Having just added John Venlet's Improved Clinch to the blogroll, here are two other recent pieces from him.Read them in order, I suggest:
300 In The 21st Century
The "Immensity of Defiance" In Small Acts
Make John a regular stop.
I have.
Having just added John Venlet's Improved Clinch to the blogroll, here are two other recent pieces from him.
Thanks for the great Blog. Very good intel for a television hater like me.
ReplyDeleteI'm responding to something I found via: WRSA "More From Venlet" -> Improved Clinch "300 in the 21st Century" -> Samizdata post of Perry de Havilland's titled The tower struck by lightning -> Comment posted by Nigel Sedgwick.
ReplyDelete"As a political scientist I see no way for libertarian ideas to win because there is a distance between the statement of ideals, and an understanding of what it would take to make those ideals real.
Political ideology is mostly a smoke grenade to apologize for the status quo and prevent political victims from thinking clearly; political reality is mostly a Darwinian balance of military power. Piracy was stopped by making it cheap enough to hang pirates that piracy became unprofitable. Notice that while piracy was vanquished, the kings they were competing with were not. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that nobody painted "the last argument of peasants" in Latin on an RPG. The key to a free world is a self-defense weapon that works against a dozen attackers at once. Handguns made one small, weak, old man militarily competitive with one large, strong, young man, but their evolution has stalled for 100 years. Perhaps the real reason for gun control was to slow the evolution in personal weapons, and prevent the emergence of a weapon which would make politics unprofitable?
This from elsewhere in that thread:
ReplyDelete"Remind me again when the Rapture of the Nerds will arrive and make all this moot?"
You'll know it when the Terminator Penguin appears in your bedroom to tell you to knock it off with the Constitutional Socialism crap -- and the video of you in your pajamas freaking out is ranked funny on Slashdot. I think that strikes the right tone: Forcibly prevented from harming others, ridiculed for cause, and left unharmed to contemplate the error of your ways. "Politics" is the punch line of a five thousand year old joke, and one of the finest activities of man is to deliver the laugh track to its proponents.