4 Aug 21
“A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum will convince you that ‘faith’ proves nothing.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Extremists” to the rescue!
In promoting the concept of hot ranges, I often put it this way:
“Range Safety” is correctly defined as, “Those reasonable precautions we take to reduce risk, while never losing sight of training objectives, never forgetting the purpose of our training”
Many however, wrongly define “Range Safety” like this:
“A maniacal preoccupation with the utter eradication of all risk, to the point where training objectives are forgotten entirely!”
Hot ranges have become “mainstream,” mostly due to the efforts of courageous “extremists,” who bravely promoted and practiced this advancement, at great personal risk. In the process, we were called “unsafe,” “radical,” et al, much as Second Amendment defenders are today called “racists” and “fascists”
Among shallow politicians there is routine condemnation of “extremists,” those audacious few who dare question leftist political orthodoxy, the Marxist “religion.”
We’re assured that our society, including our military culture, must purge itself of all such “extremists,” lest they deceive the masses with “misinformation!”
Leftists love to talk about “diversity,” that is in everything but opinion! To leftists, it is unconditional conformity of thought that they forcefully impose upon all, first with slurs and threats, eventually with gulags and gas chambers!
Yet, over the last 6k years virtually all human progress has happened as the result of “extremists” fearlessly discovering truth, and then pointing the way to the future. All of history’s heroes, from Moses, to Columbus, to George Washington, were called “extremists” in their day!
In America, we have a First Amendment in place, just to insure that “extremists” are not routinely silenced and then squashed by comfortable politicians. We also have a Second Amendment, to insure the First is not regarded as just a scrap of paper, by those same politicians!
It is thus not surprising that comfortable politicians are unhappy with both, as we see!
“The secret for harvesting from your existence the greatest fruitfulness, the greatest atonement, is to live dangerously!
Build cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!
Send ships into uncharted seas!
Fred Nietzsche, again
/John
