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Walter Williams and Western Civ thou wast the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.
(Sir Ector, speaking at the death of Sir Lancelot, on the last page of the Morte d’Arthur.)
Holding a black belt in karate, Walter was a tough customer. One night three men jumped him — and two of those men ended up in a hospital.
The other side of Walter came out in relation to his wife, Connie. She helped put him through graduate school — and after he received his Ph.D., she never had to work again, not even to fix his breakfast.
Thomas Sowell’s obituary of Walter Williams, who died on December 2nd.
I tagged this ‘sui generis’, because Sowell also wrote:
Walter Williams was unique. I have heard of no one else being described as being “like Walter Williams.”
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I think the best way to speak of Walter Williams is with his own words. His syndicated columns are a treasure trove of insight for those who have ears to hear. His most recent and, it turns out, last column is about what I personally think is the most pressing problem in America today, one for which our government is doing exactly the wrong thing. If you loved what you learned from him, which I do, if you respected him for the ballsy guy that he was, which I do, I suggest taking time to remind yourself of what he wrote, for that is his true legacy. That’s what I am going to do this Sunday.
http://walterewilliams.com/posts/
I have been feeling that the America I immigrated two decades ago is slipping quietly away. The land of free speech, self reliance, opportunity, pride, and the self made man is disappearing before the onslaught of censorship, cancel culture, “you didn’t build that”, “entitlements”, hate the rich, self loathing and self flagellation. It makes me wonder why I still live here. The death of Walter Williams, a man who represented everything I loved about America, is just one more nail in that coffin.
“30 of Walter Williams’s Best Quotes on Liberty, Rights, Property, and Coercion.”
And, of course, his stinging rebuke to peddlers of the fashionable ‘white privilege’ myth, in the form of a printable, framable certificate.
@Zerren one of the quotes you mention is this:
There is no moral argument that justifies using the coercive powers of government to force one person to bear the expense of taking care of another.
Personally, I agree with this. The problem is that the large majority of the population does not. Morality is not some fixed thing, some axiomatic framework from which you can hang your arguments. Rather it is something that a society agrees upon and evolves through a refining process.
I think a quite significant majority of Americans (and probably a larger majority of Brits) would argue that it is immoral NOT to use the coercive powers of the state to force the rich to take care of the needy.
So this is why I feel like old news in America. I think William’s statement is self evidently true. Yet were I to say something like that he says here in public, not only would people disagree, I may well get canceled, or were I not self employed fired from my job. So really this is a deep problem. The issue is not Joe Biden, it is not election fraud, it is that the moral center of what is considered decent and right from the perspective of a large majority of the people has moved to such an extent that what was once self evidently decent and true is now considered unspeakably immoral. We live in a world where the ephemeral comment of a four year old child puts them of a track of hormone treatment and genital mutilation, and to put up your hand and say “hey, hold on there”, is to put yourself in the same box as Hitler, and Jim Crow. Books that say “hey, hold on there” are literally being tossed into a bonfire to burn.
And I don’t know how you solve that. Recently my biggest concern has been that China will overtake American hegemony. Now, that seems inevitable, my concern is now that America will BECOME China. If you think that is crazy, just look around. Last year I would have said a social credit system happening in the US or the West would never happen. One need only look at what has happened on social media over the last year to think that now such a social credit system seems almost inevitable. One already exists informally. People get fired for posts they made ten years ago. I know one of the people who got fired for such a cause. So, like I say, there is a very real danger we BECOME China.
It’s not a majority.
It’s s vocal minority currently occupying the commanding heights of our civilization, but scared and vulnerable despite their terrible power.
“The land of free speech . . . . ” Nope. It’s not some Magic Dirt that’s losing its qualities. It’s too many people buying into the proposition that we all have to live for the sake of others. It’s too successful of an effort, by thieves, to inculcate their dishonor amongst those people. It’s our failure to spread our own views more forcefully and believably.
But remember that eighty million people – eighty million! – thought enough of our views that they trudged out and voted for Trump last month, and if it weren’t for early voting and vote fraud, I bet the result would have been different. I bet the result would be different if we voted again today. Remember that the biggest Google search in the week before the election was (supposedly) “can I change my vote?”
So, we take it all back next time. And, there will be a next time. Paraphrasing U2’s Helter Skelter – “this is the country that Harris-Biden stole from us. We’re stealing it back.”
@bobby b
It’s too many people buying into the proposition that we all have to live for the sake of others. It’s too successful of an effort, by thieves, to inculcate their dishonor amongst those people. It’s our failure to spread our own views more forcefully and believably.
I think that would, at any other time in my life, be a great point. But things have changed. First of all your views will be heavily censored by the main platforms for getting them out there, and secondly, a lot of people are really scared to say stuff, because the left is really out to get them. They don’t just disagree with you, but they really are out to destroy people who disagree with them. For example, you express what last year was a pretty conventional view, such as: “we need to support the police”, say that today and you are a racist, you might have your home assaulted, you might get fired from your job. There is a saying, you aren’t paranoid if they really are out to get you.
And you, in your little rural paradise, might think you are safe, but you aren’t. You might be last, but you will still be a target. Remember, they didn’t just take Winson and Julia out back and shoot them, they forced them to believe the way they believed.
But remember that eighty million people – eighty million! – thought enough of our views that they trudged out and voted for Trump last month, and if it weren’t for early voting and vote fraud, I bet the result would have been different. I bet the result would be different if we voted again today. Remember that the biggest Google search in the week before the election was (supposedly) “can I change my vote?”
Again that is true, but do you think that will ever be allowed again? They have the lists of Trump donors and don’t doubt that the left will use that information to persecute them (it is why I think the FEC is one of the most dangerous organizations around). If they win the senate it is almost certain they will destroy the high court and pull in two new states, making republican majority impossible.
But the main problem is the republican party. They are almost as bad as the dems. Who are they going to run? Romney? The thing that was unique, powerful and refreshing about Trump is that he is an outsider, who owed nothing to the system, who owed nothing to all those special interests. I doubt there will ever be another Trump. (And if you think Trump will run again in 2024, I wouldn’t be confident of that. When there is a pretender to the throne the king will chop his head off. They will absolutely go after Trump and find something against him and throw him in jail for a thousand years. If he goes away quietly perhaps not, but he will not go away quietly. I imagine he will put in prophylactic pardons for himself and family, but they will still get him in state court.)
But the Republican establishment hate Trump almost as much of as the Dems, and for the same reason, he is an outsider, he doesn’t have his snout in the trough. So, just as the Dems won’t let someone like him win again, the Repubs will make sure someone like that never gets to run again.
And they won by cheating this year, do you think they will give that up next time around, when they have much more power to implement it?
So, we take it all back next time. And, there will be a next time. Paraphrasing U2’s Helter Skelter – “this is the country that Harris-Biden stole from us. We’re stealing it back.”
I’d like to think that, but honestly I don’t think so. This is an inflection point in history. It looks the same, but I think the left has successfully turned America, that great and good city on the hill, into a banana republic.
Maybe I am being too bleak, but I really don’t see a positive way forward. The left, and the radical left in particular have all the exits covered. This is the denouement of thirty years of work transforming the culture and moral structure. They managed to leverage the fear of Covid and the chaos it brought to push it over the edge. If the Repubs hold Georgia then we might have a last gasp of breathing room. But I am far from confident that they will.
OMG, I sound like Paul Marks. I probably should mention the Frankfurt school of Marxism…. I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite books “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” by Harry Browne. It is kind of out of date, but maybe I need to re-read it.
I was not aware of his Amnesty Declaration and thought a nicely framed copy would make a good gift for an American relative.
If anyone knows where such an item can be obtained I would be grateful. Amazon, Etsy and more surprisingly EBay have nothing. If all else fails I will simply have to try and gain access to a better quality printer than my own and download the pdf.
I think that it is a moral duty to work to pay your own way through life and not expect the government to rob your fellow man on your behalf. I accept that there may be those for whom this is not possible and that we may have a duty of care toward them, but I think that there may be too many folk who don’t see blagging off the state for your entire life to be immoral.
I’d never heard of Mr. Walter Williams, but if Thomas Sowell admired him that’s good enough for me.
Fraser Orr:
1. Consider, perhaps, that it’s not that I’m in a rural enclave and so can’t see the bigger picture, but that I saw the bigger picture and took myself out of the liberal enclave. In my last five years of practice, my worked morphed into a different thing, and so I spent extended time in courts and hotels in NYC, Chicago (had my own favorite room at the Palmer House – walking distance to the courts!), Miami, Atlanta, Austin, LA, SF, Portland – all the fun progressive places. Spent my evenings and days off there, too, which is the nature of extended business travel. My attitude isn’t based on ignorance – it’s based on knowledge.
Get out of Chicago. I recognize the defeated attitude – it was common amidst my conservative contacts in those areas. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you choose to go sit at the table with all the self-proclaimed cool kids.
2. We still outnumber them. The committed progs are fewer in number than their influence suggests. Sure, they have a ton of carried-along serfs who love the feelings of superiority and the opportunities for bullying that modern progressivism confers on them, but the numbers of pure Marxists is low. The hanger-on bullies can be bullied. When push comes to shove, they’re not serving some overarching moral principle – and so they’ll run from the Marxists once it’s no longer fun to be around them. Our job is to make it no fun for anyone to be around them.
3. I see the middle half of America as lacking strong principles about anything except feeling good about themselves, and so they all engage in a sort of tidal drift back and forth in favor of whichever side seems “nice.” The tide surged towards the left for Obama mostly because they could point to him and say, see, we’re not racist!
Trump didn’t pull that tide back very hard – he’s not nice – but the strength of the political philosophy he represents was sufficient to pull half the country back anyway – plus, we’re about to watch the exercise of raw naked leftist power with Biden/Harris/et al. Can you picture the middle half of America ending up with warm fuzzy feelings about the Bernie Bros? I think the tide started turning the day after the election, and I think it’s only going to get stronger.
Call me overly positive, but I think we win in the end.
A plan:
http://pointsandfigures.com/2020/12/06/civil-disobedience-redux/
And an observation:
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1325513362545897472
Fraser Orr, (December 6th, 7;08pm). Off topic but, as someone who came from the UK to the US in 1994 and has lived here ever since, I agree absolutely with your concerns about the future of America. If Joe Biden becomes president, I think dark days lie ahead for this country. Biden himself has always been a moderate and doesn’t bother me, but some of the people behind him frankly scare me.
Bobby b (December 7, 2020 at 12:44 pm), below I comment on the plan you link to in the context of one possible future.
While I think such a plan will be liked for itself by many on this blog, and the hypocritical-lockdown stuff speaks to a concern beyond the stealing of an election, I’d strongly advise those pursuing this to keep the vote-fraud (e.g. specifically the four fake data dumps) visible in its propaganda.
I’m reacting (possibly overreacting) with this well-meant advice to the line, “It doesn’t matter if you think the election had hanky panky or not” – something whose point in context I comprehend, but that needs better phrasing, as part of a better approach.
Allies matter. Even more (I think), coherent justifications matter. Many people will understand the disrespecting of an illegitimate government who will be less ready to act against a legitimately-appointed one, however excessive and our-rules-only-bind-you it may be. Like the background fraud I strongly suspect happened, that put Biden near enough for the four dumps to get him over the top but turned out to be not enough in itself, so the general fed-up-ness caused by this year of laws-for-the-little-people is a background but needs a focus. (For example there is no such focus in the UK and that alone makes an immense difference here.)
A distant historical example may illustrate where I am coming from. Lincoln took a year-and-a-half of civil war before issuing the emancipation proclamation. This was not because he did not want to free the slaves. It was because he knew winning versus losing the war was such a central part of doing so that it came first.
My take (which by all means criticise if you see flaws) is that the four data points have the advantage that no statistical understanding is needed to see how phoney the jumps in the graphs look. They have co-anomalies (e.g. the pretend shutdown of counting to exclude poll watchers, the bizarre ratio of second-to-third parties) to defeat honest sceptics (e.g. the idea that Dorsey just funded a very locally-focussed technically-legal ground game that recruited the poll-counters themselves cannot rationally survive the co-anomalies even if it could survive the extremity of the main one), etc. I, of course, think it likely (and fairly well-evidenced) this was the final over-the-top part of much more voter fraud, but see that aspects of that background are both more debatable and less established (at least as yet) in some details. IIUC, the four drops are highly provable and highly specific in time and place and highly visual (two graphs each with one step and one graph with two steps – a four-panel graphic with the slogan in the panel that lacks a graph seems obvious) and are sufficient.
“He that draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard”, said Machiavelli. In this (I hope) in many ways very different scenario of e.g. “nullify lockdown hypocrisy” (IIUC), I offer, “He that sets his free will against his allegedly-elected government should equip himself with a strong argument why it isn’t really his elected government, and take care not to throw that argument away.
None of that is one single iota of argument against the plan. I am just advising how strongly-visible certain aspects of its justification should be kept. That which a libertarian might see as good in itself could nevertheless be praised contingently – as Lincoln arrived at the start of the civil war by refusing to accept that slavery could last, but then treated the winning of the war as his pre-eminent task in ensuring that slavery did not last.
Hope this helps – or at least makes sense.
I wonder what Walter Williams would have made of all this?
Walter Williams was a great man – and he was a good man Those are not the same thing – and he was both.
As for the struggle against “Sustainable Development” (“Green” totalitarianism) and “Stakeholder Capitalism” (a Corporate State, Fascism, the ending of freed competition, especially from small businesses, and the extermination of the general freedom of ordinary people), I suspect the battle is already lost.
With hindsight (20-20 vision) perhaps it was lost as long ago as 1992 – when President Herbert Walker Bush and Prime Minister John Major (among many other utterly useless political and corporate leaders) signed up for the “legally nonbinding” Agenda 21 (now Agenda 2030 – or “Build Back Better” “Great Reset”) – which was-and-is essentially “Sustainable Development”, “Stakeholder Capitalism”, and in its CULTURAL side Frankfurt School of Marxism (“Critical Theory” Marxism which is now called “Wokeness”) by the instalment plan.
“Wokeness” (the Frankfurt School of Marxism – very different from the ideas of Karl Marx himself) is very useful for the Corporate and Government elite (the two groups are really one group – they are all “educated” managers) as they can smear anyone who opposes their totalitarian plans as “racist”, “sexist”, “Islamophobic”, “homophobic”, “transphobic” and-so-on.
On balance Walter Williams is fortunate to be out of all this – and it is all only going to get worse.
Only today I heard a British government minister say that it was “honourable” to “take the knee” for Marxist BLM – yes he used the word “honourable” not DIShonourable.
All the old lies that Minneapolis is an example of “systemic racism” and so is Britain – so one should literally kneel down and worship a Marxist organisation who organised riots that were an orgy of looting and arson – with some people burned alive. This is “honourable” because it is about opposing “racism” (a LIE) and if, for example, sports fans booed when they watched highly paid “sporting stars” “take the knee” they, the fans, should be condemned.
Who would want to live in a world like this?
bobby b – James Woods is correct.
As for Jeffrey Carter and his plan – well I have got nothing better, so give it a try!
By the way – I hope your sister is recovering.
Beware the “false recovery” – someone seems to be getting better, and then suddenly takes a turn for the worse (which is what happened in the case of Hermon Cain).
The virus is a respiratory one – BUT it can also attack the body generally, including the immune system
This is why EARLY treatment is so vital (and must be seen through – not left off after a couple of days), nothing must be left to fester in the lungs and get into the body generally.
The advice that so many governments (and corporate bodies) have given to avoid early treatment, has led to mass death.
“America will BECOME China”…. Soon you’d wish it would.
America will BECOME Venezuela.
For those unfamiliar with Dr. Williams, this is a good intro to his thinking (his speech starts around 7:30). I can’t speak to his technical economic work, but he was as good as any public speaker I’ve encountered at making succint, logical statements in defense of personal liberty in language that anyone could understand.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?150756-1/liberty-failures-government
Paul Marks – thanks! (And thanks to all the previous well-wishers, too.) Sis is doing fine. Now I test positive. Not sick, just positive. No surprise.
Niall K – cannot disagree with what you said. After four years of fake “he’s not legitimate!”, we’re not going to let go of the fact that we now have an actual illegitimate prez. Georgia is now key, obviously. But even if we lose the Senate, Woods’s remark will rule.
“America will BECOME China”…. Soon you’d wish it would.
America will BECOME Venezuela.
Absolutely. The globalists with their Chinese partners want the US destroyed, not a satellite of the Chinese.
No noticing just how psychopathic that goal is.
Further to my post, an interesting segment from Tucker Carlson, with a video from a Chinese academic openly admitting the Chinese have people at the very top of US society.
https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1336117667015630849
@bobby, thanks for your comforting words and suggestions. And if, by any chance, you read my comments to suggest you are parochial, I certainly did not mean to imply that at all. I find your comments insightful and not at all narrow. I really just meant to say that just because you live in fly over country don’t expect them to let you be. They will come for you eventually. My god you live right near one of the epicenters of chaos yourself. (And if those cops do get off, I think they will burn Minnesota to the ground. You’ll need all those thousand lakes to put out the fires.)
As to your suggestion that I leave IL, I would if I could, but family ties me here for now. And if I left here, why stop in Florida (which would be my next choice of state.) Why not go to Costa Rica or Panama. Even though they both have vast plantations of fruit, they are both far less banana republics than the US has just become.
And to the man in your plan who spoke of fighting back, I’d say two words: “Kyle Rittenhouse”. Never was there a more clear case of self defense than that one, but they will undoubtedly tear him limb from limb. You have a lot more confidence in the criminal justice system than I, and perhaps I should defer to you, but there is a big difference between how big ticket cases like Rittenhouse are handled and how plain old regular murderers and rapists are handled.
As to the plan you mentioned, maybe it will work. But again the power is against them. Refuse to pay your fines and the government will take everything you have, eventually including your freedom. If everyone does it then perhaps they can’t, but the critical mass is high, and I doubt there are enough with the bravery to do it. Mob local council meetings and be labeled White Supremacists, and be vilified and canceled by a monocultured press.
I hope you are right that it can be recovered. But I think when Trump ends up under massive indictment, and eventually ten thousand years in jail, the center of the movement will be gone. And those sixty million will get constant negative press. I think that Trump could lead a movement forward, but it is for that reason that they will just have to go after him. Does anyone know the arrangements for the Secret Service protecting a President in the clink?
I really am trying to find some positive way forward, so I do appreciate your comments. I think the next thing is to see Georgia, and then we will be able to assess going forward. So far the market is doing well, so that is one small positive.
Bobby b, I’m glad she is better and greatly wish you remain so – and my thanks for your kind words about my words.
Jacob and Flubber – yes I agree with both of you, and it is good that Walter Williams does not have to see the country he loved being destroyed.
I also agree with Frasor Orr.
bobby b.
I am glad to know that your sister is on the mend – and I hope it is a real and full recovery.
Watch out for yourself as well Sir – if you develop symptoms, please get medical treatment immediately.
Keep your head down – and the New Order will probably leave you and your family alone.
Oppose them, in any way, and they will destroy you and your family – with sadistic glee.
When I say that the forces of evil have won – I mean that literally.
Agreed, and this is what happens when you turn your schools over to communists.