Thursday, June 23, 2022

On the "Stupid" and "Malevolent"...

“If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.”
― Isaiah Berlin

“But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you—the social reformers—see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
― Isaiah Berlin

True pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation among them. Moral conduct may therefore involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values.
― Isaiah Berlin, "Russian Thinkers"

4 comments:

  1. Total false equivalence. BLM protests weren't about overturning the legitimate results of an election.

    Isaiah Berlin "argued that liberty was achieved when individuals were given maximal freedom from external constraints (so long as these did not infringe on the freedom of others to achieve the same condition)".

    I think the "freedom" to overturn the results of elections you don't like definitely infringes on the freedoms of others. republiturd minority rule is all about taking freedoms away from groups you don't like.

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  2. So your for locking up Colbert's staffers for Insurrection. Good to know. :)

    When are you going to lock up some of these people?

    lol!

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  3. I'm opposed to locking anyone up for imaginary crimes.

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