Once upon a time in the mad 60’s a pair of mad lefty (but I repeat myself) socialist sociologists refined a strategy for bringing about the blessed socialist utopia by overloading and bankrupting the welfare system. This, they confidently hoped, would crash the capitalist system and bring about the longed-for socialist utopia. Essentially, they drafted the poor and unprivileged into an army demanding services which the state ultimately could not provide; somehow, this would crash the system and bring about radical social reform. The whole thing sounds rather like the Underpants Gnomes theory of economics or the cartoon showing a pair of white-coated scientists examining a complicated mathematical sequence on a chalkboard with a notation in the middle of it which says, “And here a miracle happens.”
Civil Society
A Promise Or a Threat?
Put me down firmly on the side of those who see “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” as more of a threat; I see “You will be happy” with special emphasis on “will” and the unstated addendum to that statement as “You damn peasants better be happy, or else!”
The simple fact is that owning things especially things which can be construed as tools allow one a degree of independence, and even a mild degree of comfort over and above the norm. This was suggested to me in a college class four decades and more since. I think it must have been the required readings for medieval history course; dedicated medievalists had gone into various probate records and wills in England or France and studied the inventories of barely-above-survival peasant households. Nothing really notable in the main just basic tools, household and farm implements like butter churns, cheese presses, cooking pots, some simple furniture. But at least one of the readings pointed out how possession of certain tools like a cheese-press, hinted that the owner of that item was in fact, making cheese, possibly for their own use or for the market. The very fact that they owned something with which to turn a farm product like milk, into something to sell or barter for in the marketplace implied a slightly higher level of comfort and security for that household.
When the Rule of Law Fails: A Reprise Post
So, reading the story of this numbskull (link found through Instapundit) bloviating on MSNBC about the fierce urgency of abolishing the police reminded me of a long post that I did some years ago about what happens in a lawless, politically corrupt, violence-plagued city when the otherwise upright and law-abiding citizens get fed to the teeth with lawlessness, corruption and violence, and decide to take matters into their own hands. Brittany Packnett Cunningham, apparently noted as an anti-police activist, likely would not like what happens when citizens are finally pushed an inch too far.
The resulting post of mine was originally in three parts, but reposted here in total, below the fold. The story of the Vigilance Committee of 1856 was one that I had originally researched as providing a turn of plot for my Gold Rush adventure, The Golden Road. The hero of that novel, young Fredi Steinmetz worked for a time in San Francisco with his friend Edwin, selling copies of James King’s Evening Daily Bulletin on the streets and delivering to subscribers late in 1855, but left for the diggings before the Vigilance Committee renewed itself. The situation in San Francisco, which finally boiled over, reminds me very much of current events; naked chicanery at the polls, political corruption, a high level of crony capitalism, and criminals terrorizing ordinary citizens and going unpunished.
The Invasion of Safe Spaces
The most disgusting post on Twitter among a whole library of disgusting posts created by the largely insane freaks who inhabit that archipelago of the Internet was a picture of a hulking guy in a dress, boasting of his achievement as a transsexual, of scaring a woman into turning around and leaving the bathroom almost the minute that she (most likely a genuine XX female) walked in and spotted she/him/shim/it immediately, unconvincingly masquerading as a delicate flower of femininity.
What Hulking Guy In A Dress didn’t know, or perhaps really didn’t care, so eager was he to count coup in the Trans Sweepstakes and make a harvest of likes on Twitter, was that his presence as a Hulking Guy In An Empty Room sent every antenna warning of danger vibrating like one of those sensors around the Pacific ocean which send out tsunami warnings after an earthquake. This acute sense of danger has been instilled for decades into every sensible woman over the age of fifteen or so that there are situations which you turn around and avoid if you value your life, physical health, and sanity. You do not get into an elevator alone if there is a lone man already in it especially a fit-looking and vaguely menacing man. (Male senior citizens toting an oxygen tank are probably OK, though.) You do not walk out alone to your car in a darkened parking lot or structure at midnight, not without your having store security or a gaggle of co-workers walk with you, or you are carrying something concealed of a caliber starting with the numeral 4. You do not hitchhike wearing Daisy Dukes and a crop-top, unless you really want to personally discover some weird and probably fatal (to you) sexual kinks on the part of the sickos offering you a ride.
Erasing Women
Well, it’s really kind of sad that erasing biological XX-chromosome no-kidding 100 percent female women seems the ultimate endpoint of early 21st century popular prog-thought, as mad and illogical as that might seem as an ambition, or rather an idée fixe. The ancient jape of a fox hunt described as ‘the unspeakable in hot pursuit of the inedible’ comes to mind, only this is the deranged in pursuit of the unachievable. As little as I think of the long-time and loud professional Feminists-with-a-capital-F (or LT&LPF(F) as I call them), and their tendency to view all men as potential rapist and abusers, I would have expected them to be assiduous in protesting for the actual physical safety of biological women in women-only spaces like restrooms, locker rooms, battered woman shelters, hospital wards and prisons. Alas, they would seem to have fixated on the availability of reproductive health or as the rest of us call it, abortion, as the great fight for the LT&LPF(F); the hill upon which they wish to see fetal humans die. I mean; what the hell, LT&LPF(F) you look away from the physical safety of real, no-kidding vulnerable women … and focus on the rights, ways and means of killing fetal humans. Good job, sisters. (Not.)