Between attempts at disarmament, invasions of privacy, regulation of assembly and apparent attempts to dilute the vote by including illegals and dead voters. It becomes difficult to impute benign intentions.
tdave
November 2, 2014
Forum post on the topic Have people taken the issue of gun control OUT of control?
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
I’ve long ago stopped assuming benign intentions. I’ve also stopped assuming ignorance. (“Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained as ignorance”)
Neil Smith puts it concisely and well: “Make no mistake: the only reason that they want to take your guns is so they can do things to you that they can’t do if you keep your guns.”
It begs the question; why should it ever have been difficult at all?
No one has ever had good intentions while advocating disarmament, invasions of privacy, regulation of assembly and making apparent attempts to dilute the vote.
Was it the rationalizations that fooled us? The selling points? The lies? Claims of good intentions? Are we that gullible? That unaware? That desperate to avoid conflict or appear “open-minded”, desperate to fit in somehow, that unsure of ourselves, that disconnected from principles, so distracted or irritated that we’re blinded to what’s right in front of us, or what?
I’m going with a hypnotic state as the answer. It would be consistent as an explanation. It would certainly explain both the Republicans’ deer-in-the-headlights paralysis, and our continuing support of them.
That’s what we are as a society. Deer in the headlights;
“Derr….” WHAM!
Actually a better analogy is deer in the face of a spotlight. Deer in the headlights connotes an accidental situation whereas the spotlight has intent (a man with a gun, i.e. a carnivorous predator) behind it.
I think the reason is that the face of evil doesn’t have a black mustache they twirl or go by the name of Snidely Whiplash. They frequently have attractive faces, are likeable, and claim they have (and may actually have) the best of intentions.
But it has long been known what the best of intentions really means in government. It’s just sometimes hard to remember that when someone tells you they have a solution when you don’t have an obvious solution that addresses the immediate problem at hand. Sometime the answer is, “This is just the price we pay for freedom” and you can’t easily see and articulate the price to be paid for entering into slavery.
In this regard, I’ve always loved this quote by C. S. Lewis:
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
I think it is because we lack the individual authority to do what needs to be done.
Right thinking and sensible people know who should be on trial in the future just like in Nuremberg. Just keep pushing us progressives, just keep pushing…
Look at the steaming pile of fail that is the TSA. We complain about it to our representatives (the best route for peaceful correction). We videotape and document their abuses against grandmothers and little kids, their stupidity and incompetence (confiscating replicas of firearms while no terrorists were ever caught or deterred by them) and they get rewarded with unionization.
Heck, if we just good about consistently removing corrupt officials by recall or the next election, we would be way ahead of where we are now. They don’t need to have an evil moustache. I can name a dozen perverts, despots, and the “pay to play” politicians that are in “safe” districts where their voters will not remove the scum.
The problem with the TSA isn’t that it fails at doing what it is set up to do (though of course it does, as it must because it is a government agency). The real problem is that both the purpose and the reality of the TSA are utterly, completely, and irredeemably unconstitutional. There is NOTHING that agency does that is Constitutional, and there never will be. The only valid cure for the TSA is its immediate termination, the firing of all its employees, and the trial and swift conviction of all its managers and executives.
Does an evil person know he’s evil? Sometimes, and sometimes not. One would have to understand and acknowledge human rights before he’d be able to see himself as violating them. Even then he can make any of a thousand excuses, claiming victimhood, “social justice”, or one of the endless number of “common good” arguments.
To me it is irrelevant. When your rights are being attacked, your obligation is to defend yourself and the rights. The rationalizations the attacker uses, and whether he actually “believes” them or not, are quite beside the point, until, maybe, his sentencing hearing. The sentencing hearing is not your immediate responsibility while you’re under attack.
Anyway; the solution is not a political one. That comes after. Politics will follow culture.
From Ayn Rand’s preface to the updated version of “Anthem”:
“Some might think — though I don’t — that nine years ago there was some excuse for men not to see the direction in which the world was going. Today, the evidence is so blatant that no excuse can be claimed by anyone any longer. Those who refuse to see it now are neither blind nor innocent.
The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”
Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.”
“…neither blind nor innocent”. I think that accurately sums it up.