bfp: “maybe i should speak spanish instead?”

No, no, you don’t understand! She’s not bigoted against Spanish-speaking immigrants. She’s actually objecting to the influx of undocumented immigrants in her neighborhood speaking Classical Nahuatl.

Now that that’s all been cleared up, I’m off to march openly and defiantly against the continents of North and South America.

I notice that several videos of Ron Paul’s answers have been uploaded to YouTube. (Cf. for example [1].) I also note that none of the edits I’ve seen so far include Paul’s support for forced pregnancy. I wonder why that is, and what that tells us about the Paul apparatchiks.

HoldOn: “The zip code 07675 covers three different towns in NJ: Westwood, River Vale and Old Tappan. So there’s not always a 1:1 mapping between zip and city/town. More info is required…”

Well, so why not take the ZIP code alone, and then present a menu of options only when the ZIP code actually does map to more than one city name? The existence of ambiguous cases isn’t a good reason to require unneeded input in the unambiguous cases.

Kevin,

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this is a wonderful post. Kudos. I just wish that I had more to add.

Iaian: If a government did that, you would hope the right-“libertarian” would oppose it (unlike, say, von Mises and his support for fascism in the 1920s).

This is a libel against Mises. Ludwig von Mises had plenty of problems, but “support for fascism in the 1920s” was not among them, unless you consider explicit attacks on fascism to count as “support” for it. If you are (as I suspect) referring to his remarks in Ch. 1, § 10 of Liberalism (1927), then you had better note that the chapter explicitly condemns the assault on freedom of speech and association by the fascists, as well as the policy of jailing and murdering political opponents: “The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents. The Third International seeks to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus; it considers itself in no way bound by the terms of any compact that it may conclude with opponents, and it deems any crime, any lie, and any calumny permissible in carrying on its struggle. The Fascists, at least in principle, profess the same intentions. . . . . Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect—better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall. . . . So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one’s own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.”

In the same section, Mises made a couple of embarrassing mistakes about fascism. First, he suggested that fascism would likely moderate with time and become less rapacious as it settled into power; that first error led him into the second error of supposing that fascism was a lesser evil than Stalinism. But in a chapter that directly and unequivocally condemns the Fascists’ repressive policies, states that Fascist anti-Communism (the only “merit” he can find in Fascism at all) is ultimately doomed to failure, and closes by saying that Fascist militarism “cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization,” the claim that Ludwig von Mises — whose apartment, library, and papers in Vienna were targeted and seized by the Gestapo ten years later while he sought refuge in Switzerland — “supported” fascism, is both unfounded and irresponsible.

Better yet, how about:

0. Go to the SF Food Bank’s website and donating, say, $15.85 to the Food Bank, or better yet starting a monthly giving program (say, $10/month). Encourage your friends to do the same.

That’s what I did. Then I skipped steps 1-3 entirely.

Because now, no matter what the pols in Congress end up agreeing on, the Food Bank will still have my part of that money in the bank. If everyone puts their time into begging for busy Congress types to remember the line item for one city’s food bank in a massive annual budget that’s perpetually running huge deficits, then you’re going to hear about this same funding crisis every year when the Feds once again consider cutting funding. On the other hand, if the people themselves are funding these programs, instead of trying to finagle the government into doing it for them, the base of support will be much more stable, and much more resilient, since it won’t depend on the ever-shifting whims of a very small group of powerful people.

Here’s the quotation, as promised. It’s from letter # 294, on 8 February 1967 to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had interviewed Tolkien for the Daily Telegraph Magazine and sent him a draft of their article in advance of publication. He commented on their quotation of him as saying, “I don’t read much now, except for fairy-stories,” by saying:

“For ‘except,’ read ‘not even.’ I read quite a lot–or more truly, try to read many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy). But I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention.”

Tolkien adds a footnote to this:

“There are exceptions. I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote, in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy. I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner-up when The L.R. was given the Fantasy Award: Death of Grass [by John Christopher]. I enjoy the S.F. of Isaac Azimov [sic]. Above these, I was recently deeply engaged in the books of Mary Renault; especially the two about Theseus, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. A few days ago I actually received a card of appreciation from her; perhaps the piece of ‘Fan-mail’ that gives me the most pleasure.”

As far as the Letters go, unfortunately I can’t find any reference in the index to Verne. The index entry for H.G. Wells turns up only a passing reference to Eloi and Morlocks (#109, 31 July 1947) in a letter about the prospects for publishing The Lord of the Rings.

I’m away from my books at the moment so I can’t give you the quote yet, but somewhere in the Letters there’s a draft of a letter that he wrote in response to a press interview from later in his life. I don’t precisely remember the context, but he mentioned along the way that outside of his professional studies, he read very little other than fairy tales and science fiction, mentioning Isaac Asimov (which he misspelled “Azimov”) by name. If that’s a reading habit that persisted from earlier in his life, rather than one he picked up later, then he may very well have read Wells and Verne as a younger man.

I’ll post the quote and the reference when I get back home in a couple of days…

I think you’re right on about most of the points you touch on here. (Utah Phillips has a good monologue about just this topic, The Violence Within.) But here’s something that, given the rest of what you say, I find baffling.

Among many other people I count soldiers in this group, not least because of the oath they take to defend our best institutional hope against tyranny: the Constitution.

I certainly hope that the Constitution is not “our best institutional hope against tyranny.” If it is, we are all seriously in trouble.

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

— Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority.

Anyway, practical questions aside, the right and the duty of soldiers to refuse tyrannical orders is a duty of conscience, which is higher than any government law or mortal oath. I can’t see what in the world the Constitution has to do with it.

AnotherGuy,

Yes, I have. The Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish slavery. It freed a number of slaves within the parts of the Confederacy that were conquered betweeen 1863 and 1865, but left many other slaves in bondage, and never claimed to do anything like abolishing the institution of slavery.

I have read several histories of both American slavery and the Civil War; last I checked, slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. And last time I checked the Constitution, amendments were ratified by the Congress and the several states, not by Presidential edict.

AnotherGuy: “Is Lincoln just another one of those evil, oppressive white males in your little brain?”

Anonymous: “Apparently, Lincoln is to be faulted because he is not perfect, like the lefties of today.”

Headless Unicorn Guy: “Because Gods Can Do No Wrong”

None of these remarks have anything to do with anything that I said above. All I did was complain that it’s not historically accurate to present the abolition of slavery as the work of a single politician. Please try to respond to what I actually said, rather than to the lively debate that you’ve created in your own head.

“If there is one characteristic that all great President’s have shared, it is a profound love and instinctive appreciation of this great idea and its fundamental role in the life and history of America. … Lincoln exhibited it when he abolished slavery and the country had to live up to the values and ideals enumerated by its founders; …”

Excuse me, but on what date did Lincoln “abolish slavery”?

Was this before or after he defeated the whole Army of North Virginia singlehandedly using his superhuman strength, invulnerability to bullets, and ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound?