Biden Pandemic Adviser Calls for Four to Six Week National Lockdown

[pbrower2a]

(03-20-2021, 05:34 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(03-19-2021, 06:30 PM)flower2 Wrote: No country in history has ever hated freedom as much as the USA does. You know that all hope is lost when you talk to 5 Americans in one day and one says that the Bill of Rights should be repealed, another says blacksmithing should be illegal, one swears wearing fur should be a crime, one says private charities should be outlawed, and another says bump stocks must be banned.

Disgusting.

You would benefit from a trip to Saudi Arabia or North Korea 

Oddly he reminds me of the Rick Blaine character at the start of Casablanca, a self-loathing character who left America with some huge chip on his shoulder and would eventually learn the hard way after hearing plenty of sob stories from people who had legitimate causes for those sob stories, like having to leave behind a banking fortune in the Netherlands, like being sought by the Gestapo, like fleeing the crushing regime of Francisco Franco in Spain... if Casablanca was Purgatory, fascist Europe was Hell, and America was Paradise. 

Rick Blaine had to find out the hard way how good it is to be an American. 

1. The only controversial point about the Bill of Rights is the poorly-written Second Amendment. I'm guessing that on the rough frontier in which might have encounters with bears, cougars, still-hostile Indians, miscreants living on the edge of civilization who return only to raid the diligent frontiersman or settler for whatever he is too lazy to make or earn, or who might need to shoot a deer for a family feast, firearms might be necessary. Hunting rifles and military rifles were one and the same. Also, the States needed their own militias as there was not to be a large standing army that could go wherever it was needed. A private navy would have been out of the question, but a navy would have been necessary for suppressing pirates, deterring invasions, and enforcing the laws at sea (including by 1807 the prohibition of the importation of slaves). 

Do the People as a whole (meaning State governments) have the right to maintain militias or does everyone have the right to own whatever weapons one desires? Apparently, tanks, artillery weapons, and bombs are out of the question, although if America ever had occupying Nazis bedeviling any part of America we would have been quite lenient on the ownership of those. 

...people can be free and have practically no "gun rights" (Britain under Thatcher), and can have extensive "gun rights" and utterly lack political freedom (Brezhnev's Soviet Union). The political cultures that make the most out of weaponry as their identity seem generally on the totalitarian side.

For a more reliable defense of property and loved ones, get a dog. A barking dog warns a criminal of a serious mauling. It is telling that the Nazis quickly prohibited Jews from owning dogs, as they might figure out what some SS thug was up to. 

2. What is wrong with blacksmithing? This may be one reliable means of getting a necessary part for an old machine, and if it should ever be necessary to make some Katusha-style rockets for use against an occupying power it might be a good idea to have some trained blacksmiths. 

3. We have good-enough synthetics that we don't need fur. Wool is almost as good as fur. A leopard fur looks better on a leopard than on a person, even if a leopard is a truly nasty creature. It takes eight dead leopards to make a leopard fur. If you want a fur coat around, then let it be on a creature that might have some affection for you, like a cat or a dog. Wool is a renewable resource. 

4. Who advocates the outlawing of private charities on the whole? Charity scams, of course.

5. Bump stocks make semi-automatic weapons into fully-automatic tools of massacre.  

Reference to another movie: in Forrest Gump, the author Winston Groom puts these words into the mouth of the dullard Forrest Gump: 

"Stupid is as stupid does".

Or less cinematically: in Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, in which he tears apart the idea that people who think outside the box are exempt from concerns about their good will... he shows that intellectuals are often no more honorable than the shamans of old times or cranks of modern time. Know well that Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Vidkun Quisling, and Joseph Goebbels took great pride in their intellectual prowess. Brilliant people can't get away with every whim.