Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Our Ministry of "Truth" and Fear

The Burdens of Thought Policing

by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON April 7, 2015

  From gay weddings to Iran’s muscle-flexing, PC enforcers have a big job. 

 It is not easy being a contemporary thought policeman. No sooner had the radical gay Left demonized the owners of an Indiana pizza parlor, which does not cater weddings, for suggesting that in theory they might not wish to cater a gay wedding than all sorts of stories surfaced saying that lots of Muslim eateries professed that they too would not cater gay weddings. What can the thought bullies do if one victim should victimize another? 

Money complicates thought policing as well. The CEO of Apple is outraged at the thought crimes of Indiana pizza-parlor owners who offer his trillion-dollar company no chance of lucre — but he is not outraged at the concretely homophobic culture of the Middle East or the religious intolerance of China, which are hooked on i-products. Are theoretical sins worse than actual ones?

 We are back in spirit to the scripted outrage of a few years ago at Mormons in California for supposedly voting down gay marriage on a ballot proposition — until exit polls suggested that the state’s black voters had proved as much opposed to gay marriage as the so-called Religious Right. Figuring out who is and who is not an enemy of the people, and so subject to banishment to the PC gulag, is as difficult as it was for the Stalinists in the 1930s to hound out the last Russian counterrevolutionaries. 

In the George Zimmerman case, we have to give the thought police of the New York Times and NBC News some credit for matching the untiring zealousness of Inspector Javert. The Times invented a new rubric, “white Hispanic,” to preempt any competing Zimmerman claim on ethnic victimhood. ...

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416540/burdens-thought-policing-victor-davis-hanson
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