6/23/2022

 Senator John Cornyn and 13 other US Republican Senators are betraying gun-owners’ rights now by working with Democrats in both Houses of Congress to pass major gun control legislation, the most significant in 30 years.

This will do nothing to prevent gun violence, it it will decisviely further erode gun rights.

Why are the Republicans doing this? I have several reasons that might explain their treachery.

First, they are RINOS and RINOS do not know what they stand for, and, if they did, they would betray their own values for political advantage, so they "compromise" and become bipartisan join up with Marxists, Democrats and Leftists seeking to wipe out 2A, to disarm the public, so that the dictatorship of the proletariat will reign unopposed, once triggered. Pure power is the aim for the Democrats, and the RINO traitors are giving it to them.

Second, Cornyn was booed at the Republican convention a few days ago, and he flippantly and scornfully dismissed gun-rights Republicans that booed him, smearing them as the mob that he will not pander to. These are red-blooded, patriotic Americans worried about remaining armed so that they can discourage tyrants and elitists like Cornyn in the Washington swamp from finalizing their implementation of their Marxist tyranny, for fear of a united, fierce, armed public. To disarm them makes it easier to cow and control them. Are the Soviet citizens armed to repel Putin and his thugs? No, they are disarmed, murdered, imprisoned, and abused, and that is what elitists like Cornyn desire for America going forward, but gun-totaling, gun-loving patriots stand in their way to installing their dominion over the American people.

Third, Cornyn, McConnell, other swamp dwellers, Democrats and the Left enjoy power and privilege as their rule the American people from Washington. If these turncoat Senators can ally with the Democrats, then they can send a clear message of rejection to the gun rights folks like the citizens and American Firearms Association that they cannot tell Senators how to vote. The swamp-dwellers will rob the people of their constitutional and gun rights just to keep themselves in power as elite creatures ruling and exploiting the cowed, obedient, long-suffering, brainwashed, disinformed masses. They achieve their retention of power as the ruling elite by sending a message to gun rights advocates that gun control will be implemented, despite their angry protestations.

Fourth, these 14 Republican Senators may be a bit sincere in hoping that doing something to control guns will help deter future Unvaldes from occurring, but there is no chance that severely and incrementally restricting the gun rights of the law-abiding will in any way prevent the evil, the criminal, the terroristic and the mentally ill perpetrators from harming children in mass shooting.

We in the gun rights movement may fail to derail this horrible gun control legislation, the worst in decades. but we are angered, emboldened, better financed, better organized and eager to fight forward to thwart this legislation and take control of the swamp in Washington and all 50 of the state capitols, and make gun rights a pillar to be protected with pro-gun rights laws going forward with sympathetic judges, and we will take back our country from Quislings like Cornyn and McConnell and the Leftist haters of America.

The Root Of All Evil

 Is money the root of all evil? Not so much. Instead, having money is the root of all good.

The Realization

 It is one thing to conceptualize something, but it is quite another to realize its full significance, once one has experienced the impact of living through a condtion or situation.

For two years I have been reading widely, extensively, and deeper to build my competency in epistemology, ethics, logic and the philosophy of language.

It is unsettling and humbling to encounter the fact as to how little one really knows. One's level of ignorance is not an urban myth, but a cold, frustrating reality.

I wish to know enough to think competently, without forsaking my love of continual learning.

Not Fundamentally Rational

This is what Stephen Hicks writes on Page 159 of his book, Explaining Postmodernism: "In effect, this strain of Left thought came to agree with what the collectivist Right had long argued: that human beings are not fundamentally rational--that in politics it is the irrational passions that must be appealed to and utilized."

The revolutionaries on the Right and the Left, earlier in the 20th century, came to the conclusion that the masses were fundamentally irrational, and the elites that made the Revolution possible and underway, would also rule the irrational masses, after the successful Revolution--should it be victorious, the effort.

Now, I abhor tyrants of any stripe, and elites, all through history, have justified ruling, oppressing, abusing, exploiting, murdering, and impoverishing the masses, because they deemed the masses were irrational, selfish children that needed to be ruled with a gun, and baton, and a firm hand, and that was what they deserved and all that they were capable of handling.

As  a Mavellonialist, I reject this cynical portrait of the masses, wholly and wholesale. People are irrational more than they are rational, but they can be taught to reason, to think, to maverize, to exercise their agency and liberty in culturally and politically responsible ways. The common people can and should run things, and elites need to disappear.

Either Black Or White

 Tomght I seem entranced by definitions of the principle of moral and/or ontological moderation, as a fundamental law ruling the universe.

Here goes: it would seem that the willingness or inescapable penchant some people work under,  to divide the world and situations into neat, binding black-and-white categories, is typically now how things are. Things are often more nuanced than purely black or white, shades of gray being common and pervasive.

The, even where clear-cut circumstances do divide people, the world or ethical decisions into black and white categores, the corresponding action selected must be implemented with caution, mercy, prudence and reasonableness, in most instances.

The Rule About Rules

 Dennis Prager, the other day, referred to some binding rule that had a legitimate exception, as all rules have. That seems right to me, and perhaps this is not a bad definition of ontological moderation.

It just might explain how reality operates, though such inconsistency and paradoxical coexistences raise hell for applying the rule of noncontradiction.

Compartmentalized

 It is well-documented that Nazi officers could run a concentration camp during working hours, and commit the most heinous crimes against humanity imaginable, and then go home and serve as loving, sweet, moral, decent husbands and fathers to their wives and family members. How is it, it is asked, that we can compartmentalize the evil that we do, from the good that we do, all in the same person?

It seems that we have an amazing ability so live with varying levels of cognitive dissonance, the syndrome of existing with wildly conflicting mental outlooks, all within a functioning personality.

It could be that moral growth for a morally ambitious striver would be the ever-expanding capacity to see oneself as one is, to ever narrow the gap between how one acts and how one sins less and less so that one’s self-conception of oneself as a praiseworthy individual is a self-appraisal that is deserved and not a lie. This decomparmentalization of how one sees oneself in line with how one is becoming overall more loving, holy, and blameless may be an accurate measure of personal moral growth.

If the wild inconsistency (how people wall off the evil they do from their positive self-conception) is shared with most people, they are horrified at the prospect, and regard it as a rare and exceptional state of existing. 

I do not find compartmentalizing the good we do from the evil that we do, in our personal lives, at all unusual. In fact, it is universal and common, though not to such wild extremes as evinced by a German concentration camp administrator.

To minimize the comparmentaliztion of our personal good, bracketed off from the evil that we do, we must accept that we are all born sinners, and that any of us and most of us would operate successfully and willingly, with minimum guilt felt, as a Nazi concentration camp administrator, and this is Jordan Peterson's take on such things, and he is both wise, truthful and accurate here.

If we refuse to lie to ourselves, and love the truth, and God, then we will be much more self-aware, and much less likely to compartmentalize the evil we do, bracketed off from the good that we do, and the good that we do is how we see ourselves as existing and being.

By being brutally honest with ourselves, it is much easier to decompartmentalize the evil we do from the good we do, and we will do much less evil over time.

Let me offer several moral axioms that further our explanation as to why all we naturally cruel humans so easily comparmentalize the good that we do from the evil that weare and commit.

First, Ayn Rand is correct: generally: selfishness is virtue, and selflessness is evil.

Second, to be moderate is to be and do good, and to be extreme is to be and do evil.

Humans, as individuals and individuators, are self-interested, but not much inclined to seek to control or attack others. Such control and campaigns of assault, systemic prejudice, even institutionalized genocide against minorities and outgroups are altruistic, selfless, collective activities.

We are naturally pro our ingroup and tribe, and we are just accepting that we insiders are without flaw or sin, and if there is ever a conflict, the fault belongs with the outgroups or rival tribes. They are without honor, worth, dignity or rights.

We will comparmentalize and treat ingroup members according to our cultural and religious ethos, but outliers are subhuman, not people like ingroup folk, we can justify setting morality aside, and hurting, raping, attacking, even killing those monsters as they deserve to be maltreated. This ingroup kindness versus outgroup cruelty makes compartmentalizing the good that we do, separated from the bad that we do and repress--it makes it all something that we can engage in and justify to our neighbors and ourselves.

Where we are immoderate, extreme, violent, enraged and completely frenzied, intolerant true believers in defense of expanding our cause, we can justify doing whatever to any infidel in any outgroup out there that we can think of doing.

Extremism and lying, groupism and viciousness all go together, so we are able to lie to ourselves and to each other so that the whole society is a web of lies and mass deception--at that point it is easy and convenient to compartmentalize the good that we do to ingroup people while hurting savagely outgroup victims, and proudly claiming the right to so act.