THERE IS NO EASY OUT | 2003-06-07
The world would be a safe and easy place if all we had to do was compromise.
Freedom and safety would be easy if the Truth were in the middle of the road.
It isn't.
Freedom and safety require just as much intolerance as tolerance.
Yes, intolerance is very dangerous. But you cannot do the right thing by an endless series of compromises. Some things are true and some things are false. Some things work and some things do not work.
What people call political Moderation is a good example. Moderation is a compromise between liberal policies which are always disastrous and simple political sanity. But in the real world a compromise between sanity and insanity is still simply insane.
As long as we remain committed to the nostrum of compromise what we do will not work. That's where Vietnam came from. That's where Somalia came from.
Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing you always do and expecting different results this time. Another name for that is Moderation.