Posted on 04/17/2013 11:12:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Interesting, since the entire Constitution was ratified to prevent, what was then, imaginary tyranny.
All tyranny is imaginary until it is real, and then it is a bit difficult to stop it.
I have a tendency to think that because I follow the news and try to stay fairly informed that other Republicans/Conservatives do too. That is definitely not always the case. I know she was probably a Dem, but we need to inform ones on our side too.People are in a trance.
When my middle child was in her 20s, I remarked that I used to listen to “News Radio.” She was amazed to learn that, because from about the time she was 4 I had begun to treat the news as an advertisement for something which I wouldn’t buy on a bet. Which is what it is.People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)It is especially impossible to prevent such meetings of journalists; from the founding era communication among newspaper printers was promoted (by subsidizing the mailing of newspapers from printer to printer) to facilitate the propagation of information across the country. But then came the telegraph, and on its heels the Associated Press wire service. The AP newswire is a continuous virtual meeting of "People of the same trade” of journalism. The AP started in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and quickly aroused suspicions about its concentration of propaganda power. The AP responded that it was a consortium of newspapers - and newspapers were, at the time, notorious for not agreeing about much of anything. This, claimed the AP, proved that the AP itself was objective.First of all, anyone or any institution which claims to be objective is engaged in sophistry. Nobody can know that they themselves - or an organization of people who agree with themselves - are objective; in fact IMHO believing in your own objectivity is the very defining characteristic of the being subjective, the very opposite of objectivity. The term “sophistry” derives from the ancient Greek “sophist,” a term for someone who claimed to be wise. Sophists were notorious for their slippery logic and argumentation, and made their name a byword for unfair argumentation, ad hominum attacks, and so forth. And the journalist’s claim of “objectivity” is intended to the same purpose as the Sophist’s claims of “wisdom” - to shut down dispassionate analysis of facts with logic.
Secondly, who now thinks of newspapers as being "notorious for not agreeing about much of anything?” The AP has systematically homogenized the news, while relegating the explicit opinions of the individual printers (formerly what newspapers were really all about) to the “editorial page” ghetto. The AP “style guide” was recently in the news for ruling out the expression “illegal alien,” for example. What is “style guidance” of that sort but the systematic censorship of particular thoughts from the news? It is Newspeak.
At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.American journalism, for all that it is fronted by numerous individual newspapers and broadcast stations, is by now a single entity which, as Adam Smith’s prediction suggests, is nothing but “a conspiracy against the public."But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.
And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is
NEW!
Background checks are a great idea. Let’s start with Obomba and perhaps take a closer look at yours Hairy.
Um, in a word: no. You got it wrong again Harry.
Those machine guns never just “disappeared.” They’re still around. Of course, they’re very expensive now and the average Joe can’t afford to buy or feed one.
The point I would make is that the machine guns in question WERE used by gangsters. Rifles are a vanishingly small factor in so-called “gun violence.”
Dingey Harry damaged his own arguement.
It's funny...those defending the Constitution are accused of "imagining" tyranny, which has significant historical precedence.
But those on the left have no problems "imagining one life saved" as a result of their laws.
To the Honorable Harry M. Reid,
Please feel free to impregnate yourself at your earliest convenience. Repeatedly.
Sincerely,
Myself
Can we get the NRA to change his 'B' rating now?
>>It’s the ignorant apathetic lethargy of the unwashed masses.<<
Precisely. Even members of my own family fit into this category. When I start talking about the need for preparation supplies, and how the government is no longer for the American people, using every historical example I can think of; I’m usually met with jest and mockery as a response. I really don’t know how people can be so conditioned to have their heads so fixed firmly in the sand.
But when things go south, they’ll be flocking here for safety, I guarantee it.
Gun control IS tyranny you idiot (Reid)...
This Nations founders would have taken dingy Harry to the woodshed. What a weak pathetic man.
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