Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 4:37pm

The Way Republics Die

People never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke, 1784
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Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 9:25am

A bit cherry-picked. No one said ‘go away you wanker’?

What’s gone on various places is depressing as a symptom of the pathologies of elite culture. It doesn’t penetrate very far. The problem is, our institutions are in such a decayed state that popular opinion does not matter anymore.

Hank
Hank
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 10:05am

I couldn’t watch the whole thing. It made me want to cry . I can’t believe that William F.Buckley went there and didn’t blow his brains out. But then Yale has always been like that. Read Buckley’s ” God and Man at Yale “. Should give us some insight as to how a great institution fell so low .

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 10:34am

Nah, it shows people don’t expect petitions to do jack.

So signing it just makes them leave you alone.

Although that might mean that the “ban water” petitions are also just “leave me alone” things.

I’d be interested in seeing what percentage of folks sign things that nobody would actually want, just to be left alone, vs things nobody would want that are also silly.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 12:37pm

Your typical young anti-American has been indoctrinated with unadulterated liberal bullshit (I repeat myself). He/she was not educated.

The Bear
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 12:37pm

It didn’t seem that people were signing just to be left alone. Most of them seemed pretty enthusiastic about it. And can anyone provide a reason to suspect they wouldn’t be, now that tribal taboos are replacing carefully drafted provisions of the Constitution, and, indeed, all rational thinking?

Don the Kiwi
Don the Kiwi
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 1:52pm

Un….Be…Lievable !!!

And this is where your future leaders are taught ?

More like indoctrinated !!

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 2:22pm

And this is where your future leaders are taught ?

Not precisely. People in elite positions come from all sorts of places. What’s odd is the position that two schools with an enrollment of 25,000 between them (or 0.2% of the enrollment of baccalaureate granting institutions) have in two odd realms: Presidential politics and the federal Supreme Court. The presence of the rest of the Ivy League (or prestige schools out side it) is outsized but not all that remarkable. The position of Harvard and Yale is … remarkable. It’s not derived from their academic rigor per se. The rankers will tell you both schools have an ample supply of peer institutions (“their history department is no better than 10 others” is what Norman Cantor had to say). What I’d wager is the case is that people with a certain sort of ambition (in politics or law) gravitate to those institutions and not to Stanford or Cal Tech or Johns Hopkins. To a much lesser degree, they gravitate to Duke and Columbia and Princeton.

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 4:18pm

Of course they didn’t have body language that said “I am doing this so you’ll leave me alone.” If you do that, then they take what you give them and go after you twice as hard.
If you’re not willing to have an actual screaming match, or run away to avoid them, you have to echo it back.
***
I’m no good at echoing, and I really don’t enjoy arguing– that’s why I look for sources so much– so I guess I notice it better, but this is also why you’ll have protests of Chick-fil-a and nobody will get up and call the protesters stupid bigots, but then the line snakes out an down the block a few times.
The more sane folks are not going to fight unless they have to, and will avoid a battleground that was chosen by the loons as best possible. Anybody who doesn’t has already been brow-beaten to submission.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 4:40pm

I think the Republic bequeathed to us by Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, et al no longer exists. I think it was incrementally subverted over a protracted period of years.
.
I read that Wilson believed that the Constitution was a dead letter and no longer pertinent to the conditions and the time.
.

The question is when did they give it the coup de grace?
.

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 4:43pm

Maybe a very small % would give false answer to avoid questioner. Also some small % would just walk by. But I believe these youngsters were earnest in their answers

Mary De Voe
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 7:51pm

Some voted for Obama and Obama will erase, I did not say repeal, but dis-en-ratify our First Amendment. The state is our new God and the politicians are our new owners. The students signed a petition without even reading it. I have a bridge to sell them really cheap.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 10:54pm

These idiots have been done educated into inbecility.

TomD
TomD
Saturday, December 19, AD 2015 6:51am

Back in the 1960’s my mother told me about someone who did exactly this, except he told the signatories that the entire Bill of Rights (he didn’t call it that, of course, he just read parts out loud) was a Communist attempt to destroy America. He managed to get a lot of signatures.

Then there is my personal favorite: http://www.dhmo.org/

David Spaulding
David Spaulding
Saturday, December 19, AD 2015 7:27am

People sign the damdest things: not a week goes by that one of my officers doesn’t present a validly signed affidavit to someone who says “yeah, I signed some papers for him to get his greencard but I didn’t know it said THAT.”

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, December 19, AD 2015 1:27pm

Maybe a very small % would give false answer to avoid questioner. Also some small % would just walk by. But I believe these youngsters were earnest in their answers

Having done candidate petitioning house to house, I think a great many people just want to get rid of you and are happy to be compliant to do that. This is an issue petition and issue petitioners are easy avoid or brush off. I doubt you’re getting many compliance signatures.

I think the whole mess is indicative of insularity and the degree to which in the prog mentality, life is high school.

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