Comments on: The bad apple tree

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:46:29 +0000

One wonders what they want to do, besides more grave-dancing. I say let them spend their money….. anything else they spent it on would be worse.

By: Karen M

Karen M — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:33:35 +0000

There is something so deeply unseemly about their wanting to buy that clinic that I wanted to be sick this morning listening to that weasel on the radio.

By: William Timberman

William Timberman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:34:32 +0000

No, you shouldn’t. What we need to fix what’s broken, we already have. It’s a matter of implementation, and for that, you have to take it as a given that most of what we call politics these days takes place in an asylum which has abandoned the distinction between caretaker and inmate.

If you can’t win the argument, in other words, change the subject. If you don’t like the reality served up by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, let alone the vast assortment of loonies to the right of them, from Orin Hatch to Rick Santelli to Generalissimo Petraeus, make your own.

All wars begin as wars of meaning, and end when you find that you’re the one being quoted. The rest, as important as it sometimes is to our own individual destinies, is really just a collection of props.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:33:27 +0000

Yeah, I went to that hippie enclave, Powell’s Books today, so I wore my Kevlar, but made sure not to jaywalk. You can get tased for less.

By: sysprog

sysprog — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:25:57 +0000

I shouldn’t be so down.

Not EVERY liberty is being rolled back.

There’s always one liberty that shall not be infringed, no matter how contrary the exercise of that liberty becomes to the security of a free State, and no matter how far away it is from a well regulated Militia.

What’s so bad isn’t that we’ll never have gun control.

But that, in lieu of gun control, we’ll have other — worse — forms of control.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:32:53 +0000

PS…. Sysprog, I’m currently reading Neiwert’s book, “The Eliminationists,” as you might have guessed from my tone. Book Saloon coming….

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:30:11 +0000

“Liberty” can be defined in so many ways. To the right, it means the “liberty” to silence opponents and bend them to their will. Now they want to buy Dr. Tiller’s clinic… a Wichita branch of the “Creation” museum? A gun shop? Who knows?

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:25:22 +0000

Ah, Karen, you make me like this tweet thingy. Of course law enforcement favors nots on the right… They have so many advocates.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:22:24 +0000

Ah, I had similar experiences with board members when I worked for the ballet. Some, not all, were the shallowest, silliest, least pleasant characters I’d ever met. Are the rich different? No, about the same as the rest of us, many much worse.

By: sysprog

sysprog — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:19:07 +0000

Sara Robinson at David Neiwert’s blog, after the Dr. Tiller murder:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2009/05/jesuss-jihadis.html

THEN, THEY FIGHT YOU.

Gandhi famously said:

First, they ignore you.
Then, they ridicule you.
Then, they fight you.
Then, you win.

I think the ridicule part is over, and the fighting part has started in earnest. And this is not (as many of us seemed to hope) going to be a metaphorical fight, but a real one — with guns and bombs and death involved. The fact is: In America, whatever liberties we win and keep have all been bought in blood, and that’s a historical truth that we are not going to get past any time soon.
- – Sara Robinson

She’s more optimistic than I am. It’s hard for me to see how any liberties are being won, or soon will be.

What happened after the Oklahoma City bombing? In 1996, in order to make sure there’d be no delay in executing Tim McVeigh, the Gingrich Republicans, and most of the Democrats, and Bill Clinton, enacted the AEDPA (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act), which gutted Habeas Corpus not only for those few sentenced to death but also for all other convicts. A few people spoke up, but who’s going to vote AGAINST “antiterrorism”?

One of the cases for which Sotomayor is now being unjustly criticized (or, worse, unjustly praised) for lack of empathy is a case in which the judges’ hands were tied by the AEDPA.

And it’s hard to see when and how, at some point in the future, the murder of Dr. Tiller will be seen as a sign that we’re winning liberties.

What next? More surveillance cameras, more metal detectors, more vacuum cleaners sucking up blog comments and emails and trying to gauge the paranoia level.

I wonder how high mine ranks.