Doctor Who Speculation - minor note about the recent special

They're trying to wind the series down and end it. The Doctor now has, in three different sense, a destination: "all" of his regenerations are enumerated, his final burial place is shown, and he has a new mission to "go home". The first two were already known, but the last bit was like the last piece to the Key to Time falling in place.

Another reminder of how odious Murray Rothbard is.

The Oppressed Gender (from the 70s)(it's men, of course) This should of course also serve as a reminder of how odious the Von Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, and most of Austrian economics is.

I would provide citations, but every single paragraph is odious and I really don't want any of those things coming in google results tied in any way to my name. Search for the "n" word, for instance!

Why I don't like states' rights

And why I am a filthy statist:

Freeing the slaves at the point of a gun was the right choice after the Southern traitors seceded. States' rights here are just a code for "the right of a state to decide to enslave black people".

Desegregation in the states at the point of a gun is the right choice. Keep in mind that the federal government had to call in the National Guard to desegregate schools in the South. This, to my mind, is a perfectly excellent use of force and a strong argument for government contra the libertarians and federal government contra the racists, er, states' rights crowd. States' rights or individual rights or the rights of businesses here are just code for "the right to segregate or discriminate against black people". Again, no two ways about it.

Without the Civil Rights Act, there would be worse discrimination by businesses than there is today. There is still rampant discrimination.

EDIT: For instance, an illustration from a conversation on reddit somebody had with, let me be blunt, a fool and libertarian. This is why I believe in a federal government that enforces desegregation at the point of a gun. Because it won't happen otherwise and segregation is a worse evil than parading around with a gun (don't these people like the idea of parading around with a gun, anyway?).

ANOTHER EDIT: the reasoning in that link reminds me of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act. And after their ruling, the states went on to enact a series of measures whose obvious intent was to curtail minority voting. If anybody needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.

A more serious post on libertarianism.

I give libertarians a hard time, but, really, it's only the Rothbard/von Mises/Paul crowd that gets me going. The other types of libertarians are, generally, decent folks with ideas I disagree with but would read and engage with. However, Austrian economics of von Mises' brand is a joke and Rothbard and the Von Mises Institute associate too freely with (or are themselves) racists, neo-Confederates, and anti-semites - see previous posts for the record on that. So does Ron Paul, by the way. Rand Paul seems to associate gleefully with neo-Confederates, but I don't have any record of anti-semitism or racism (except insofar as neo-Confederates are probably racists).

EDIT: an example of all three together at once: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2008/01/the_rockwell_files

Absurd drawings + Nietzsche make me happy

This really does warm my heart.

Guess what time it is: make fun of Murray Rothbard time.

Here is yet another quote from celebrated libertarian "philosopher" Murray Rothbard:

SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL? If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

TL; DR version: scientific racism disproves the need for economic egalitarianism and justifies inequality. Therefore, it is useful as a weapon against the welfare state project.

Fine, you can object that this was written in 1944, almost every philosopher at that time had this kind of problem, and it seems separable from the rest of his thought. Presentism should be discouraged. After all, we don't completely discount the statistical views of RA Fisher (unless you're a very strict Bayesian) just because he was a supporter of eugenics and denied the possibility of smoking causing cancer. However, one salient difference is that we do not use his works that go anywhere near his eugenic ideas or his crazy denial of the link between smoking and cancer. We use his math and that is all. With Rothbard, these ideas are harder to extricate.

Oh, wait, that was written in 1994. Less than 20 years ago. So he's just a racist.