Posted on 10/10/2009 3:35:12 PM PDT by Saije
Consider nature...as Tennyson saw it, "red in tooth and claw." To glimpse a state of nature as Hobbes imagined it, where human life is "nasty, brutish and short," visit the Whole Foods store on River Road in Bethesda...you will see proof of this social equation: Four Priuses + three parking spaces = angry anarchy.
Anger is one of the seven deadly sins. Therefore advanced thinkers are agreed that conservatives are especially susceptible to it. As everyone knows, all liberals are advanced thinkers and all advanced thinkers are liberals. And yet...
Recently Paul Schwartzman, a war correspondent for The Post, ventured into the combat zone that is the Chevy Chase neighborhood in the District of Columbia. It is not a neighborly place nowadays. Residents are at daggers drawn over . . . speed humps.
Chevy Chase is..."a community that views itself as the essence of worldly sophistication." Some cars there express their owner's unassuageable anger by displaying faded "Kerry/Edwards" and even "Gore/Lieberman" bumper stickers. Neighborhood zoning probably excludes Republicans, other than the few who are bused in for diversity.
Speed humps -- the lumps on the pavement that force traffic to go slow -- have, Schwartzman reports, precipitated "a not-so-civil war . . . among the lawyers, journalists, policymakers and wonks" of Chevy Chase -- and Cleveland Park, another D.C. habitat for liberals. The problem is that a goal of liberal urbanists has been achieved: Families with young children are moving into such neighborhoods. They worry about fast-flowing traffic. Hence speed humps.
And street rage. Some people who think speed humps infringe their rights protest by honking when they drive over one. The purpose is to make life unpleasant for the people who live on the street and think they have a right to have the humps...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Anyone living in this country for the last 8+ years knows that when it comes to irrational anger and bizarre unremitting rage, the lefties have it all over the conservatives.
They are in Chevy Chase...and I’m not.
Nicely perceptive column by Will (is he one of them “intellectuals” we must necessarily ignore?).
Amazingly great article from the quaint RINO I love to hate..! All that he’s lacking is the butterfly tie....
Another characteristic of the Rights Talkers (Will’s term) is their strong love of every incarnation of “me” —I, myself, individually, etc.
Sometimes they will get sucked into a mysterious “me” vortex and use these words multiple times even in short clauses —doing so bolsters the legitimacy of their claim on something, they think, because to the liberal PASSION isn’t just important, but the alpha and the omega.
Another penchant is a love for the F Word: If something is important, conservatives try to keep this one from view, but liberals are the diametric opposite; it should be pushed front and center, with dazzling lights and spin-around rims.
10-15 years ago, first time in DC area, I had my wife and a van full of kids. We were going around (I believe) Chevy Chase circle at 45 or so with the locals, trying to locate one of a half-dozen streets leading off it.
I was navigating and told my wife, “This one!” It was the wrong one, and we hit a speed bump hidden in the shade. I thought we had all bought the farm with broken necks and snapped vertebrae. The coolers and luggage bounced off the ceiling of the van. Good thing we didn’t have the dog with us or he would have been smashed.
When we got our senses back and pulled into a driveway to turn around, an irate local started yelling at us for speeding on his street. It was hard to ignore him but that we did.
They decided to live there. No one made them do it.
The left is also angry because as unreason ages it becomes rage.
Honking while going over neighborhood speed bumps is a great idea.
A lot of the people are DC people.
I agree and plan on doing it from now on!!
OK, Show of hands. How many here ever played in the street when growing up? Would a motorist doing 40 mph through your ball game have been somebody exercising his rights as a taxpayer, or a negligent ass looking to spend well deserved time for reckless homicide? If you are speeding and end up in some sort of incident with a pedestrian, you deserve fry, whether or not you believe the kid belonged in the street.
Hell yes we play in the street and we never got hit.. we just yelled “CAR” when we saw one and got out of it way
btt
Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial; it tends toward moral inflation and militates against accommodation. Rights talkers, with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments, work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness. To rights talkers, life -- always and everywhere -- is unbearably congested with insufferable people impertinently rights talking, and behaving...
UNlike liberals, let US be clear.
1. RIGHTS come from the requirements of man's nature as a choice-making rational being (in other words, from God), not the Constitution. The Constitution is just to designate the structure of the federal government, and as far as rights go, it is supposed to protect them, not grant them. Rights are innate in every human. If they are "granted" by a Constitution or any other act of human beings they are nothing more than revocable privileges. This is WHY we use the term "rights" rather than "permissions" and insist upon their distinction.
2. RIGHTS are expressions of LIBERTY, as claims of immunity from, and to distinguish them sharply from, any use of coercion. They are the recognition of every individual's independence, or ownership of his or her own life. Thus you have rights to assemble, move, work, play, speak, write, worship, etc. and make your OWN decisions about yourself. This is not to deny our social nature. Instead, it clarifies the fact that one's social contacts are to be chosen by or consented to, not forced upon, each individual.
3. In order to be a right, a condoning of liberty must be applicable to EVERYONE in the same sense at the same time. If it is not, it must be considered to be only a permission or a license, and cannot be construed to be a right.
4. In order to be a right, a condoning of liberty of one kind must not entail the violation of another kind. Your right to swing your fist ends where another person's nose begins.
5. Whenever anyone postulates such a thing as anyone's "right" to health care (or any other goods or services, for that matter) then they are implicitly, if not explicity, postulating that coercion is involved BECAUSE THE LIBERTY OF OTHERS MUST BE VIOLATED TO FORCE THEM TO PROVIDE IT. BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "RIGHT" TO VIOLATE RIGHTS.
PERIOD.
http://freedomkeys.com/rights.htm
http://freedomkeys.com/teapartysigns.htm
But how do speed bumps relate to the outfield hills at Crosley Field and Minute Maid Park? Or even an odd bounce on a grounder up the middle hitting the mound?< /george will obligatory baseball reference>
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Wow, now I just got ideas about what to do when facing these damnable bumps.
More demonstration of why I hate circles.
(Which MD - liberal that it is - has hastened to gain in as many intersections over the last 10 years as it can.)
As Will's article points out, the term "Rights Talk" was originated in the 1991 book by that name by Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law professor who is also one of our nation's most valuable pro-life and conservative scholars.
If you were going 45 around Chevy Chase Circle, you would have deserved broken necks. You must be misremembering. It would take real speedway skillz to navigate that circle at anything over 35. The speed limit on the main through street (Connecticut Avenue) is only 25.
It is in both. Part is in the District and part is in Montgomery County, MD.
Most of the streets in Chevy Chase have a 25- or, at most, 30-mph speed limit. That rarely stops the yuppie SUV class from going 45 in clearly residential areas. Many of the drivers are blackberry-texting professional women with kids in the back.
See post 25.
Here are some other priceless gems of wordsmithing from the article:
Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial; it tends toward moral inflation and militates against accommodation. Rights talkers, with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments, work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness. To rights talkers, life -- always and everywhere -- is unbearably congested with insufferable people impertinently rights talking, and behaving, the way you and I, of course, have a real right to....
Can't liberals play nicely together? Not, evidently, when they are bristling, like furious porcupines, with spiky rights that demand respect because the rights-bearers' dignity is implicated in them.
I think ambulance drivers should throw lit dynamite charges at the speed humps as they go over them.
I do like traffic circles better than sitting in line at an intersection, knowing I’m not going to make it because the green light only lasts 5 to 10 seconds.
Are you sure that wasn’t just bad pavement? IMO, only an idiot would put a speed hump on a traffic circle.
People want speed bumps in their neighborhood because THEIR kids are important. They complain about them everywhere else.
We had one woman locally who asked they be removed because her kids had left home. She was one of the leaders in getting the bumps.
Come to think of it, Chevy Chase Circle doesn’t have any speed bumps. I can’t recall a single hump on any traffic circle nor any major avenue in NW DC like the one bisecting CC Circle. It must have been a side street.
It wasn’t on the circle, but rather on the residential street just after we turned off the circle. It was definitely the real thing. No warning of the bump, at least that we saw. You know how it is on a circle you’ve never been on. You are just trying to find your street. For a visitor, they are miserable. The locals are riding your bumper and you have to be continually looking for the street.
Could be, it was some years ago. But when you are the only person in the circle from out of town, and the locals are on your bumper, and you are looking for a street, and things are happening too fast, it feels like you are going way too fast.
Sorry to nitpick your account; but for the benefit of others who may be driving in Chevy Chase now, there is just no way that anyone could do 45 around that circle and have others on the street survive. As you noted, it is always full of traffic, and it is not a road, but a city street with sidewalks and pedestrians.
I’m still trying to figure out how someone would think I said there was a speedbump on the circle.
Even at 35, it was a hell of a jolt.
I’m not talking about lights (although that’s OK, too); I’m talking about replacing stop signs.
I hate circles. People get lost, confused, into accidents (when the “slow” lane HAS to turn right but the person doesn’t know and steers into your “fast” lane when you turn right). It’s 1 of the things that makes DC a living hell for traffic.
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