I have done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture with elbow room. The others, those who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as urn.
Senator Ted Cruz’s non-filibuster filibuster, monopolizing the Senate floor for the ninth hour as I type these words, is easy to characterize — if you are Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.
Easy to make fun of, especially when the senator read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham as a bedtime story for his children — via C-Span.
It’s not a filibuster, since it stops no vote. It’s not even a speed-bump on the way to a vote. It’s something of a demonstration by one senator and a few of his allies to highlight the dangers of the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act, and the necessity to repeal it. Marshaling emails, tweets, and open letters, Cruz hopes to pressure the unmovable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to allow a vote on an amendment to defund Obamacare.
The point is this: Attacking Obamacare can’t help but seem quixotic. Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, we who want less government — who want to limit government — often find ourselves jousting with giants who don’t budge, or (ahem) budget.
So of course we do appear comic, now and then.
But there’s also a reason that when Broadway and then Hollywood turned Cervantes’ classic into a musical, Don Quixote became something of a hero. The dream of justice, of economy, of equality before the law, of humility before the forces of nature, and resilience before the hordes of delusional politicians, does seem impossible.
But not fighting it, whatever peaceful way we can, would be disgraceful.
Ted Cruz is heroic.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A weak man has doubts before a decision, a strong man has them afterwards.
There’s something very, very wrong with today’s public school culture.
I wrote that as a start for today’s excursion into the land wherein common sense has utterly fled . . . but without knowing whether I would dissect a Washington Times story about two Virginia Beach, Virginia, students suspended (perhaps for the entire year) for playing with an air soft gun in their own yards, or the Washington Post’s excellent coverage of a new test-score scandal.
The first story reflects both today’s crazed anti-gun culture and a sort of imperialism: educators seem to think that it’s their jurisdiction to judge how children behave at home, especially when it comes to toy guns, which they apparently deem inherently bad, etc., etc. Yes, Virginia educators insist on enforcing pacifism and disarmament as a settled matter, as if the Second Amendment didn’t exist.
Now, schools should not allow violence on school grounds or buses. And, if the kids who were playing with the toy guns were pointing and shooting with dangerous irresponsibility, and against city code, then maybe the school has a leg to stand on.
Nearby in Washington, D.C., in our second story, public school administrators have rigged the testing system to yield better math scores. Indeed, the district had boasted of a four-point gain. Then it was discovered that scores had actually declined, in part because of new rigorous tests. But instead of “biting the bullet” and taking a “temporary” hit, educators fiddled with the statistics and came up with phony bragging points.
Liars to the north of me; fools at another point in the compass, entirely.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Following the recent Navy yard shooting . . . much talk of gun control.
But the more “clever” and “sophisticated” response is to advocate cracking down on crazy people. You know, “put away” people who are a danger to themselves and others. So argues Charles Krauthammer, the psychiatrist-turned-columnist.
Not so fast, writes Brian Doherty at Reason: “No, Arbitrarily Locking Up People Instead of Restricting Guns Isn’t a Good Option Either.”
There are all sorts of things we could do . . . to violate the rights of citizens because they are in a class that sometimes but really hardly ever goes on to commit a crime. Of course, it’s best, as Krauthammer does, to say it’s not just for our (possibly presumed) good that we do it: it’s for theirs.
Wanting a quick cure for the problem of mass shootings is not the same thing as having one.* Doherty notes that, “like most gun control solutions offered,” the idea of locking up the mentally ill is “just one more thing to say that pretends on the surface to be a solution” but that “would not necessarily have prevented the particular problem.”
Science has come a long way, but studies show, as fellow Reason writer Jacob Sullum recently put it, that even “mental health professionals are notoriously bad at predicting which of the world’s many misfits, cranks, and oddballs will become violent.”
An easy fix? Science fictional, not scientific. And we know what science fiction says about locking people up for institutional convenience.
That’s truly crazy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Wanting a quick cure for the broader problems of the mentally disturbed is also not the same thing as having one.
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
How not to do foreign policy? How it is now done, in Washington, DC.
Click on over to Townhall, where we take the time Putin has given us for calm reflection on the continuing crisis in Syria. Then click back here for more links, for more thoughts, for less of a crisis.
Some skepticism about blowing things up to make a point, or to draw a line in someone else’s sand, to establish a principle:
But then look at the bigger picture:
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.