Candy From Babies
L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - on Amerika's neopuritans, who "just can't be satisfied unless they're taking something away from somebody else. Something that gives them pleasure." Prompted by the new ban on soda pop in gummint schools. [tle]
I also know that neopuritans are notorious pathological liars. For decades I've listened to them lie, loud, long, and elaborately, about the "evils" of gun ownership (as one example), while one by one, each of my own predictions about the benefits of an armed society have come true. In a period where more and more Americans have been acquiring and carrying personal weapons, numbers for violent crime have fallen steeply.
Of course.
Neopuritans have always lied about pornography. The earliest, most naive, and therefore the best studies clearly showed that porn serves as a safety valve, delaying or preventing sexual predation, and even improving physical relations between permanently attached couples. The neopuritans, naturally enough, saw pornography in a different light, as a source of greater personal pleasure to individuals than almost anything else. So they shopped around for decades--the addition of marxoid feminist academics to their ranks in the late 20th century helped a lot--until they found counterstudies that "proved" the opposite.
I know that neopuritans are liars when it comes to phenomena like "secondhand smoke", because I saw that lie being created, right before my eyes. During the first Bush regime, the EPA was ordered to "study" the presumed health hazards of secondhand smoke. When the agency reported (uncharacteristically for an outfit like the EPA, which is why I believe them) that there exist no such hazards, an infuriated Bush Administration ordered them to go back and find some. Failing, they presented their results in graphic form--only they pulled an old piece of Madison Avenue chicanery, cutting the tops off the bars to exaggerate differences where, in fact, there were almost none at all.
