Comments Elsewhere

Pro-Choice Auburn local organizing meet-up this weekend! If you’re pro-choice & in Auburn & would like to see a more Pro-Choice Auburn, come on down. We’ll be talking about opportunities for local activism and move forward on efforts to organize an abortion fund. (\u003Chttp://www.fundabortionnow.org/> for more on what they are, what they do, and why they’re important.) There’s food, there’s talk, there’s community activism.

Electoral politics destroy social and political movements. http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/02/democrats_deserted_the_anti_war_movement.html

FWIW, it’s one thing not to hear the news, or to slip up once or twice when you’ve become used to using an old name. Nobody expects you to be perfect or omniscient. But there’s a difference between slipping up and belligerently trashing somebody’s stated preferences. if you’re the person who goes on for years still calling someone “Cassius Clay” instead of “Muhammad Ali,” even though you know he said that’s not his name anymore, then you’re the asshole here. It doesn’t matter whether or not you understand why he changed it. It doesn’t matter whether or not you sympathize with his reasons. It doesn’t matter if you think he believes something that’s weird or even crazy. You’re still the asshole here.

By the by, J. Neil Schulman acted like a transphobic pig, and also a huge asshole in general, and he ought to feel embarrassed about both his statements and his conduct at an otherwise wonderful Libertopia.

#NoWarOnSyria “The hidden premise, of course, is that the U.S. government necessarily must intervene, bomb, wage war, and inflict mass bloodshed as a remedy to foreign horrors. It is taken for granted that nonintervention is no option, which assumes that U.S. intervention tends to cause more good than bad, or is worth the effort even if it sometimes fails. This premise is steeped in a cold utilitarianism and stands in tension with the actual results of U.S. policy over the last few decades. The utter calamity that has unfolded in Iraq should guide even those who philosophically embrace intervention toward a realistic advocacy of U.S. restraint. Even if humanitarian war were not a total oxymoron, the United States in particular deserves a prolonged time-out. It has in the last fifty years left behind millions of corpses piled under a thousand broken promises, and so a 50-year moratorium on further American wars would seem like a reasonable goal, rather than starting yet another war even as the chaotic and inhumane consequences of interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya continue to unfold.” – Anthony Gregory

Also, if your house is on fire, analysts say flamethrowers might make that worse, too.

If the U.S. government begins bombing Syrians, they won’t be resisting Assad, or stopping him, or ending his butchery. They will just be joining him in it, with the aim of replacing it with their own. #NoWarOnSyria

http://www.gofundme.com/all-libertopia-2013 ($175 out of $2,800 raised so far) Help me & the ALL Distro get to Libertopia! We have currently raised $175 of the $2,800 that we need to cover the travel costs, exhibition booth, and to help replenish our depleted travel fund for this fall’s upcoming bookfairs, speaking appearances, a research trip to the Labadie Collection, etc. Thanks to those who have contributed! Anything you can chip in will help us a lot in bringing some great talks, some great books, and a strong left-libertarian presence to Libertopia.

Of course President Obama gave President Bush absolute immunity for everything. He is President, and he has war crimes of his own that he may some day want immunity for.

Some people, when asked to read the word “asked,” will tend to spontaneously say “ax’t.” Other people, when asked to read the word “asked,” will tend to spontaneously say something that is much closer to “ass’t.” Both of these represent a significant difference between the way the word is pronounced (a metathesis of the /s/ and /k/ in one case, and a complete elision of the /k/ in the other, not even getting in to what’s going on with that last syllable). Yet it’s only the people who say “ax’t” who routinely get mocked, or get judged as ill-educated, or ignorant of the standard pronunciation, or who are assumed to lack basic literacy skills, just because of the way they happen to pronounce the word. I wonder why that is.