S: Their logic would not have permitted them to believe they were being killed.Our collective memory does not allow most to fathom that they personally could end up in a mass grave.
K: Explain.
S: Vulcan has not been conquered within its collective memory. The memory goes back so far that no Vulcan can conceive of a conqueror. I knew the ship was lost because I sensed it.
K: What did you sense?
S: A touch of death.
K: And what do you think they felt?
S: Astonishment.
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Immunity Syndrome
Forgive a detour into nerdland, but my argument about strictly academic thinking in yesterday's "Con-Con" post reminded of a Star Trek episode, "The Immunity Syndrome," where the ship Intrepid, manned by Vulcans, has been destroyed. Dialog between Kirk and Spock:
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6 comments:
Too safe for too long, and the WRONG lesson learned from 9/11. What people SHOULD have learned is, terrorists shouldn't bring a box-cutter to a gunfight.
Maybe all those Albanian and Ugandan and other Third World hijackers in the '70s were setting us up for weapon-free air travel and The Big One. The enemies of freedom are patient, especially when a World Caliphate is the goal. And they have many useful infidel friends.
And, here at home, corporations are deciding that an empty desk is more valuable to them than a 30+-year employee. "It's not a performance issue, it's just business. We have to remain competitive. Besides, they wanted us to observe conditions of the contract even in the bad economy. How selfish."
The Nazis were big on that "essential/nonessential worker" classification too.
Imagine not having to pay severance pay, unemployment, insurance, pensions...
Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare... You see it in England, where people over 60 aren't allowed joint replacements in their socialized medicine system. A bad investment of the GOVERNMENT's money, since a slightly-used artificial knee or hip that could last another 10 years will be buried with them.
Randy Barnett's article about a Bill of Federalism: Has he read the Constitution, The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers?
Dude, look. It's in there. You make excellent points, but it's all been said, by 18th-Century guys, and more elegantly. Buy some copies and send them to Congress. (They'll have to wait while they're irradiated in case of anthrax).
Something else for them to ignore in favor of their Better Marxist Ideas.
it comes down to questions of intent, and how to follow the original intent of the document. once you pen the words down, the intent can be forgotten, and schoolchildren recite passages from the document instead.
it was totally true what you said, "if they just somehow find the right incantation, all will be respected and put right," but i reiterate this now to point out that this unfortunately also applies to the drafting of the constitution in the first place, unless we want to contradict ourselves.
ladies and gentlemen, you can't rewrite it any better than the founders did -- you can only take that and do what you will with it. if you want liberty, you only have to follow the intent (which itself lies encoded in the DoI).
crowley wasn't futzing around trying to get into teenagers' pants when he wrote "do what thou wilt," he was judging the nature of reality, god's reality. and if you'd like a less, ah, occultist view, there's always bastiat.
the point is that the good among us have to know and live in liberty, and to do this you first need a consistent theoretical framework, not a new and marginally more complete social compact -- to fail to do it right is to fail to do it at all.
there's such a thing as "good enough" when we go to get things done, but only because we can plan ahead what perfect can be. "seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful." sun tzu.
My father fought in the Battle of the Bulge. When the Germans machine gunned POWs in Malmedy and several POWs escaped to tell the story and the story was spread among the troops, the attitudes of U.S. troops were changed. No American soldier ever thought of surrendering under any circumstances after that.
Yeah, anon, I have often said that Malmedy ensured the failure of the Wehrmacht at the Battle of the Bulge.
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