16 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Tirno

  1. Absolutely! Countless historians and every strip have tried to warn us of the dangers of the well-intentioned do-gooder. And how their works always seem to end badly.
    I once had a person tell me that feelings are never wrong. I pulled out my tape measure and started measuring her. She looked at me and asked why?
    I returned with a question; You want the strait-jacket to fit properly, don’t you?

    • Our culture tells us over and over again to “trust our feelings”. It’s framed in different terms as well, so it’s everywhere. “Follow your dreams” is another one, to which Mike Rowe says, “No; follow your opportunities” but of course as sensible as that may be, it too, as with everything else, can be misinterpreted and re-directed to purposes of evil.

      And this “feelings, wishes and dreams” garbage is sold to political leaders and little children alike;

      When you wish upon a star
      Makes no difference who you are
      Anything your heart desires
      Will come to you

      If your heart is in your dream
      No request is too extreme
      When you wish upon a star
      As dreamers do

      Fate is Kind
      She brings to those who love
      The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing

      Like a bolt out of the blue
      Fate steps in and sees you through
      When you wish upon a star
      Your dreams come true
      — That’s the Disney theme song of course.

      And it’s nothing new. It’s ancient Pagan theology; the stuff out of the warnings in the Bible, which when practiced always leads to destruction. It’s also Jesuit doctrine (more recent, but which, like many of the others, practices “techniques” of invoking dreams, visions and apparitions, while imposing such absolute obedience to the organized leadership as to leave the follower brain-dead).

      “Trust your feelings, Luke” from Star Wars, and “Trust the force”, “May the force be with you” and more recently; “It is the way” are of the same theologies, having the same history and nature. These doctrines run through most if not all of “science” fiction too, thus putting the lie to the notion of “secular” science. I can point to whole episodes in various Star Trek offshoot series that are nothing but pure paganism framed within a space epic, yet if they were to insert Jesus Christ into one of them there’d be howls of “forcing religion on us” and similar outrage.

      And so, whether the authoritarianism is delivered to us under the guise of “secularism”, or “Rationalism”, et al, whether garnished with a big helping of “science”, or whether they’re delivered wrapped in the labels and trappings of “dreams”, “feelings” and “wishes” and such (or base urges), they’re all cast of the same ancient molds. Most of us, no; practically all of us, in all sectors of the political and cultural spectrum, have fallen for these things to some degree. We’ll even embrace some of it with open enthusiasm as we point out the hypocrisy, the “stupidity” or “gullibility” of others. Mote in your eye, meet beam in mine, and all that.

      Yeah, so the point is, we’re pretty much all screwed. We can reject one set of egregious lies and trickery, only to embrace another. After thousands of years of trial and error on the part of the forces of evil, there’s a set of excellent, compelling and wonderful lies practically tailor-made for each of us. Just take your pick. Any one of them will do the trick as well as the other.

  2. Think about the children.
    We are all in this together.
    There needs to be a consensus.
    How much money do they really need?
    Who needs an assault rifle or high capacity magazine?

    No matter how well meaning the speaker, any of the above get’s me ready to ignore what ever follows in the conversation.

    • I didn’t know they had cameras which would take color photographs back in the day of Genghis Khan. I thought they were still using black and white film.

      Learn something new every day.

    • It should be noted that while trying to create a utopia, you always end up with a pyramid of skulls, it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you created a pyramid of skulls, you were a utopian.

      Genghis Khan just ended up wanting to have a lot of power to himself. But then, when you look closely at a utopian’s motivations, you find that they expect to have a lot of power for themselves, once they have established their utopia. A funny coincidence, to be sure!

    • Genghis Khan started with a dream: grassland for the nomad’s horses stretching over half of Asia, no longer interrupted by cities and farmlands. Making skull pyramids of the city dwellers and farmers seemed a way to reach that dream, but eventually he realized that great wealth could be extorted from the cities if he left them and the farms that supported them in place – and pyramids of skulls worked even better to terrify them into submission.

      Tamerlane had the same dream, and tried to stick to it. He failed, but did a _lot_ of damage trying; Bagdad didn’t recover until the 20th century, and not fully. In absolute terms it may be as great now as before the Mongols, but in relative terms it will never again be one of the greatest cities on Earth

  3. I would not go that far.

    Utopians are dreamers trying to solve what they view as a problem. We would not have computers, internet and a lot of other things without utopian visions. The difference is the domain, but even there, not all utopian dreams fail.

    Our founding fathers dreamed of a government with a balance of power and free from tyranny – they too were solving what they thought was a problem.

    Musk and others today dream of an utopian future, and while I think many of his ideas are crazy, that may not turn out to be the case in all of them. Today’s leftist also see problems that they are trying to solve. We, of course, disagree with their solutions and would suggest other solutions.

    I would also argue that our ideal world is also an utopian view.

    Where things go awry is when mass mania takes control of our collective minds. Then we head into a dystopian world and disaster. It’s not utopias that we need to fear – it is mass mania.

  4. I have not dug into it as much as you, but would you consider Marx’s work an utopia? Or just the attempted implementations?

    The essential characteristic that seems to happen after every crisis is ‘examination’ and ‘correction’ which leads to more rules and regulations. And that is what many people regard as a loss of freedom. At each stage the bureaucracies grow and become more entrenched. Enforcement is specified. Add opinions and it gets even messier – as you pointed out. And opinions differ even in narrowly defined contexts such as railroad and airplane safety.

    What would Ryan have to say about this? How about our founders?

    • Marx’s work is certainly a utopia in the literal meaning of the word. After all, it means “no such place”, and indeed we know from a century of genocidal experimentation that the good outcome Marx predicted does not exist.

      • I am convinced that Marx’s dream of “the withering away of the State” is possible — but it’s only possible under the very Capitalistic system that Marx thought evil. He saw a lot of people with “capital” lording over people without, but failed to see the cooperation between people that is natural when their individual rights are preserved.

        It is his insistence that Communism is possible through a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” that has led, and always will lead, to mountains of skulls.

        Even though I’m convinced that Marx’s “utopia” is “possible”, I cannot help but cynically note that no market success is so great that a bureaucrat or politician won’t want to hinder it or tear it down so they could benefit from the graft of regulating it!

    • Distinguish Marx the economist from Marx the political theorist. As an economist, his theories were like the phlogiston and ether theories: wrong but close enough to serve as a basis for further investigations leading to better theories – if taken as a hypothesis rather than the dogma of a new religion.

      But as a political theorist, his ideas were unsupported by even his economics, and in practice were bad beyond utopianism. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” WTF? Somebody is going to rule, and it’s going to be a much smaller group than the working class, but with this piece of handwaving instead of a Constitution that specifies power sharing between several branches of the government, any arrangement will be unstable until it devolves into one-man rule, with that man being nasty enough to beat all the other sociopaths to the top.

  5. Mountains of skulls, rivers of blood, and oceans of tears are our future now, no matter what happens at noon on Wednesday.

    Communists don’t stop. They never stop. Until one side or the other is extinct.

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