Sipsey Street Irregulars: Four from Herschel Smith.

Monday, August 31, 2015

Four from Herschel Smith.

MBV NOTE: Please keep Herschel's son Joshua in your prayers. He has just gone through some major back surgery.

Adam Gopnik On Guns As Symbols

The Second Amendment And Illegal Aliens

Here Is Your War On Drugs

The Fargo Police Are Imbeciles

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: "Here Is Your War On Drugs". I'm a law abiding citizen. There is no contraband in my home. I rarely leave home. I'm a stay at home dad. Decades ago, I had acquaintances that were part of the drug culture. I said decades ago...more than one decade. Most are now dead or lost in time. My home cannot be easily violated without a lot of effort and noise. I have burglar bars, surveillance cameras and dogs...otherwise known as 'hillbilly doorbells'.

If a SWAT team came to my door, kicked it in after erroneously targeting the wrong house for a drug raid, there would be a need for many body bags because I, with several loaded 'crowd repelling' models of firearms, including those that can easily penetrate level III armor, could definitely take out more than a few of those SWAT guys before they got me. I hope they have their affairs in order before they violate my rights.; August 31, 2015 at 8:02 AM
Chiu ChunLing said...: As far as the right to bear arms is concerned, I'm pretty much an orthogonalist. Everyone, as a human being, has the right to be armed to the best of their ability, and the presumption that everyone is so armed makes everyone safer. I could argue this from more basic axioms, but in this forum I will take the theorem as granted.

This being the case, the mere fact of being armed, rather than anything one might do with one's arms or while bearing them, is irrelevant to anything else. If I'm in church talking with people I trust, I don't make any fuss over whether they're armed. It doesn't make a difference how I treat them. If I'm in a dark alley confronting some illegal aliens rummaging through a trash can, I have to presume they're armed anyway, because I can't know they aren't no matter what laws exist forbidding it (since they're already breaking the laws forbidding them to be there in the first place). So why not just allow everyone to be armed? What advantage is there to disarmed anyone?

If I want a higher penalty for someone committing a crime because they committed it armed, then I should want that same penalty even if I can't prove they were armed because when I caught them I had to deal with them as if they were. The costs of the crime itself, and of responding to it, are not affected by whether or not they were actually armed because I can't know that they aren't until after the criminals have been successfully arrested. So there is no real point is lessening the liability for having committed the crime if the criminals turn out to have been unarmed at the time. I'm rewarding them for committing a crime in a manner that does nothing to reduce the costs to myself.

So what exactly is the point of prohibiting even criminals from carrying weapons while they commit a crime? None whatsoever that I can discern, because you must assume that, if they are committing a crime at all, they wouldn't hesitate to commit an additional crime that improves their odds of getting away with the crime, and being armed increases their chances of getting away with the crime.

If you can't make a case for why criminals who are armed while actually committing a crime should be treated differently from criminals who commit the exact same crime while unarmed, then how can you justify ever treating someone differently because they're armed? Rationally, you can't, a direct contradiction will always arise unless you grant the presumption that simply carrying a weapon, in and of itself, is a criminal act.

And I won't ever grant that presumption. Because it isn't. Tools, absolutely all of which can be used to inflict harm on other humans, are the entire basis of human existence. A human deprived of tools is functionally no longer a human at all, and a tool that cannot possibly be used to hurt anyone else (like maybe an Asimovian 3L robot) is no longer a tool.

Of course, this can be taken as a comment on pretty much anything posted on the Captain's Journal, but I suppose it's most relevant to the questions of increasing charges (or administering extra-judicial punishments like summary execution or threats thereof at the scene) for people who happen to be armed (or just appear so). Which, I suppose, covers all four of these particular posts.; August 31, 2015 at 12:20 PM
Anonymous said...: As one who has endured a spinal surgery that didn't quite pan out as planned, I will surely pray for a right and proper outcome. Science and doctoring can work some magic these days but there still ain't no such thing as perfection. That fella needs all the prayers he can get!
So prayers up Sipsey readers!!!; August 31, 2015 at 12:48 PM
Anonymous said...: If the Georgia cop killed the homeowner's dog, he deserved to get shot.; September 1, 2015 at 7:53 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Monday, August 31, 2015

Four from Herschel Smith.

4 comments:

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