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

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
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