Thursday, June 23, 2005

The flag burn amendment

Congress is acting up again. Burning the flag is bad, because it is...bad. This is some suck ass reasoning.

Certainty leads to people beating the crap out of each other. Ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies of every stripe -- commie, nazi, democrat, repub -- suck for this reason. If the conviction of rightness is strident and loud enough for long enough, it will be met, sooner or later, with force.

That a systemic problem with "causes". They are the attempts to compel one group to conform to another group's view of what is a correct view of the future (an impossible thing). And the group intent on doing the compelling usually can't offer any greater authority than they know what's best for the rest of us. (See: the flag burning amendment, gay marriage, smoking bans, miscengeneration laws, standardized spelling, etc.)

People who think they know the only correct answer are very comfortable with forcing the incorrect into getting with the program.

Every social interest, even ones we might find personally distasteful, deserves a chance to be heard. Our society, our culture, our technology, our government become more vital when experimentation is condoned and protected. And the alternative is, well, Iran. Or Mississippi, circa 1964.

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