Horizon

Quick, Hide the Soldering Iron!

Michael Covington asks if chemistry will be banned in the United States. As someone who owns his own pH meter, I share his concern. I just hadn't realized that my paranoia about law enforcement thinking my homebrew equipment was a still should have actually been rational worries about them thinking it was a meth lab. Along the way, he posits the following:

We must beware of what I call the anti-freedom principle, best articulated as, "If I don't want to do X then nobody has any business doing X." This is an attitude held by fashionable people who don't realize they're inadequately educated, people who assume that the only worthwhile human activities are those of their own in-crowd. Yuppies, in other words.

I've thought about this pretty often, myself. I've got enough obscure and unhealthy hobbies that it's not rare for me to stumble across someone advocating a ban on one or another of my pastimes. But Covington's point is more broadly applicable, and if you were to ask me about golf or long-distance running, I'm sure I'd be equally uncharitable. Scratch an American and you'll find a Puritan.