Friday, April 09, 2004
"TO THE MOON" MEANS "TO THE DOGS":
Ireland has banned divorce, birth control, and abortion. Yet the heavily Irish-American state of Taxachusetts has gone in the opposite direction. That is not due to the Anglo-Saxon settlers there. The English Puritans who settled the colony had tried to live in the Netherlands first. They gave up and went to a new land because the Dutch were so liberal they would not allow the Puritan fathers to impose their harsh religion on their own children, much less their neighbors. Here they were free to put people in the stocks for public kissing, and burn heretics, Quakers, and witches at the stake. Those were the good old days of real religious freedom.
Today the Netherlands is still one of the most extreme left wing nations on earth, yet Americans of Dutch ancestry are among the most conservative and Republican voters in this country. Likewise the Dutch settlers in South Africa were the strongest supporters of apartheid. This leads me to a theory. The people who leave a country are not typical of those who are left behind. The emigrants leave because they are unhappy with the culture in their homeland. Their self-selected departure magnifies the very traits which caused them to leave. If a bunch of anti-Castro people flee Cuba, it makes the island even more supportive of him than it was before.
If Bush goes through with his preemptive occupation of Mars, first building a staging point on the Moon, who will emigrate to those other worlds? Well paid, high-tech, military-industrial complex types, who today are very likely to vote Republican. As more of them leave, America will become more liberal. The Bush administration is clearly falling into this trap, even encouraging the creativity of free enterprise by issuing the first license for a private, reusable suborbital rocket.
As the libertarians warn, when there is private and competing space transportation, it will be cheaper and there will be more of it. Well before the end of this century, the hard core Republican voters left here will be limited to a hopeless minority of anti-technology fundamentalists. Those updated Amish on a larger scale will not be able to hold back the radical tide. How bad could it get? Senator Santorum warned us, and now the scoffing moderates can see for themselves he is right.
We already knew that the Dutch, lacking vital conservative antibodies in their politics, were the anti-Ireland, allowing not only abortion and divorce, but prostitution, pot smoking, and gay marriages. Now it turns out that a man who raped horses in the Netherlands has been allowed to go free. Why? Because they don't even have any laws banning sex with animals. Yes, there was a public outcry over this, but to prove just how far around the left-hand bend they've gone, the outcry is over "cruelty to animals". A group proposing a law to ban this gave as their reason that "sex with animals was a "violation of their physical integrity", considering that the creatures were unable to give or withhold their consent." Read it at "Netherlands may ban bestiality". Whatever happened to that wonderful time when we could just execute people for sin? If all the conservatives go to space, we'll never see those days here again. Maybe we can do it on Mars....
Ireland has banned divorce, birth control, and abortion. Yet the heavily Irish-American state of Taxachusetts has gone in the opposite direction. That is not due to the Anglo-Saxon settlers there. The English Puritans who settled the colony had tried to live in the Netherlands first. They gave up and went to a new land because the Dutch were so liberal they would not allow the Puritan fathers to impose their harsh religion on their own children, much less their neighbors. Here they were free to put people in the stocks for public kissing, and burn heretics, Quakers, and witches at the stake. Those were the good old days of real religious freedom.
Today the Netherlands is still one of the most extreme left wing nations on earth, yet Americans of Dutch ancestry are among the most conservative and Republican voters in this country. Likewise the Dutch settlers in South Africa were the strongest supporters of apartheid. This leads me to a theory. The people who leave a country are not typical of those who are left behind. The emigrants leave because they are unhappy with the culture in their homeland. Their self-selected departure magnifies the very traits which caused them to leave. If a bunch of anti-Castro people flee Cuba, it makes the island even more supportive of him than it was before.
If Bush goes through with his preemptive occupation of Mars, first building a staging point on the Moon, who will emigrate to those other worlds? Well paid, high-tech, military-industrial complex types, who today are very likely to vote Republican. As more of them leave, America will become more liberal. The Bush administration is clearly falling into this trap, even encouraging the creativity of free enterprise by issuing the first license for a private, reusable suborbital rocket.
As the libertarians warn, when there is private and competing space transportation, it will be cheaper and there will be more of it. Well before the end of this century, the hard core Republican voters left here will be limited to a hopeless minority of anti-technology fundamentalists. Those updated Amish on a larger scale will not be able to hold back the radical tide. How bad could it get? Senator Santorum warned us, and now the scoffing moderates can see for themselves he is right.
We already knew that the Dutch, lacking vital conservative antibodies in their politics, were the anti-Ireland, allowing not only abortion and divorce, but prostitution, pot smoking, and gay marriages. Now it turns out that a man who raped horses in the Netherlands has been allowed to go free. Why? Because they don't even have any laws banning sex with animals. Yes, there was a public outcry over this, but to prove just how far around the left-hand bend they've gone, the outcry is over "cruelty to animals". A group proposing a law to ban this gave as their reason that "sex with animals was a "violation of their physical integrity", considering that the creatures were unable to give or withhold their consent." Read it at "Netherlands may ban bestiality". Whatever happened to that wonderful time when we could just execute people for sin? If all the conservatives go to space, we'll never see those days here again. Maybe we can do it on Mars....
