Who Were the Sea Peoples?

It is puzzling that so many libertarian thinkers get so worked up if you suggest the obvious fact that abortion is, you know, killing, and that the fetus has not been liberated from anything but life. (There are, of course, refreshing exceptions to this rule.) The reason, I believe, is the issue of obligation: If abortion really is wrong, that implies that one could have an obligation to care for one of one's fellow beings into which one has not voluntarily contracted. Denying that any such obligation can exist is part of establishing the reign of the ego over reality, of the ego installing itself as Supreme Being. Yes, the libertarian ego realizes it must compromise with other egos that occupy bodies out and walking around in the world, since they might have guns and could kill one. But fetuses can't kill you! If they become a barrier to the ego's desires they can be chopped up at your pleasure.

James Kalb describes why political action can't get us out .

Sheldon Richman blogs about the good version of individualism . So good that there is no reason to call it individualism! 'Human agency and social structure then presuppose each other. Neither can be reduced to, identified with, or explained completely in terms of the other, for each requires the other.' -- Tony Lawson 'Let us take a man, an Englishman as he is now, and try to point out that, apart from what he has in common with others, apart from his sameness with others, he is not an Englishman—nor a man at all; that if you take him as something by himself, he is not what he is… What we mean to say is that he is what he is because he is a born and educated social being, and a member of an individual social organism, that if you make abstraction from all this which is the same in him as in others what you have left is not an Englishman nor a man, but some, I know not what, residuum which never has existed by itself and does not so exist.' -- F.H. Bradley

So, what does an ideologue make of an experiment that shows how little we still know about the atmosphere ? Well, it's conclusive evidence that AGW is a hoax, of course!

"I know that uncertainty about future tax rates was as great in 2006, when the unemployment rate was 4.5%, as it is today when unemployment is 9%. So was uncertainty about what the government was going to do to solve its long-run health-care spending problems, deal with global warming, deal with dependence on foreign energy sources, and regulate finance. Yet--as Allan Meltzer surely knows--investors weren't holding cash in 2006." -- Brad Delong

it turns out, preceded commodity currency ! Well, there goes The Theory of Money and Credit out the window*. ( Hat tip to Jim Henley . [Jim, let's see how many layers deep we can drive this cross-linkfest!]) * -- I hope it is obvious that I am being facetious -- there is valuable information left in that book that is not overturned by these findings. But clearly, the regression theorem is kaput. That is simply not what happened. It turns out a priorism is not a good way to do history!

"Members admitted to a community at birth cannot be given a free choice of their premises; they have to be educated in some terms or other, without consultation of any preference of their own." -- Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society , p. 72 "E, veramente, se in qualche modo non si sapesse che cosa essa è, non si potrebbe neppure muovere quella domanda, perché ogni domanda importa una certa notizia della cosa di cui si domanda, designata nella domanda, e perciò qualificata e conosciuta." -- Benedetto Croce, Breviario di estetica