Once you determine a state’s right to intervene in the internal affairs of other states based on the latter’s domestic social institutions, you’re left wide open to the kinds of liberventionist justifications coming from Tim Starr and his ilk.

Really, this is where the whole post just fails, miserably. You can’t have any meaningful discussion on the subject if you can’t at least define in broad strokes what makes a state legitimate in the first place. If you can’t define that, you can’t possibly define when seceding from a state is justified. And most importantly, you must be much more specific than Koffler was here in describing what “people” you are talking about.

For example, though Koffler studiously evades any attempt to speak explicitly of slavery, we can see that it wasn’t secession, per se, that violated the rights of the slaves. No, their rights were being violated prior to (and continued to be violated in the Union even after) the war began. So it’s less than clear, from this post at least, what about the *secession* violated any person’s rights. And this is directly traceable to the admitted failure to answer the fundamental question involved.

As for the incompatibility of “pointy” and “gunky”, I’m guessing there is generally a less than zero exposure to eastern philosophy? (and from reading Roderick Long, it appears that Aristotlean philosophy can be interpreted in a similar fashion?) Just because there are two concepts that are at some level contradictory does not mean that both can’t be used to describe reality. Or that both aren’t *necessary* to accurately describe reality.

For example, I can claim to be an individualist anarchist and still believe that small groups of like-minded people are the only way to ensure maximum liberty. By seeking to reduce every question to some sort of logically determinative “either/or” solution, libertarians in general leave out the possibility that the real answer is oftentimes “both.”

I don’t know whether the individual really should be considered a unitary entity. It seems a rather Cartesian way of looking at things that have changed with advances in psychology.

One argument for emphasizing the rights of families, states and similar entities is that the individual is rather helpless against the state, but when agglomerated in such a fashion they may better resist it. I’ve been reading some of Burke’s reflections and that was his attitude toward large property holders. Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote about the same sort of thing in On Power. I’m of like mind. I’m not so much in favor of “rights” which I don’t believe in anyway as I am opposed to the state, because it’s big and scary. I talked a bit about that here and several other posts at my blog.

I remember when I hung out more exclusively at right-wing fusionist sites they said it was liberals who had deviated and started believing in collective rights, often but not always in reference to “identity politics”. Will Wilkinson got into a dispute on what’s collectivist vs individualist here.

If there were some way to disagregate the vast majority of non-slave holding citizens in the south from those that were, and allow them to secede, that’d be consistent with the values of the “pointy” freedom advocates. It’d be consistent with Lysander Spooner’s view, for that matter, who held that the secession of the slaves from the slavemasters was paramount.

In the case of the FLDS, let’s imagine for a minute that they want to secede. Unlike slaves, the children of the compound are not literallly owned, at least no more than other kids in the US, as in they are deemed minors and are without the rights of the majority.

I don’t see why that community should be denied that right. Sans actual slavery - physical bondage - there is no (pluralist) liberal/libertarian way, as I see it, to deny them the right to secede.

For people like Wilkinson and what are called rationalist liberals, a “culture of misogyny”, etc. are enough to deny the (or a) right of secession. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Reason magazine has defended the liberating potential of American gangsta rap in Romania! And Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs” are nowhere to be found, as far as I can tell, in the FLDS community. Indeed, the Texas authorities found the female Mormon teenagers to be respectful, conscientious and kind.

There’s been some stellar criticisms of, and historical background to, what happened in Texas over at the blog The Immanent Frame (http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/). Here’s a different take on the issue: Is it “Culture” or “Religion” that is under siege? It makes a difference for Constitutional Scholars:

http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/26/reforming-culture/

Put me in with the pomos on the critique of the arrogance and pretense to knowledge (of “the good life” for every person, everywhere) on the part of the statist secular elite.