Yesterday, on Facebook, Larry was discussing how the liberals interpret “some teachers will be allowed to carry guns if they want it” as “all teachers will have to carry guns.” Going from that assumption, people of course make comments about how their friend the teacher is half blind and can’t shoot straight, which Larry called a “Poor Sally who was born without feet” argument.
I can see how it would apply, from having seen liberals in action for a long time. Look, I know we’re not the side of “more laws.” (They don’t know that. Since this is their modus operandi, they assume it’s everyone’s.) But in Portugal when mom was little someone passed a law that you had to wear shoes to use public transportation or in the confines of the city of Porto. This was partly so that tourists didn’t realize how poor the country was, but it was also a public health measure. In my day tuberculosis was endemic. In mom’s day it was epidemic. And there’s a charming habit of spitting on the ground/floor all over the country. So, shoes were sensible.
Of course, showing the limits of laws to change behavior, because the country was extremely poor, I heard about this law because mom told us how they cheated it. You wore one shoe, carried the other, and if the police told you to put the other shoe on, you said it made your foot hurt, and they couldn’t force it. So people wore out one shoe at a time, and made it last twice as long. (Father’s family was never poor enough for that contrivance.)
But if such a law passed here, or even if we said “you know, wearing shoes is a good idea for health reasons, so everyone should be encouraged to wear shoes” you know and I know some idiot would pipe up with “But poor Sally who was born without feet would never be able to go out.”
There is a fundamental denial of humanity in that statement and the poor Sally with no feet argument. It assumes two things: what is not forbidden is mandatory, and if we want people to be ABLE TO carry guns (after passing all appropriate screenings) it’s the same as requiring every teacher to be armed. And two, people are incapable of discernment and exceptions within rules.
First, this makes obvious why they want to multiply rules and regulations till ever part of your life is scripted. They believe rules are a kind of magical spell, and if they exist everyone obeys it.
Given that idea, banning guns makes perfect sense. I mean, if no one breaks laws or rules, just say that no one can have guns, and you’ve eliminated a major form of mass murder. Of course, then you have to outlaw explosives, and also knives and eventually butter knives. And perhaps frozen legs of lamb. (Never mind.)
Also, if people just do things according to law and have no discernment, of course we have to script every little thing.
Never mind that we never heard of a single case of a transsexual being banned from the bathroom of their chosen sex (unless they announce “I have a penis” while entering a woman’s bathroom) because no one actually checks the contents of your underwear. (Trust me, one of my friends way back when looked so masculine that my husband on seeing her picture took weeks to figure out which she was (and only because her wife let it slip.) And yet, she would go into bathrooms without anyone asking anything, and certainly without anyone checking her underwear. In fact, the only time I know someone protested wrong sex in a bathroom was older son who looked six at 3, and who — being three — would do things like look under our stall partition to see who was on the other side. (Not sexual but curiosity.)) BUT if people are like programmable robots, who only act according to rules and laws, then you need to specify that transsexual people will be allowed to use the bathroom of their chosen sex, or the panty police TM will rise up and stop them, right?
This is the same thing that makes taxes THE way to redistribute and doesn’t trust private charity, because if it’s not mandatory, people don’t know to do it. It also removes several checks for worthiness, because then people will refuse everyone.
It is at the basis of the idea that the government needs to regulate EVERYTHING about business, because if it’s not mandatory people won’t do sensible things like, oh, raise the salaries of high-performing employees in order to keep them, or hire the most competent regardless of sex and skin color, because it’s a value add.
It is in fact at the basis of EVERYTHING. And it’s a completely consistent view, except for one thing: people are neither robots nor computer programs. They just aren’t. No policeman is going to arrest Sally for going without shoes, when she has no feet and is therefore not walking like other people. (Not unless he wants to harass Sally, which is why I’m against more laws.)
People don’t need laws to say “Healthcare will pay for contraceptives when they serve a clinical need other than keeping you from getting pregnant.” Insurances were doing that for all the decades I’ve been in this country. I know because given my screwed up system, I needed it intermittently. Because people aren’t robots. “Stops bleeding for a year” is not “elective use of contraceptives.”
“Looks like a woman and it’s none of my business” is most people’s default position, and no one is going to ask to check panties. (Note this is different from “doesn’t make any effort, has a five clock shadow and is wearing a Carmen Miranda hat.” Because in that case, yeah, people might get worried, since someone who does that might have other mental issues.)
“Doesn’t have feet, will not ask them to wear shoes” is also most people’s default position.
Because people aren’t robots.
In fact, the left has never explained how, if people are supposed to be robots, incapable of disobeying rules and laws, we still have murder, something that has been forbidden in every society in the world, from basic tribe on.
So… why do people think that humans are robots and must follow the law?
Honestly? First, because we’ve lived so well so long, people of middle class upbringing have no experience outside their class and group. If they are law abiding, they imagine everyone is, and that laws are inflexible.
Second because for years now our teaching of humanities has been corrupted by Marxism. It’s all “Great movements of history” and humans as widgets within it.
It has a certain amount of truth — all of these things have. That’s what makes them pernicious — in that people tend to have their mental image of the world and what’s possible within their time from the culture they live in.
But it is an incomplete picture. Sure Elizabethans might think of the universe as a mechanical arrangement of spheres, and therefore that the sovereign was untouchable. To an extent that explains how the Tudors got away with so much. But it wasn’t UNIVERSAL and some people thought themselves quite outside the rules, which explains why it was the years of “a plot a minute.”
Because humans aren’t robots.
The very mechanics of Marxism demands that we think they are though. (I think Marx might have been… ah… neuro-atypical.) It’s all supposed to be vast movements of history and people will all act like the other, regardless of what they bring to the situation. People have to be widgets, for Marxism and its promise of future utopia to work.
Hence people being divided into classes, genders, colors, all of which are supposed to act and think uniformly.
Except people aren’t robots. And that’s where the philosophy falls apart. And why pushing it into people’s heads as the model for everything is wrong. And why Marxism in any form always ends up in piles of dead, whether violent or not. (Do you want to count the dead from the many, many socialized health systems? How about the dead because people don’t work harder than they have to, and society stagnates? How about the dead of drugs because there’s no hope for the future? Piles of dead I tell you. Some in this country.) Because it’s designed for robots.
And humans aren’t robots.
Whether the left wants to believe it or not.