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Just Like The Bloody Romans
Those who remember Monty Python’s Life Of Brian will be familiar with the line “What have the Romans ever done for us?” followed by the recitation of roads, laws, plumbing, a supply of potable water, etc.
So whenever some stupid Marxist [redundancy alert] suggests that eliminating capitalism will help the Pore & Starvin, we should use one of their own arguments against them by saying: “So really, what you want is for 80% of the world to live in poverty, again?”
But logic has never been a particular strength of the Left, especially when it contradicts dialectic.
Acceptable Risk
The inimitable Heather Mac Donald takes the Nannies to task, in her inimitable way. This paragraph in particular struck home for me:
We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.
Bill Whittle once said more or less the same thing about accidental gun deaths: while even one such death was tragic, the plain fact of the matter is that some freedoms come with risk, sometimes deadly risk; and the overall benefit to our society is far, far greater than the danger that may (or may not) ensue. Using statistics of “gun deaths” (even correct ones) to bolster calls for gun control / -confiscation is likewise irrelevant.
It’s called the price of freedom, and We The People have been balancing those freedoms against the collateral harm to individuals ever since our Republic was formed and the Constitution and Bill of Rights promulgated. All individual rights are potentially harmful, whether it’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion, gun ownership, privacy or any of the others.
And to Heather’s point above: driving isn’t even a right protected by the Bill of Rights. How much more, then, should our First- and Second Amendment rights (and all the other rights for that matter) be protected, even when we know that some tragedy is bound to follow thereby?
“If it saves just one life” sounds great on a bumper sticker, but as a basis for public policy, it’s not only foolish but in many cases more harmful in the long run. Heather again:
We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.
The current wave of totalitarianism and loss of freedoms caused by State overreaction to the Chinkvirus needs to be rolled back, and fast. It just sucks that we have to rely on judges — many of whom, to judge from their records, are not especially friends of freedom — to hold back the mini-Mussolinis in their totalitarian quest for absolute power over the governed.
And just so we know what kind of “acceptable risk” we’re talking about, comes this from Fox News:
Alternative Use
Looks like this is a week for alternatives, but this one is a little less… contentious, shall we say, than the one from yesterday.
While looking at this article about Harry Redknapp’s little beach cottage, one of the pics got me thinking. While I think the house in general is awful (like Alyssa Milano: quite lovely from the outside; inside, not so much), this room is excellent:
Now I have little use for a wine cellar, being that I don’t drink a lot of wine and have no interest in collecting it either. But a temperature/humidity-controlled room, with very limited access… can we all say “Gun Room“, children?
If I ever same into something like this (assuming it was in the Land Of The Free and not Hoplophobic Britannia), I know that one of the first things I’d do is turn to the interior designer and say, “Lose all those faggy shelves and stuff, and put in some glassed gun display cases, with room for a couple-three safes on the side.” All that’s left is to have a decent, robust table somewhere with several clamps for gun cleaning and -smithing, and there ya go.
The same is true of houses that have projection rooms — in-home cinemas, as it were — which I think are a total waste of space. Here’s one, from some mega-mansion on the market here in Plano:
Once again, a room with no windows, a single door access… who the hell needs stupid Disney movies that much. when you could have a primo gun room?
I know, I’m so hopelessly out of touch.
Alternative Actions
Just who the fuck do these glorified debt-collectors think they are?
Congress should find out exactly how much the I.R.fuckingS. paid for this data, and reduce their operating budget by 100x the amount. Unfortunately, as the House is under the control of the Socialists (for now), this isn’t going to happen.
Thus stymied, my thoughts run a little deeper than Stephen Green’s tar and feathers.
ROPE, TREES
and
WALL, BULLETS
…all come to mind, but no doubt someone is going to have a problem with this.
The Master
One of the highlights of my excellent high school education was in choral singing. I’d joined the Prep School Choir (after a rather terrifying audition), and when I moved from Prep School to College (a distance of about fifty yards — literally, College started in the next quadrangle over), I joined the College Choir.
The St. John’s College Choir was famous in South Africa. We performed often, sometimes live concerts at the school and elsewhere, and sometimes radio performances (usually transmitted live from our chapel). It was as close to a professional choir as one could get — actually, I’ve been in professional choral groups that weren’t as professional as we were.
The man who ran the thing was our choir master, James “Jimmy” Gordon, a tall, very classy 40-ish man of unbelievable talent as a singer, church organist (we had a 72-pipe organ in the chapel) and teacher. It was generally accepted that Jimmy could have made a good living as a singer or an organist — even, perhaps, as a concert pianist; but there he was, in St. John’s College, teaching a bunch of young hooligans such as myself to sing sacred choral music. His mastery of the choir and of its music was absolute, yet he was patient, self-effacing but a relentless perfectionist for all that. Here’s an example.
Our choir had about sixty members, and we were rehearsing a piece by, I think, Mozart or Handel. At one point he stopped the choir with a raised hand, pointed to me and said, “Du Toit, that was a lovely harmony you sang at bar 28 — but it’s not what the composer wrote. Kindly read your part properly and sing accordingly. Now, again from bar 14…” He could pick out not only a dissonant voice, but could identify its owner, out of sixty choristers.
As I said, he was endlessly patient, and I only ever remember him losing his temper twice, and venting his anger at the miscreants. (No prizes for guessing who was one of them.)
We (and I) did not deserve to have him; but we did, for five whole years. And as my voice changed from soprano through alto and finally to first tenor, my ability grew and grew until I could read any piece of music, and sing any part of it. It was, and remains, a priceless gift from this extraordinary man, James Gordon. I’m only glad he never heard me perform with the rock band — he’d have cringed at what I did to my voice.
Jimmy passed away last week at age 91, and I only learned about it via my sister’s link to the school’s website. Here’s his obituary, and if I can say anything about that and the tributes that accompany it, it’s that they don’t do him justice.
Thank you, Jimmy, from the bottom of my heart, and R.I.P.
Clayton House (1971)