02.22.07

Some stuff I though worthy of reading or listening to today.

Days Of War, Nights Of Love Audio Book: Hypocrisy
It can’t be avoided, so deal with it as best you can, and stop worrying about it. It is a mental relic of our religion based culture. An excellent essay in the form of a podcast, and yes, I know they spelled it wrong. AudioAnarchy.org

Nostalgia for the Past isn’t a Plan
“The state of our Republic today is pretty dire. Calls to rectify the situation by means of Kulturkampf seem to me misguided, however. The central problem of the United States today is not that people’s brains are encrusted with filth but that they have been scrubbed so clean by puritan Left ideology that we have lost the ability to talk, even to think, about what ails us. This is as true over large parts of the conservative movement as it is in the popular culture at large. We cannot discuss what needs discussing, and we have stripped away defenses that will protect us when the coming tsunami of new understandings in the human sciences makes landfall.” John Derbyshire

Reflections on the 1956 Revolution in Hungary
“As the gun lobby says: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. My interest is in why people kill, why they make wars and revolutions, and why they undermine civilized life even though their well-being depends on protecting it. To say that people do all this because they are sinful or destructive or driven by their ids or irrational or stupid or genetically aggressive is to postpone facing the question, not to answer it. For the question remains of why they act on these motives rather than on dozens of other motives they also have, such as altruism, caution, reason, fear, pity, conscience, and so on. This, of course, is a general question, and I am not about to give a philosophical answer but only to set forth my opinion of what motives led to the Revolution and whether the Revolution was worth what it cost. I am afraid I will offend those who have sentimentalized the Revolution, and for this I apologize in advance. But, as I see it, the task of philosophers is to tell the truth to the best of their ability, not to obfuscate in order to avoid unpleasantness.” John Kekes

The Kathryn Johnston Indictments: A Good Start. A Long Way to Go.
“When 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot and killed by Atlanta narcotics officers last November, it had all the trappings of the typical drug raid gone wrong. Critics (like me) cautioned Atlanta officials to use Johnston's death to spur real reform in the investigation and policing of drug crimes, and to avoid what other cities have done in the wake of such tragedies: express regret and remorse, promise changes, then return to doing things the same way they've always been done.” Radley Balko Well maybe. Let’s see if the cop union doesn’t spin this into a typical police “accidental shooting” type whitewash first though.

Technorati Tags: neo-con_mischief police_shootings audio_anarchy Hungarian_Revolution