Fred Pohl two years ago: None of the four leading Republican presidential candidates is acceptable, because none has a plan to deal with global warming. Obama “is the only remaining hope we have”; he has no plan either, “but his options are still open.”
Roderick Long defines right-conflationism as defending existing economic structures as if they were outcomes of a genuinely free market (what Kevin Carson calls vulgar libertarianism), and left-conflationism as using those outcomes to attack the concept of free markets. I hope my paraphrasing doesn’t offend either of them.
Left-conflationism asks us to believe that Big Business, through its corrupt control of legislatures, prevents political interference in the market and goes no further; that mere market freedom allows it to loot us so thoroughly that it does not seek subsidies or protection from competition.
Peter Ludlow (linked from Reason):
The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”
(I haven’t found a more direct source for Bolton’s remarks.) If Snowden had instead sold his info to a rival state, at least he’d be keeping it in the family, as it were, rather than giving it indiscriminately to people who have never taken a government paycheck nor come anywhere near Yale; and it wouldn’t be the great sin of acting on his own initiative.
Later: Rather than go public on his own, Snowden shoulda given the files to 299,999,999 other Americans and let them vote on whether or not to publish.
I posted this, which is mostly a condensation and paraphrase of part of Roderick Long’s zaxlebax speech.
Except for the chicken part.
Do we not continually hear them quote Blackstone’s assertion that “no subject of England can be constrained to pay any aids or taxes even for the defence of the realm or the support of government, but such as are imposed by his own consent, or that of his representative in parliament?” And what does this mean? In affirming that a man may not be taxed unless he has directly or indirectly given his consent, it affirms that he may refuse to be so taxed; and to refuse to be taxed is to cut all connection with the state. Perhaps it will be said that this consent is not a specific, but a general one, and that the citizen is understood to have assented to everything his representative may do when he voted for him. But suppose he did not vote for him, and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected someone holding opposite views – what then? The reply will probably be that, by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority. And how if he did not vote at all? Why, then he cannot justly complain of any tax, seeing that he made no protest against its imposition. So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted – whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine, this. —Herbert Spencer: Social Statics
When did this happen? Mary Ruwart has webbed the first edition of Healing Our World.
For the individualist, half of human decency in political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight.
Found by some indirect chain of links from Roderick Long’s blog.