Liberalism in a nutshell

I came across a cranky website recently which had a lot of darkly humorous material, something like a Devil's Dictionary. I'd credit it, but I can't remember it. Age has its downside: bad knees and a slowing brain.

Anyway, definition of a liberal: "someone who upholds a woman's right to kill her unborn child, but not with a gun."

Ouch.

Speaking of guns, some recent discussion of gun-banning leads me to describe why I gave up on being a liberal. Liberals are anti-gun. Guns hurt people. People shouldn't have them. The SF city council tried to ban them here, although the courts overturned their plan. And the Toronto city council just voted the same kind of opinion.

But here's my problem. All the law-abiding people are gunless. Do we now suppose that only the police and the military have them? Of course not. Criminal have them. Gangs, thugs, etc. have them because by definition, they do not give a shit about your gun-laws and your moral musings on violence. So liberalism creates a situation where nice people make themselves defenseless in the face of violent criminals, in order to uphold a high-minded vision of how nice things would be if everyone were to behave themselves.

And of course when the criminals do use their guns to wreak havoc on nice people, liberals are the ones excusing them! And always blaming the police for being brutal and trigger-happy. And of course the military is warmongering. It's nuts. So the only protection that nice people have against underprivileged criminals is the state-sanctioned paramilitary that cannot be trusted.

Sometimes I see liberalism as one long tantrum.

The point is that we do not live on a protected island where we can create a multicultural, woman-centered, economically sharing, transnational, nonviolent, post-religious, eco-green society. Neither locally nor globally. Because the only way such a society can survive is if every other society and every other group is the same.

And they are not.

If, on the other hand, some societies turn themselves into the above-described model...Europe, for example, or Canada...they find themselves practically unable to deal with the rest of the world, which is emphatically and unapologetically not like that.

Europe and Canada, for instance, have no military significance anymore, by their own design.
America protects them, and is roundly despised for it by these very people. Reminds me of when I was a teenager and looked down from my totally untested moral highground on the business/corporate life of the man who made my life possible, my hardworking father.

And Europe and Canada find themselves dealing with massive immigration of Muslims, who care not one whit for the niceties of a dying Western culture and indeed are happy to facilitate.

The world is largely run by the Crips and the Bloods. Always has been. Always will be. You can call them kings or commisars or Dictators for Life or whatever. And they, and the people who regularly line up to serve them, will prey on the HighMinded Liberal societies when given a chance.

One of the terrible phrases from the Sixties is Robert Kennedy's hubristic "Some look around and ask why. I look around and ask why not"...or something like it*. I'll tell you why not!

Because of the nature of the planet and the nature of the species. This, it seems to me, is something that liberals either known nothing or want to know nothing of. As was said, far too generously, of communism's classless utopian ideology: great idea, wrong species.

RFK's musing and the apparent inability of liberalism to see what is and has always been the case makes for its passing from my life.

*It's up there with Marx's “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” . Yeah, and what a great improvement that was.