First:
The importance of private gun ownership, practically, is twofold: first, it allows private citizens both to prevent and to defend against crimes of violence. As was reported in the way you would expect–by and large not at all by most of what I think I am just going to go ahead and start calling the Criminal Media, since they have incited riots and other violence that has cost an unknowable number of human lives, in ways not really that different from those used to cause the Hutus to slaughter the Tutsis–there was a mass shooting, with an AR-15, that simply DID NOT HAPPEN because a woman with a handgun shot the shooter before he could get his rampage started. That was in West Virginia a day or two after Uvalde.
I won’t focus too long on this point. As the saying goes, when you need help immediately, the cops are at best two to five minutes away. If you get it, you get it, if you don’t, I won’t try and convince you here and now, other than to say that violent CRIME went up considerably in the UK and Australia when they banned guns. Rapes, home invasions, armed robbery. Taking private guns is disempowering honest people in the face of violent and generally remorseless and violent people.
More importantly, guns play a, in my view, pivotal role in the balancing of government versus private power. Now, with modern technology, which includes of course tanks, rockets, mortars, lasers, drone swarms, and God only knows what else, the Citizenry, writ large, stands no chance against the Government, writ large, in an armed conflict.
But there is the thing: the Government is not composed, yet, of robots, and the people that weak people like Joe Biden would depend on to inflict violence are mutable. It is one thing to ask them to disperse a protest with fire hoses, and another entirely to shoot back at people shooting at them as a result of just grievances that the cops or soldiers might well agree with.
What guns do is raise the ante, and force would be authoritarians to think harder than they would if we were disarmed, about how much force they are willing to ask their foot soldiers–who after all are Americans, and by and large tend Christian and conservative, probably even after the Stalinist purges and mass indoctrination they are attempting–to use against regular Americans. Are they willing to kill Americans? That would be needed if they showed up with guns.
And not being able to count on the loyalty of their foot soldiers, their dealers of vicarious violence, has to be part of the overall authoritarian calculus.
There is ZERO doubt that one of the FIRST things the Bidenistas did on him taking office (after a patently criminal election that he lost badly, and after starting us on the path to high oil prices) was start to try and create shock troops who WOULD do whatever these assholes wanted. They wanted to brainwash them, and purge out the ones they couldn’t. That was beyond obvious, to me at least. They want reliable people. And I very much doubt they HAVE reliable people. Their ideas are so fucking nuts, and the military has been so tightly integrated racially and socially for so many decades, that I can’t see their Agitation and Integration propagandas have succeeded all that well. No doubt there are a lot of meetings even know with top leaders, trying to figure out how to make the American military less Americans, and I have no doubt the idea of importing foreigners has been offered often, and perhaps to some unknowable extent accepted.
Second:
I recently read the book Ishmael. Since I have Ishmael as my name on the Goodness Movement blog, and since it talked about “saving the world”, it seemed appropriate. I bought it used in some small book shop in the Midwest somewhere.
It was disappointing. Here are the points I would make:
The Leavers, effectively, in trusting the gods, had a SYSTEM OF SELF CALMING THAT WORKED.
We all admire stoic people from “primitive” places. Australian aboriginals, or Native Americans. They are calm, brave, accepting.
And the root malady, what drives Western civilization so relentlessly, is something like Original Sin, which is a mark that means that YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH. It is a shame we are born with and cannot erase. Culturally and psychosocially, that is embedded in our kids even if we don’t any longer hold any of those religious beliefs, by epigenetics and conscious and unconscious social conditioning.
And by and large the large scale destruction of the planets environmental resources, in any serious way, is only in my view perhaps 50 years old. For 10,000 years we more or less lived in harmony as “Takers” also. It’s a false distinction, driven in my view by more than a little hysteria on the part of the author, whose motivations I well understand, but who was in my view a bit too self congratulatory. Maybe I am too. I don’t know. I don’t mind even nasty feedback, but I never get any, so I do the best I can to try and be honest with myself.
And in my view things like Global warming serve to JUSTIFY preexisting hysteria. The fear is not the RESULT of the “science”. The “Science” is the result of the fear. And I will note that Kari Mullis–who I have publicly speculated somewhere, but I think on Facebook, may have been murdered–said the main problem with our science is that you are paid to FIND what they WANT you to find. If you are paid to find global warming, and you don’t, they you don’t get paid any more. It’s a shameless racket run by fearful people.
But to the point, yes, of course we need to make changes. But we are not in an EMERGENCY. I worry about plastics in all our waterways, but there are solutions. Global warming is non-existent.
What we NEED, though, is a better culture. Better ways of thinking and being. Ways of calming ourselves outside of consuming things and media. Ways of calming one another, as families and communities and even nations and as a species.
I offer thoughts on all this continually. But the most important thing anyone could do is point out that this is the problem. In the dialogue between the Taker and the Leaver, what stands out? That the Taker fears the future. Given that the author ALSO feared the future, was that fear not embodying the very ethos he was trying to critique? Yes, I think so.
And I will add that there was definitely a very Malthusian undertone. You can’t just grow FOREVER. Every other lifeform has feedback loops. Too many deer the wolves thin the herd. Too many wolves, the wolves die of hunger. Etc.
So it would not be off the mark, in my view, to say that the World Economic Forum and the, in my view, likely Nazi Klaus Schwab (never forget that much of the Nazi eugenics program was very popular across Northern Europe particularly, and based, often explicitly, on Darwinian notions of Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest–which I know was not his term–and the like. The idea was that humanity as a whole would survive best if the best among us culled the rest from the herd, as so many wolves would do if we were prone to natural predation.
As I have often said, it’s a small nudge, not even a step, from radical environmentalism to clinical Fascism and misanthropy.
A lot of these writers would prefer the human race to die out entirely, which says more about their individual psychologies than their ethics, but would that not be taking the Nazi project just a step or two farther? Is it really not just making ALL human beings Untermenschen?
Yes. The answer is yes.
Three:
One of the principle sources of anxiety–and much of Buddhist practice consists in ways of soothing anxiety in many clever ways, some of which I still have not taken the time to properly understand–is the need to be somewhere else in time or space. You want your circumstances to be different. You want the day to be over. You want to be teleported.
That feeling is the gateway to what all of us want. Don’t avoid it: enter it. It’s a pathway, not a dead end.