gdp's Comments

Broadsnark : Beware of Strange Men on Airplanes

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 04:17:29 +0000

This is my complaint about much of the privilege discourse out there. Rather than using "check your privilege" as an opportunity to shed light on systemic sexism, racism, etc, it's too often just a shorthand for "shut up". Of course there's good faith privilege analysis out there, but this is one irritating tendency I've seen, mostly on certain careless blogs and their comments sections.

Center for a Stateless Society : To the So-Called 53%: Stop Embarrassing Yourselves

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:11:55 +0000

Using one state intervention to justify further state intervention? That way lies madness.

Antiwar.com Original Articles : When It Comes to State-Sanctioned Murder, Morality Matters Most

Fri, 7 Oct 2011 17:15:56 +0000

I don't think you need to drill all the way down to an objective theory of morality in order to show that war is wrong. Fact is, most people ALREADY believe the "private" equivalent of war is wrong. But they carve out a huge exception to that rule whenever Western Democratic Good Guy Countries are doing the warring. If you start to unpack that exception to find out just what transforms would-be murder into an acceptable act — democracy? good intentions? etc. — you'll usually find that people can't back it up at all. It's just an unexamined assumption, a byproduct of the state-revering culture they've been brought up in. You can't argue with a logically consistent sociopath who thinks that murder is always OK, but most war-supporters aren't that. Not in their private lives, anyway.

http://www.paul.house.gov/ : Foreign Occupation Leads to More Terror

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:39:40 +0000

One of bin Laden's main beefs was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, a land Muslims consider holy. And that's exactly what Paul's getting at when he talks about military bases.

Center for a Stateless Society : C4SS Editorial Policy Under Consideration

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:34:25 +0000

We can argue about definitions, but it's like trying to change the weather. In most people's minds, "capitalism" simply describes the economic system the United States has now. Rehabilitating the word is a waste of effort, and runs the risk of turning off people who might otherwise be receptive to our ideas. ("Oh, these guys are defending capitalism? No thanks.") I think market anarchy is a more descriptive term with less baggage. Free market is accurate, but tends to get used by conservatives interchangeably with free trade — by which they mean state-managed international trade agreements, another thing we want to distinguish ourselves from. In any case, I took Brad's use of "privilege-riddled capitalism" as ambiguous. It can be read with privilege-riddled as a qualifier, not a innate property of capitalism, in which case the editorial policy isn't taking any position on the appropriateness of the word capitalism.