Great Hillary speech

Yes, it was substantive and, yes, it was political.

It was a strong defense of internationalism and a warning of the perils of Il Duce's America First Buchananism, both implicitly and explicitly rejecting the core isolationist idea shared by paleocons and libertarians alike that American commitment to collective security is some sort of unnecessary global altruism.

Later today, Trump spoke at a rally, and outside people carrying signs equating Hillary and Trump as stooges for corporate America and calling for socialism and political revolution physically attacked and severely beat several Trump supporters.

Actual Democrats thought it was a great speech.

But not Sanders' socialist political revolutionaries.

Josh Marshall of course blames Trump, but you might as well blame him for Occupy, for the Baltimore riots, and for Seattle.

Look at the signs those clowns are carrying.

Not the Mexican flags, the signs about socialism, the signs equating Hillary and Trump as tools of Korporate Amerika.

They are the blockheads who truly share Bernie's own explicit views on our corporate, capitalist, rigged system so desperately in need of political revolution and socialism.

These are the clowns he pals around with.

Carpe diem

Officials confirm Tennessee couple won historic Powerball

John Robinson said he reached out to his brother for help assembling a team of lawyers and financial planners before deciding to take the winnings in a single lump sum of nearly $328 million, rather than let the Lottery invest the prize and pay him 30 annual installments totaling an estimated $533 million.

Why pass up on a certain income totaling more than $200 million?

"We're going to take the lump sum, because we're not guaranteed tomorrow," Robinson said. "We just wanted a little big piece of the pie. Now we're real grateful we got the big piece of the pie."

Note, too, that they indicate no plans to donate it all to the world's worst off people, which could reasonably be expected to do the greatest good for the greatest number, as the liberal celebrity faker Peter Singer claims and recommends.

No word of consulting with experts about any charitable or altruistic volleys, at all.

Thoughts about Netfix

Liberals used to cite suppression of Suttee as a positive example of cultural imperialism, as well as the global spread of republicanism and parliamentary institutions, and I concur.

In like manner, I approve Democrats and the Occident standing up for women's rights, gay rights, sexual liberation, children's rights, secularism, science, and religious tolerance, though we certainly don't need to be fighting wars over such things.

Republicans or others chiming in on the same side are also welcome.

Not at all an expensive form of foreign policy altruism, and essential given the relative decline in Western power and hegemony in a world that always grows smaller.

Sense8 drove that message home, in spades.

Small world, I mean.

And what a blast of cultural propaganda!

Realist vs Neocon, Cruz vs Rubio

Trump is still way out ahead, but some people cling to the idea he somehow will be stopped and will not be the nominee.

The real contest, for these folks, is among what look right now to be the also-rans.

How Cruz and Rubio exposed the GOP’s rift on foreign policy

This is an interesting piece about a foreign policy fissure putting the likes of Pat Buchanan on the one side and Charles Krauthammer on the other showing up among the aspirants for the Republican nomination.

The neocons - Krauthammer is a well known example among pundits - are a species of altruistic globo-interventionists optimistic in varying degrees about American power and committed to a Marvel Comics foreign policy of fighting evil-doers and doing good.

Mostly this comes to fighting dictators and spreading democracy even as we fight the Jihaders and struggle against terrorism, but also keeping up and expanding our Cold War alliances and continuing struggles against Russia, China, and the remaining Communist regimes, as well as various forms of foreign aid.

Among these folks, Barack Obama is among those less sanguine about the utility of military intervention and John McCain among the most optimistic, with Hillary in between but closer to McCain than to O.

Opposed to the neocons and generally sharing neither their optimism nor their altruism are those sometimes dubbed realists but also sometimes labeled by interventionists as isolationists or neoisolationists.

Of these, Pat Buchanan is an example among the pundits.

The interventionist Wilson's name is bandied somewhat misleadingly in these discussions as his vigorous advocacy of and support for tribalism in the forms of ethnic nationalism and racism did far more to shape his aims and projects than his commitment to democracy.

And, in current ideological quarrels, the tribalists are more to be found among the realists while the neocons - Democrats much more obtrusively than Republicans and their loyalty to Zionism conspicuously excepted - are in varying degrees and ways post- and even anti-tribalist in their politics.

Rubio-Cruz Debate Clashes Will Shape GOP Race

Despite trailing Trump and Cruz in most polls, Rubio got a taste Tuesday night of what it’s like to be the frontrunner. 

Both Cruz and Rand Paul pounced on the Florida senator for what they characterize as his neoconservative approach to foreign policy -- from defense spending to government surveillance programs to intervening in foreign wars.

Rubio wore the assault as a badge of honor. 

“The isolationist tag team duo Ted Cruz and Rand Paul tried to take on Marco. They got beat, badly,” read a campaign fundraising email sent after the debate.

Lots of good detail in this piece on the differences concerning national security and also immigration between neocon Rubio and realist Cruz, with Paul thrown into the mix.

On the other hand, this article is utter crap.

Fair and balanced, or actually too kind?

The Nation article doesn't reflect the majority view on the American Left. 

Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner.

Did the Castros win?

Many conservatives cursed Obama for liberalizing relations with Communist Cuba. 

Many other conservatives applauded him for abandoning failed sanctions in exchange for free enterprise.

Meanwhile, an article by Tom Hayden in The Nation, the liberal American magazine, applauded Obama's decision as a "victory for the Cuban revolution" and a final vindication for the Castros.

The Nation article doesn't reflect the majority view on the American Left. 

But at the moment that Communist dictatorships Cuba and North Korea come back into the news, its love letter to Castro reminds us how divided the American Left was during the Cold War.

And remains, looking back, about the Cold War.

It was that more than - well, as much as - issues of race that put a fatal fracture into the labor-liberal alliance that was key to the New Deal coalition supporting Democratic progressivism.

Labor as well as some liberals and some socialists like those affiliated with the DSA were resolutely pro-Cold War.

But many liberals were all along as soft-headed on communism as FDR and in consequence as anti-Cold War as Henry Wallace.

The radicals were and remain flat-out pro-communist, from Bill Ayers to Michael Moore.

The line between the liberals and radicals wasn't so much a line as an area of blur.

As then, as now.

Since the close of World War Two, there has always been a kind of "America First," anti-interventionist, isolationist anti-Cold War opinion in play in America, and it was characteristic of many of the mass participants in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam Years.

But the anti-war outlook of the left ranged from the view of many liberals that communism wasn't all that bad (right wing dictatorships were much worse) and anyway was rarely a true threat to the radical view of the children of Marx and the New Left that capitalism in general and America in particular were so awful that communism was better and our enemies, pretty much any of our enemies, ought to prevail.

Hayden's celebration of the Cuban Revolution, for example, looks in part like an argument aimed at liberal fans of the Difference Principle of John Rawls' Theory of Justice, alleging as it seems to do that in Cuba party dictatorship and socialism played a key role in significantly improving the lot of the island's worst off groups and perhaps even a majority or near-majority, relative to what their fate was under capitalism in the past and might well be under capitalism again.

Tom Hayden celebrates a victory for the Cuban Revolution

But the rest of his argument adverts to other liberal/radical values.

Despite the US embargo and relentless US subversion, Cuba remains in the upper tier of the United Nations Human Development Index because of its educational and healthcare achievements. 

Cuba even leads the international community in the dispatch of medical workers to fight Ebola. 

Cuba is celebrated globally because of its military contribution to the defeat of colonialism and apartheid in Angola and southern Africa.

Joan Walsh and Michael Moore could join this celebration, along with Bill Ayers and very likely Barack Obama.

<Aside>

Carney's stories about Ted Kennedy and the KGB ought to be put side by side with the stories we so often read in the left press about Nixon undermining the Paris peace talks in 1968.

(There are other stories about Kennedy undermining American policy towards Britain on behalf of the terrorists of the IRA.)

</Aside>

Carney concludes,

With regard to Cuba, the current debate is mostly over the best means for ending a Communist dictatorship, and how to bring political and economic freedom to the island. 

As so often, the debate is framed in terms of gratuitous global altruism.

No national security motives?

Then to hell with it.

Besides, if the justification for popular democracy is that it empowers those not in and who do not control the government to in a measure protect themselves from those who are or do there is no justification for imposing it when or in a manner in which it predictably will have the opposite effect.

As it would if, in Cuba as in Russia and in varying degrees in Eastern Europe, restoration of rule by parties led to or was accompanied by restoration of capitalism, itself accompanied by the immediate or eventual loss to the lower orders or the common people as a whole of key institutional supports of their livelihood and general welfare along with a thorough looting of the national patrimony of socialism.

And I do here refer to exactly the benefits brought to the lower orders by the revolution that Hayden himself wrote of.

Those and others of the like ilk.

Yes, I have not forgotten that the counter-revolution against communism not only eliminated the worst features of that system but also features of it that, in certain important respects, made it better than the all too capitalist capitalism to which Russian and Eastern Europe were delivered up.

Not enough better to make it better in net than capitalism, even for the lower orders and ordinary folk.

But better in those specific ways.

The Cuba shift

O revises Cuba relations

O is normalizing relations with Cuba to the extent that he can.

The embargo needs to be lifted by the congress.

Sure, there is outrage in Florida among some of the exiles and descendants of exiles, many of whom are people who lost, or whose families lost, property and wealth to the revolution and still dream of getting it back.

They are today's version of the Russian aristocrats who fled the communists to Western Europe, the French aristos who joined every monarchy in Europe in attacking the French republic that had abolished feudalism and redistributed lands, or some of the Chinese die-hards who fled with Chiang to Taiwan.

For them, the policy of embargo and isolation, which has indeed seriously harmed the island economically for five decades without bringing down the Castro regime, is a tool keeping constant pressure on the communists and the people of Cuba to restore capitalism and, in particular, to give them back their wealth.

And we could say the same for some US business and banking interests that also took losses to the Cuban revolution.

But it is a tool that has not worked in fifty years and has caused hardship not only on the island but for refugees with family both there and here.

And it is a policy that has drastically curtailed the freedom of Americans to travel to Cuba or do business with Cubans.

True though it may be that the embargo has economically hurt Cuba and the Cubans far more than it has hurt anyone in the US, the fact is it has closed for fifty years not only the US market to Cuban products but the Cuban market to US goods, at a not negligible cost to the US economy.

And yet it is notable that the arguments made against O's policy shift do not advert to these things, though they are the true source of grievance, but instead denounce O's willingness to have normal relations with tyranny, forsaking utterly the enslaved masses of the Castro regime.

If this purely altruistic, interventionist argument were any good it would have been equally good against American policy toward China since Nixon and American policy toward Vietnam since 1995.

And it would be good as well against many of the regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere with which the Republicans insist we keep up good relations, even providing military and economic aid, in pursuit of our own interests.

O is right.

Enough, already.

Detente is the best way ahead both for Cubans and for Americans.

As to the public at large, we had this ten months ago.

Most Americans Don't Support Cuban Embargo

Nationwide, 56 percent of Americans say they support normalizing relations with Cuba, with the figure jumping to 63 percent for residents of the state of Florida, the poll says. 

The figure for Latinos nationwide who support a change was also higher than among the general public, at 62 percent.

"This is a key change from the past: Cuba used to be intractable because Florida was intractable," wrote Peter Schechter and Jason Marczak in a report detailing the results of the survey. 

"This poll argues that this is no longer true."

. . . . 

The Atlantic Council poll, conducted in January, found that increased engagement with Cuba was relatively popular across party lines, with 60 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans favoring it.

Marco Rubio, not beloved of the tea baggers or the most devout rightists of his party, absolutely leaped at the chance to put both feet into his mouth on this one, fiercely identifying with what is already a minority view with decreasing support as the years go by.

Rubio at WSJ, yesterday evening

[I]t has been the policy and law of the U.S. to make clear that re-establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba is possible—but only once the Cuban government stops jailing political opponents, protects free speech, and allows independent political parties to be formed and to participate in free and fair elections.

The opportunity for Cuba to normalize relations with the U.S. has always been there, but the Castro regime has never been interested in changing its ways. 

Now, thanks to President Obama’s concessions, the regime in Cuba won’t have to change.

Does China satisfy any of those conditions?

Did it when Nixon and Henry the K flew there?

Does Vietnam satisfy them, and did it in 1995?

Are there regimes elsewhere in the world that clearly don't satisfy those conditions that the GOP wants us to firmly ally with and support?

MR's fury is quite something.

Two more years to 2016.

With every passing day America moves further away from the conservatism that still totally dominates the Republican Party, fractured though it is one way as regards ends between Wall Street and Main Street, between the Christian right and the secularist libertarians, and another as regards means between the radical pundits and tea-baggers who would have shut down the government and pushed America into default and the more moderate leadership of the DC office-holders.

How do these guys manage to keep winning local and state offices?

Oh, right.

The racist, feminist, Howard Zinn propaganda of the left drives millions away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans, as though seeking shelter from the Helter-Skelter.

Update.

WAPO continues its rightward march, essentially echoing Rubio's complaints and whining about Vietnam, but not China, into the bargain.

Obama gives the Castro regime in Cuba an undeserved bailout

Morals and malice

To what extent are mores in general and morals in particular, religious or not, not the creatures of altruism or benevolence but selfishness, malice, or even hate?

The new secular morality has removed much cruelty and repression from social life, but not without cost.

Abortion, maternal infanticide (the father will have no say in the matter), and the cruel travesties of same sex marriage and gross mutilation passed off as that perverse fantasy, sex change, are a few examples.

A new Ebola Czar? Nonsense.

Obama will name Ron Klain as Ebola Czar

Saying it doesn't make it so.

He is just another establishment lawyer with zero medical or public health credentials.

He will not report directly to the president but to not one but two White House advisers who do, Lisa Monaco for Homeland Security and Susan Rice for National Security.

Ms. Monaco, also a lawyer and a prosecutor with zero medical or public health credentials, was as close as the White House wanted to get to having an Ebola Czar yesterday (they were calling her the "White House Ebola Coordinator"), and by George it looks like she still is.

Susan Rice, an historian by training and an establishment figure for some decades, is at any rate not another lawyer, praise be to God.

She is well known to favor altruistic American and Western interventions in Africa, and did so in the Clinton White House where she urged intervention in the Rwanda genocidal conflict.

On foreign policy generally she is well aligned with O and is a staunch globalist.

So how long will the press be going along with the pretense that Mr. Klain is the real thing?

Did the people who called for an Ebola Czar over the past week want just another political stooge, just another White House lawyer, for God's sake?

One who will be reporting to two White House advisers with no knowledge of or experience with medical or public health issues?

Where the hell is C. Everett Koop when you need him?

And could the White House possibly make it any clearer that it does not take seriously its own rhetoric about how serious a challenge Ebola is?

The bumbling, the refusal of travel restrictions, the refusal of a Czar, the small military mission to Africa, the tiny budget.

Maybe it all adds up to the Administration just not being all that concerned.

I think that's a mistake.

But it could be where they're at.

Neutral monists vs. The Frankfort School?

The president said yesterday that he did not have any philosophical objections to travel restrictions.

I was wondering about that, and the title is my best guess on that matter.

[Yes, kidding.]

Meanwhile, as the election approaches the right continues to urge the president's loyalties or his priorities - or both - do not privilege America as they should.

This from the party most in fealty to Zionism and most given to squandering American lives and treasure in unnecessary wars of no earthly good to the country.

Though of course in all candor both parties are so in love with global power that both are for the foreseeable future irrevocably committed to policies that, from the point of view of national interests, amount to global military altruism though, if you follow the money, mostly subject American policy to the needs and aspirations of expanding, global capitalism.

Anyway, playing the race card, big time, they are, these right wing guys.

Pat Buchanan: Community and country come ahead of any obligation to people of Africa

Tom Frieden's story is that travel restrictions will help America very little, if at all, and will significantly impede efforts to deal with Ebola in Africa.

I don't agree, but that's neither here nor there.

Buchnan's position is that this prioritizes Africans over Americans.

But Frieden and those who support him might insist their policy will minimize the risk to the US, since the worse things go in Africa the worse they will be everywhere else, including here.

And though I have seen one or two white male liberals outside the Administration do so, neither O nor anyone else inside it, that I know of, has denounced travel restrictions as racist.

Au contraire, the suggestions that they have, and that they prioritize non-whites over whites, is itself a conservative effort to play upon racial fears, suspicions, and animosities with the ballot box in clear view.

Guardian joins Joan Walsh, plays race card on Ebola care, Texas blunder

Texas Ebola cases expose troubling contrasts and spark fears of race divide

Universal coverage is something Obamacare did not actually achieve.

There is no standing commitment from any level of government to reimburse hospital or care-giver costs for treating the indigent on a par with the insured, and so they don't.

What Medicaid actually covers varies state by state, and in some states it's pitiful.

Given that ordinarily no insurance covers experimental drugs, therapies, or treatments, it's an interesting question who will get ZMapp, if it becomes available again, and how it will be financed.

Ditto any experimental serums, vaccines, or drugs.

Ditto the transfusion therapy that seems to have some merit.

I suspect in law and in budgeting there is and will be money as needed for isolation and quarantine of the sick, as a public health measure to protect other people.

That's not the same as money to ensure all the afflicted, including the uninsured and the under-insured, get top flight treatment whose aims may range from palliative care to improving chances of survival.

If a vaccine becomes available, which rubric does it fall under?

Too, it's not prudent for a vaccine to be used unless the chance of getting the disease if you take the vaccine is less than the chance of getting it if you don't.

That is always true if it's a killed virus vaccine and in any degree effective.

Not so if it's a live virus vaccine.

If it's a live virus vaccine of modest effectiveness it might make sense for people living or working in West Africa to get it and no sense at all for people outside Africa, except perhaps some care givers.

And in that same case it would make good sense for the wealthier nations to supply the vaccine to the West Africans, to help eliminate the problem at the source.

The race card will be played against that strategy all the same by people who find it politically advantageous or emotionally satisfying.

If it's a highly effective, killed virus vaccine the temptation will be to give it to ourselves first, and then skimp on what is sent to Africa or elsewhere, the practical incentives for doing so reducing to altruism supplemented by concern about indirect economic loss here due to disaster in Africa.

In that case, the race card will be played with great fury if white people even indicate they are thinking of such a strategy, probably accompanied by violence encouraged, as usual, by the left.

Including The Guardian.

[Aside:

Will there be rationing, and will it incorporate the latest and most approved PC ideas of who has a worthwhile life and who does not, as well as who deserves care and who does not?

Can't help recalling that fellow who used to work for the administration who urged death at 75.

Hmm.

/Aside]

Will they end up enforcing quarantines for areas in which the sick will constantly run far ahead of means to help them?

U.S., Britain to send troops to help fight Ebola in West Africa

Won't that look great on the evening news, white soldiers from the US and Britain keeping helpless black people penned in without significant medical care?

How long will it take for the media to christen those areas "death camps"?

Thousands more could become infected before the worst outbreak on record is brought under control, the WHO has warned. 

They still really haven't grappled with how bad it is and is going to be.

Those who care for patients are among those hardest-hit by Ebola, which is spread through contact with the bodily fluids of its victims. 

In Liberia alone, about 152 healthcare workers have contracted the virus and 79 have died, according to the WHO.

The country, which is still recovering from years of war, had only about one doctor for every 100,000 people when the outbreak began. 

“Every infection or death of a doctor or nurse depletes response capacity significantly,” the WHO said.

Humanitarian workers have expressed concern that fear of contracting the hemorrhagic fever is keeping local and international medical professionals from responding in the numbers needed to contain the outbreak. 

There is no vaccine or cure.

The story finishes,

In an interview broadcast Sunday, President Obama said that the U.S. military will help set up isolation units and equipment for the public health workers arriving in West Africa from around the world.

The troops will establish a 25-bed field hospital in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, to care for health workers, Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday.

The military does not plan to have a permanent presence at the facility, which will be turned over to the Liberian government once it has been set up, the Pentagon said in a statement. 

But it will ensure that supplies are maintained at the hospital and will provide the periodic support needed to keep it functioning for up to 180 days.

O is not talking altruism, and sounds the alarm.

“If we don't make that effort now, and this spreads not just through Africa, but other parts of the world, there's the prospect then that the virus mutates, it becomes more easily transmittable, and then it could be a serious danger to the United States,” Obama told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

British military engineers and medical experts will build and operate a 62-bed care facility near the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, the British Department for International Development said Monday.

Staffed by local and international personnel, it will include a 12-bed center providing specialist care for health workers to “ensure they can continue to respond to the disease as safely and efficiently as possible,” it said in a statement.

They must have got this from the anthropologists

Considering study of them is their bread and butter, it is no surprise field anthropologists panic at the thought of disappearance of any primitive culture.

It is really the disappearance of an entire academic discipline that they are worried about.

Knee-jerk anti-Westernism and anti-capitalism have led leftists to routinely join in, frequently denouncing indifference toward the disappearance of primitive cultures as racism.

The habit has spread to liberals, who now have brought religion (!) under the umbrella of their concern for disappearing Xs.

The list of endangered Xs, by the way, to the disappearance of which liberals are opposed now includes all animal and plant species, all ethnic groups and races, all primitive cultures, and now all religions.

They stand athwart history, natural and human, yelling "Stop!"

None of these weird obsessions is countenanced, by the way, by utilitarianism - the liberals' favorite ethical theory - or altruism.

The former subordinates all else to the greatest good of the greatest number of individuals and the latter at least one's own good to the good of individuals other than oneself.

In Iraq, An Entire Religion Faces Extinction For Something It Doesn’t Believe

Liberals now support military interventions only for the most bizarre reasons having nothing to do with the vital or even noticeable interests of Americans.

Afterthought.

Perhaps when liberals say "Yazidis" we should be thinking of Jews.

It certainly seems like they are.

A liberal Mullah on Ebola fighting

Fighting Ebola for Us All

Even when offering a clear and reasonable appeal to our self-love, this priest of liberalism cannot resist moral pontification and praise of life-risking altruism.

So annoying.

And his story of what happened to him in Japan does not encourage trust that medical professionals will get this right.

Not even close.

Getting really close

Ebola almost gets to America

Reportedly, the CDC denies any risk of epidemic among the general population if it reaches the US or any well-off country.

Perhaps they think it would be mostly confined to special sub-populations like AIDS or Hepatitis C, spreading among them only in similar manners via specific, risky behaviors most of the population does not engage in.

But in Africa, again like AIDS and Hep C, there is a greater risk of spread among the whole population, for like behavioral reasons (greater promiscuity, more widespread risky use of drugs, etc.).

In which event support by groups not much at risk for any significant effort by wealthier nations to stop Ebola in Africa would seem to be largely altruism, as has been any help provided to date with regard to Ebola, AIDS, or Hep C, so far as such folk are concerned.

But viruses mutate, and all the more as they successfully spread lots of fresh generations in lots of fresh hosts.

So the risks to be faced by most humans now alive would be reduced by efforts to suppress outbreaks and drive down infection rates for pretty much any bad virus, anywhere in the world, including promiscuous and drug-sloppy Africa.

Hard to say what costs might be justified by such gains.

Time to do something? Almost time to put your affairs in order.

Fight Against Ebola Is Thin on the Ground

US media begin to get alarmed.

Not quite yet at the point of telling us this is about a terrible threat to the entire world and not just a humanitarian appeal for altruistic intervention.

But they will get there.

Sooner rather than later, one hopes.

Evidences of egoism

Vast seas of desperate poverty in which the rich remain rich, and even get richer, as far as they can.

And give away just enough for applause, and not quite enough to be criticized.

Certainly nothing they expect to miss.

And those who give too much are condemned as no example for sensible folk.

We are, after all, a capitalist society.

Capitalism runs on "enlightened self-interest," so understood that more money is always better, and will certainly be put to your own purposes.

Of course, those purposes might be anything.

But we know those purposes are overwhelmingly egoistic, anyway non-altruistic, ignoring the interests or purposes of others so far as possible, with only a few exceptions for people very close to us, and not as leftists dreaming of a "new man" might want them to be.

And if those egoistic purposes were too much frustrated by any of the multifarious coercive measures available to society the fundamental motivation of the capitalist system would be significantly undermined.

And however true it may be that people do not choose their work, however arduous, solely with a view to the biggest paycheck some degree of exceptional cash reward above the common is in fact almost always a crucial motivating element.

Of course, an alternative to the carrot is the stick.

Not necessarily naked bayonets, but coercion, all the same.

Like so many communist societies drumming up "volunteer" labor to work in the fields, especially at harvest time, for "non-material incentives."

How exactly would that have worked, motivating Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?

The essence of liberty

Work out your own salvation?

That or go to Hell in your own way.

Be selfish, be an ass, or throw your life away.

Something out of Fitzgerald, maybe, or perhaps Jane Austen.

Fame as a philosopher, composer, financier, self-made billionaire, or novelist.

Or the obscure life of a country farmer, and perhaps a poet.

Or a pipe-fitter, mechanic, or electrician.

Architect, engineer, or bank president.

Whatever works for you.

A world of such lives, chosen or fallen into, planned or serendipitous or even damned bad luck, is free.

The fundamental freedom, the first freedom, is not freedom of speech, freedom of thought, or even freedom to go armed.

It is freedom to live for yourself, as you damned well please, rather than at someone else's behest, for someone else's good, or according to someone else's design.

The society that affords the greatest variety of interesting possibilities along those lines or shows the greatest multiplicity of such choices is most free.

IMHO, just now.

Precious little to any of this of altruism, of living for others.

Not a lot of the greatest good of the greatest number.

And even that little only voluntary.

Slaves don't have this liberty.

Nor do wage-slaves.

Nor, indeed, do draftees, whether digging foxholes or building habitats for humanity.

On the other hand, the conditions of slavery are not always and for everyone equally rigorous.

One thinks of Epictetus.

And the same is true of wage labor, obviously.

But the Greeks were not silly to think no man is free who has to work for a living.

Quid pro quo? Always?

Hunter at KOS on Binswanger at Forbes

Steve M on Binswanger

My two cents.

It’s true that from exchange both parties benefit.

But there is no guarantee the parties gain equally and anyway the fact is that ownership itself is coercive and, in that sense, pretty much every exchange is a stick-up.

("Property is theft," remember?)

Because I own X you cannot simply use it if you need it.

I can demand you pay me, perhaps a heavy price.

And it is the community whose collective will makes me, perhaps for better but perhaps for worse, the owner in the first place, whether or not the community is at most a metaphor, as Binswanger's individualism entails.

And in any case parenthood is not readily explained as egoism masquerading as altruism.

Nor are such efforts as those cited by Steve.

In such cases, selfish genes might somehow be at work.

But those are not selfish people.

Yes, writing of genes as selfish is a metaphor.

Reading Hobbes

Might does not make right.

There is no such thing as right for it to make.

But there is surely might.

As to his particular variant of egoism,  I think Hobbes is mistaken,  though not by much.

Says he, early in Leviathan,

" . . . of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself. "

This is untrue.

But the object is rarely the good of another.

And such others are few.

And the cost to oneself is rarely much, if anything,  in net.

It might be said in defense of a more altruistic view of humanity that, after all, for very nearly all of us just staying alive is a struggle.

It's root, hog, or die.

But that cannot account for the behavior of the rich and mighty, can it?

It is many long decades since Bill Gates faced such a struggle.

That's the thing about the great and the mighty.

They are exempt from any such desperate necessities.

And we see what they do in their freedom.

Josh Marshal to the universe: If you disagree with me you’re a racist!

Neo-confederate libertarians

Not for the first time, Josh tells us how he really feels on the legal and constitutional questions raised by the Civil War.

The idea that there is a ideological divide or set of philosophical questions or priorities that makes some libertarians embrace the Confederacy and secession and despise Abraham Lincoln while others do not is, to put it generously, nonsense.

Neo-Conderates [sic], pro-secessionists, whatever else you want to call them are varying hues of white supremacists or to put it even more simply, racists.

That’s not an accusation. 

It’s simply identifying them as a distinct political strain in American politics.

Do they embrace the Confederacy and despise Lincoln?

Perhaps they do.

Or perhaps not.

Are they, in fact, white supremacists or racists?

And is that supposed to discredit their claims about the constitution, the law, and Civil War?

Hitler built the autobahn and was the patron of the Volkswagen, so Eisenhower was a Nazi and so is your kid who just bought a new Bug, I guess.

There’s a libertarian war over the Civil War?

The libertarians - not without exception, of course - tend to view the constitution as though the incorporation doctrine had been true since 1776 and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics really had been written into the constitution.

And not in the 14th Amendment but from the beginning.

The neo-Confederates, as a rule, completely reject incorporation, even now, and think states originally had and still have legitimate powers no libertarian could love - powers perhaps eschewed by their own constitutions, but not denied by the federal one.

And nobody doubts that Lincoln violated the constitution massively during the course of the Civil War.

So what?

The libertarian war over the Civil War

What does it say about contemporary politics in general and liberal politics in particular that people think departures from Civil War Unionist dogma about the War Between the States call for “policing”?

Rachel Weiner, who seems to regret the libertarians aren't very good at "policing," nevertheless is far more sensitive to nuance that JM seems.

She appears ready, for example, to recognize that one might hold a critical view of Lincoln and his war without endorsing or in any way legitimating the cause of the South.

She writes,

There are contrarians who criticize Lincoln’s use of federal power and argue that the South had a right to secede — but have no love for slavery or the Confederacy.

Libertarians are anti-war and in favor of market-based solutions, and some argue that even though slavery was abominable, it would have ended for economic reasons with far less bloodshed if the North had allowed the South to secede.

“Though I think Lincoln was the worst tyrant in U.S. history and his war was illegal, immoral, unconstitutional,  I do not think the [Confederacy] was some quasi-libertarian bastion of freedom or justified,” said Stephan Kinsella.

“The real enemy is, as always, the State — whether it be the USA or the [Confederate States of America].” 

On the other hand, JM is not really contradicting her, is he?

She says these guys are not pro-slavery or pro-Confederacy.

He says they are racist and white supremacist.

They could, of course, both be right, on those points.

Lincoln,  himself,  was a racist and a white supremacist. 

And yet, as I said, one can like Volkswagens and the Interstate system without being a Nazi.

Update.

"Neo-Confederate," by the way, covers people who are not libertarians, at all, as well as some who are, if it refers to anyone who thinks secession was not unconstitutional, opposes Lincoln's choice for war, and believes Lincoln violated the constitution quite vigorously in his conduct of the Civil War.

Paleocons, generally.

Think of Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo.

And even that's not all of them.

If that's a neo-Confederate then I am one, too.

And I am no kind of libertarian or conservative.

By that I mean I expect I would have opposed the war, at the time, had I been one of the Northern whites whose taxes would pay for it and who might even be coerced into fighting it.

Of course, had I been a black slave at the time, I would have seen things in a different light.

However much one disapproves being coerced into altruistic sacrifice for others, one is always grateful for altruistic sacrifice toward oneself.