A collection of rapid-fire thoughts provoked by recent interactions

As the title says…

1. Many conflicts today come down to whether we believe there is an order to the universe and it is our duty as humans to find our place within that order, or whether there is no order that ought to be respected and we can rework nature, including ourselves, however we’d like.

2. For related reasons, there is a more old-school environmentalism that is thoroughly conservative in the sense of believing that humans should live in harmony with the created order. Present-day environmentalism that sees covering natural hillsides with solar panels as “green” is more in line with the modern, controlling technocracy (and makes corporations a lot more money too).

3. We could use more science textbooks today that recognize and combat this problem:

   Tara Ann Thieke @TaraAnnThieke

   After teaching children their brain was 'just' a machine and their body was 'just' a piece of meat and the sun 'just' a ball of gas and God 'just' a spaghetti sky daddy, the way was paved to teach young children to accept big porn and big pharma.

   

   Libs of Tik Tok @libsoftiktok

   New Jersey’s new sex curriculum points elementary students to watch videos from Amaze. This is one of their videos. They are telling 9 year olds to watch porn. Groomers. https://t.co/9GrXYmJsNl

4. It is in the professional interest of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) administrators to never actually solve the problems they are hired to solve. In fact it is in their interest to always be convincing you those problems are horrible and getting worse. This fact should be remembered.

5. For related reasons, many public health bureaucrats are in no hurry whatsoever to declare the pandemic over.

6. There is an interesting pleasure from stressing a mechanical device to its limit, and seeing it hold. (This comment motivated by bicycling back from the hardware store pulling a trailer of heavy soil over uneven terrain!)

7. The complaint that progressives want to celebrate the appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court, while at the same time claim not to know what women are, is getting to them, and no they have no good rebuttals. So keep pushing. This cannot last. They are caught in the tension of wanting perfect subjectivism (whatever I feel like) and perfect objectivism (the science says!) at the same time.

8. The technocracy doesn’t believe in human rights. It believes in planners, and you may pretend to have rights only as long as your desires don’t contradict the planners.

9. Millions of people managing the lives of millions of people results in much less possibility of great harm than a few planners managing the lives of millions of people. (We want plans by the many, not by the few!)

   Patrick Madrid ✌🏼 @patrickmadrid

   What the?? This video taken yesterday in Shanghai, China, by the father of a close friend of mine. She verified its authenticity: People screaming out of their windows after a week of total lockdown, no leaving your apartment for any reason.

10. Americans have gotten by for a long time with the attitude that, as long as I don’t personally behave badly, the world will keep going along OK. I don’t really need to confront the evil all that much, just not add to it myself. Well, things have gotten worse, and now we have to say “no, this is wrong, you stop this”.

11. The US political system was brilliantly designed, and the fact that is still works as well as it does despite being ruled over by awful people is proof of this fact.

12. Per Biden’s recent ban on “ghost guns”, gun control is another attempt to solve a cultural problem (no gun shoots another person by itself) with technological controls. And in this case, the technological controls will accomplish virtually nothing anyway. Computer-aided milling and 3D printing are going to make it increasingly easy for anyone who really cares to make an off-the-grid firearm to do so. They simply aren’t very complicated devices. So maybe we should focus more on the cultural problem.

13. There needs to be an effort made to teach children about the benefits of freedom. This is strange to have to say, because (as Chesterton quipped once), like the ability to breathe, freedom is something whose value we all understand when we lose it… but perhaps not until then. Quite a number of adults are walking around in the US right now basically of the opinion that statists care about other people, whereas freedom is about selfishness.

14. Every big cultural battle in the US today is a spiritual battle, and we shouldn’t shy away from pointing that out. We are not merely fighting against well-intentioned but badly educated humans.

THE END