Apparently, Lots of Libertarians Don't Think Women are People Either

[paft.livejournal.com]

So The Mercatus, a right-wing think tank, has declared North Dakota -- which recently passed an incredibly restrictive anti-abortion law, one of the free-est of all the fifty states

Once again, we see that when right wing libertarians use the word "liberty," they're using their own extra-special definition of it. As Salon has pointed out reproductive freedom apparently isn't even entered into the calculations,

Women, you see, just don't count.



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Comments

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Jefferson's personal qualms on slavery revolved. . . .

. . . mostly around their cost and resale value. He did try to pass emancipation long before the Civil War, but when he was roundly defeated he realized the South was not ready. He couldn't emancipate the majority of his own slaves because of his massive debt; letting them go would have left his daughter that much more penniless. As it is, she had to sell the remaining, non-freed slaves and sell Monticello a few years after his death.

Dude loved his French wines and cooking enough to rack up the modern equivalent of over a million in debts at his death.

Haiti was a problem for all slave holders, not just the racist ones. Jefferson was (by standards then) respected by his own slaves; but an outright rebellion was trouble for all on the wrong side of the numbers.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

So... In order to avoid responsibility, a libertarian maintained ownership of other human beings...

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Kinda. He was brilliant, but not with money.

More seriously, "avoid responsibility?" Really? Had you lived most of your life in Jefferson's Virginia as a slave-inheriting landed gentleman, would you have embraced "responsibility?"

It's easy to project ones self to far away lands and far away cultures and imagine being a shining knight for justice (as viewed in near lands and near cultural standards). It's more difficult to wonder what happened to the Steinbergs next door and think about doing something about it in wartime Germany when the kid in your son's class disappeared after repeating a joke his father told him: "I'm a beefsteak; brown on the outside, but red inside." Come to think of it, that kid's entire family disappeared, just like the Steinbergs. Hmmm. . . .

(Joke/Steinberg story is real, told to my propaganda class by a child who grew up in Nazi Germany.)

We are all what I like to call "leather-clad vegetarians," people who embrace within our lives contradictions between our declared values and our lived experiences. I don't worry too much about the inconsistency.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

"It's easy to project ones self to far away lands and far away cultures and imagine being a shining knight for justice"

In fairness; realizing something like this comes with experience and maturity (I started to say age, but know too many people in my generation that still believe that)

Most of us like to think the best of ourselves and the farther away, both in time and space makes it that much easier. Well said!

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Agreed ^

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Most people do that. I'm the guy who's writing a deconstruction of that kind of story where the modern day Tumblr Social Justice types go back to the past to uplift the past to modern Civil Rights standards. It starts going badly the first time they meet slaves and slaves see them as just another bunch of white people more intent on telling them what they needed than they understood about what they needed.

That being said, there *were* people at the time who did object to slavery, and went so far as to abolish it in the North. So this line of argument can only go so far.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

As I pointed out in another comment, there may have been some very real and very significant reasons for the North and South to go in different directions on this issue. Also from the same book, Mann notes that the natives were likewise split, with the Northern tribes eschewing slaves, and the Southern embracing them.

Take the two factors together, the native predilection and the disease losses, and you have the earmarks of a cultural institution.

That said, kudos to those that bucked the trend. Before industrialization, though, they may have been rightly viewed as those that would keep the South from prosperity.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Eh, perhaps. But only after the rise of the Cotton Gin. Usually cultural institutions do not require an increasingly draconian, even totalitarian, set of coercive rules to bolster them, however.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

Sorry it took me a few days to respond.
"More seriously, "avoid responsibility?" Really? Had you lived most of your life in Jefferson's Virginia as a slave-inheriting landed gentleman, would you have embraced "responsibility?"
"
Well, see... I'm not the one propagating a theory of duty/responsibility. That's the libertarian's job. I'm a bit more Heideggerian(fascism aside), in that I try not to prescribe normatives on ontologically shaky grounds.

"More seriously, "avoid responsibility?" Really? Had you lived most of your life in Jefferson's Virginia as a slave-inheriting landed gentleman, would you have embraced "responsibility?"
"
Well no. But once again, my point is that libertarianism makes it quite easy to shirk responsibility. Notice that there is no reply from Jeff on Locke being a fucking founder of institutional chattel slavery in South Carolina. I'm sure he really still believes that libertarianism is incompatible with slavery, despite ample history of libertarian slave holders. argghhhh Re-reading this thread makes me so angry. Suffice it to say, I may have rose colored glasses on when it comes to my contradictions, but I sure as hell don't come up with excuses as to why I ought to wear them.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

He tried do that when and where? And it's not like outright rebellions didn't happen. For that matter slavery began the ARW era as legal in all 13 colonies. At the end of it, every single Northern state was either abolishing the institution or came into the Union without it ever existing. If people from Pennsylvania and New York, where the largest slave populations in the North existed, could do that, the Virginians were on rather thin bases to claim it was outside their power.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

He tried do that when and where?

According to Clay Jenkinson, Jefferson tried to introduce anti-slavery legislation on a few occasions in Virginia, never at the national level. I'm not sure when.

If people from Pennsylvania and New York, where the largest slave populations in the North existed, could do that, the Virginians were on rather thin bases to claim it was outside their power.

In his book 1493, Charles Mann presents a theory I had never heard; malaria. Big problem in the South, not so much in the North (too cold). The border of the malarial skeeter breeding ground was essentially marked by the Mason-Dixon line.

As indentured servants arrived in early colonial times, up to 70 percent croaked in the south. Those that survived the year-long acclimation to the disease served their term of labor, then went off to start their own claim rather than stick around and work existing farms. The land was still abundant (once your screwed over the local native tribes).

Given this, and given the immunity many west Africans have to the more debilitating malaria, the South slowly began replacing white indentured servants with black West Africans. Over the decades, this became the tradition.

He even noted that the plantation estate most envision is perfect to avoid mosquitoes. Surrounded by lots of lawn (no puddles for breeding); big windows to promote airflow. It makes some sense.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's a curious argument given that by the time the US colonies were in full swing with the Atlantic Slave Trade, it already existed in great numbers in South America and indeed had its biggest customers there. Reliance on black slaves gives the USA more similarity to its neighbors south of the Rio than difference, especially in terms of the long term danger zone caused by that particular culture's influence.