It Occurs to Me

Random thoughts, again.

• So I'm guessing I'm not the only one who wishes that people could write articles about crime policy without having to tell you a horror story.


• Though he's doing the lord's work here in pointing out how much V for Vendetta sucks, John C. Wright does suffer the inherent biases of being an orc...um, Anglo (sorry, I get them confused). See, he said the French Revolution stood for the Terror, and that Parliament was "one of the most noble symbols of human freedom mankind has ever produced". Hahah.
  
  Well, actually, the French Revolution stood for Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law, and like all real Republics, it fulfilled its destiny by becoming an Empire (the American Founders, of course, realized this, that's why they delineated the Emperor's role in Article 2 of the Constitution). Parliament, on the other hand, is purely a symbol of oligarchy—the Hanoverian Succession was the Lords announcing that never again would the king prevent them from doing exactly what they liked. And what they liked was, of course, to loot monasteries and rape Irishwomen. Oh, and murder twice as many people as the Terror in the same amount of time, just for being members of Wright's own religion.


• I forgot to mention this in my post about economics, but high taxes for the rich aren't socialism; they just make capitalism less efficient. Look at it this way: suppose your state's army restricts officer commissions to aristocrats. Now, if you want to reform this system, do you start promoting exceptional enlisted men and NCOs? Or do you simply make it harder for your nob-officers to get their supplies? Because that's what putting a bigger tax burden on the investor class of capitalism is.
  
  Amusingly, the longer Republican-style "capitalism" is in play, the bigger the investor class becomes—until soon enough, you're not really talking about capitalism, but about what Bush called an "ownership society" and the Chesterbelloc called "distributism". I'm sure that's quite galling to knee-jerk elephantophobes like Mark Shea, but it's how the stats play out.


• I like Thomas Sowell, the conservative columnist; maybe it's just because he's quite old, but he manages to avoid the common condition of black conservatives, that of being a knee-jerk antitribu. What I mean is, a lot of them basically seem to think "so many black people are supportive of this welfare-state nonsense, I'll go to the other extreme and say it's good when the poor die in the gutter." He's a lot more thoughtful than that, though I disagree with him on a few things.
  
  But Mr. Sowell (he's over 70, he gets a Mr out of the deal) had an excellent line: "I believe in libertarian principles but not in libertarian fetishes." And that is why he's smarter than 98.3% of all right-wing thinkers, kids: because all too often, their views are just that, fetishes.


• It is amusing to note that John 1:1 may be rendered, given all the things "logos" means, as "In the beginning was Reason, and Reason was with God, and Reason was God." It wouldn't be far off to say that was the official Dominican interpretation (since the Angelic Doctor identified the Second Hypostasis with the Divine Intellect). Rather a slap in the face to anti-rationalist Christians (mainly inspired by Luther), and also to those who charge Christianity with anti-rationalism.
  
  It may be that, as Aquinas said, his words were mere straw—but abandoning them forces us to make the bricks of the City of God without straw.
  
  I just thought of that, it's cool, huh?


• Remember, aeons ago, how I said the existentialists were stupid in calling themselves atheists, since the thing they devoted their lives to essentially calls itself "I AM"?
  
  Well it's kinda awesome, but that's sorta the ending of the FullMetal Alchemist manga, and the second anime.