Theory vs practice

I believe what the militias in Illinois did was fight injuns. I don’t think the National Guard does that. I believe that back in the day if a militia guy didn’t want to join in on a particular raid he would tell the rest of the guys to go fuck themselves. I don’t believe that option is open to a member of the present day National Guard. I believe the closest thing we have had to a militia in the present day is those black helicopter guys who used to roam the forests of your state, but now I think their wives let them drink beer in the house so we don’t hear about them anymore.

Yeah I think all of us states should have their own armies too. Then the Fighting Illini could march into Wisconsin and the upper peninsula and then the lower and make you guys pay tribute and that could solve our budget deficit.

I think a yeoman was pretty much a vassal, a step above a serf, but that was it. Read your wiki.

I wasn’t there when prohibition began, but I don’t believe the wets ever used the argument that the constitution protected their right to drink. At least they were more honest then you gun nuts.

See here’s the thing, if you believe that hauling Old Betsy around makes it a better world, than make that argument. Don’t make some constitutional argument when you admit that you will be packing heat regardless of what the constitution says, so the constitution is irrelevant to the argument.

My theory vs practice thing is like the founding fathers drew up the constitution, dividing up the government and putting in all those checks and balances. That is theory. Then they put people in the positions they had invented and those guys used it to fight for whatever they wanted and sometimes they went along with the constitution when it was to their advantage, and sometimes they found loopholes, and sometimes they downright cheated. That is practice.

Ideology is theory and the politicians are the practice, and I think if you are only interested in ideology to the exclusion of the politicians you are outside Plato’s cave where all the action is.

You know I am the kind of guy who believes there are two kinds of people in the world, and I think there are two kinds of philosophy also. There are the stoics who believe the world is corrupt and there’s not much to be done about that, so the thing to do is keep yourself morally straight and the hell with everybody else. And then there are the utilitarians who believe you should fight to make it a better world, and if in the struggle you might have to cozy up to some dirty guys and soil your tunic, then so it goes.

The better world to the utilitarian is the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. And you are absolutely right that the big problem with this is who decides what the greatest good is.

I wonder about these laws against bazookas and atom bombs. Surely they aren’t just laws that say here are the weapons that you cannot have. It is never good to have a list of weapons because you gun nuts always find some loophole. I guess that it is more of a general law and the forbidden weapons come from the interpretation of the law. I guess you would know exactly what that law is.

See that’s where my anti gun nuts come a cropper, is it a an assault weapon, is it a tactical weapon, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Myself, I would leave you Old Betsy, but I would take away all the automatic weapons and I would be pretty strict about who could own a handgun. But you know that is theory, in practice you gun nuts occupy the seat of power, and there is nothing to be done about it until people change their minds about it.

I don’t know what you mean by the recent controversy that has made guns fly off the shelf. I guess you mean the election of Barak Obama. And indeed you are right they have been flying. Obama has done nothing to curb guns in six years on the job, but gun nuts are so stupid that they think they have to fill their closets before the spigot shuts off. You guys are in control, that spigot is not going to be turned off in the foreseeable future, but go ahead, do as you like, it’s your money.

But how about gay marriage? I remember you saying that if we allowed gay marriage it would damage your marriage, so now that is legal for roughly half (maybe a third) of the people in the country what damage has you marriage suffered?