Quote of the day—William Kirkland

Liberals today are wrong to see contemporary issues like gun control and climate change as surfing on an inevitable wave of progress. Rather, these issues are boats piloted by committed activists who steer them forward through a sea of indifference. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, with all its triumphs and tragedies, rested on the shoulders of thousands of activists who fought oppression in the streets, in courtrooms and on public buses. It emerged not from the progress of Reconstruction but from the backwardness of Jim Crow.

William Kirkland
April 20, 2015
Kirkland: The progressive lessons of history
[I find it absolutely fascinating that people can advocate gun control and then two sentences later praise the advancement of civil rights. And in this case a civil rights movement which was dramatically assisted by private citizens with guns. And this is by a person who prides himself on his knowledge of history!

How does someone do that? It has to be something like Peterson Syndrome.—Joe]

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5 thoughts on “Quote of the day—William Kirkland

  1. Joe,

    I was going to comment on the post about the Peterson Syndrome, however I noticed that the comments are closed. Probably just as well.

    What concerns me is the number of people that are puzzled by her lack of ability to discern truth. How can she not discern or determine truth. Or how can she deny truth. Of course that spills over into the rest of the gun control crowd. They refuse to acknowledge or believe empirical evidence.

    My hypothesis is that they are what are called “Post-modern” in their thinking. Part of the thinking process of someone that is post modern is that there is absolutely no absolute truth. What is true for you may not be true for me. And it is up to me to determine what truth is, and who’s truth is “best”

    Of course, “There is no absolute truth” is a self refuting statement, but in their little post-modern world, that is irrelevant.

    Once you’ve cut yourself loose from any sort of absolute truth, it is open season on anything you want. Followed to it’s ultimate conclusion, it will lead to a violent anarchy followed by despotic dictatorship – the rule of the strongest over the weak. And the “government” that would be making the rules would be capricious and violent. History has proven this time and again.

    Sadly, they have been cut loose from one of the most basic truths that is absolute for all peoples in all times (whether they are exercising it or not) – “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal [in value], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

    • Excellent points. Indeed, the ability to tell true from false is essential for freedom, so destroying the distinction is a first step for destroying freedom. This explains why modern schools teach that truth is a matter of opinion.
      I don’t think that Peterson suffers from this; rather, she is relying on the audience suffering from it. It’s a variant on what Hitler did, except that he didn’t actually pretend that the difference between a lie and truth was a matter of opinion, only that a lie could be snuck through if repeated often enough.
      Incidentally, “truth is a matter of opinion” is a variation on “the meaning of the Constitution is a matter of opinion” (a.k.a., “the living Constitution).

    • The Left in the West today is a literal crazy quilt of tiny splinter groups that hate one another, who are united only by their hatred of the cultures in which they live and for democracy, majority rule, and the concept of limited government. Gay activists despise the animal rights activists, who abhor the (still necessary, even in an age of computer simulation) animal testing for AIDS drugs. In their zeal to destroy “cultural hegemony,” they import tens of millions of Iron Age Third Worlders who despise them and all they stand for. And so on. It’s all one enormous circular firing squad, and always has been–but they’re still better at organizing than conservatives, who have too much pride, too much faith in human nature and dignity, too many principles and scruples, and standards much too high for the mud-slinging, street-fighting tactics the Left has perfected (a party which would rather stand on principle and be “right” than win may well be right, but they’re never going to win). In such an environment, cognitive dissonance isn’t just a coping mechanism, it’s a point of pride. Without doublethink they couldn’t function for a moment in the elaborate sea of contradictory lies at the bottom of which they swim. Psychiatrists call this “alethephobia,” fear of truth.

      • Perhaps this is why anti-gun activists refuse to even learn the fundamentals of firearms or nomenclature and sound like idiots when discussing why they need to ban X or Y.

        Why let such little things like facts get in the way of their “progress” in banning stuff to make their brave new world. Hey, they feel all emotional about it so it must be right!

  2. Your featured author is guilty of the same indifference he thinks activists have to overcome in order to cause society to be sufficiently “Progressive”.
    I don’t think it’s really the Peterson Syndrome, but more like the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, as applied to social events. Something similar has been expressed about actors and singers as “working for twenty years to become an overnight success.”
    Kirkland knows nothing about how any of this developed. He sees Brown vs Board of Education and is ignorant of how it came to be. He sees the freedom riders and lunch-counter-sitters and thinks they did all the work when effectively they benefited from the decades of heavy lifting by the NAACP.

    The civil rights movement of the Sixties which every Leftist wishes he could replicate and participate in today did not spring fully-formed from the brows of nine Justices in 1954, to be carried by activists for ten years until the Civil Rights Act was passed (by Republicans, btw, not Dems). It resulted from fifty-seven years of steady chipping away at the edges and voids in the Jim Crow laws by such organizations as the NAACP. Eventually courts concluded that after so many cases requiring that separate be equal and if separate conditions could not be accomplished, integration was required, meant that separate could never be equal.

    This is why I think the incrementalism after Heller is so important and is to be credited for the successes in removing the Jim Crow laws that have burdened personal liberty for these last 150 + years.

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