Oh, Brave New World...

...that has such atavistic people in it.

I persist in believing certain types to be extinct, or nearly so. This increasingly proves to be wishful thinkng.

First example here, via David Codrea, about which (the example, not Codrea) I truly believe the less said the better. This fellow, who to no surprise of mine claims to be a retired Federal "Only One," perfectly melds purported second amendment advocacy with a breed of virulent racism I thought had died out with my oldest uncle. Guess not. Click on him only if your stomach is thoroughly settled. Better yet, click on him not at all. One day soon he'll be discovered by the Brady Bunch, and will achieve his fifteen minutes.

Second example is alluded to here, via Billy Beck. Socialism, unlike so many other "isms," is a statist pathology that's been thoroughly tried, no matter what anybody says, and it invariably leads to tragedy. It's a source of much confusion to me, why there are still people out there who can't let it go. People who seem to truly believe that if we just try it more, try it better, this time it'll lead to heaven on earth.

Anyway, this dead fellow G.A. Cohen wrote a book called Why Not Socialism? - as if that question hadn't already been thoroughly answered by tens of millions of dead Asian peasants. I gather from the excerpts that Cohen, through his pathetic "camping trip" metaphor, isn't looking for the return of Stalin but rather a kinder, gentler, "voluntary" socialism that might take years to result in genocide. If he were alive, I'd suggest he read some accounts of the first few growing seasons of Plymouth Colony, before they wised up. Why not socialism? Because at its very best it doesn't work at all. At its worst, you get the Soviet Union. You never get peace, love and brotherhood.

I really don't get it. There are so many new tragic social experiments waiting to be tried. Why do people cling so bitterly to old, proven mistakes?