Friends, Romans, Countrymen

Ending the night with the Macallan 12 (even if it turns out I like the Auchentoshan best and still have a touch of it in the beaker left to go... and more than twice that left of the Ardbeg when I wish it was the other way around!).

Meaning of this last post is that these little beakers are all tagged 'Whisky 1-4' but I'm clearly missing Whisky 3. I do actually remember polishing off Whisky 3 but don't remember what it was and what the heck I did with the beaker. I am 100% sure I kept the beaker as I know how I work but where can I find it now? Have not the foggiest!

And, yet, and yet, just like in Post 1 where I had a Surprise Brainwave about what I was originally planning to write about I had a Surprise Brainwave it may be in the baking cupboard and so it was. The 'Whisky 3' I don't get to drink tonight was the Aberlour 12.

Alright, but enough about whiskey -- back to the burning of monuments!

The problem with remembering what you wanted to talk about not too long before your usual bedtime is that you won't then have had the prep time you really need to do such a thing well. In this case the prep time I could have done with would have been The Pulling of the Relevant Quotes from This Damn Book. I've now got This Damn Book in front of me and we'll see how I get along with finding even Thing One to quote from it at this point given that I've not marked the thing up at all.

Luckily one of the Adam Smith quotes I remember well enough to pull it with a bit of Googling rather than through digging:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

Unfortunately for me I didn't remember the specific 'so far as it is instituted' bit and so had to go digging for it anyway where I find O'Rourke had irritatingly elided it out. To side note a bit from burning monuments, this is exactly the problem with reading this style of book: you're trying to get a quick sense of it and yet you can hardly get any solid sense at all as it's been cut to ribbons to make 'witty' [pointless] points.

Alright, so since he's not very useful for Smith at all let's just pivot and see if he's any use in and of himself:

"After 230-odd years of experience we still don't know much about democracy. We have discovered that it works. If you compare the countries that have the greatest degree of democracy with the countries that have the greatest degree of other things we prize, they are the same countries. But an examination of any democratically elected government leads to deep puzzlement about why democracy works. And every democratic election produces a dismal display of how democracy works. Maybe we the people, with all our idiocies, cancel each other out. Maybe politically empowered people are different from other pests and predators--the only thing worse than a lot of them is a few."

Does his country have the greatest supply of monuments you should make sure to save from burning over Some Person?

The thing that most struck me when I read that quote is that it feels like democracy works is because, at its best, it is the system that most wants people to be the most people-ly they can be on the biggest scale. This is why I think there's a common experience of first learning that 'we the people' or 'all people are created equal' (or 'demos' means 'people' but not actually all of them, hardly any at all, really at its emergence) when the legal definition of who those people was quite restrictive caused a severe bristling of 'how/why did they say people when they didn't actually mean all people??' I'd say the more people who have become eligible to become people the better things have generally gotten and produced 'the greatest degree of other things we prize'. And yet there are others who'd track along with how Adam Smith is represented in this book and say that actually more people have gotten to become people the better the economy goes as now we can afford for more people to be people, so hooray for Economic Success.

And yet, one way or the other: whether caused by an expanded intrinsic understanding that all people should get to be people or caused by A Successful Economy the fact is that if at any point we're shrinking our definition of who people are it is the lead indicator that we are failing.

Last year I did Nice Tea Writing Night as I was a guest in a house for cat sitting but tonight I'm back at home with the quit-gift scotch glasses first referenced in 2023 but instead of the quit-gift Cragganmore I've got the last of my Covid Birthday Scotch (that being the scotch that was shipped to me in the mail for a 2021 Virtual Scotch Tasting since IRL Scotch Tastings were not A Thing in January 2021). Starting with a 10 year old Ardbeg, which is either my favourite or my least favourite as there's more of it left than anything else.

Can confirm by first sip it ain't 'cause it's my favourite but it also ain't bad, so off we go.

To my profound frustration there was something I was planning to write about tonight that I can't for the life of me remember. It was something that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I now wish I'd made an Actual Note on instead of a Mental Note. To be fair, my Mental Notes for things like this usually don't fail me so new note made that this is now A Thing.

Since it's the day after Halloween the local Pumpkin Parade is on so I popped by it taking the long way 'round to the grocery store as they were missing 3 key things I wanted last time I was in (thankfully all 3 were there this time). For those not in the know a Pumpkin Parade is way to squeeze one more day of value out of your carving by bringing it to hang out on display in one place (in this case, the local park) so folks can conveniently pop by and check 'em all out without wandering the whole 'hood. There's always a bunch of classics and usually one standout pop culture offering (closest to that this year was a death star). This year really seemed to be the year of The Interesting Scary Face more than anything else.

I'd hoped the extra long walk would shake whatever the idea was loose but I think in that sort of slippery way where you're trying to get at a tip-of-the-tongue-word the more attention you give it the more it slips away.

Happily, even as I was writing that paragraph about mental notes I finally got a little flicker of remembrance and am now pretty sure that what I wanted to write had its roots in this: ""You must understand the weird logic of the left. To them life is priceless and should always be prioritised over property. They would literally let the statue of Liberty burn to save one person."

I was almost certainly thinking of this 2019 Post of Questionable Linage a couple of weeks ago as I have the ongoing misfortune, at present, of reading PJ O'Rourke on the Wealth of Nations.

How does anyone misfortunately read such a book? Well, first you pluck it off the street outside a bookstore with a heap of other books that look interesting and are clearly destined for the trash and then you take it home, forget about it for years on end, and only years later take it down to read it on your daily commute and think to yourself before you get started, "wait... isn't this guy a well known fuckhead?"

Before we get to anything about burning copper-clad statues and fuckheads, let's first do a bit more meandering in NaDruWriNi Post #2.