http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/g5528/the-24-best-looks-from-game-of-thrones/ …I failed to find the one where that archer is on the cover with a huge train. In red? Different stylist?
4 Likes
I like the shirt, and I also think it’s horrible. Classic is the period before Confucianism, right?
Polity
Flaming arrows return to earth
Faster
5 Likes
13 Likes
That is true, but the argument fails when one considers that the woman is essentially defending herself from another person who is taking literally everything they need to live from her without her permission, and putting her at risk of harm to do so.
This is why I’ve thought for a while that the pro choice crowd should concede the issue of fetal personhood. There are already enough self defense, castle, and stand your ground laws to justify the killing of someone who wants to take something from you against your will- Most of which were strengthened over the last 30 years by the same people who oppose abortion. If really pressured, I’m reasonably certain they would choose their own right to defend their property over the life of a fetus.
3 Likes
Thanks.
Your third para did it for me.
I’d just not come across it as a “public choice theory” and had no exposure to the US historical body of work and debate in that context. Basically, at a high/generic level, it sounds a lot like Thatcherism/Reaganism and everything that followed from it - i.e. “the market is king and government’s job is to get out of the way and let people take direct control of their own money and all personal and social provision, to the extent that we can get away with it (without it being bleedin’ obvious it’s all a scam to line the pockets of what later became called the 1%)”
I need to read more, but thanks for the summary - much appreciated.
4 Likes
Yeah, I actually still think he should apologize. I’m not holding my breath though!
For your request to engage Magness, I have engaged him until he and I both tired of the exchanges. (Although he got back on Twitter yesterday looking for more) IT is all on my blog. Munger I have not addressed because my work right now focuses on the 1950s & early 1960s and Munger has not really addressed that time period.
I think Magness and Munger (and, if I read this correctly you) make a basic historiographical mistake: you put the theory before the historical investigation. Herbert Butterfield called this “The Whig Interpretation of History.”
You find Public Choice theory a good way to advance a better society. You then look to the historical record for evidence to support Public Choice theory and discount any evidence that puts the theory’s originator in a bad light. There is really no reason to do this, yet MacLean’s critics refuse to admit that it was even a POSSIBILITY that Buchanan was wrong about school vouchers and segregation. So Magness trots out Hutt as somehow disproving Buchanan’s actions of six years earlier. Or finds a line or two in Buchanan’s unpublished correspondence from the 1940s or the 1970s as if they shed light on the issue of school vouchers and segregation in 1959.Or, my personal favorite, that the footnote in the dissertation that the article she uses as a source gets a citation wrong. MacLean, he admits, gets the citation right, but his headline blares “The National Book Award nominee was based on a typo!” Really, these are the desperate depths he’s going to now. That a single error in source she cites, which SHE CORRECTS, shows her book was “based on a typo.”
Folks predisposed to embrace a theory-first version of history may be impressed, but historians are not. I will note that, Magness excepted, most of her critics are economists or public choice theorists, or political scientists, not historians. Meaning they want to save the theory and think the theory itself can disprove the historical account she presents. I don’t think so.
3 Likes
When Emma Goldman was about, ‘Libertarian’ was roughly analogous to ‘Anarchist’ in terms of the ideology described - even ‘Left-Anarchist’. At some point the term crossed the floor.
8 Likes
I came to see libertarians as anarchists who refuse to put any thoughts into the workings of power and authority.
5 Likes
But seriously, your assumption is that the pro-lifers (as a whole, which may not speak for individuals) are arguing from a coherent world view in relation to abortion, or that the goal is ending abortion. It’s not really that, it’s more about keeping women in check and making sure we can’t exercise control over our bodies.
And plenty of pro-lifers have changed their mind with certain circumstances, some of which I’m sympathetic to, some I’m not. They don’t want to extend that ability to make choices to all women.
18 Likes
They don’t believe power and authority exists - they literally think they/we are free from all forms of external pressures/authority, entirely autonomous beings with complete agency to build up our own wealth/independence.
8 Likes
This reminds me of a species of demons I played with imagining, that are totally unable to trust anyone. As a result, the only ways to get one to do something are coercion and magically-enforced contracts. They make me think of libertarians.
6 Likes
LOL, this thread explains so much about this place.
At the very least, if nobody got anything else from the linked piece, it reinforces the fact that neoliberalism isn’t just when liberals do something that disappoints you, it’s a distinct ideology that just happened to be concerned about state power at the same time colonialism reaches it’s high-water mark and begins to recede. Just like dudes just happened to start flying the confederate battle flag post-Brown.
1 Like
I highly doubt that most people who frequent this place confuse political liberalism with the various forms of economic liberalism (e.g. classical or neo-), except perhaps for the apologists for the Third Way Dem establishment.
7 Likes
Easy answer;
You first, comrade.
Considering that pregnancy is a life changing condition that you personally will never have to endure firsthand, it’s fair to say that your opinion is highly irrelevant to those of us who possess the ability to become pregnant.
(I know by this point your comments have been eaten and the account you started in order to trolley has probably been nuked, but nevertheless I still needed to get that off my chest.)
Preach.
Self sovereignty is a much better term for conveying agency over one’s own life, as it doesn’t imply ‘chattel ownership.’
13 Likes
Agreed and agreed. In a proper world one has absolute control of one’s body, one’s labor and one’s time. But when “self-ownership” is invoked, here come the property rights and the valuations that come with ownership and the comparisons that come with the valuations. Self-owned A may be worth more than self-owned B, so fuck B re: health care, war, sexual abuse, u.s.w.
14 Likes
Add anti-LGBT to that list. I speak as someone who’s a former ancap and noticed how often other ancaps would justify anti-LGBT nonsense on the grounds of “property rights” or that LGBT people on the whole are magically are lazy or have “higher time preferences” or somesuch nonsense that basically reads being LGBT is a moral failing.
12 Likes
I agree that their motive is more about puritanical control over people than it is about babies.
My main argument is basically strategic: It’s not really about what they believe, so much as laws on the books with legal precedents behind them, and putting them in a position where pursuing their agenda would require them to make sacrifices they aren’t willing to make.
Basically, I just think that in a moral, legal, and optical sense, “this isn’t a person” is a less defensible position than “this person has no more or less rights than I do”.
2 Likes
The babies part is still important to many of them, though: the religious fundies and ethnic supremacists see procreation as a front in their demographic wars.
10 Likes
The courts are part of democracy, not a limitation on it.
11 Likes
Thank you. An independent judiciary is indeed a core institution of liberal democracy, but I’m not sure if this person understands that the U.S. is a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy.
6 Likes
