. We make them about patients with terminal illnesses and accident victims. We still have passionate debates about the justifications of our actions as a society, but we don’t have to do it while being bullied around by the vague idea that if you say we’re talking about human life, then the jig is up, rights-wise.

The big difference is that these examples – drone strikes, the death penalty, terminal illness, and even sometimes accident victims, involve decisions made by those actors.  Those life and death choices are made as a result of their actions.

Drone strikes used against terrorists are supposed to be used in order to minimize casualties of good people and hold accountable only terrorists and their allies.  Terrorists chose to be terrorists.  The death penalty exists only because there are people who have chosen to commit atrocities against their fellow man and are being held accountable for it.  Murderers chose to be murderers.

Patients with terminal illnesses are fully developed people who are able to make decisions about their own lives.  The terminally ill can choose what they wish with their lives.  Accident victims depend person by person, depending on wishes they expressed to their families prior to their injuries; so even they sometimes have choices as to whether they wish to continue living or end it – even if incapacitated.

A human life that is not fully realized is no less human.  The Salon writer agrees, but simply does not care.  This is honest, but shows how cold and callous a philosophy this is.

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

The Salon writer agrees that both are human life.  This is again both honest and very telling.

Consider the sub-heading to her piece:

I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice

And she finishes with this:

…it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

Some of this is similar to the “future like ours” argument.  If a prospective baby wouldn’t be loved or would maybe have poor opportunities in life, it’s not as valuable as other lives, and it can be/should be destroyed.  It’s a sketchy argument because it leads down a road that justifies killing children and adults as well if they don’t have “good” lives.  But in this case, it’s more an argument of “if it inconveniences the mother”.

See what this really sounds like now:

I believe that life starts at conception.  A life worth sacrificing.

This is making fundamental judgements not about life choices by an individual who can make their own decisions and who will live with accountability with those decisions.  This is about one person making a decision to exterminate a human life based on the idea that “women’s choices and their possibilities” are more important than the human life they carry.  And this ignores entirely that the woman and man (or men, if that’s her thing) involved had the choice to avoid pregnancy entirely.  (There are plenty of ways.  The internet is full of suggestions.)

–

Let’s revisit this medical ethics paper from the Journal of Medical Ethics:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

…

If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all. So, if you ask one of us if we would have been harmed, had our parents decided to kill us when we were fetuses or newborns, our answer is ‘no’, because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the ‘us’ whom you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, then no harm occurred.

As the Salon writer agrees that human life begins at conception, but that some lives are worth sacrificing… well, we’re back to the old eugenicist arguments again.

We’re back to a group of leftist-progressive planners who decide whose life is worth saving and whose is not – based on their own whims.  In this case, they do so on both a personal level and on a societal level by advocating for abortion.  (Which is what Margaret Sanger did.)

There have been no actions made by the life forfeited to deem it worthless.  The human life destroyable by the Salon writer so she isn’t “punished with a baby” has no influence on its death.  It did nothing wrong, and made no choice.  Again, the murderer and the terrorist who face death at someone else’s hands do so because of actions they chose.  The terminal patient or accident victim may choose to face death by their own hands or with the help of others as that is a choice they have made.  The evil parties made their decision to forfeit their lives, the good parties made their decisions to end theirs.  Those parties are responsible for their own ends, for good or evil.  The zygote, fetus, or infant destroyed so the mother (and perhaps father) can skip out on the physical, financial, and social burdens of parenthood is destroyed due to no fault or decision of its own.

The leftist decision here is that “yes, life begins at conception, but I can take a life because I want to”.  That’s basically it.

I believe that life starts at conception.  A life worth sacrificing.

This is about abortion, but it’s actually bigger than that.  It’s about the value of life in competing value systems.

The conservative/traditionalist value system looks at life and all its possibilities, whether intended or not, as a bounty and a treasure.  That same view sees that life is a gift that can be squandered or misused.  Those who abuse their life and the natural rights they enjoy simply by their existence (regardless of whether you see life and rights as preexisting by being God-given or nature-given) may have their lives ended.  In short, bad guys may forfeit their lives by their decisions.  Conservatives/traditionalists tend to argue against euthanasia and the ending of ones’ life out of respect for the gift of life – they may empathize with the pain, but often empathy for the desire to end suffering will not outweigh their love for life.  This often comes from a long view of history, which is full of people who overcome suffering – and thus it leads to a desire to help those who are suffering to go on living.

The leftist/progressive value system feels that life is only a treasure if you feel like it.  They view that it’s “unfair” to those who are fully developed that they should have to suffer consequences of their actions.  This applies to the hapless new mother and father who didn’t take enough precautions as much as it applies to the villain who didn’t care about someone else’s life.  They see the developed lives in front of them and fall to the Broken Window fallacy – they truly can only see what’s in front of them.  They can’t see the loss of the potential life destroyed.  They feel for the murderer and listen to his story of disadvantages and “social injustice”, but they don’t care about his victims.  The left never really cares about actual victims.   They feel that an unformed life is worth destroying, that a human life that isn’t fully developed isn’t of any worth at all – because it’s all up to them to arbitrarily assign value.

To quote Thomas Sowell:

“For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”

The “new man” leftist/progressive has decided that their value system, arbitrary as it is, is better in all means.  In their hubris, they disregard history, and substitute their new amorphous morality.  This applies at all levels – it applies to the value of life – and it applies to human life that may be sacrificed for the greater good.

The “greater good” in this microcosm is the mother’s physical life (which very few object to), and then it progresses to the mother’s financial and social life (which more object to), and finally simply to the mother’s convenience and whim.

The “greater good” in the larger leftist view sees “the mother” become “the people”, and the individual human life that can be sacrificed becomes… the individual human life that can be sacrificed – all for the “greater good”.

-

From a purely libertarian point of view, being able to live freely of coercion is the most important thing.  If the life of a mother is threatened because of a pregancy gone awry, the mother’s life is sacrosanct – she should not be forced to risk her life.  If a woman is raped and rendered pregnant from it, the woman was forced to become pregnant, but the life created did not choose its origins and is also guilty of nothing.  Whatever the mother chooses – to reject the force that made her pregnant and terminate the pregnancy, or to acknowledge the pregnancy as a human life and as a victim of things outside its control – either should be her choice.  If life itself isn’t formed at a certain level, if something is still a medical condition that may or may not be life, then that leaves some area for a mother’s choice (hopefully with the father’s input as well).  A lot of both acceptance and rejection of abortion stems from where people believe that level is.

But if both sides of the debate have decided that a life is a life, and one side claims that it can just be killed arbitrarily, that leads to a conclusion that coercion, domination and destruction of other lives is acceptable.

I believe that life starts at conception.  A life worth sacrificing.

The author asks “So what if abortion ends a life?”  The response to that “so what” is that by the same reasoning, all lives are worth sacrificing on a whim.

The Salon author’s argument that she should be able to kill kids based on feelings holds every bit as much weight as Adam Lanza’s.

–

Update: Moonbattery gets it, too.

Presumably the same thinking would apply to humans of all ages deemed to be inconvenient.

Liberalism is reducing us to a society of monsters.

Plausible Deniability and the Logical Black Hole of Feminism

In the first video – “Is Feminism Hate?” she utterly destroys the feminist’s initial statements, before going into the greater detail.

Part 1:

If you’re not familiar with Girl Writes What?, it’s probably better to watch them both in order, if you have the time.  If you don’t have time for both, part 2 stands incredibly well by itself.

-

This second video is Part 2 of Girl Writes What?’s response to a few stock feminist statements.  I want to stress that it really does stand incredibly well by itself.  Take a few minutes, sit back, and enjoy having your mind blown on gender issues.

Part 2:

On Women In Combat Part 5 – Panetta Sends Girls Off To The Front Line

Defense Secretary Leon “I Will Get Your Daughter Killed Gloriously” Panetta just opened direct front line combat MOSes to women.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has lifted the military’s ban on women serving in combat, a move that will allow women into hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando units, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday.

I’ve already done most of this in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Over at HotAir, they have a writer, Sentry, who echoes all of my criticisms of this stupid move by Panetta and the PC idiots in the Pentagon.   And the writer is a PT stud female Marine.

I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream.

We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit. First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy.

Sound familiar – like anything in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4?

Everyone wants to point to the IDF as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men?

The answer, Sentry, is yes.  They want to deprogram that instinct, because to a stupid, petty, foolish human with female attributes who lives in political worlds of cocktail parties and in the ivory towers and ivy halls of academia, chivalry and chauvanism are the same.  Any acknowledgement that women and men are different not just biologically but physiologically and simply by nature; would mean that such things can be judged.

Remember “How Modern Liberals Think”?

The leftist philosophy opposes the objective judgement that women simply are inferior to men in their capacity for war.

Though I’ve said it before, it bears repeating that doesn’t mean there’s any judgement of a woman’s character or civic virtue due to physical, physiological, or other limitations.

Doesn’t mean you don’t have the character or virtue to stand up for your nation.  Does mean you’re going to be a liability if you want to go to BUDS.

The leftist philosophy has an ulterior motive, though.  It also supports the idea that an “empowered” woman will, to be very blunt here, put out to an inferior man.  A sniveling, cowardly toad academic, or a womanizing rapist politician who has his state police procure conquests for him – these are the kind of “men” whose actual character is no longer called into question when their behavior is viewed as normal, and when men and women are to be treated as “equals”.  They subjugate women by destroying the privilege that women used to enjoy as part of their nature; all while decrying it as “chauvanism”, “antiquated”, “anti-feminist”, or other such nonsense, and claiming that those who would put women on a pedestal are in fact engaging in a “war on women”.  (Contrast GirlWritesWhat’s comments about bonobos.)

A woman may well find that society (depending on region) has stigmatized her virtues as a provider and protector of life, traditions and values that she sticks to in order to give better chances for success at providing and protecting life.  Why is “women’s rights” synonymous with destruction of infants today, rather than protection of infants, children, and all life?  Why is “women’s rights” about a woman being denigrated to the point that she is just a few “parts”?  Is she a mother or a “breeder”?  What is really being supported with these ideas?

One could dissect the destructive nature of leftist philosophy that denigrates women – and also denigrates men’s roles – but that’s a broader (no pun intended) topic than could be looked at in any single blog post.

If you want a very intelligent analysis of modern feminism and the leftist philosophy that denigrates both women and men, consider Girl Writes What (you could start with this most recent video and go from there if you’re not familiar with her very intelligent critique of the modern feminist movement).  You’ll note her own analysis has changed as she went on, but it’s all a series of very fascinating opinions and reasoning.  Her look at it is from a fairly utilitarianist point of view (at least as it seems to me).

I’ll finish this section with this quote from Thomas Sowell:

“For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.“

Many things are done for a reason, and throwing women into combat because it feels good to some limousine liberals who will never see the two-way range is a violent idiocy, stupidly rejecting billions of years worth of human lives that said no.

–

On the radio today, I heard this line of weapons-grade stupid trumpeted by some dumb plane driver:

WASHINGTON — The nation’s first female combat pilot yesterday defended the Pentagon’s decision to allow women on the front lines of war, dismissing an argument that the genders shouldn’t be blended into the same battle environment.

“So that’s like saying Pee Wee Herman is OK to be in combat but Serena and Venus Williams are not going to meet the standard,” Air Force Col. Martha McSally said on “Fox News Sunday.”

I know not all Air Force pilots are imbeciles, but this one is.  If they were all three to try out, Paul Reubens has to meet the same standard as all of the current men.  If standards at boot camp are held, he doesn’t go.  If he fails an indoc for a unit, he doesn’t go.  Serena and Venus maybe could meet one physical standard, but they’re exceptions that prove the rule.  Also, tennis is not combat.  Tennis does not last for 10 months in cramped, nasty conditions with poor sanitary facilities and if you lose at tennis, you don’t end up in the hands of jihadis who will behead you after mutilating your body.\

But there’s another dimension to this – how simply out-of-touch the comparison is.

Guess what, Colonel?  Paul Reubens is 5’10″.  He ain’t exactly a small guy.  He’s also 60, and more an example of how she confused Reubens’ character name with him actually being small, as well as naming someone who was popular decades ago.  Why not compare Billy Barty to Allison Hayes?

Or someone more modern like Verne Troyer and Carmen Electra?

Or how about a more apt comparison of wannabe badass couch-jumper Tom Cruise to the much more badass Claudia Black?

Tom Cruise wasn’t tall enough to get into the picture even when he wore elevator shoes, so you’ll just have to pretend you can see him.

The Air Force Colonel doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  She is not a subject matter expert on groundpounders any more than a “leg” is going to know about Immelmans or the Thach Weave.  Air Force pilots do not endure the same conditions that infantry or any other land or sea combat unit does.

Note that SERE, arguably some of the most difficult training for pilots, already had the standard lowered.

As a last note, for some unfathomable reason, unplanned pregnancies are very high in the military.  What’s usually ignored (outside of those who deal with women in the military) is that it’s a free pass out of a deployment.  A young woman who’s already given special treatment in the military environment (anyone who says they aren’t doesn’t have a clue) has an easy out.  On top of this, there are financial incentives as well as personal incentives.  The military, in effect, has enabled the use of the female agency against it.  A female servicemember can’t be hit with malingering because they created a medical condition that prevents deployment.

Why Does Anybody Need an “Assault Weapon”?

From Reason:

At this point, many self-defense activists respond that the need for guns has to do with the ability to defend against tyrannical government. Then gun controllers chirp, “but you can’t defeat tanks and nuclear weapons with rifles!” thereby demonstrating that they don’t keep up with the war in Afghanistan and skipped their history lessons about some difficulties the U.S. military ran into in a place called Vietnam.

But really, that’s all irrelevant. Because in free societies, you don’t have to justify owning things. You get to own them because you want them and have the means to acquire them. And you get to acquire more than just the basic necessities, if you so choose.

As I look around my office, I see a lot of stuff I don’t need. There are two dogs aggressively shedding on the upholstery, a hat collection (panamas and vintage fedoras), CDs and DVDs, a shit-load of books …If I owned only what I need, I’d be living in a spartan efficiency apartment, wearing a Mao suit and eating gruel. I have no interest in living that way.

…

The appropriate answer to “Who the hell needs … ?” is “hey, if you don’t want one, don’t buy it.” The right to own stuff without an explanation is the right to be free.

I disagree slightly, in that in order to maintain freedom, you need a modern rifle – it’s your homeland security rifle.  Of course, you probably only need one, and as long as enough people maintain and fulfill that need, it acts as a deterrent to tyranny, and it never has to be used, as its mere presence is sufficient.  Everyone benefits.

Alternately, Colion Noir explained it as well:

Self defense is a need, and self defense is a human right.

“Bring Your Pieces to Church”

A very interesting piece over at The American Vision:

Imagine the following scenario: At church this Sunday, while reviewing the list of announcements and upcoming events for your church, your pastor added, “Oh, and don’t forget: on Sundays we have our regular target practice. Make sure to bring your rifles. Make sure to bring your pieces to church.”

Absurd, right? Not so. It used to be the American way. For example, a 1631 law in Virginia required citizens to own firearms, to engage in practice with them, and to do so publicly on holy days. It demanded that the people “bring their pieces to the church.” Somewhere along the line we have lost this mindset. Today the ideas of church and arms are assumed to be at odds, as if loving your neighbor has nothing to do with the preservation and defense of life and property.

But the idea of Christian society and an armed, skilled populace actually have deep historical roots.

Self-defense was viewed as what it is – a testament to the fact that you cared about life, liberty, property, happiness, and freedom.  In this case, it’s often the freedom to worship, but still, interesting even so.

The American Second Amendment did not spring into existence from nowhere. It had a long pedigree. The Christian society emerging from the old laws of Alfred continued to include the ideal of an armed populace as a means of securing human liberties. The Founders, many of them lawyers, had studied that legal tradition and would have read William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769). The first part of the first volume elaborates on the subject of our “principal absolute rights… of personal security, personal liberty, and private property [i.e. life, liberty, and property].” It then covers five means of securing and protecting these rights “inviolate”:

The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute I W. & M. st.2. c.2. and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.[9]

Blackstone was noteably cited in DC v Heller.

Locke elaborated these views within the context of belief in God’s ultimate sovereignty, ownership, and law-order over all of creation:

Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself… so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.

Locke’s elaboration there and in the Second Treatise of Government is also noteworthy because it can exist even if you don’t believe and thereby don’t equate God’s gift of life with the morality of self defense.  If you are a die-hard atheist who believes totally in the accidental creation of the universe by the FSM or something, your survival – your own personal survival, is ultimately of paramount importance to you.  If you don’t believe in God, you still know that there’s something that came before the big bang, you still know there’s some Higgs’ boson or something out there left to discover, and the ultimate answer to existence (since you say no to God) means it’s left to be discovered.  In the meantime, you need to survive, learn, and most likely procreate so your descendants will learn from you and ultimately you’ll find that purpose.

Yeah, yeah, 42, but what’s the question?

Moving on…

Survival becomes, and is, an absolute moral.  Your life is the most important thing there is.

I mentioned Starship Troopers in the last post, and I’ll mention it here again.  Within the book (the movie is an abomination), there’s much discussion of how survival is the basis for all morals, and morality has become almost mathematical because of it.  Your life is the most important thing in the world.  But the value you put on your family’s life may exceed that you put on your own.  It doesn’t mean that yours is less valuable, it just means that you have taken it upon yourself to value their life more, and put your own at risk to protect them.  This starts with spouse and children (with whom you share a link to the future), but ultimately extends outwards to encompass all of your region, culture, society, and humankind.  It takes great understanding to put your own life at risk for someone you’ve never met, which is why this is such a virtuous thing to do.

And at the same time, it’s also why a tyranny that views even one life as unimportant (let alone millions) is an invalid entity – because that one life has value on its own.

Thus even if you choose the advancement of human knowledge as your deity instead of Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, Ahura Mazda, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you can still find that these principles apply, and agree with the wisdom here:

Evil ever advances upon our families, churches, and states. Evil seeks positions of power, such as government, and from there seeks to eliminate the avenues of power that threaten it (an armed people). Thus tyrannical government seek to pass gun control laws.

“…and if you don’t have a AR-15, sell your cloak and buy one…”

Luke 22:36

Perhaps it’s important to note something else Heinlein put forth: that “an armed society is a polite society”.  Tyrants don’t try to oppress those who can fight back, just like bullies don’t torment those who fight back.  It’s a preemptive move against tyranny, and creates a more peaceful state.  No wars were ever started because a pacifist was too strong.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Retired General McChrystal and the Draft

Former Texas State Representative and Luby’s Massacre survivor Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp said these words that are allow instant understanding of almost every political figure:

How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.

Generals are ultimately politicians, and retired General McChrystal gave his opinion the other day on how citizens shouldn’t own effective guns.  It’s also worth noting he’s lived on military bases where everyone is disarmed except for the military police.  His interactions as a younger officer are often dealing with discipline problems among troops.  I have little doubt this has colored many of his views about what people should be allowed to do and what they shouldn’t be allowed to do.

Now yesterday, he says this:

I personally believe that national service is important for the nation, and that’s having all young people serve a term of national service. Certainly not all military. But I believe those things do have two effects. One, those things that bind people to their nation are important, and another thing is that we’re also a nation that doesn’t get to know each other too well. Someone from one part of an inner city never meets another person from an upper class neighborhood. We need some things that pull people together in shared experience. We need to be ten years after the fact when they are meeting somewhere, ‘Where did you serve?’ begins a connection that allows them to move on because we are getting too fragmented in my view.

No.

We don’t need a peacetime draft.  During wartime, if it’s necessary, it’s one of the burdens placed upon members of a society.  During peacetime, it’s an expansion of standing armies that we don’t need.

McChrystal is pushing for a draft (or alternate service) as some kind of a “shared experience” and cultural social program.  He wants to bring people together by herding them into military camps so they can have “experiences”.

The reason for the slow, ongoing Balkanization of the US is that there are politicians who benefit from the Curley Effect (Democrats) and encourage it.  The reason someone from one part of an inner city never meets another person from an upper class neighborhood is because the limousine liberal has made the inner city dude his pet cause – someone he taxes the suburban joe to subsidize – while all the while hating both; and driving wedges between Americans.  Look at the tax fight for the last few months wherein Democrats fought the government to a standstill so they could begin to liquidate the Kulaks.

There isn’t a lack of connection because of lack of military service – there’s a lack of connection because social engineer politicians have developed their constiutencies that way.  Instituting another social engineering program – that of a peacetime draft for “service” is just as bad.

The reason we honor military men and women is because they provide the peace that we enjoy.  They fight so we don’t have to – that’s why they’re given respect.  I fought so others wouldn’t have to.  It’s a volunteer military for a reason.

America is supposed to be a society without classes and castes.  In many places, it still is.  Ranchers who own 20,000 acre spreads still talk to their ranchhands, and while one’s the employer and the other the employee, that’s all there is.  They aren’t from different classes, just different income levels.  In cities where half the people or more live off handouts extracted from the other half at gunpoint by a sliver of a redistributor class, there is a divide – and it’s a divide that didn’t used to exist.

McChrystal is one of those who believes Americans to be a crowd that needs to be lorded over and controlled, supervised and taken care of.  The whole reason we have the class problems we do now is precisely because of social engineer progressive politicians like him.  Instituting one more policy will only exacerbate the harm as it brings people into the military who don’t want to be there.  Try telling the 47% that get handouts that they owe someone else something and are being drafted.  That’s going to lead to a schism within the military and a breakdown of good order and discipline all around.  People whose lives consist of “gimme gimme gimme” are not going to be exemplars of civic virtue and rectitude.

Leftists often lament the fact that the military is becoming more rural and Southern, but that was going on well before they started noticing it.  That all started happening because their own institutions and beliefs demonized the military.  Those in deep blue states often don’t have much interest in the military because it often stands counter to ideas they’ve been taught.

The idea of self-sacrifice by choice in order to preserve the liberties of their land is alien to people in a world where the government disarms them, won’t let them drink a 16 0z soda or have a cigarette.  Their liberties have been taken by their masters, they have nothing to stand up for.

(Also keep in mind that the people in those deep blue states are the kind that reward, promote, protect and have as educators the terrorists who planned to kill troops and their dates at an NCO dance at Ft. Dix.  So as a general rule, should it be surprising that someone who’s venerated by the left as an educational hero, and who dominates education and brainwashes the children for 12 years, might be an indicator of why there’s a divide?)

That whole cultural divide has been built with a lot of effort by devotees of Cloward and Piven and the Curley Effect.  If you want to change it, you don’t change a victim of 12 years of state-sponsored indoctrination and expect it to wear off in 2-3 months of training.  You get rid of the 12 years of indoctrination.

Now, if the retired general was advocating something like Starship Troopers, wherein completion of voluntary service risking one’s life was required to vote, I could see the logic to that.  He’s trying the reverse.  He’s trying to make everyone serve in order to instill virtue and understanding that cannot be instilled.  If he was saying “hey, if you aren’t willing to put your butt on the line and ‘some skin in the game’, then you don’t get a voice when it comes to government”, he’d find some sympathy for that – but he’s also find that 47% of handout voters would be vehemently against it because they’ve been trained by their political leaders to vote themselves largesse.  This is also why McChrystal’s draft will never pass, and why even if he wished it into existence, it would never work – he’d be drafting people with this mentality:

All you’ll do with someone of that mentality is waste the military’s time and add to the 10% of shitbirds already there who join up anyway.  Drafting them in peacetime will be a failure in every way.

An Interview With Friedrich A. Hayek

It’s a little break from blogging the relentless assault on Second Amendment rights.  It’s worth noting the same people who hate the free market are typically the same ones who hate firearms rights, or any citizen freedoms.