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This is the part people almost never highlight that’s even more important than emphasizing one’s right to a firearm for self-defense. A right to overthrow the government is written into the second amendment. Makes it difficult to determine where the clear dividing line is between a warranted insurrection (no such thing in the eyes of the government) and sedition.
IMO some people treat the Civil War as if it was an Amendment to the Constitution. The Federal Government crushing a rebellion ended the part of the 2nd Amendment giving a right to insurrection. Especially people on the left seem to imply that the Civil War settled that interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Though they also did not take the time to write out an amendment banning the right to have arms for insurrection. It would have made so many of these gun questions easier today.
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Which is in actual fact a right to overthrow the people, which necessarily means it's a right to be a military threat to your neighbor, anywhere you might go. (Blue is correct that "stand your ground" means this.) Just like 1A is the right to be a social threat to them, and just like 4A is the right to not have to deal with your neighbor's fishing trips because he believes you're doing blatantly illegal things (even if it is very obvious that you are indeed breaking the law).
This generally makes even liberals uncomfortable, because it all of a sudden means that they're relying on their neighbor's good will not to shoot them. If the only thing that keeps you from dying on the road is the unwillingness of other drivers to cross the center line and kill you, then "unwillingness" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and everyone generally understands that encouraging deployment of the Final Argument of Kings can/will lead to defect/defect spirals.
Mass shootings (in the case where they're workplace violence) make people very uncomfortable (in a way gang violence doesn't, but that's generally because it's confined to certain areas and considered a lost cause) because it's very clearly their own private civil war. Some fight it for nihilism, others fight it because they're So Oppressed about Current Problem, but this is in fact what they are doing and why. And sometimes the soldiers (on either side) look like this.
People like to say "overthrow the government", as if the government wasn't following the wishes of the people. A majority of people in the US (and most other nations) are of the belief that the people can do no wrong- in other words, they have sovereign immunity. A mad king with 100 million heads is just as destructive as a mad king with one- actually, even more so, because a decapitation strike against the former is indistinguishable from a genocide (Israel/Hamas being a good and recent example).
But peoples have been wrong all the time. The vast majority of peoples of the West (and East, for that matter) were pretty famously wrong in 2020-2022 when they caused runaway inflation and trillions of dollars in economic destruction because they were absolutely hysterical about the uncommon cold. It is possible that threat of paramilitary action kept some People saner than others.
Which is ironic because they’re usually the party that believes in the innate peacefulness of humanity and the supposed natural harmony that exists between distant groups. It’s strange to me that liberals seem to be the only group of people I regularly encounter that honestly believes they aren’t an in-group, let alone one that also has an out-group bias like everyone else.
I don’t usually involve myself in these discussions anymore because they’ve been discussed to death and rehashed endlessly. I used to partake in them quite frequently. Now? Hardly. To me the solutions have already been found, they’ve been known, but the people don’t want to face reality. That’s all there is to it.
Take a concept the left loves so much like “diversity” (which, in all in favor of, to a point, even most conservatives are). Well what’s wrong with how they conceptualize it?
Diversity is a source of conflict within institutions and therein, societies. Conflicts impede institutions insofar as it inhibits them to performing their proper functions; and that’s even if one doesn’t adopt the goal of artificially promoting it. If a school divided by conflict it can’t teach as well as a harmonious one. An army divided can’t fight as well as a unified one. A society riven by conflict is a less pleasant place to live than a peaceful one. You don’t have to be a philosopher to understand this. This is common sense.
The idea that any society or institution is improved by large-scale diversity is an aberration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There is ‘no’ serious political philosopher or statesman of the past would have entertained the idea for a moment. The entire goal of politics is to create social order and harmony. Basically, it’s the problem of getting along with one another. Social life has to deliver net benefits to its participants, or people will go their separate ways, and society will collapse. Straight up. But beyond that, since we’re not just selfish individualists, you have to cultivate social responsibility and investment, so people work to better society and are actually willing to sacrifice to ensure that it’s preserved and perpetuated.
Those are the great problems of politics, creating social harmony and a sense of an identification with the body politic, responsibility to the body politic, willingness to lay down one’s life for the body politic. Now tell me, does diversity help with those goals?
The prevailing dogma is that diversity will strengthen literally everything. Presumably it means every institution touched by diversity will perform its function better. Neighborhoods will be better places to live. Governments will better promote justice and harmony. Schools will better educate and train students. Hospitals will better heal the sick, etc. But this makes zero sense. Every institution is defined by its goals. So to function properly, every institution has to find people who are good at promoting its goals. Teachers have to teach. Firemen have to fight fires. Soldiers have to fight enemies, etc. The primary criterion for hiring and promoting people in any institution is ability to contribute to the institution’s purpose. No institution can be improved by introducing competing criteria of success, like diversity.
This is why as soon as diversity becomes the “greatest strength” of any institution, people will naturally lower its proper standards of success to promote diversity. And that’s why too much diversity isn’t a strength, it’s a weakness. But don’t for a second think you can’t also go overboard in the other direction. Diversity is a good ‘if’ it contributes to the institutional goals of society. It is not an intrinsic good.
To give an example, in academia, economics halls have often been assailed for being far too insular and siloizing itself from the discourse with other academic disciplines. This is led to an environment where economists spend far too much tinkering around with mathematically abstract economic models that bear little resemblance to reality. The solution for this wasn’t to encourage more English majors to enter into economics courses. It was to demand economists have an interface with businessmen to bring theory and practice together. And it led to projects like The Atlas of Economic Complexity.
This has been overwhelmingly true for most of history. One accolade I’ll give to democracies over the kinds of systems I’m more palatable to is that democracies have proven themselves to be the most sustainable political system of the future thus far. Maybe that’ll continue to change with time though.
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