- Phil Maymin discusses my article “Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism.”
- DT Strain discusses my paper “On Making Small Contributions to Evil.”
Tag Archives | Democracy
The Atrocity of Hope, Part 5: Thanks For Helping Me Get In Power, Suckers
Here’s what the defenders of Sotomayor’s nomination are saying:
Known as a moderate on the court, Sotomayor often forges consensus and agreeing [sic] with her more conservative nominees far more frequently than she disagrees with them. In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time.
So in other words, by making this nomination, Obama is stabbing his supporters in the back? Yay?
Elect the Dead!
This is a cute idea, but I don’t think the top of the ticket is constitutionally eligible. Not because he’s dead, but because he wasn’t a natural-born u.s. citizen. There is actually no constitutional requirement that candidates for the presidency be living.
It occurs to me that we anarchists could get everything we want from the state just by electing nothing but dead people to all public offices. But I don’t know whether it’s in strict accordance with agorism.
Anti-voting activists like to say they wouldn’t vote even against Hitler. But the question is, would they vote for Hitler – so long as he’s dead?
For Reproductive Anarchy
According to these statistics, u.s. voters are becoming increasingly anti-abortion.
If that’s true, I suppose there’s at least some comfort to be derived from the fact that it’s Obama who’ll be picking Souter’s successor.
Still, the most reliable defense of abortion rights will ultimately have to come, not from the permission of judges and electorates, but from direct action. As Sonia Johnson wrote in 1989:
So the men let us have legalized abortion, and almost instantly the energy drained from the movement, like air from a punctured balloon. Instead of the Women’s Liberation Movement, we became simply the Women’s Movement, because liberation is antithetical to letting men, depending upon men to, make the laws that govern our lands. For the last 15 years we have been nailed to the system by Roe v. Wade, our mighty energy and hope and love channeled into begging men in dozens of state and national bodies not to pare away cent by cent the truly miserable allowance they promised us for abortions for poor women.
If we hadn’t trusted them again, if we had kept on going in the direction we were headed, with the same time and money and energy we have since expended on groveling, we could by this time have had a woman on every block in every city and town who is an expert on contraceptives, women’s health, birthing, and abortion. We could have educated the women of this country in countless creative ways about their bodies and their right to rule them. We would have learned how to govern ourselves, discovering a whole new way for women – and therefore everyone – to be human.
And, significantly, a Bork could have been appointed to every seat of the Supreme Court, men could have been spewing laws aimed at controlling our bodies out of every legal orifice, and all their flailing and sputtering would simply be irrelevant.
This moral of course generalises to further rights besides abortion. As La Boétie long ago advised us (unless it was Montaigne):
I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
While I’m at it, here’s another great quote from Sonia Johnson:
I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: ‘Of course our government isn’t perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system (husband) in the world.’ Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant questions: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, at all?
The Doctor Is In (Or Near, Anyway)
Rand Paul (Ron Paul’s son – not named after Ayn as far as I know) just announced his – well, not his candidacy, exactly, but his exploratory committee-hood-ness, on Rachel Maddow’s show.
I took a look at his website to see whether there were any issues where he disagreed significantly with his father, but I didn’t notice any. (But the website covers a fairly narrow range of issues; there’s nothing listed, for example, on drugs, immigration, abortion, or gay rights. I reckon he’s trying to avoid alienating either libertarians or conservatives.) My overall reaction to the website was … well, boredom. Still, I wish him well in his combat with modal Republicans.
The Atrocity of Hope, Part 4: No Pictures, Please
Just saw Jonathan Turley on Maddow’s show, talking about the latest torture cover-up, and saying “This administration is turning out to be the greatest bait-and-switch in history; Obama is morphing into his predecessor” – with Maddow nodding gloomily.
While I think “greatest bait-and-switch in history” is hyperbole (the Russian Revolution surely edges it out by a bit), I’m glad to see that not all of Obama’s supporters (cough, Olbermann, cough) have signed away all their civil-liberties principles upon the accession of the President Incarnate.