That's what the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, comfortably ensconced at Harvard, says. He is borrowing the term from a dystopian novel by Veronica Roth which visualizes a future society torn into rigidly separated sorts of humans by rather obscure terminology (it's sort of like the the Sunni-Shia division in Islam expanded into a five-way split):
Abnegation, for the selfless;
Amity, for the peaceful;
Candor, for the honest;
Dauntless, for the brave;
Erudite, for the intellectual
For the record, Roth deems herself a Christian and her protagonist is born of the Abnegation class, seemingly headed for the Dauntless class, but societal test scores indicate that she is not pure but combines the attributes of the Abnegation, Dauntless and Erudition class, which is heresy and can lead to death.
Ferguson is in love with the Dauntless class and with America as exemplifying that class. I'll bet he sings the Star Bangled Banner with great fervor.
I take issue. America the Dauntless ... PTAH!
A nation so quivering in fright that everyone must pack a pistol to protect themselves?
From f*ing what? I say.
Shadows in the night. F*ing weapons of mass destruction that were not found in Iraq.
We are a cowardly nation subject to repeated panic attacks: ebola, Benghazi, God knows wot!
And, in Roth's view, people who think too much, intellectuals, the Erudites, appear to be the villains.
The bashing continues below:
Niall Ferguson, recently pilloried for his take on Obama:
Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
Paul Krugman and others take issue with Ferguson and his statement that ACA increases the nation's deficit and that Obama is directly responsible for China's economic growth:
This is not exactly true. Although roughly half of Americans do not pay federal income taxes, most of them still pay some combination of payroll taxes, state taxes, local taxes and sales taxes, according to the Washington Post.
Ferguson's story also included a chart that seemed to blame Obama for letting the U.S. economy lose ground to China's. The chart shows China's GDP as projected to surpass U.S. GDP in 2017, a projection whose inclusion Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal and Slate's Matt Yglesias called unfair. Yglesias wrote: "Ferguson is implicitly making two points with this graphic and it's difficult to know which of them is more absurd -- the idea that Obama is responsible for rapid economic growth in China or the idea that if he were responsible that would be blameworthy."
In the meantime, we are utterly besotted with guns as the only thing that can possibly protect us.
Like a gun protected that young woman in Idaho whose two-year-old son unwittingly killed her with her own pistol. Or, the fear-filled mother of Adam Lanza whose utterly witless fear led to her death and the deaths of 26 others through the astounding array of armaments and ammunition she stupidly amassed for protection.
Courage is facing down the world without a gun. There don't seem to be many courageous people in America. Look at how many guns we have!