Life or death in one twitch — ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.

What most people don’t realize is that TFT provides you the same choice, only with your hands, feet, and body. Since most people don’t know the actual principles of violence or how to get it to work for them, they must necessarily rely upon external attachments like firearms. But that is not necessarily true. THe passengers of Flight 93 had no real early warning and no real arms, Mike, yet they demonstrated more moral and physical courage than simply someone who is packing heat.

A gun does not make you a better person. It only offers good people to defend themselve and others against evil. You must be good first to use a tool for good, after all.

The Founding Fathers of the United States believed, and wrote, that the bearing of arms was essential to the character and dignity of a free people. For this reason, they wrote a Second Amendment in the Bill Of Rights which reads the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.

I make note of the fact that the Founding Fathers did not believe women could fight and kill just as efficiently as men back then. They also didn’t believe that women could kill with their hands and physical bodies as well as men could.

The Founding Fathers were bereft of much information and knowlede we here today have access to. It is a testament to their foresight that they were able to overcome the restrictions of their culture and era in order to fashion a more perfect Union for their descendents and the descendents of many other forlorn families across the centuries on planet Earth.

Even http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm John stuart Mill, famous for his work on the Subjection of Women (a call of liberation that people like Bookworm and I can appreciate and respect far more than the Code Pinkos and Leftist feminists), did not fully comprehend the reality here. They were men, and women, who lived in a different time, where communication and information traveled only as fast as the physical devices from which it could be physically delivered (or as far as the telegraph lines).

The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.-John Stuart Mill

If he knew what I know now, that the principles of violence cares not whether you are man, woman, or child, then Milton would have had a far stronger case. After all, part of the justification for laws against women were that women couldn’t cut it and needed protection and patronage from men. Milton argued that the dependence of women are a natural consequence of treating them as appendages rather than as independent individuals. Few men can look on a delicate flower of a woman and think she needs to be protected for her own good, after realizing that she can kill you with ease. Equality comes at the barrel of a gun because nature cares for only one thing: results. All the moral posturing in the world, in the entire history of the world, is meaningless without results demonstrating that what you speak of is true. Not “could be” true, but is true, right now, right here.

In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost universal opinion. They must be very fortunate well as unusually capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in obtaining a trial, than any other litigants have in getting a verdict.

Even though Milton lived in a different era, a different time, amongst different folks and molks, the human species was the same back then as it is now. Challenging majority opinion has never been an easy thing. It wasn’t when Neo-Neocon outed herself as a *gasp* Bush and Iraq and Vietnam supporter and it won’t be for anybody in Hollywood who wants to adopt conservative ideas in the open. THe pale and bitter truth of the human condition is that we will always be like this, without end except the end of the human species.

If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other people. In all other cases, burthen of proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion about the reality of an alleged historical event, in which the feelings of men general are not much interested, as the Siege of Troy example, those who maintain that the event took place expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required to say anything; and at no time these required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition either any limitation of the general freedom of human action or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared with others. The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint not required by I general good, and that the law should be no respecter of persons but should treat all alike, save where dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is useless me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men ha a right to command and women are under an obligation obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit, on the affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection. It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly allow to men, having the double presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality, must held to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought to against them. These would be thought good pleas in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance. Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not only to answer all that has ever been said bye who take the other side of the question, but to imagine that could be said by them — to find them in reasons, as I as answer all I find: and besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even if I could do all and leave the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal to reason has power to produce in intellects but those of a high class.

Individuals like Sarah Palin have always been challenging the majority opinion. That is also part of the human condition and our inheritance as members of humanity.

There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free men.

Life would be boring without the Saddams and the Tookies. WHo could people like me kill with justification then? Somebody has to die and it might as well be them, yanno. 3% sounds a little high these days. The population needs to be culled more.

************

People should have seen and known me before 2001. I was very much a pacifist. Avoided fights. Was afraid of fighting not so much because I was afraid of getting hurt but because I was afraid of what my anger would allow me to do if I ever gave it free reign. Then it happens that I chose to get into a fight simply because I was tired of this guy always goading me on, for days and days, about wanting to fight me. So I kicked him in the stomach when we got off at the same bus stop, in the same apartment complex. I landed a nice knife hand on his neck, although it did no real damage at the time because it only had the weight of my arm behind it (5 pounds is not that much regardless of how fast you think you can move your hand. It ain’t gonna be as fast as gravity, 32 feet per second second. Who the hell can move their hand from a place of rest, in two seconds, to 32 feet or 9.8 meters away?) He landed a kick on my right thigh, upper part, when it was braced (an incorrect dodge, which I learned how to correct years afterwards).

I’ve learned to accept the bloodthirsty side of myself and control it. Everything in my environment told me that “hitting was wrong”, “being angry was wrong and bad”, “aggression was wrong”, yet I saw plenty examples of it go on amongst my classmates and there was nothing done to effectively stop it. Such osmosis education led me to be both afraid of external factors as well as internal factors. You become afraid of your own responses on top of being afraid of what others will do you because you are too paralyzed by indecision and uncertainty to figure out how to resolve problems.

I got tired of that game, though it wasn’t until 9/11 that things started falling into place.

We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.

And that is why I believe this is perfectly true. Most people only have access to a small percentage of their brain power at any one time, as was popularly said before. THis is obvious because your brain doesn’t want to burn itself out using up mega gobs of oxygen. It is quite apparent when you see that geniuses often have deficiencies or abnormalities or low lifespans. Madness and genius are two sides of the same coin. The same is true for human decision making concerning life and death: two sides of the same coin.

When an individual is able to defend themselves, like the Iraqis are now able to do, they start acquiring dignity, self-respect, peace, harmony, and the various other virtues like courage and valor and honor (real honor, not Islamic honor).

When people are protected “for their own good”, you get the Boomer generation, Germany as it is, France, Spain, Code Pink, and et all. And I don’t believe I can call the results of “protecting people for their own good” a good thing in the end. It is not sustainable.

I call it: On the Dignity of Free Men, and the Bearing of Arms.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html

(I think Ymar would indicate that Dignity of Free Men is also accomplished via TFT.)

People are going to rebel, companies are going to leave. Do this for awhile and the worse things will get. America hasn’t gotten to this point because whenever this has happened, either the economic or military situation changed for the better or reforms were made to stop taxation policies like milking the rich (JFK’s tax cuts) or milking the companies or milking successful and self-sufficient rural areas in AMerica. That is the deathblow.

Once a nation starts taxing its colonies and rural areas, the self0sufficient parts, to death, it’s going to be the Colonies vs Britain once again. This won’t happen for many many decades, however, but the seeds are being planted even now. Just like the seeds for the Civil War were planted long before Lincoln was ever born.

or something equally sleazy and weak.

As you know, Book, I despise weakness. Machiavelli said it well when he noted that being unarmed has numerous disadvantages, not least among them is that it causes your enemies to despise you. It also causes your allies to despise you as well.

There are things you can clearly see that happened fairly recently – for example when Grumman merged with Northrop a decade ago they couldn’t get themselves out of New York and away from New York taxes fast enough – but it remains an interesting question.

The Rhode Island example came from a conversation with Jack Welch not long before the recent election – which I’d put here if I knew how to stick up a youtube – but you can find it easily enough on that site.

There is apparently no way to control tabs, so the first number is the current unemployment rate, and the second is the ratio of defense spending to state GDP.

The top 10 states averaged 5.4% unemployment while the bottom 11 states averaged 6.99% unemployment. I want to live in a state with lots of federal government jobs.

So, you think the next few years will look like a re-run of the movie classic “Airplane”? I hope they don’t remake it into a tragedy. “roger, Rodger”.

Mike D, a little pessimism, like a little paranoia, is not only understandable but might be healthy. I tend to be a bit of an optimist in most things, as befits an old carrier aviator, but I certainly feel there is ample cause for concern. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”

When you look to the state for your well being, you are subordinate to the state. Always. The greater good and all that.

>> You might think that this would make me depressed, but in a strange way it doesn’t. >>

I’m not depressed. My pessimism leads me to believe we’re going to face very tough times sooner than I believed. We will choose, at that time, the path of dictatorship, or we will rediscover what it means to be American. My pessimism doesn’t lead me to decide which of those paths we’ll take; I simply do not know if greater than 50% of us will choose dictatorship.