Kennedy:

There’s no private return for thinking clearly about such things and no private cost for getting it wrong.

Isn’t there?

Kennedy:

Long says most people don’t know what they’re talking about when they discuss capitalism and socialism. That will remain true no matter what he does.

So what?

Don’t you have reasons for trying to think and speak clearly, whether or not you expect it to affect other people somehow?

Kennedy:

There’s no private return for thinking clearly about such things and no private cost for getting it wrong.

Isn’t there?

Kennedy:

Long says most people don’t know what they’re talking about when they discuss capitalism and socialism. That will remain true no matter what he does.

So what?

Don’t you have reasons for trying to think and speak clearly, whether or not you expect it to affect other people somehow?

Jonathan: That’s basically what a union does: negotiate terms of employment in bulk. There’s no reason why “team buying” can’t happen in healthcare without the government’s help.

In point of fact, mutual aid societies in the U.S. and the U.K. were doing exactly that around the turn of the 20th century, through the institution of “lodge practices.” Care from a G.P. under a lodge practice contract typically cost about one day’s wage per worker per year.

Until the government and the government-backed doctors’ guild destroyed them, that is.

David,

Here’s an example from around when the Passion came out:

“‘YOU’RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?’ Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader’s Digest for March.

Gibson: ‘I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.’”

The phrase “The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives, especially when followed by the gratuitous change of subject to the horrors of Marxist-Leninism in the 20th century, minimizes and obscures the nature of the mass murder of Jews under the Nazi regime. It is also typical of the kind of weaseling routinely engaged in by Holocaust denial outfits such as the IHR (in which something called the “Holocaust” is sometimes admitted to have happened, so long as the word “Holocaust” is revised to mean something other than what everyone else means when they say “the Holocaust”).

It is possible that Gibson could utter something like this without intending to go on record as denying or minimizing the Holocaust, but given the conversational context of the question (including accusations of anti-Semitism and the controversy over his father’s clearly Holocaust-denying views), Gibson certainly should have known that such a weasel-worded statement would be understood as Holocaust denial, and the fault for the misinterpretation, if it is a misinterpretation, lies on him, not on the reader.

David Bernstein has a good discussion at Volokh Conspiracy ( http://tinyurl.com/z74wt ).

If you say so. The point is simply that the passage is universally applicable, even though Aristotle happened not to recognize that it was.

At one point, one of the white dudes said something to the effect of “We have never witnessed a wage increase due to illegal immigration.”

Ah, nativism.

Of course, immigrant workers’ wages increase from “illegal immigration”; it’s precisely for the wage increase that they immigrate. Nativist bully boys would like you to believe that they are merely looking out for the little guy; it always turns out, however, that they are avoiding a real discussion of class and labor in America, and trying to prop up the Anglo-American little guy’s standard of living at the expense of other workers who are even worse off. It would be ridiculous, if real people’s lives weren’t at stake.

Holocaust denial is a pretty rough edge.

Bithead: Look, John, that infrastructure was set up by mutual agreement within this society, within this culture, within this country…. years before any of us were born.

The decision to fund that out of public monies was done long ago. That choice is now part of that society. Call it baggage, call it history, call it what you will, it is part and parcel of what the society has become, so far.

I think this is perfectly absurd. Even if the decision to fund roads by coercive taxation were legitimate then, I don’t see how that obliges anyone now, who (ex hypothesi) wasn’t party to the “mutual agreement.” But let’s pretend for the second that that’s not so. Let’s go ahead and suppose, with you, that using government roads involves you in an obligation to pay taxes.

Fine. I’ll swear not to use government roads, if it means that I don’t have to pay any tax anymore. Will you support my right to refuse to pay taxes as long as I don’t use the roads?

scott: ok john, what ought i do? or would you like to start a new blog entry for this never-ending issue?

I think, in spite of your put-on of ignorance, you actually know some of the answer to this question, or at least some of the things that you need to get a start on answering it. In any case, if you don’t, there’s nothing I can do to help you.

For, while we must begin with what is evident, things are evident in two ways—some to us, some without qualification. Presumably, then, we must begin with things evident to us. Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the fact is a starting-point, and if this is sufficiently plain to him [sic], he will not need the reason as well; and the man [sic] who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting-points. And as for him [sic] who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod:

Far best is he who knows all things himself;
Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;
But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart
Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Bk. I, section 4.

Mandos: “within a paradigm of male supremacy, equality between the sexes is impossible…” Er, um, isn’t this immediately and redundantly tautological anyway? Supremacy obviously can’t mean equality.

I think the point is that people (mostly men) often try to assert that equality between men and women exists in this or that limited domain based on superficial resemblences, but that they are mistaken: under a society-wide system of male supremacy the superficial resemblences do not actually play the same role or get taken up in the same way for the men that they do for the women. It’s obvious that supremacy and equality can’t coexist at the same time and in the same respect, but it’s not always obvious that male supremacy in particular is pervasive and systemic. It’s true that it is, but many (especially men) ignore or deny it.