I went looking for something by Ben Shapiro that talks about emotional arguments. I think it was in his "How to debate a Liberal" speech, but I can't find the quote I was thinking of. Found these :
Hillory Clinton saying 'here's how you know that I care about you.' I think that people who pretend to care about you are generally the people who want the power to control your life. The only people that I want power in their lives, and they want power in my life, are my immediate family, and that's it. My parents, my siblings, my wife, my children. And they're independant human beings too. 'Caring' is the way that the left controls. They don't come with the jackboots first. They come and they say we care so much about you we have to do these things for you, and by the way we brought some guns to help out.
-- Ben Shapiro,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rQ_mphb7HU @13
Mental Health
When it comes to gun violence there's two problems. There's inner city violence, which is a matter of gang violence and people shooting each other unfortunately because they are involved in gangs, in Chicago and Los Angeles and Washington DC and all the major cities and these are all the heavily gun controlled areas the democratic areas these are the places where people are getting killed en mass. And then you have the mass shooting issue. The mass shooting issue is largely because in the 1960s and 1970s, this is the one area where I think the government should be involved, in the 1960s and 1970s there was a decision that was made basically all across the country to empty out all the mental facilities because there was an idea that went around the country and gained a lot of traction that mental illness was basically One Flew Over The Coo coo's Next. That nobody was actually crazy, everybody was just eccentric. And this is why you have a mass growth in homeless people. In 1960, how many people do you think were in mental institutions in the United states in 1960? Half a million, and we had half the population then. Today there are 25,000 people in mental facilities. So you've got a lot of violent people on the streets. And if you have a lot of violent people on the streets you're going to end up with a lot of mass shootings, and that's why whenever there's a mass shooting almost invariably it's somebody who is crazy and we've known they are crazy. And involuntary commitment laws are really really difficult because you have to show that the person is a threat to themselves or others, as opposed to the old standard which was they are incapable of caring for themselves. One of the big problems with paranoid schizophrenia which has afflicted a lot of these shooters is that you have a condition where you literally can't even recognize that you have a condition, so you won't take your drugs. And when they let you out, you just go off the drugs, and you go right back to doing whatever it was you were doing in the first place. Most of the people who are committing these acts are not on heavy medication. Most of the people who are committing these acts have gone off their medication, and they have significant mental illness, and they need to be medicated. This is an area where the medical health system is dramatically underfunded, the laws are complete ..., when it comes to people who legitimately can not take care of themselves. And I'm speaking as somebody who's grandfather was a schizophrenic, and went into a mental hospital and they gave him lithium, and then he spent the rest of his life as a happy productive human being. These are things that might not have been possible now. This is an area where I think there is a role for the government in this. John Locke would have thought the same. John Locke said this in his writings he said the problem of mental illness is one that falls upon the society as a whole because you have a group of people who can't take care of themselves. That's the real problem with mass shootings. Taking guns away from me, is not going to stop the mass shooter. In fact it's probably going to create more mass shootings because now I can't defend myself.
-- Ben Shapiro,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rQ_mphb7HU @18
What was the American Revolution fought over? What was the general principle of the American Revolution? Were the taxes bad? They weren't bad bad. They had the protection of the greatest empire in the world. What they were upset about was the concept of sovereignty. This is a concept that has bled down to today, and has had serious ramifications throughout American history plus what we do today with regard to government. Sovereignty is not a term that we talk about a lot, but it was conflicting notions of sovereignty that drove the American Revolution. The Brits believed that sovereignty resided in parliament. Sovereignty meaning legitimacy. Sovereignty meaning the ability to make law. They believed that it resided in parliament. That had been a shift from the sixteenth century in Britain and before where sovereignty resided in the King. God appointed the King, and the King had all the sovereignty to make law and govern over people, and that sovereignty could not be removed from him. This was the argument all the way up to the revolution of 1640 and the glorious revolution of 1688. Then there was a shift in Britain and sovereignty now resided in parliament. Parliament was the source of rights, and it could take those rights away. What the American revolution did was it said those rights are not, the king doesn't have the right to govern you, parliament doesn't have the right to govern you, you have the right to govern yourselves via parliament. Which is a very different argument. And so the British had been saying they had the right to legislate for the colonies, and all clauses under the Declaratory Act of 1776, and the American colonies were saying yes sovereignty does reside in parliament, but not regarding internal matters affecting the United States, and later they shifted that to sovereignty doesn't reside in parliament at all with respect to us because 'no taxation without representation'. Sovereignty resides in the people-at-large. Sovereignty resides in us. This is why the Constitution doesn't start "We the State", it starts with "We the People". Popular sovereignty it resides in the people; and the government is an instrument of our will not the other way around. That also meant that if the government violated our rights, if it violated the popular sovereignty, we had a right to remove the government. The British feared, the United States having parliamentary representation, because they were afraid that if there were too many Americans that we would eventually end up ruling the British Empire basically just by voting. There would be more British people in America than in Britain therefore they could just basically vote out any government they want in Britain. They were afraid of that and so they insisted on this parliamentary sovereignty without Americans having a vote, and we said no if you're going to represent us we actually have to have a vote, and Britain wouldn't allow that and that's why there was a revolution.
The problem with popular sovereignty is one it legitimizes, it can be used to, it doesn't have to, but it can be used to legitimize violations of rights. In the 1850s the case for slavery expanding into the western territories pushed by Stephen Douglass who you'll remember if you learn your history from the Lincoln Douglass debate, Stephen A. Douglass was the actual senator who won the senate seat that Lincoln was running for, Stephen A. Douglass who ended up running for president himself, he was a fan of the popular sovereignty theory of the expansion of slavery. What he said was there is a territory out west, and the people out west want to vote to legitimize slavery, that would make it legitimate. That would make it legitimate because popular sovereignty, legitimacy resides in the people and the people can vote for slavery.
What he was neglecting was the Lincoln idea of popular sovereignty, which is more like the Founding idea, which is
popular sovereignty resides in the people but only to the extent they are not violating the God given rights of others. And this is the debate that you see bleeding all the way down to today, because the left seems to suggest that if the people vote for something that makes it ok, that makes it legitimate. It does not make it ok and legitimate. You do not have the right via popular sovereignty to override rights that popular sovereignty was designed in order to protect. The idea of popular sovereignty is that you are the best protector of your own rights, so you should be given the ability to govern the government that governs you. But if the population decides to overthrow the rights of others, popular sovereignty no longer applies. Because the left does not get that you'll see them refer to America as a democracy and not a republic. Because they will suggest that basically whatever the people vote for should be good to go. Anything people vote for should be just fine and that's not a problem at all because of popular sovereignty. They've taken the issue too far. They've taken the same as the French Revolution and that often ends in tyranny, it just ends in tyranny of the majority. The founders opposed that as well, which is why they bothered in setting up these checks and balances. They believed in popular sovereignty, but they believed that a popular sovereignty that was checked by all of the various ambitions of the players so that we could avoid the degradation of popular sovereignty into tyranny itself.
-- Ben Shapiro, Ep. 334 (the end 5 minutes)
(Canada charter
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const//page-15.html )
The social contract, the Lockean bargain. The difference between Locke and Hobbes is Hobbes says you give up all your rights when you move into a governmental system. Locke says you give up none of your rights, you're just delegating the enforcement of your rights to a government. Locke's is a just bargain, because what you're giving up is what you're receiving back. You're giving up the power to enforce those rights to an entity that guarantees it will enforce those rights.
-- Ben Shapiro k0OMtLTGgrc?t=4450
(Several Liberal MPs have expressed Hobbes ideas about rights -- i.e. that rights are granted only by Liberal MPs)
When you are talking about Gun Control, for example, the terms of the debate are not "does the American experience prove guns cause mass homicide". That's actually an irrelevant question. The question is "is anything you have proposed going to fix this even if you think that guns cause homicide." And the answer is "no". There's not a gun control solution that the left has proposed short of us all living in padded cells that will supposedly reverse the amount of mass homicide.
If you're not taking flak you're not above the target.
-- Ben Shapiro, quoting a WWII U.S. Bomber Pilot
