"The Only Thing Keeping Us Free is the 2nd Amendment"

A confession, of sorts, by Naomi Wolf.

(H/t: D29)

8 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

If anyone is aware that crazy people can still be smart and get the right answer to individual issues, it would be me. I have been friends with a few schizophrenics over the years. It nonetheless remains that Naomi Wolf is flat-out insane at this point. I would be very cautious about anything she says now.

David Foster said...

I flipped through a book Wolf wrote back when she was still on the Left & thought it was pretty weird.

Still, even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day.

One aspect of self-defense that I haven't heard much discussed is defense from *mobs*....even a pretty tough & well-trained guy isn't going to do very well against a pack of 50 people, but with a firearm, he may be able to deter them.

Robert Avrech, a Hollywood screenwriter (and one of the few in that job that is an open conservative), wrote an article about his family's encounter with an LA mob. The title of the article was 'Jew without a gun', and the experience convinced him that he never again wanted to be a Jew without a gun.

Grim said...

I'm not practiced at diagnosis, nor qualified for that matter to practice it, but I have to admit I'm finding it increasingly hard to tell who is still sane. Confer this piece from the left, today, on the dangers to trans kids from rising waves of white supremacist right wing fascism. It reads to me at least as crazy as anything Wolf says, but it's not self-published.

https://truthout.org/audio/attacks-on-trans-youth-are-a-fascist-moral-battering-ram/

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Truthout is crazy, yes. Or at least they were a decade ago and more and I haven't gone back. The uncle I am named for used to send me articles from them. I apply my rule that anyone who puts "truth" in their name is probably lying, or at least deeply mistaken and unable to see it.

Wolf wasn't always crazy, and unless it turns out she is using inordinate amounts of chemicals, there is only one diagnosis pattern that fits, late-onset schizophrenia. It starts in the 30s very gradually (which is unusual) and is usually suffused with paranoid interpretations rather than hallucinations. You know, as if you are in a movie that has background music that tips you off that something is up, usually bad. Their lives are like that, but the background music is based on odd things, sometimes even random.

When it has delusional symptoms, they are usually physical impressions, such as smelling gas when it is not there or beginning to find toxins everywhere. Being "just sure," though not evidenced. But I have never even watched a video of her, let alone met her, and more information might change my mind.

The cart seems to be pulling the horse here. Conservatives didn't much like her until she became increasingly covid skeptic. Instead of wondering why so many paranoid people were joining them, many began to think that she must be smarter than they had previously thought. Backwards reasoning.

Elise said...

In some ways, I agree with a lot of what Wolf is saying in this piece but that makes me worry about myself since she's been saying the same thing since at least October of 2008. Back then, though, the approaching tyranny was courtesy of Sarah Palin:

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-battle-plan-ii-sarah_b_128393

(I pretty much gave up on her sanity when, in the same essay, she claimed that her daughter's letters from camp never arrived - part of the campaign of harassment she was experiencing.)

All that said, however, I have to applaud her for figuring out that if a woman owns a gun, the gun might just be a deterrent to that woman becoming a victim of rape or other violence. It seems like such an obvious point but it really is a huge leap for women who grew up believing as she did. And bless her for deconstructing the Second Amendment through comparison with the work of Jane Austen - I love that.

At the same time, I do wonder if there's a little bit of the Jane Fonda Syndrome going on here: the man she's with determines her beliefs. Still however she arrived at her current position, I'm glad she got there.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ Elise - I'd forgotten her comments about Palin. Thanks for the reminder.

J Melcher said...

bless her for deconstructing the Second Amendment through comparison with the work of Jane Austen - I love that.

YES!

douglas said...

Yeah, not the best messenger to be sure. I think the best takeaway is that it's a great example of how o make an argument that is both intellectually strong and emotionally compelling. We conservatives often forget about the latter aspect, much to our disadvantage.