RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 12
BLOGS 11
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
| Iraq war is 'lost' says Harry Reid | Murder in America |
VT: The Tradeoffs in a Free Society
by Christopher Chantrill
April 20, 2007 at 3:47 am
THE HORRIFIC Virginia Tech shootings have, as they should, inspired every political activist to use the event as a hook to their perennial issue. As usual, commentator Charles Krauthammer does so in as sensible a way as possible.
There are, we should never forget, tradeoffs that a free society makes in favor of freedom and against safety and security.
It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly... [S]tricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.
How many innocent lives would be saved by stricter gun laws and how many violent crimes would be deterred by more guns in homes?
Maybe a deeply disturbed person like Cho should have been institutionalized.
But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.
What we can all agree, surely, that the kind of rambling political nonsense generated by presidential candidate Barack Obama is not the solution. At a speech captured by Politico’s Ben Smith he connected the Virginia Tech violence with Don Imus’s radio insults.
Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur[.]
But if that is what Sen. Obama believes let us hear more of it. It is not, after all an extremist position. That sort of political free association is exactly what passes for serious political analysis among our liberal friends. It’s all part of the “cycle of violence” paradigm, “arms are for hugging,” and other magical thinking that proceeds from the assumption that humans are naturally peaceful rather than naturally violent. And nothing so exactly represents the mood as the comment made on The Volokh Conspiracy:
Schools and guns do not mix. Period.
One is tempted to quote Sir Toby Belch: “Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?”
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
mysql close 0