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How I’m Feeling Today
“Why I’m no longer a Libertarian”
Sometimes someone puts your own thoughts so clearly that it would be plagiarism to try to rephrase them. With that in mind, I stand aside for John C. Wright:
I often introduce myself as a recovering libertarian. It is not an entirely serious introduction, but it is not entirely frivolous either.
Why “recovering”? Sad experience teaches that any ideology, even a sound one, like libertarianism, is intoxicating. The appeal of ideology is the appeal of elegance. Just as Newton reduced all motions from the orbits to apples falling to three expressions, every intellectual craves a simple formula to explain the human condition. Libertarianism is based on a single principle that limits the state’s use of force to retaliation against fraud and trespass.
Nearly all the natural moral rules all men carry in their hearts are satisfied by the simple rule that you may do as you like provided you leave your neighbor free to do as he likes. No neighbor may rob, defraud nor attack another.
…
For me, the intoxicating spell ended in three sharp realizations, each one as forceful as a thunderbolt.
Read the whole thing, as they say. The above is just a teaser.
I’m comfortable with where I stand, for it has come to me through brutal confrontation with the truth- truth about myself and those around me. I’m comfortable with the Bible, with G. K. Chesterton, with C. S. Lewis, with Rudyard Kipling- giants whose intellect would squash the tiny whingers of today. I accept my weakness and failure, because only that acceptance leads to truth.
Truth is in short supply today. Have any?
Prophecy
Tom Kratman, commenting at Vox Popoli:
One of the really nice things about living in an open society is that when those who most hate that society have had their way, when society – when civilization – is ruined, when it’s only a matter of time before we see children turning on spits over fires, we know _exactly_ who to drag to the lamposts, the stakes, and the crosses.
Yes, it will soon reach the point of “rope, tree, prog- some assembly required”. Read some history, it isn’t that hard to see.
“All Enemies Foreign And Domestic”
Hard to argue
The Left’s modus operandi, neatly encapsulated
Lest we forget, not so long ago-
EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariaz: “I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said:
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.
“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
This is what happened at Mozilla yesterday.
Bryan Preston at PJ Media: (too big of a quote, but I just had to)
The IRS — the federal government — deliberately leaked confidential information on the National Organization of Marriage’s donor file to one of its enemies, the Human Rights Campaign. That leak was illegal, but no one has been sanctioned for it.
The Human Rights Campaign took its illegally-obtained booty and used it against NOM donors. That information formed the basis of the assault on Eich, via the dating site OKCupid. The company he co-founded, Mozilla, behaved like craven cowards and pressured him to resign.
Brendan Eich is not a pundit, or even a particularly political person. He invented JavaScript. I wouldn’t expect the likes of HRC to go after a pundit who publicly opposes same-sex marriage. But that isn’t and never has been the point. What they are doing is going after private citizens who oppose same-sex marriage.
What was the Chick-Fil-A battle about? It was about the company’s owner, Dan Cathy, stating his beliefs on marriage in an interview. Democrats tried to shut his company out of whole cities, to shun him and hurt him.
What was the Duck Dynasty battle about? It was about the Robertson family patriarch, Phil Robertson, stating his beliefs on life and marriage in an interview. Activists pressured A&E into taking him and his hit show off the air.
The fascists lost both of those battles, so they adjusted their tactics. The Mozilla battle saw a few employees within the company tweet their displeasure with Eich. No employees tweeted support for him or for the concept of free speech.
In both of those earlier cases, and in Eich’s, private citizens expressed their views, and the fascist mob tried to destroy them and their entire lives for it. The fascists lost the first two battles, but have won the third. Eich is gone and now Mozilla is radioactive to a large number of people. I deleted Firefox from my computers and mobile devices, and replaced it with other products. Many made similar decisions. Web browsers are easy to replace. I’m already happier with Epic and Dolphin browsers than I was with Firefox, which had become buggy and slow.
The progs don’t care what happens to Mozilla. It can live or die, they can’t be bothered about that. It doesn’t matter to them at all. They actively wanted both Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty destroyed. They would probably be content to see Mozilla die too. But it doesn’t matter to them anymore. It did what they want. They will turn and attack some other target when the opportunity arises.
The objective was not to intimidate those of us in the pundit world. On that score, the fascists’ tactic backfired — same-sex marriage supporters have been rightly appalled by all of this.
But we aren’t the target audience.
It’s setting an example- see what will happen if you cross us? Goebbels, Himmler and Speer would be proud today.