>Vin -
>
>Last night they had a teacher here in the shop that was looking at the
>paper money. She was fascinated by the Confederate money, expressing
>that she thought she had heard once about the Confederacy but had no
>idea who, what or where they were. This is a college educated school
>teacher who is in daily charge of 30 students and teaching them of such
>things! One of my fellow workers also had never heard of the
>Confederacy, had no idea that a war had been fought, had no idea even
>when it was or anything else about it. And she is a fairly smart
>'graduate' of government schools.
>
>I guess we might as well give it up. They are winning simply by dumbing
>down the victims of government schools. We really have to be at a point
>to be able to teach our kids at home when the time comes. And that
>includes the finer points of marksmanship.
>
>On the dumbing down part, the folks that supply the watermill water have
>a system that removes the rat poison (fluoride) from the water. You may
>have already done so, but read some of the reports about how docile and
>stupified fluoride makes people that consume it. And we are not talking
>black helicopters here.
>
>Glen
>Glen R. Parshall
Hi, Glen --
Frightening, isn't it?
When I respond to letters of the "Second Amendment only authorizes you to join the National Guard" variety, I go to a lot of time and trouble (probably much more than can be justified) to quote MULTIPLE founders -- Federalist and anti-Federalist, New Englander and Virginian -- as to what they WANTED and MEANT the amendment to mean (detailing when and >where they wrote or said these things.)
I never really expect to get back the answer: "Oh, I didn't know that; I guess you're right after all."
However, one MIGHT expect to get something on the order of: "No, no, you've taken Alex Hamilton completely out of context. If you'll look at what he wrote later, in his letter to Sidney Hook in March of 1794 ..."
Instead, my "correspondents" ignore all historical evidence, fail to offer any counter evidence of their own, and actually attempt to ridicule this very MEANS of presenting an argument, saying things like, "I guess you must not have any ideas of your own if you have to quote so many other people."
Other than that, the only tactics they seem to know for pursuing a debate are 1) Keep repeating your same naked assertions, while accusing your opponent of being too slow-witted to understand the positions he's already destroyed; and 2) the last line of defense -- "Well, that may have been all very well in an AGRARIAN society, but now things are completely different."
One is sometimes tempted to offer them $500 if they can define "agrarian," but for that money I suppose they could probably dig up a dictionary somewhere. The argument is finally such a rotting puffball that one simply sits in stupefaction. Are there any of the founding principles of the Enlightenment -- any of the observations of Locke and Adam Smith and von Mises and Hayek -- that we SHOULDN'T abandon because we can no longer hear the cows bellowing from the back 40? Can I somehow get my property and firearms and random-jury rights and my medical liberty restored if I plant a couple rows of CARROTS? How many are required? The founding fathers surely knew a few folks who lived in tenements in New York and Philadelphia and London; if they perceived "crowded conditions" as somehow trumping "God-given rights," surely they would have been CAPABLE of writing "The right of the people living in rural areas to keep and bear arms," or "The right of an agrarian people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers ..."
I think you've got it right, though. Home-school those kids. Bring in tutors to show them how things actually WORK -- from electrical wiring to internal combustion to vegetable pollination to hydraulic pumps. By the time they're 18, they'll go forth into a world full of grimy, puzzled morons, waiting for someone to give them some orders ... ANY orders.
Of course, the darker side of this vision is that the children of the remnant could go forth into some amalgam of the worlds pictured by Ayn Rand in "Atlas" (after the collapse of the Twentieth Century Motor Company) and by Monty Python in "Holy Grail," full of frightened, tick-laden peasants sleeping in hovels and harvesting dirt, who will set upon the visitor, shouting: "There he is! One of the clean ones! One of the ones who KNOWS something! Stone him!"
-- V.S.
p.s. -- What's "watermill water"? As you know, I suspect we already get enough fluoride in many of our canned and otherwise preserved foods and beverages to make it virtually hopeless to avoid ALL consumption of the stuff -- though I certainly agree mandatory universal medication by majority vote is inherently dangerous in principle, before we even START examining the "everyone knows" nature of the "consensus evidence" that salts of fluoride are entirely innocuous ... except, of course, when they're universally beneficial.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken