One can get balled up in Christopher Hitchens’ atheism, for he’s an equal opportunity offender of all the faithful. Hitchens provides a rich vein of ore for those faithful who mine umbrage from their surroundings. But if umbrage is your game, you might miss gems like this, from his analysis of a famous Japanese Buddhist;
“Effusions like this are–however wicked they may be–almost beyond criticism. They consist, like most professions of faith, in merely assuming what has to be proved. Thus, a bald assertion is then followed with the words “for this reason,” as if all the logical work had been done by making the assertion. . . .Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”
I run across this type of discourse every day in the maunderings of the liberal Left, who motivate me to attempt to reconnect reality to their flights of fancy, and who, despite my efforts, remain resolute in their intention to not endure such connections.
I suspect the Founders did not intend to legally preserve individual freedom from state coercion in order to protect the right to be crazy. I suspect the relatively harsh circumstances of their day lowered the bar considerably on how far afield one could go before survival necessities culled out the recreationally insane.
On the other hand, in a perverse testament to the success of modernity, our western societies seem to have an unlimited capacity to give succor and support to the marginally rational and disconnected growing minority. No degree of uselessness is a bridge too far.
This “type of discourse” now governs the country. Its pronouncements trickle out of the Oval Office each day to thundering applause from the analytically unhinged. The Rule of Law is in shambles. Our Constitution, a jurisprudential empty shell. And the Left, plus assorted hangers-on and margin-dwellers, issue streams of social, political, and economic effluvium without restraint.
The slope of our decline gets steeper, and the “progressives manufacture the consensus of their own intelligence and insist that it proves them right.”
B_Imperial