Rethinking the Second Amendment-Can we really have peace and freedom without guns?

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm
The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It's time, in the West -- It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence... Solzhenitsyn

The 'law' was never meant to be the standard - it was designed as the absolute minimum standard. Solzhenitsyn's brilliant. Thanks again for sharing.

I recently read Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” and I found it hard to read, because it baldly points out a number of things I would rather have ignored to my grave.

But one of the things she posited, and the more I dwell on it, the more I agree with it, is that the United States started on the path to where we are are today a little over a decade before we reached our apogee at the end of WWII.

That trailhead to where we are now began with the United States granted formal diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, right at the peak of the forced and deliberate starvation of the Kulaks by Stalin and his government. Five million murdered by starvation.

And we knew it. Sure, they had the Walter Durantys of the world saying it wasn’t like that, things were fine, and a lot of people bought it hook, line, and sinker, but...our government knew. They knew WELL what was going on.

And yet we extended that privilege on a world-wide stage to them. And we knew.

Shameful. Just shameful.

Our country has done wonderful things, and we have a lot to be justifiably proud of. But that moment back in 1933 where we recognized Stalin and his government as legitimate was not one of them.

Glad the speech struck a chord.

Another passage (near the end) that struck me:

It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

I found this passage from that speech both prophetic and terribly sad in its truth:

"...There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East, where the press is rigorously unified. One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment; there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspaper[s] mostly develop stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events...

At least the Eskimos were focused on knowledge and language integral to their survival and traditional culture.

Putting trans on pedestals and job-hiring based on non-competence criteria such as sex, race, religion, and political correctness will ultimately destroy our society.

A Sept 2021 story from the WSJ also points to key trend to watch:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

To me, this says that college is not the only path ahead for making money in the new economy. Males usually want to become the main breadwinner, so the lower numbers of men going to college means greater opportunities are opening up to succeed without college. And given the indoctrination students get at college that can be a good trend.

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