Hey, Progressives...

By -
are you a little bothered by Obama ordering hits on US citizens, and that, as Greenwald notes, "not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality"?

Comments

  1. Jim12:20 AM

    No. I'm a LOT bothered.

    ReplyDelete
  2. steve3:55 PM

    Yeah, but in an ancap land, a ceo of a private company would put hits out on civilians. So by your logic, its no biggie that Obama has that power.

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah5:12 PM

    "So by your logic..."

    I don't understand your use of the word "logic" here. I never proposed any syllogism of the form, "If A does X, then it's OK if B does X."

    But, in any case, private organizations do that all the time, right now. Perhaps you've never heard of the Mafia, or drug cartels?

    ReplyDelete
  4. steve11:33 AM

    "But, in any case, private organizations do that all the time, right now. Perhaps you've never heard of the Mafia, or drug cartels?"

    Right! Your blog has the same answer to every libertarian critique of the state. Just post some abuse in the private sector as the justification for an abuse in the public sector.

    ReplyDelete
  5. gcallah11:44 AM

    Steve, your complaint might make a wee bit of sense if, in the post you are commenting on, I was "justifying" "an abuse in the public sector."

    But Steve, you might notice I was protesting an abuse in the public sector, not justifying one. So your post makes no sense whatsoever.

    Are you sure it's not you who has the same answer to every critique of libertarianism?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more

Against their will / we were taxing against their will / we were young and we were strong and we were taxing against their will

By -
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Read more