The ballot boxes are the coffins of freedom. We will not take part in the funeral of freedom.
– A text message circulating on Iranian mobile1 phones yesterday
1 = US: cell phone
|
|||||
|
The ballot boxes are the coffins of freedom. We will not take part in the funeral of freedom. 1 = US: cell phone Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs – and the best are very clever – have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public. Although the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, they are a new Tocquevillean elite. Much of the web has moved in this direction because the wilder, bigger, and more chaotic it becomes, the more people will need help navigating it If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? All the ‘idiotarians‘, Left and Right, both subscribe to the same fallacy: violence is the greatest evil, the state has a monopoly of violence, the USA is the most powerful state, therefore the USA is the home of evil, and all evil events have their roots in USA policy. The idiotarians stand to the responsible anti-statists (such as our host) as the Ku Klux Klan stood to the sensible American patriots. They are what happens when a principled objection to force hardens into a reflexive aversion. They end up condoning the worst crimes a state can commit, provided the state in question is not their own, and if the alternative is inflicting violence themselves. State funding of abortions is, however, a completely different matter. The pro-choicers say it’s a matter of choice. Let it stay that way, then, without forcing people who oppose infanticide to fund it. “God made the 20th Century to teach us that the notion that things work better when experts plan them is a fallacy. It’s a pity that a hundred-million or so had to die to illustrate the lesson. But now we got it. Right?” There are two possible political morals to this. One is, don’t have schools. Children in large groups behave like troops of baboons. The other is, if you are going to have schools, have discipline. |
|||||
![]()
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||