Holes In Souls

This is something that's been on my mind for days, now.

That link will take you to Kim du Toit's place. It goes through TinyURL because, some time ago, he thought he could stick his head in the sand and avoid links from here and a couple of other places. (At one point, he actually told me in e-mail to stop needling him.) As he says, "It all started with this post at samizdata.net," but it didn't end before he completely blanked-out on my challenge to substantiate what he said there. Search that page for my name and you can find it. It's the only remark I posted there.

We'll get to that soon enough, but I'll take his post at his blog as it rolls.

This...

"Taking the second, first: there is nowhere else to go. Let me repeat that in more detail: this is it, this United States of America."

I've said it before, and it's true no matter who says it or even if nobody at all ever says it.

In his very next sentence, he refers to "the Noble Experiment called the 'Constitution'".

It is one of the most horribly lamentable aspects of our times how often even literate people with brains in their heads resort to metaphor when plain English would -- and should -- do. Look, ladies and gentlemen: an "experiment" is comprised of cause and effect observations of phenomena conducted for the purpose of proving or falsifying a hypothesis. The point of an "experiment" is to validate or invalidate a given view of how reality works.

Now; we might stipulate to the assertion here, but if we do, then there can be no other conclusion -- on the data -- but that it has failed. Consider this question: how long should this "experiment" run, with all its attendant destruction wrought upon countless individual lives, before the facts can be manfully faced? Consider this one: are the plain facts of the progression of political history in this country to be ignored?

The constitution is not an "experiment". To say so, and attempt to mean it, is to consign the very lives of real live human beings to the status of animals to be toyed with at the pleasure of rulers whose very existence were summarily rejected in all the ideology of the American Revolution. This is what it means, and to attempt to deny it is to cynically attempt to deny the assertion in the first place.

Let Kim du Toit stand up and say that, then. If he means what he says, then he should mean all of it.

With all that, he goes on:

"However, there is a great deal to be said for gradualism, as long as one is not too impatient."

"Not too impatient." Do you understand? With the clock ticking-down on the only life you're ever going to live, you're not supposed to be "impatient" about the fact that -- in "the land of the free" -- you have to live it at the direction of any bureaucrat wielding all the authority of "We, The People" and none of the responsibility for what it takes away from every one of those days and hours of yours.

You're not supposed to be "impatient" for freedom.

You should leave that to forebears who drained their own blood in righteous battle against everything this man is arguing for here.

Here is an aspect in which he is completely correct: because of the fact that such things turn on ideas, and because of what ideas are and how they work, the essence of this fight is intellectual, and can only be won a single mind at a time.

Where he is wrong is in the actual ideas that he espouses. Essentially, he equates the moderation of time with corruption of ideas. He thinks that mixed and opposed premises (from which there is never any escape) will turn the trick over time. It's very difficult to think of anything so roundly proven wrong with the facts of history at hand. One might very prudently begin with the history of the United States.

du Toit:

"My political philosophy, such as it is, is: stopping the tide of socialism, one small area at a time."

This is the disintegration of thought, in action. It's the attempt to apply ideas piece-meal, without principles in wholesale. It doesn't matter whether he's "the only one in the struggle" or that others specialize in their own fragments of the disintegration. His opponents hold principles, and that's how they've been steadily gaining the upper hand here for as long as he's lived and long before he came here.

It's an admirable thing that he does for the case for firearms. What I can never admire is the man's will to feed the endless blood and treasure of tactical platoons into the maw of opposed forces battle-blessed with real strategic integration. Proven, over too many generations, at that.

There's metaphor for you. Look: the socialists stand on their principles. Here is one of Kim du Toit's:

"At the end of it all, I have to trust that We, The People, will end up doing what is right, and we will reestablish the core values of the Constitution in this country."

That's what they're doing right now. It's what "We, The People" means, if it means anything worth spelling the words.

"We, The People" want socialism now.

If the man would protest that he doesn't, then it's up to him to distinguish himself from the immediate practical political implications of his own stated principle. And if his political principles exist in order to further his own existence (which, I say, is what they're for), then haste is in order because his opponents -- acting not only on their principles but also on Kim's -- are right now coming to eat a great deal of the whole second half of it.

du Toit calls me an "elitist" and then puts words in my editor:

"Ultimately, what Beck and the other 'revolutionaries' are saying is: The People are not worthy of the public trust, The People are not worthy of being free, because The People are screwing it up."

Briefly:

• If my insistence on immediate practical application of principles of freedom is "revolutionary", then make the most of it.
  
  
• There is no such thing as "The People" when it comes to "trust" with my existence. It's the anti-concept that is not "worthy", and that's why.
  
  
• A political leave to dispose of each others' rights by vote is not "free[dom]".
  
  
• in re "screwing it up": the next administration is going to bring you "universal health care" and destroy what's left of medicine in this country. Watch and see if it doesn't. This doesn't even scratch the surface, and you know it.

du Toit:

"Of course, left unsaid is the corollary: if 'The People' cannot be trusted to manage their affairs, then who should do the managing?"

Why does he refer to "their affairs" when there is obviously no possessive referent? "Their affairs" ought to refer to "affairs" that their possessors would -- and should -- "manage" on their own. In most plain English, such conceptual transpositions are nearly intolerable (would Kim tolerate it around guns?), but this is linguistic alchemy by which matters said to belong to some must be taken in hand by others. Forcibly, mind you, because this is in the nature of government.

In no sphere of his own life would Kim du Toit ever claim the authority to unilaterally force another person to give up his affairs to the authority of someone else. I believe this: I think he understands this as a matter of right.

How in the world does such authority come into existence when he agrees with others that it should?

By what magic -- or any otherhow -- does this happen as a matter of right? This is something that does not exist in any individual, and every reasonable person knows it, but somehow exists in "We, The People" -- even when demonstrably extant people dissent, proving that this mass does not exist for its own stated purpose.

Metaphor will not do in any of this, ladies and gentlemen. All of this, and a lot more, must be confronted at its own words in order to distill what it's really about, and it is not this:

"Scratch an anarchist, you’ll find a tyrant."

I hate to have to deal with that in a man like Kim, because of the sheer cowardice of it. At the same time, it takes a lot of bloody nerve to demand "trust" from "people" now born and bred to government and call someone who stands for freedom a "tyrant".