Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
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Saturday, February 2. 2008QQQ"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When ... the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) Sunday, January 27. 2008QQQ: Two from Adam Smith on free tradeBy means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy...What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage. Both from The Wealth of Nations, Book IV Friday, January 25. 2008QQQ - "the simple system of natural liberty"All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man...is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) Thursday, January 24. 2008QQQ“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Adam Smith Wednesday, January 23. 2008QQQVirtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience. Adam Smith (that quote, I feel, contains a deep truth, and one reason why we trust those motivated by money over those motivated by gaining power over others) Tuesday, January 22. 2008QQQ"Here, if you see someone wearing an American flag, they're probably Cuban. If they wear Che Guevara, they're probably a tourist." Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, quoted in The Guardian (borrowed from our friend Dr. X.) Friday, January 18. 2008QQQ"Does it have to be said? Does it have to be said now? Does it have to be said by me? " An AA aphorism, but useful to everyone Tuesday, January 15. 2008QQQ“It’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his papers for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. HE is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, they don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” C.S. Lewis (h/t, New England Repub) Saturday, January 12. 2008QQQWinston Churchill (h/t, Shape of Days) Continue reading "QQQ" Friday, January 11. 2008QQQ"Whaddya gonna say? If there must be Democratic candidates in the world, I suppose a win for stealth-lefty Clinton is preferable to a win for far-lefty Obama or loopy-lefty Edwards. That victory speech, though— oy! “Young people who can’t afford to go to college to fulfill their dreams…” As I used to say when my mother told me to finish my greens because kids were starving in Africa: Name one. And why is going to college the only way to fulfill your dreams? And why should I care about some fool teenager’s fool dreams anyway?" John Derbyshire, as quoted by Theo Thursday, January 10. 2008QQQ
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it."
H. L. Mencken (h/t, Englishman's Castle, in a piece on how wrong the climate predictors have been) Wednesday, January 9. 2008QQQMy old Dad always said: “Never drink on an empty stomach: always have a beer or two first”, and he was probably right. Kim du Toit, in a piece a week ago on holiday drinking Tuesday, January 8. 2008QQQImagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words "tequila slammer" would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker's head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state's whim. They'd have thought you a paranoid loon. Samizdata commenter Ian B., posted as a Samiz. Quote of the Day Friday, January 4. 2008QQQ"The start of this election is a little scary and has started with two populist, eloquent demagogues. They talk about hope when half the world hopes to be in America." An Insty reader Tuesday, January 1. 2008QQQThere'll be no change in strategy. There'll be no change in message. There'll be no change in Fred. Monday, December 31. 2007QQQAnn Althouse posts her quote collection from 2007. Here's one, in which Bob Dylan reponds to the question of how he became a star: "Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?" Saturday, December 29. 2007Great movie quotes, but not cliches50 excellent but non-cliche movie quotes. Samples:
Read 'em all. Friday, December 28. 2007QQQOur battles are first won or lost in the secret places of our will in God's presence, never in full view of the world. Oswald Chambers Tuesday, December 25. 2007QQQChristmas Day is the one day when you can indulge so many of your pleasures that you end up doing each in moderation—a little gin and tonic, a little champagne, a little white wine, a little red wine, a little dessert wine, a little port ... Monday, December 24. 2007QQQAt the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. . P.J. O'Rourke, (h/t Just Barking Mad) Yep, a bit like kids at Christmastime.
Saturday, December 22. 2007QQQ #2There have always been elements of ironic comedy about the spectacle of Marxist academics fervently proclaiming their revolutionary message while safely ensconced in Western institutions of higher education. Roger Kimball, in Was Jesus Christ a Palestinian Insurgent? He goes on: As the years have passed and another generation of young radicals has settled into middle age, tenure, and pension calculations, one might have hoped that these freethinkers would have had manners enough to mute their demands for the destruction of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, “the repressive state apparatus of late capitalism,” etc. After all, blue jeans or no blue jeans, what these middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism have unwittingly been clamoring for is nothing less than their own destruction. QQQMuch of climate debate is exactly backwards. Advocates are spending far too much time arguing over how important that it is that others change their behavior, usually in ways that those doing the advocating would want regardless of climate change. In this way climate change becomes not a problem to be solved but a political weapon in service of other goals. R. Pielke, Jr., via Flares
Posted by Bird Dog
in Politics, Quotidian Quotable Quote (QQQ)
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10:50
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Friday, December 21. 2007QQQ...the conflation of democracy with liberty is fallacious but I realise that we have quite a bit of work to do at the axiomatic level to bring that once obvious and widely accepted fact back into the broader intellectual meta-context. The notion that "our democracy depends on individual freedom" strongly implies that freedom should or does serve democracy. I would argue that democracy is not an end in and of itself at all but at best merely a tool by which freedom is pursued by mitigating the power of the state. Samizdata, on The Ideological Divide
Posted by The Barrister
in Politics, Quotidian Quotable Quote (QQQ)
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14:23
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Thursday, December 20. 2007QQQWe are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. Ayn Rand
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