Stand strong and militant. We do not recognize any duty to not be anywhere because it inconveniences the military wing of the Democrat Party, and we do not recognize any duty to not legally pack heat in doing so. We do not recognize a duty to suck up to petty administrators and flunkies. And we’ll swear about that desiccated old freak if we feel like it. The GOP better get on board or we’ll toss it off the train.
Something a little less erudite
Kurt Schlicter:
"Fell Doctors and Fell Doctrines"
Another very good post from the Orthosphere.
A man did not become a Frenchman simply by taking up residence in France, or because a bureaucrat issued a passport bearing his name. Nor did a Frenchman remain a Frenchman if French doctors lost the war of opinion and that Frenchman came under the tutelage of fell doctors and fell doctrine. That Frenchman might murmur, he might even squeal, but his grandchildren, at least, will spit on his grave.
Yes, that is where we are today with many of our children or grandchildren.
Memetic Fantasy
AVI remarks on something modern fantasy does:
Modern girls look on the lives of women in the past and think "I would never put up with that." Sure you would. It was normal life. You would have the same focus and concerns as the women around you.* We put up with a lot because we don't really think of it s putting up with anything....* The world where you go back there and refuse to put up with it and set a good example is more fantastical than the time travel itself. Yes, modern fantasy novelists like to set up stories like that, of girls trying to break out(!) of old ways and become a wizard, or a warrior, or a bard or some other previously forbidden role. (Tolkien and Lewis were early examples and did it well.) But that is largely a modern value.
Only somewhat. I have commented before on how many medieval history thesis papers I have read that begin like this: 'As a feminist, I am interested in how women of an intensely patriarchal period could live lives of their own construction. I find that my subject today was hugely successful at doing this, and that in fact her strongest allies were often male relatives and friends.'
It really was a lot more common than you might think; what is surprising to the authors of these papers is that it is often groups of women who were most invested in enforcing limits on women, and men who loved a particular women who were their chief allies in defying societal limits on females. That's actually in keeping with my understanding of human nature, though, in which men are much more likely to try to win a particular woman's heart by giving her things she desires than they are to bond up for the purpose of suppressing women as a class; or wherein fathers of particularly beloved daughters are likely to give them their way if seems really important to making them happy.
That said, I was amused by this send-up of Red Sonja-type portrayals of women in medieval-themed video games. I saw it on FB, but I believe this may be the original artist.
That's a pretty fair critique, all the way around. I note that the admin of the FB group where I saw it nearly immediately deleted it and followed it up with a strongly-worded criticism about how offensive all forms of sexism are.
Australia Moving Citizens to Concentration Camps
It has begun: in the wake of a COVID outbreak, Australia has banned people from leaving their homes for any reason except medical treatment, and is using military forces to arrest the sick and their close contacts and deport them to concentration camps.
Sanitized panegyrics to whiteness
Tom Wolfe said, "The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." James Lileks runs with it:
Soon the streets will fill with angry men who want to break store windows and set cars on fire.
No no not those guys, they’re good! We mean the bad ones.
There will be mobs who attack Jews. No no not those guys, they’re angry about colonialism or acting out whiteness doctrines of otherizing, please keep up.
There will be throngs of white men in positions of authority demanding that Asians be suppressed in academic admissions –
What? No, no, that’s different. Please, you’re not conversant in the prismatic subtleties of the intersectional matrix, so maybe sit this one out? Once you’ve done the work, then perhaps you will be alert to the neo-Fascist elements who will restructure society to otherize those who do not have pure blood –
What? No, no, that’s different. That’s a matter of public health. Of course, you should have to show your papers. Point is, America is a lost cause. Soon, very soon, a group of people will try to burn down a city because they saw some tweets about a thing, and there will be a horrifying moment when the authorities prevent it. The nascent subterranean Fascist instinct ignites in the citizens, and they will join the police to prevent the people from smashing the store windows and burning down the legislature building.
When the morning rises and the streets are not twinkling with broken glass – Kristall-not! – and the legislature is not a smoldering heap – well, then you’ll know. The Second Wave of Fascism has crashed on the shores of America, and engulfed us all.Related:
It sounds crazy, but The System could wake up tomorrow and convince half this country that the sky is green.
* * *
And the shaming would begin. Oh the shaming. Anyone talking about a blue sky would be treated like some deranged conspiracy theorist. Families would divide over it. Facebook would ban you for discussing “blue skies”.Both h/t Glen Reynolds.
Don't forget the "victims"
They enjoyed long walks on the beach, relaxed barbecues with friends, raping children, beating grandmothers, strangling brothers, and all the other things that show us we humans are in this together.
The soft-focus NPR piece, to give it credit, does cite the bald evidence of the three men's convictions for violent crimes, but somehow the information doesn't seem to penetrate into the author's tone. Not that it's OK to shoot them on the street on the strength of their criminal records or otherwise shattered and chaotic lives of mental illness, drug abuse, brutality, and complete failure of self-control, but one would think that their background might have some slight bearing on how easy it is to believe that they were enraged, rash, and stupid enough to chase down and endanger an armed teen.
One more example of youths who were about to turn their lives around. If only their mothers had kept them home that night.
Biblical Defense
In the post below on Natural Right, I cited Aquinas’ philosophical account. If any of you happen to prefer to reason from Scripture, here is an article on the subject.
More than you wanted to know about Ivermectin
Scott Alexander does write long articles. All of this one is at least somewhat interesting, but I particularly recommend scrolling down to the final section, the "Political Takeaway." He's on one of my favorite topics, the difficulty of persuading people of anything when you clearly hold them in enough contempt to lie to them, and you give them excellent reason to believe you're hostile to their best interests because you consider them outside your tribe.
Spoiler on the specific issue of Ivermectin: he leans toward the view that's becoming more common, and which I'm guessing has some validity, that Ivermectin seems most effective in societies with lots of worm problems, perhaps because worm infestations inhibit an effective immune response to COVID. This is at best a tentative conclusion, however, and we'd all benefit from adopting a reasonably skeptical scientific viewpoint until the data are much clearer.
Put it on the usual footing
An old Doonesbury cartoon from the 1970s showed a slow afternoon during the Watergate hearings. "Have we got any more witnesses lined up? No? Well, then, the Chair opens the floor to hearsay and innuendo."
Natural Right
If you were a Briton in a village by the sea when the Saxons came to loot and burn your village, you would have a right to resist the looting and burning of your home even if you weren't a soldier. If you were, later, a Saxon on the same shore when the Vikings came to loot and burn your home, you would have a right to resist even if you weren't a thane. If you were, later still, an Anglo-Norman living on the same shore when the French came to loot and burn your village, you would have a right to resist having your home looted or burned even if you weren't a knight.
This kind of thing is called a natural right. It is rooted in what St. Thomas Aquinas called the natural law.
The natural inclination of humans to achieve their proper end through reason and free will is the natural law. Formally defined, the natural law is humans’ participation in the eternal law, through reason and will. Humans actively participate in the eternal law of God (the governance of the world) by using reason in conformity with the natural law to discern what is good and evil.... On the level that we share with all substances, the natural law commands that we preserve ourselves in being.... Natural law also commands those things that make for the harmonious functioning of society (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal”).
'Thou shall not kill' is one of the more famous mistranslations in the Bible.
“The original Hebrew, lo tirtsah., is very clear, since the verb ratsah. means ‘murder,’ not ‘kill.’ If the commandment proscribed killing as such, it would position Judaism against capital punishment and make it pacifist even in wartime. These may be defensible or admirable views, but they’re certainly not biblical.”
So you can kill, but not murder. When might killing not be murder? Well, when it is necessary to fulfill the natural law: to preserve life, and the harmonious functioning of society. For example, when resisting a horde intent on burning and looting your village. Allowing looting and burning might actually kill people who were just minding their own business, and it will definitely degrade the harmonious function of society. The latter is the higher and better end, notice: you might think avoiding death was more important, but in fact on Aquinas' model that is just a thing that we have in common with plants and animals. The better end, proper to human beings as creatures of reason, is to preserve a harmonious society that fulfills the human good in a fuller way.
Dying to do that is honorable; it is why we praise soldiers who fought and died for our way of life. Killing to do that is acceptable, if necessary, and at least according to George S. Patton it is preferable to kill than to die for your country.
Positive laws that come to defy or refuse the natural law are rightly reformed. Today we saw that our positive laws in fact defended the natural rights. It is important to ensure they continue to do, and to reject attempts to reframe them in ways that would defy this natural right to preserve our homes against lawless violence.
They're pretty much lying to you all the time
Drew Holden gives a good summary of how blindingly bad the anti-Rittenhouse propaganda was. I'll just add two more examples: GoFundMe and Fundly shut down defense funds in August 2020, and Facebook started removing pro-Rittenhouse statements, and even videos, in September 2020.
Rittenhouse Acquitted
According to the New York Post:
Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted Friday on all charges for shootings that killed two men and injured a third during last year’s violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Emotions have been running high in anticipation of the jury’s verdict, with protests and shouting outside the courthouse and Gov. Tony Evers deploying National Guard troops to Kenosha.
The case left Americans divided over whether Rittenhouse, 18, was a patriot taking a stand against lawlessness or a vigilante.
The teen faced five charges, including intentional homicide in the fatal shootings of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, as well as attempted homicide for wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, 27.
Judge Bruce Schroeder threw out a weapons charge against Rittenhouse on a technicality over the length of the gun’s barrel.
A seventh count against the teen for violating curfew on the night of the shootings was also dismissed after the judge ruled that prosecutors failed to present sufficient evidence.
Parents of a clump of cells
The idea started as several days of bereavement leave for parents who lost a child to stillbirth. At some point someone added coverage for abortion. Now it's 12 weeks of parental leave:
One thing that’s important to note about the Pittsburgh and Portland policies is that they are classified as “bereavement leave.” This must be confusing for the “clump of cells” crowd, because if no actual person was lost, of what is the sufferer bereft? But to the rest of us, this policy is, again, compassionate and humane. I’m not here to judge any woman who decides she needs to terminate a pregnancy, and I pray for her spiritual and emotional healing. Also, like a natural miscarriage, an abortion causes physical and emotional trauma. A few days’ rest and recovery (and maybe even prayer) is well advised.
But we all know that “progress” usually involves taking a reasonable idea and driving it right off a cliff.
Really liking DeSantis
And not just because he held the bill-signing ceremony in Brandon, Florida. He's one of the few politicians who can talk about the limitations of government power like a real person instead of a geek.
HD for me, not for thee
I hope there will be serious consequences for the prosecution if they really did this, particularly in a case they attempted to turn into dispute over what one blurry frame suggests:
Don't Take Your Guns to Town, Bill
Tex gets at a big problem for the Rittenhouse defense in her comment to the post below. In discussions with people who want to see him convicted of something, I run into the same intuition over and over. "He shouldn't have been there," they say, "and he definitely shouldn't have brought a rifle." (Especially, I suspect, a scary rifle like the AR-15 they've been taught to fear.)
There's definitely a longstanding concern, expressed in the Johnny Cash song that heads this post, about young men taking guns to town. It's definitely a risk, given that young men have not fully grown into maturity of judgment and are still driven by hot pride and hormones. The fact is that this particular young man exercised exceptional judgment with his firearm. The facts show that he did not fire first, that he fired fewer shots than his attackers, that they had more guns and assaulted him in multiple ways, yet he constantly retreated from conflict and fired only when absolutely necessary. Yet the intuition, which is a moral feeling, is stronger than the facts.
It is also stronger than the law. The law is that 16 and 17 year-olds may carry rifles and shotguns in that state. A citizen, even a youth, has a legal right to be in public places (the claim that he was violating curfew was unsubstantiated and abandoned by the prosecution). He has a right to travel freely, without being stopped or assaulted or fired upon. Stopping to render aid to the wounded is permitted of citizens even if they are not government employees, and in fact often required by law: in many states, if you come upon an accident you are legally required to render aid and assistance if capable. There is no reason citizen volunteers should not put out fires in the streets even if the fire department has not shown up yet.
Everything he was doing was legal, in other words, but it is felt to have been a provocation that should void his other legal rights -- up to and including his right to defend himself from assault, battery, theft of property such as that rifle, and so forth.
Would he have been harmed if he had been unarmed, without the rifle as provocation? Maybe! Also in those riots an elderly man with a fire extinguisher was beaten by similar thugs just for trying to stop the fires they were starting. Just because he had a fire extinguisher in his hands, was that a provocation that voids his right to self-defense? The older man was trying to prevent arson of a fraternal organization, the Danish Lodge, which was destroyed in the fire after his beating.
Ultimately self-defense is not the right place to hang the defense of Rittenhouse. What he was engaged in was good citizenship. Citizens have a moral right to defend their community from lawless violence, even with rifles, even if they constitute themselves as a militia for the purpose of doing so. Yes, even if the government chooses to abandon its duty to protect the community from such lawless violence -- especially if they do.
That he was defending himself is true, and a legal reason not to prosecute him. The moral feeling that he was doing something wrong is misplaced. He was doing something right. We should all respond so well in the face of danger, of arson, of mobs. We have the moral right and we have the legal right. So did he.
Catholic Archbishop Against Globalism
There’s an obvious irony in a high official of the Catholic Church protesting a global conspiracy to unite humanity under a single system of belief. That said, there’s a live issue if one such conspiracy is false and the other might be true.
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