Well, yes and no.
Here’s my response at the Western Standard:
Being an uneducated working class type, I actually am a stereotypical law & order (definitely lower case :-)), Archie Bunker, “life is life,” lock em up and throw away the key type.
And I make no claims for ideological consistency either. I don’t think that would be humanly possible, literally. You aren’t really “human” in one sense if you are so rigidly principled that you NEVER bend to circumstance and insist on filtering everything through whatever your favorite author/thinker once said.
However, I am law & order etc regarding real criminals who have been convicted of real crimes.
(If I saw those criminals getting just punishments instead of what they do get, I’d be more sympathetic about their “rights,” which sometimes seem to go too far.)
I share Peter’s frustration with people who are blindly motivated by party politics, which frankly bores me.
In this case, there is actually an undertone of city mouse/country mouse in the SDA critiques, too. When push comes to shove, many people react to these situations by going “tribal” (myself included.)
Certain Blogs have long history of “city folks are scum” thinking. Believe me, that is driving a lot of this animus even though they won’t admit it. Yes, people can be that shallow. Again, I include myself.
Oh well, nothing like a little tear gas to clear the air!
(Finally: as for Mill, I’ve also read Stephen’s Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which offers pesky counterarguments to Mill. Just a mischievous suggestion 🙂 )
Just to add:
I celebrate Kent State Day and the Hard Hat Riots at my blog every year.
I’m still pretty convinced that invoking the War Measures Act was the only good thing PET ever did.
If labels are required, and I find them tiresome, I’m a libertarian for myself and a conservative for everyone else.
When justified by evidence and statistics, I support “racial profiling”, which we used to call “a description of the suspect”‘ when I was a kid.
I want the cops to pay more attention to the clear and present bad guys/likely suspects (natives in Caledonia; young Muslim males with engineering degrees) and NOT their victims (homeowners in Caledonia; Medal of Honor recipients having their medal confiscated at the airport because “it’s pointy.”)
Basically? I cheer my team and want my enemies dead.
I don’t pretend to be consistent, some great political philosopher or member of any group. I fail every political purity acid test and would worry if I didn’t.
