lewrockwell.com — People must be bamboozled into accepting some ideological rationale for govt to expand & become an imperial power that rules as much as possible. And what kinds of rationales are there available? Almost any idea alive in the culture is open to being co-opted. If people are religious, the rulers can claim that empire is necessary for religious .....
Oct 30, 2006 View in Crawl 4
flamingmbOct 30, 2006
Just some of softwaresamuri's other comments:"Or...Is the DNC deliberately suppressing voter turnout?""Or...Democrats Fear Landslide Defeat."I cant say I see a pattern.......
twinklyjesusOct 30, 2006
No, he has observed and reported on the behavior. Technically, he's somewhat of an expert. If you do go to their website, you'll see Rhiannon prominently represented there.
libberkeyOct 30, 2006
"Never has the work of the Mises Institute been more essential. This country and this world need a voice that addresses the questions that others not only fail to answer, but also fail to ask. The cause of liberty itself needs the Mises Institute. It needs all our student programs to thrive. It needs our publishing to be even more aggressive and prolific. It needs our web presence to be ever more spectacular. Academia is in desperate need of thinkers who understand what liberty means. The human population needs liberty in order to continue to grow in numbers and well-being, and liberty needs champions to make it so. This is what is needed for social peace and economic prosperity. And above all, the Mises Institute needs you, your fighting spirit that inspires our work, and the confidence you give us to forge ahead and say what few others are willing to say. Thank you for all you have done to give voice to the wisdom of the ages, and for enabling us to point to a future in which the idea of liberty rises above all the ideologies that seek to kill the human spirit."Remember, it is Liberty and freedom you want, not killing and spending.www.Mises.org
joybranOct 31, 2006
The only problem with the Articles of Confederacy was that it created a government that didn't have enough power to be exploited by the elites of the time. So those elites used every scare tactic possible to bamboozle the public into believing that the government under the Articles was an "impotent government incapable of dealing with its own instability and economic depression."
lojackOct 31, 2006
What's wrong with imperialism? Isn't that how we 'won' the west, used the slaves, & came to dominate the world? A good life in America IS the product of imperialism. Hello...!?
Closed AccountOct 31, 2006
SPAMtastic!
joybranOct 31, 2006
"Here is double-think for you (or at least illogical think):"A woman's right to control her own body." WRONG. As soon as she has become pregnant, it's her body AND SOMEONE ELSE'S. That someone else deserves some reasonable level of protection from convenience-based death. And that is what most abortions are - the death of the baby for convenience."I think abortion is immoral, particularly if it is just for convenience, but the idea that two people share ownership of a body when a woman becomes pregnant is ludicrous. Joint ownership of anything implies that both owners have equal say in decisions about the property. How is an unborn baby in any way competent to make decisions about its mother's body? It is also not competent to appoint another person to represent its own interests. The only person who could possibly have any right to represent the unborn baby's interests is its mother. So we are back to the fact that she is responsible for her own body and for her unborn baby's body, which she is hosting and nurturing.There is a difference between the concepts of morality and legality. An unborn child may have moral rights to certain treatment from its mother, but it can't logically acquire any legal rights until it is separate from her and, at least theoretically, able to survive independently from her. Any legal rights you tried to assign to it would be rights that are taken away from the mother. If abortion is judged as murder (a legal term), it doesn't matter whether it is to save the life, the health, or just the convenience of the mother because, if the unborn baby owns the body it inhabits, the mother's ownership and right to life has already been denied. Therefore, the statement "abortion to save the life of the mother is murder," while false, is logical, in fact the only logical conclusion to the proposition that the mother does not retain full and exclusive ownership of her body when she becomes pregnant.To get back on topic, once you accept double-think like "imperialism is freedom," you are logically led to all sorts of ridiculous propositions that are obviously false. You sometimes have to follow the reducto ad adsurdum to find out whether you are being bamboozled.
onwardknaveNov 1, 2006
Thanks, I'll take a look. In return, I'll offer you (and all others interested in social justice, civil and worker's rights, unions, and socialism) <a class="user" href="http://www.haymarketbooks.org/">http://www.haymarketbooks.org/</a> as the source I've been familiar with for a while.
ramazDec 1, 2006
@joybran:"I think abortion is immoral, particularly if it is just for convenience, but the idea that two people share ownership of a body when a woman becomes pregnant is ludicrous."Quite right. I didn't mean to argue for joint ownership. What I am insisting upon, however, is that there is another person present in the woman's body. It's the woman's body and there is another person's body in the equation.Couching the pro-abortion-rights argument in terms of a woman's right to control her own body is ludicrous because there is someone else there. When the presence of that other person is acknowledged, then the rest of the discussion can proceed with some sanity. Your argument has a lot of strong points. But ..."it can't logically acquire any legal rights until it is separate from her and, at least theoretically, able to survive independently from her." I find your idea of logic wanting here. A newborn baby is completely unable to survive independently from the mother, or from someone substituting for the mother, and is not even "theoretically" able to do so. But the baby has plenty of legal rights. So the moment of birth can't logically be adopted as the beginning point of legal protection.(By the way, I note with great interest that you refer to the baby as "it." However, that might be done innocently enough - I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.)"if the unborn baby owns the body it inhabits, the mother's ownership and right to life has already been denied."Once again I am not arguing that the unborn baby owns it's mother's body. Only that the baby is present, is another human being, and deserves some measure of protection. I completely agree with you that sorting this protection out will be difficult. But I believe this is where the conversation, study, debate, etc. should focus - on what is a reasonable protection of the child in light of the rights of the mother, not the current incessant campaign to keep the carte-blanche right to kill the child under any circumstances.