In Loco Parentis

On an unrelated note, I just shook the hand of the governor of the state of Idaho and wished him a merry Christmas, just before I sucker punched him and had to be wrestled to the ground by his security detail.

Just the first part of that sentence is real, just in case.

And isn't it just like me to open a post ‘on an unrelated note’? Sigh.

Roger Kimball's 10th December post has the following:

The state’s near monopoly on instruments of violence is merely one token of a much broader and deeper calculus of control. Tocqueville got to the nub of the issue in his famous paragraphs, in Democracy in America, on “Democratic Despotism.” Where old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes over men, democratic despotism infantilizes them. Such despotism would, Tocqueville writes,

resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves… . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

 

I am not normally a conspiracy theorist, seeing bogey men around every corner and black helicopters in every inch of sky, but the willingness of the soft left in this country to cede every personal responsibility to a most impersonal government is alarming. Any further steps down that road and we'll soon not be able to name our kids whatever the fuck we want.

Don't think that can happen? Don't think the state can require you choose from an approved list of baby names? Think again. Name investigators indeed!