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.

I’m like you. I’m essentially one of those libertarian natural rights types. I don’t think rights - most certainly “negative”, but “positive” too (as in the ability to actually do stuff) - are something that only come into existence with a territorial monopolist on violence.

But for the purposes of this blog, and of engaging with society at large - period - the claim that it is illegitimate to assume, as a starting point, the idea that rights are something state-delivered begs the question for those not fully on board with libertarianism to begin with. Hell, that would even include the majority of libertarians, who are after all minarchists. Even for them, the basic right to life, liberty and (property!) happiness is something that begins with the state’s ability to “guarantee” this most negative, classical liberal notion of rights.

To get rather Habermasian for a moment, what this blog represents is an ongoing discussion, a forum for argumentation and deliberation. The argument you make is akin to saying “Stop! I don’t accept the premise that “we” have a right to sit around debating about what our rights are. Libertarianism precludes this.”
That gets us nowhere. (And by the way, Habermas’s Argumentation Ethics is remarkably libertarian if you think about it. How can one hear all sides of an issue and come to an informed conclusion if we’re threatening one another and batting each other over the head!?)

For many on this blog, the state is just that entity that can allow us to peacefully interact to begin with, to hash out just what is valuable about “libertarianism”, “liberalism”, etc. To assume away the legitimacy of the state’s deliverance of rights is a non-starter.

It would be wise to consider this group’s outrage with a truckload of salt.

I think there’s a third possibility of what’s going on here: Hitchens notices that the neo-imperialist ship is sinking & is trying to separate himself from it somehow, but he’s so used to them by now that he can’t bring himself to move more than a millimeter, when he really needs to run a mile. The neos rationalize torture by way of redefinition and/or “but these are EVIL PEOPLE!” talk, and this stunt is his sheepish attempt to disagree without telling the neos what they REALLY need to hear: “If you’re supposed to be such big freedom fighters then how the fuck is this kind of conduct compatible?”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, due to reading the fever swamp that is Malkin commenters, my eyes have a date w/ a bottle of bleach. I mean godDAMN, I’ve scrolled half that fucking page & only seen two comments by anyone that sounded remotely human!

However, the other direction is harder, because there’s no immediate way for a classical mathematician to distinguish between truth and not-not-truth. Goedel showed how to translate intuitionistic logic into classical logic with the aid of a provability modality, but that’s strong medicine. (If you’ve got something equivalent to arithmetic, such as sets or higher-order quantification, you can code up a provability modality using a Goedel numbering, which is one way of seeing why Heyting and Peano arithmetic are equiconsistent.)

In managing this conflict between individual and state prerogative, the state will always tend to favor a more granular, one-ist approach, because it’s more bureaucratically manageable to think of rights in terms of fungible units. The great delusion is to think authorities are capable of defending rights above and beyond their own authoritarian interests. Whenever the state protects rights, it does so primarily as a means to the maintenance of its own power and legitimacy. Rights are the stunted language used by statists to talk about freedom without getting all carried away.

As a libertarian, I’m starting to wonder whether talk of “rights” isn’t conceding too much to the authoritarians in the first place, since it accepts the proposition that our liberty can be divvied up into any sort of system whatsoever. At least we should understand that rights articulate individual interests within the context of state prerogative - they aren’t designed to protect our liberty so much as to organize it for bureaucratic interests. Hopefully, we will someday realize that living holistic, integrated lives means going outside the structured, static bounds of social permission set down by the state.

I’ve encountered arguments against decentralism by liberal Democrats claiming that the elimination of racial injustice was possible only because of a “progressive” national government imposing its will on the south. Nothing could be further from the truth. The national government was pro-slavey and dominated by the Democratic Party through 1860. The enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scot decision, the suppression of abolitionist speech in Congress and abolitionist literature in the U.S. mail reflected the federal political climate in the 1850s.

And what brought that to an end was not the triumph of a progressive anti-slavery majority in the federal government. It was, rather, entirely a fluke: the disintegration of the ruling Democratic party. And the Democrats came apart at the seams as the result of a feud over whether the party should be rabidly racist, or only moderately racist. Had the racist majority that dominated the national government not been divided against itself, the anti-slavery Republicans would have been another footnote in history.

John Rosenberg defends Helms’ most notorious ad here.

I hear that Helms became pals with Bono late in his career, which just makes me dislike him more.

“Kristol, on the other hand, is trying to reframe the debate to obscure its ramifications for his ideology in case McCain loses. ”

Absolutely. And as a Republican who was against the war from the start, and will voting for Obama, I’m looking forward with relish to the November disaster and the civil war within the Party. The neocon bubble is about to burst, assuredly as the bubble in oil prices eventually will. (As an aside, when did everyone become oil analysts/futures traders all of a sudden?)

Those of us who are conservatives in the Party (paleo is a redundant suffix) understand the neocons are to blame for the disaster. We know that unless we wish to resign ourselves to permanent minority status, we will need to refashion a new conservative platform. The old debates and factions are exactly that–old.

Consider several points. (I’m willing to concede I don’t know anything, because, well, I don’t.)

(a) anti-Semitism - growing in Europe, growing in America, a dishonorable, powerful, useful stimulant, especially if the populist backlash against Bush’s incompetence continues to grow. Never to be discounted, unfortunately. But politics can be a dirty business, and, well, the stakes are high.

(b) the Wall Street crowd (Northeastern Republicans, Ivy elitists, Rockefeller blah blah blah ) - many of us voting for Obama, can personally attest to this one. I had hoped that the O man would disappoint many liberals and the shrieking left and pleasantly surprise Republicans. He has and will continue to, except on taxes, but we can’t win them all.

(c) populist backlash ties nicely in with nativism, isolationism, American-firsterism (terrible coinage, sorry). This is not necessarily, or at least, does not have to be, anti-corporate.

“It will continue to be at a disadvantage in intra-party disputes on practically any topic, including foreign affairs, war and internal security prerogatives.”

Wishful thinking, sorry.

Corporations will adjust to the situation at hand to make money. High tariffs, high oil prices, weak dollar is starting to mean more manufacturing in the US. Whatever the political situation, the American capitalist will find a way to succeed. That’s his genius and where he gets his power.

(d) The evangelical movement is changing. Greater Israel, global conflict with “Islamo-fascism” whatever is old news. Evangelicals for Human Rights conference on torture the weekend of Sept. 11 this year–that’s the future.

(e) The active and excited base of the Party is Ron Paul’s coalition. There are problems with Paul and the coalition, but these are our Deaniacs–young, passionate, anti-war, anti-abortion, religious, but interested less in cultural issues than things like AIDS, poverty, etc etc. It’s natural for the young to be idealistic, of course, and pro pot smoking, and there aren’t enough of them yet to cobble together a majority, but the change is starting. It’s generational.

The Republican Party kindly asks the neo-Trotskyites go back to the Communist Party where they belong. They’ve done enough damage to the cause of conservatism. They were useful for their time, of course, but, well, things change. (Haven’t you heard?) Thanks for the memories. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

But it’s true that given the relative inelasticity of the demand for the commodity called gasoline, combined with the world demand for it, consumption and price patterns wouldn’t exactly track each other as nimbly as do other products.

1) The stock market (adjusted for interest rates) gives us some idea of national assets. Of course it is influenced by speculation, limited inclusion, and mass-delusion, but it should generally be based on our best guess of the future productivity of the assets involved, so it’s a reasonable estimate of the value of national assets.

2) Sure the “broken window” phenomenon might produce a temporary boost to GDP, but it can’t produced a sustained increase in GDP…so year over year increases in GDP can be taken a sign of real growth.

With that being said, I think the fatal weakness of GDP is its failure to account for non-monetarized factors in our life. Still, other measures (e.g. productivity per hour of work) may help to account for things like that.

Negatives can render meanings ambiguous — particularly when convention dictates an ambiguous scope (like with a ‘not’ placed in front of an infinitive to avoid infinitive splitting) — but that’s a problem with negatives (in English) generally and not with n-tuples of negatives in any exceptional way.

I’ve found Kevin’s “political program” to be very helpful in explaining alternative economics to different kinds of radicals and to “normal” people alike. It outlines a concrete agenda with specific policy proposals related to real world issues. It’s not just a lot of abstract theoretical stuff that sounds weird to most people.

So when people ask, “Okay, when we throw the bums out and shoot the bastards and all that, what are we going to do for an economy?” I’ll respond, “How ’bout this?” and show them Kevin’s “political program”.

Working it out in practice doesn’t necessarily mean *blindly* working it out in practice. I think there is an excellent case to be made for the starting assumption that dismantling subsidies to centralization will result in a better world. And working from a position of confidence in one’s starting assumptions doesn’t require recklessness or unwillingness to learn from experience on the way. What alternative is there but to work things out in practice, other than imposing a doctrinaire template on the world?

Much better is the Gun Owners of America (more like the Constitution Party, paleocons or the more moderate militia groups) and even better still is the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership).

I’m with Natasha on this one. Disarm the Republicans, arm the underclass.

The irony is that a common argument by gun rights supporters is that gun control prevents law abiding people from having guns. In the context of an ethical legal regime, that might have some validity.

In the context of actually existing legal regimes, I don’t care if outlaws have guns. Prostitutes, illicit drug users, and other targeted groups need protection.

“Jim, I understand you were once a supporter of carbon taxes?”
“Look, I was never not a supporter of carbon taxes!”

Was he, or not?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e51JnJPPY0E

Check it out.

I’m also very interested in how we go about balancing these competing preferences going forward in the decision making apparatuses of our organizations. In fact, I attended a talk about just this issue. It’s a sticky one - how do we build a powerful mass movement that respects bottom-up control and that can acknowledge missteps and keep people engaged in the long term goal? I don’t think anybody has a real convincing solution to that - we’re just going to have to see what works in practice, I suppose.

The tip-off that Politico is just a “promote Romney” piece is that it mentions EVERY NAME in the next two tiers of Veep prospects EXCEPT SARAH PALIN!!! — even names far more unlikely than Palin (since Romney camp knows Palin is the ONLY ONE who tops — I’ll say tops by far — Romney as McCain’s best pick).

Bottom line, Romney and Politico fear Palin most — as do the Dems and the MSM. (By the way, the Dems and MSM do not fear Romney the most — which says a lot.)

AOL, a main on-line pro-Obama/pro-Dem player, is now carrying the Politico piece promoting Romney buzz.

Clearly AOL wants McCain and the GOP to lose the general elction — hence they gladly promote Romney (no mention of Palin).

Also, CNN had Romney — kind of out of the blue — attacking Obama. Again, CNN, wanting McCain and the GOP to lose, gladly promotes Romney (to attempt to avert the Palin threat).

All the media frenzy which will surround the remarkable Palin “story” — essentially free to McCain — will be worth millions and millions of dollars of coverage and PR (more money than Romney would provide anyway).

Uh… Can’t it be both?
/family guy

The way I see it, changing things from the bottom up includes both counter-institution building, and political action to dismantle the state. In doing the latter, we have to start from where we are now and select priorities for what targets to go after first. And in so doing, our ordering of targets necessarily reflects our best assessment of how to minimize the pain as much as possible. The idea is to remove the subsidies to centralism so that the present system can be supplanted by a decentralized market order, but in such a way that it doesn’t 1) follow neoliberal priorities of removing the restraints on the big people and leaving the little people to be screwed, or 2) result in a total clusterfuck through sudden catastrophic collapse.

But what it comes down to, at bottom, is first of all that there’s a cost to doing nothing, as you’ve pointed out elsewhere; and second, if we do anything at all it requires some use of judgment that may be wrong.