Don’t Get Cocky

People believe lots of crazy things. That doesn’t mean the people are crazy, or stupid, just human. It’s awfully tempting, though, to see the other guy’s crazy beliefs as a sign of some sort of mental or moral deficit. What with Rick Perry jumping into the race for president, it’s a good time to go over this.

Let’s take young-earth creationism, for example. It has several features we can identify:

• Somebody made it up out of thin air
• It has no plausible mechanism of action
• Belief in it stems from either ignorance of reality, or an ideological view
• Modern experience shows it to be utterly, incontrovertibly false

Most conservatives are not creationists, but most creationists are conservatives. This causes a lot of Lefties to forget that correlation is not causation and, further, to brand conservatives as stupid and/or crazy for believing such a thing. Indeed, it is no longer possible for reasonable people to disagree about the fact of evolution. Failure to believe in evolution as the explanation of speciation is not reasonable, it’s religious or, what is the same thing, ideological.

This is the typical Leftie’s cue to get all smug and to make outrageous claims like “reality has a distinct leftward bias”. Oh, really? Let’s take a belief, clung to as bitterly as any religion, by our friends on the Left: Keynesian Economics. It has several features we can identify:

• Somebody made it up out of thin air
• It has no plausible mechanism of action
• Belief in it stems from either ignorance of reality, or an ideological view
• Modern experience shows it to be utterly, incontrovertibly false

Sound familiar? It should. Not only has it never made any sense to anybody with any sense, and not only has it failed to work, ever, but the last few years should have made it painfully obvious to all and sundry that it is an unmitigated failure. And yet the Paul Krugmans of the world still say we need more “stimulus”.

Borrowing your way to prosperity is just as likely as the historicity of Adam and Eve. They’re both fairy tales.

It doesn’t mean that Lefties are insane or stupid. (Let’s set Krugman aside for now – I’m not sure he’s not royally bonkers.) It merely means they’re wrong, and that they believe in crazy things just like everybody else.

Told You So

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that I’ve been saying for years that Great Britain is dead.

The British lost their freedom decades ago but didn’t notice. Hint: If you can’t buy a gun and use it legally for self defense, you have no liberty in any meaningful sense of the word. Add in so-called “multiculturalism“, and you have the death of a civilization.

Well, none other than Peter Hitchens says that it’s now official. The “Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created.”

They have all learned what most British politicians somehow cannot grasp – that the more encounters you have with our justice system, the less you fear it. A few ‘exemplary’ sentences – none of which will be served in full, or anything near it – will only help to spread the word that arson, robbery, violence, spite and selfishness are not punished here any more. Indeed these are the things we are now famous for around a world that once respected us.

And that is why we have many more nasty surprises waiting for  us, here in The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.