absolutely loves to go over the top throwing around terms like "evil" and "heroic." (They even called ME heroic once or twice!) But they're really outdone themselves this time, as Daniel Kuehn notes.
The title by itself is not really a big deal; severed from anything else, it reads like comic exaggeration. Unfortunately, the contents of the post make it clear that Tucker was not in a particularly jocular mood.
Within "free"-market circles, the set-piece affixing of the "heroic" tag to the entrepreneur/tycoon as an ideal type has long amused me. Two aspects stand out here.
1. It's not enough, apparently, to defend the liberties and acquired wealth of businessfolk against their denigration by coercive utopians or the envious. We have to hoist them atop our shoulders and make parade floats of them as well.
2. Such admiration is due them as a pure function of their role within the black-and-white laissez-faire morality play, regardless of the actual cultural/moral content of the goods and services he has sold, toward which as presumably "value-free" social "scientists" we are under strict doctorate's orders to remain silent in purest agnostic indifference.
Until such time, that is, that the formerly *wertfrei* paleolibertarian/Objectivist pauses for a breath...asks "what's that on your shirt?"...changes out of his clinician's hat in the blink of an eye...and launches into a doctrinaire Capitalist Realism lecture on the superior manliness in the defense of Western civilization inhering in, e.g., wool suits, bow ties, .45 caliber penis extensions, Modernist architecture, factory smoke, cigars and whichever brand of distilled spirits are most correct to decant this month, bloody steaks and great car-tipping Flintstones racks of ribs...
It helps, of course, if your motivations in such phenomenological modes are pure, i.e., born of siege-minded culture-warrior resentment rooted in poor toilet training, and above all a desire to piss off "liberals" or "The Left", two mythic phyla the rumors of whose existence I have read much in the Annals of Psychopathia Libertarianis...
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...
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...
The title by itself is not really a big deal; severed from anything else, it reads like comic exaggeration. Unfortunately, the contents of the post make it clear that Tucker was not in a particularly jocular mood.
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ReplyDeleteRe "heroic" ascriptions:
ReplyDeleteWithin "free"-market circles, the set-piece affixing of the "heroic" tag to the entrepreneur/tycoon as an ideal type has long amused me. Two aspects stand out here.
1. It's not enough, apparently, to defend the liberties and acquired wealth of businessfolk against their denigration by coercive utopians or the envious. We have to hoist them atop our shoulders and make parade floats of them as well.
2. Such admiration is due them as a pure function of their role within the black-and-white laissez-faire morality play, regardless of the actual cultural/moral content of the goods and services he has sold, toward which as presumably "value-free" social "scientists" we are under strict doctorate's orders to remain silent in purest agnostic indifference.
Until such time, that is, that the formerly *wertfrei* paleolibertarian/Objectivist pauses for a breath...asks "what's that on your shirt?"...changes out of his clinician's hat in the blink of an eye...and launches into a doctrinaire Capitalist Realism lecture on the superior manliness in the defense of Western civilization inhering in, e.g., wool suits, bow ties, .45 caliber penis extensions, Modernist architecture, factory smoke, cigars and whichever brand of distilled spirits are most correct to decant this month, bloody steaks and great car-tipping Flintstones racks of ribs...
It helps, of course, if your motivations in such phenomenological modes are pure, i.e., born of siege-minded culture-warrior resentment rooted in poor toilet training, and above all a desire to piss off "liberals" or "The Left", two mythic phyla the rumors of whose existence I have read much in the Annals of Psychopathia Libertarianis...
Huh? PSH says that "unfortunately" Tucker was not in a jocular mood. How is your comment that "all is well" in agreement with that?
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