Comments Elsewhere

“The nomination of Alito is an abomination, but as Knapp points out, it is a defilement of a corpse of a constitutional Republic, which if not completely dead yet, has at least jumped the shark in my own opinion.”

I’m trying to imagine a defiled corpse jumping the shark. A zombie on water-skis? In a leather jacket?

In any case, I think that the “constitutional Republic” jumped the shark around the time folks agreed on the three-fifths compromise, and the idea that “a republican form of government” in the several states could include the absolute tyranny of the landed gentry of the South over millions of their fellow creatures. Alternatively, if you think that something has to have actually gotten started before it can be said to have “jumped the shark,” I think that the Whiskey Rebellion seems as good a time as any to call it. Certainly, to mix the metaphors again, by the War of 1812, the Creek War, etc. the corpse was already beginning to smell.

“Four decades ago, the Democrats fought the right fight.”

Four decades ago, the Democratic Party in my home state was ardently committed to the strategy of “massive resistance” to desegregation. The Freedom Movement was fighting against the established Democrat power structure; a Democrat mayor fought for bus segregation tooth and nail, a Democrat governor proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” and a Democrat police commissioner turned firehoses and attack dogs on unarmed children. Over in Mississippi (home of Jim Eastland) and Georgia (home of Richard Russell) and Arkansas (home of Orval Faubus) the situation wasn’t much different.

“What kind of Democratic Party would greet Dr. King today?”

I find it hard to imagine how the Democratic Party of today could manage to displease Dr. King more than it did at the time, given that at the time it was held in a stranglehold by his cruelest and most powerful enemies.

“Across decades, they have walked away, abandoned, left town, turned away, did not show up. Finally, as a party they just morphed, became the lesser versions of the modern Republicans.”

Not so many decades ago, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Jim Eastland, Richard Russell, Bull Connor, and nearly all the other deadly enemies of the Freedom Movement in the South were Democrats. Those billy-clubs and mounted cops and attack dogs were ordered by Democrat governors and Democrat commissioners. Many of these folks were the elite of their state parties and power brokers in the highest levels of government and the national party committee. Established “liberal” Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy depended on their favor, bent over backwards to please them, and stonewalled or went on the offensive against civil rights activists such as the delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who stood up to challenge the stranglehold of militant white supremacy within the Southern state parties.

How could the Democrats walk away from anything when they were never there to begin with?

Lopez:

Are American blacks better off now than if their ancestors had been left alone in Africa? Let’s see: on the one hand you can have ignorant backwoods fucks calling you a coon, on the other hand you can have your neighbors chopping your family up with machetes.

1. If European marauders had left Africa, and the West African coast in particular, alone, then the political and economic situation there might be somewhat different from what it is today.

2. Who cares? At best you’ve offered a utilitarian argument in favor of free immigration here. But the question was about property rights, not about whether some other regime of theft and terror would have left them worse off in the end. From the standpoint of just compensation, what matters is how well-off they would have been if no theft had occurred, not how well-off they would have been if someone else were left to do the thieving.

Kennedy:

Being long dead, the slaves cannot be compensated and their masters cannot pay.

As an historical note, the era of chattel slavery was not the last time that Black people in the United States had their rights to person and property systematically violated. Lots of people living today remember government-enforced Jim Crow.

Kennedy:

Because B’s property is not anyone else’s. Only B’s rights are at stake. If you rob my parents you’ve violated their rights, but not mine because I had no right to their property.

If you murder my parents, do I (as an heir) have the right to demand compensatory damages for wrongful death?

Wayne Besen: People will learn how destructive the closet is, not only for gays, but also on the people caught up in the sham families created to protect these closets.

I understand Besen’s temptation to put things this way, but it seems like there’s something importantly wrong here. The heterosexual families that closeted gay men and lesbians created were not “sham” families; they were real families made up of real people, and they suffered genuine pain when those families were betrayed. The tragedies here were tragic precisely because real families and real commitments were built on sham feelings.

Note also that most crusty cultural conservatives who object to hip-hop care very little about the endless use of misogynist and homophobic invective. Typical complaints have usually revolved around (1) the use of dirty words, (2) hostility towards established authority in general and the pigs in particular, and (3) musically illiterate complaints about how “easy” it is and how there’s no musical talent involved and the rest of the usual claptrap.

Incidentally, just to be clear, when you say this: “Why couldn’t Rothbard just say that he didn’t care for certain types of music rather than develop a wordy critique that opens him up to look foolish on the subject?” — are you complaining about Rothbard, in particular, holding forth on things about which he was ignorant, or are you mounting some kind of general complaint against people offering “wordy critiques” of general aesthetic trends or genres, instead of merely confining their complaints to “I don’t care for it”? Because the first point seems to me to be obviously right, and the second one dangerously tempting, but in fact quite wrong.

Mr. Bad: “As for Arwen’s ad hominem against Richard, I’m slightly surprised that you let it slide; I thought personal attacks were out of bounds here.”

This is something of a pet peeve of mine.

The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed when you (irrelevantly) appeal to facts about the person advocating a view or advancing an argument, as a substitute for addressing the argument. In its circumstantial form, the appeal points out properties that are supposed to explain why the person is making an argument, and tries to use them to explain away or dismiss the argument. In its abusive form, the appeal points out properties that are supposed to make the advocate bad or untrustworthy, and so to dismiss or undermine the argument without considering it on its own merits.

Argumentum ad hominem is not committed whenever somebody insults another person, or engages in “personal attacks.” (It is only when the attacks are insults are falsely presented as a counter-argument to some point that the fallacy is committed.) Arwen didn’t do this to Richard. In fact, she didn’t engage in any personal attacks at all: she merely used sarcasm to point out that the standards that he was applying to the feminist movement, and to feminist theory as a whole, were unfair.

Hope this helps.

Could you give an example of someone who you do think was a hero or a martyr of the civil rights movement?

And maybe also explain why you think that the purpose of the civil rights movement was to please or cater to white people’s sensibilities?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that “faith” was once counted among the cardinal virtues?

“Where [is] the wise? where [is] the scribe? where [is] the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. … But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; …”

This is not to say that the theme of “just believe” in children’s fantasy is an intentional or even an accurate expression of the purported theological virtue. Or that people were right to regard this kind of faith as a virtue to begin with. But I do think that this obviously has to be part of the correct explanation.