Sipsey Street Irregulars: "Other solutions." Glenn Reynolds stumbles toward a moment of revelation.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

"Other solutions." Glenn Reynolds stumbles toward a moment of revelation.

Glenn Reynolds: "Forecast of distrust with a chance of revolution."

All of this comes against a background of debacles like the botched ObamaCare rollout, the mistranslated “reset” button with Russia, a Secret Service that can’t seem to hang on to its guns, to keep its agents sober or to keep intruders out of the White House, an EPA that didn’t report the water problems in Flint, Mich., and a seemingly endless array of similar screwups. When they’re not crooks, our leaders all too often seem to be incompetents.

If this were just one-sided anger at the Obama Administration, then it would be troubling, but not dangerous. But if, as seems plausible, a majority of Americans don’t think a Republican administration would represent a substantial improvement, then we’ve got a bigger problem. If voters think that they can’t vote their way out of a problem, then they may look to other solutions.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: ". . . majority of Americans don’t think a Republican ESTABLISHMENT (GOPe RINO) administration would represent a substantial improvement,. . ."

There. Fixed it for ya. Yer welcome.

B Woodman
III-per; January 26, 2016 at 8:52 AM
Chiu ChunLing said...: "Some 71% said military officers put the interests of the country ahead of their own interests, while just 12% thought the same about members of Congress."

"A democracy that gives rise to those sorts of sentiments is a democracy that’s in trouble."

That's a pretty big stumble. A democracy that doesn't distrust the motivations of its politicians is in much bigger trouble than one that does. The alarming thing about those numbers is that they are dramatically higher than they should be. Democracy cannot survive if anyone believes politicians won't sell out their country if it is in their best interests to do so. And in a military organization full of career officers, it is complete nonsense to believe that many of them are really in it to serve their country over their own interests.

Still, the more people who recognize that the defects are in our government, the less destructive the coming war will be. War is always a terrible thing, but it is always worse the more people back the wrong side.; January 26, 2016 at 4:08 PM

"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

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

"Other solutions." Glenn Reynolds stumbles toward a moment of revelation.

2 comments:

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