I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
January 07, 2004 - 12:55 p.m.
I should be good today and send out some Festivus presents. I still don't have the cards but I can send them out later. I'll just write something on plane (sic) paper.
Not much has happened since my last update so I think I'll talk some politics. Is anyone still reading this? One day I should say, "now I'll write a mathematical analyses of the relationship between winning percentage in the American League Western Division and federal monetary policy. Then after everyone left I could just make fun of all my readers J
Now where was I? Oh yeah, libertarians. Absolutist positions are pretty much always over-simplistic and libertarianism is worst than most. Once again I'm going to quote the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Thomas Jefferson realized that government could not only trample rights but also defend them. So much of what libertarians complain about the government doing is simply defending the rights of some individuals from other individuals and groups. If there were no government we wouldn't be more free, we would be the victims of those more powerful than ourselves. It isn't just people that we need protection from, it is wants. When you don't have enough food to eat or a place to sleep, you aren't free, you are a slave to the need to survive.
We need to actually think about which government actions are good and bad. Reasonable people can disagree. So much of what we do affects our neighbors to some degree and where to draw the line is something that must thought about, not decided by slogans. What someone does in the privacy of their bedroom usually only affects the people there. If someone makes loud noise or burns trash that has a negative impact on those around him and then we have to weigh the rights of different people. Yes it isn't simple. Yes we have to make decisions. Yes we will sometimes make the wrong ones. When that happens we have to learn from our mistakes and try to do better next time, not give up on making the decisions.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile January 07, 2004
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