Drown in the Gutter, Reincarnate, and Try Again

Yeah it's a Sket Dance quote, what of it? And it's a Reality Check. Just because of what I've been reading lately it's mostly political.

• So Americans are convinced that "rugged individualism" is a part of what makes their country great. It's funny to me because rugged individualism is actually much more typical of French culture than American. See, in America, community spirit, i.e. "We don't allow that kinda thing in these parts", exists everywhere, town or country; in France it only ever took hold in the cities, at least after the Middle Ages. Why do you think they call it "bourgeois respectability"?
  
  What's real funny is, "rugged individualism" is especially associated with the pioneers and westward expansion. You know, the same people who'd jail you for spitting on the sidewalk.
  
  Now don't misunderstand; I like America, and the pioneering spirit. But "rugged individualism" is a thing for backwoods hermits and self-indulgent aristocrats, neither of which is in any way typical of America's national character.


• It's fascinating to me how many Libertarians—who roll on the floor in ecstasies of fetishistic worship the second you utter the word "Constitution"—don't understand that giving such a thing the absolute authority they do, fundamentally makes the state into a god. If you say that, because of a piece of paper authored by a random assortment of wooden-toothed slave-owning Freemasons, a community can't ban or at least restrict pornography or videos of animal torture, it's only a matter of time before the state founded on that piece of paper is allowed to kill and exile absolutely by fiat.
  
  And the little lambs seem to think it's some kind of counterargument to say that the state has promised it won't do that.


• More generally, Libertarians' knee-jerk individualism, and their habit of trying to undermine all extra-governmental attempts to establish a common morality beyond "different strokes for different folks", has exactly the opposite of its desired effect. See, their "individualism" doesn't actually serve to weaken the state. It only serves to remove every power from the equation except the radically atomized individual and the state—and the individual doesn't have an army.
  
  Oh well, at least they'll be among the first sent to the death camps when they get their wish.


• One last point against the halfwits: Libertarian ethics essentially boils down to, "I don't want anyone to tell me what to do," and "You should only interfere if someone will die." What's funny is, if you showed that to any premodern civilization, they'd ask why our country has a political party made up entirely of slaves.


• So a frequent canard of gun-control advocates is, "An assailant is more likely to wrestle your gun away from you and use it on you than you are to shoot him." John Lott adequately conveyed the flaw in such statistics in general—that they don't count all the times a gun is merely brandished successfully, but only count shootings—but another issue is, those statistics only counted cops. And cops have to get up close to their opponents, in order to capture them. That is not generally the case for the "armed citizen".
  
  Let's not even get into the fear-mongering tactics gun-control advocates use on women, a frequent target of that particular argument—because apparently women are not capable of standing up to men. Delightful, huh? Never mind that giving women guns makes them a hell of a lot more capable of standing up to men.


• So I've said it before and I'll say it again: thesauruses are Devil's Catechisms. They teach people to think of synonyms as entirely interchangeable, rather than merely similar. This was brought to my attention recently by the whole idea that Earth is "insignificant" compared to the scale of the cosmos. I was debating it with an idiot on this one website, and the idiot refused to grasp the concept: "insignificant" is not the same thing as "infinitesimal".
  
  See, as a matter of fact, the cosmos is a hell of a lot more insignificant than the Earth. Why? It doesn't affect us as much, and there's no such thing as "meaning" unless a person is involved.
  
  The idiot in question also refused to see the danger involved in the assumption—that meaningfulness, value, is a function of size. And the only possible major premise that yields the conclusion "earth is insignificant compared to the cosmos" from the minor premises "earth is tiny" and "the cosmos is vast" is, "significance is solely and exclusively a function of size". I pointed out that that would mean that men are more significant than women—and, also, that Germans are more significant than Jews, simply on the basis of average size. And the idiot gives me sophistry about the relative scale involved!
  
  Sorry, jackass, but, though a penny is infinitesimal compared to the National Debt, two pennies is still twice as much—even though it's almost exactly as infinitesimal. And they, all three of them, are values in the same terms, namely "monetary worth".


• The other problem with that "insignificant earth" idea is, it's often said in SF, by aliens...who think c. 10 m/s^2 is a reasonable gravity, 20° C is a decent room temperature and O2 is a civilized respiratory gas. That is, species who evolved on planets like ours—so they should think of Earth a lot more respectfully.