Deep Thoughts

TWANLOC

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The inestimably acute and prolific blog-commenter Subotai Bahadur coined that acronym and has propagated it across the conservative-libertarian corner of the blogosphere ever since. It has achieved the status of an entry on Acronym Finder, for whatever that is worth. It is shorthand for “those who are no longer our countrymen” itself an abbreviation for a slashing denunciation of those American colonists who were in sympathy with the wishes of Great Britain by Samuel Adams on American independence, delivered in a fiery stem-winder of a speech at the Philadelphia Statehouse in August of 1776

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

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Quote of the Day II

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Richard Fernandez:

Jefferson’s great insight is that all decisions in this world are marginal cost decisions; and if we feel free to heap deficit spending on the future to remember the children will also be free to repudiate it. The paramount question we should be concerned with is not whether slavery was evil, but whether a black man living in America today can make a better life than in the Congo; whether Israel is better replaced by the Palestinian authority. For we cannot change the past; it is useless to try and even more useless to make a career of it. Even if it were possible to change the past, Bradbury argues there is no guarantee that the resulting alternative future would be any better.
 
Our task must to leave the world better than we found it, not to remake it from the foundations. That doesn’t mean the past is gone, but it lacks the special quality of activity. The dead are already costed into the present…

He got that right.

Quote of the Day

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From an Instapundit comment thread re genetic testing of newborns to confirm/disconfirm parentage:

Carl Pham
Come on. Who do you think calls himself “an expert in ethics?” Would you? Would I? Of course not. Anybody with a trace of common sense and humility understands that no mere son of Adam can possible be considered competent in ethics, let alone an expert. Isn’t the next article up about Native American torture? And then there’s the one on terrorists murdering five-month olds? No sane member of the H. sapiens species would consider it plausible that any one of us could be a mini-Christ, prepared to judge right from wrong, separate the sheep from the goats.
 
So, ipso facto, who are the “ethicists?” They are those who lack genuine empathy, humility, or any deep awareness of the challege and subtlety of moral judgment. They are the narcissists, the borderline personalities, the grandiose who imagine themselves fit to be the stewards of God. In another age, they would join the Inquisition.

There is something to this argument.

A Summer Day in Bosnia-Herzegovina 100 Years Ago

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This weekend marks the hundredth anniversary of the incident which was the spark that set off the cataclysm of the First World War. Which wasn’t, strictly speaking, the first world-wide war; it could be argued that the Napoleonic Wars were, and the interminable European war between France and England which spilled over into those colonies in the North American continent could also be considered a world war.

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More Science Fiction Fan Follies

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I don’t know if I can really claim to be a science fiction fan I am not hard-core, at any rate. I have had my moments with particular authors in the genre, I’ve been to a couple of cons (Salt Lake City and Albuquerque the con here in San Antonio costs too much at the door for my budget) I have all of Blake’s 7 on VHS tape (taped from broadcast on Salt Lake City’s public TV station in the early 1990s), most of Babylon 5, and I have purchased every on of Lois McMaster Bujould’s Vorkosigan novels when and if they present themselves in paperback. Oh, and I really enjoy Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but they’re not really science fiction more fantasy with a wry twist. I watched Star Trek when it was originally broadcast but who of the age that I am now didn’t, unless their parents were Luddites who wouldn’t have a TV in the house?
And Dad worked as a scientific sub-contractor for NASA, now and again. Something to do with circadian rhythms and space travel might possibly affect them, either positively or negatively, so yes, science!

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