re:By Norman Harman, June 2 at 9:07 pm:

Norman, I happen to own the word propertarian, and so I’m suing you for
royalties, plus emotional damages!

I’d say that the Civil Rights act was good stuff, but we should go further and ban dress codes.

Libertarians are Objectivists with the brains knocked out.  Always have been, even when the party was just a small joke.

“And, if we dig a bit deeper, we find that Paul’s comments may also be invested in the identity intersection of the default legal persona as white, propertied and male.”

And therein is the problem!  As a “white, propertied, male” Mr Paul has experienced all of the advantages that society has had to offer, and though he acknowledged that racism and discrimination are “wrong”, he also didn’t feel as though it was the government’s job to “equalize” the rights for everyone through this bill.  Mr. Paul’s attempt to conflate the issue of Civil Rights for African-Americans with the “rights” of gun-owners going into a restaurant, is not just a dismissal of a group of human beings and their rights to live in a just society, but also shows his own arrogance/ignorance for the plight of “other non white” people.

That he wants to be a Senator who is supposed to represent “the people” of his district is not just frightening because it might mean more people believe as he does, it is also frightening because it is this mentality that is showing up in: the Tea-baggers, Faux Noise, Lumberger, Beck, and the whole right wing noise machine whose only real allegiance is to their own bottom line!

I guess the libertarian response to the BP disaster runs something like this:

“Government regulators failed to prevent the BP disaster, proving once again that
government is always the problem, never the solution. If BP had simply been
allowed to do whatever it wanted to do, without any interference from
government, this tragedy would never have happened!”

Or something.

<blockquote>
Ed Harges, June 1 at 5:57 pm:

re:By Anarcissie, June 1 at 1:20 pm:

‘I was only speaking of libertarians who are not laughably incoherent. There are two kinds of libertarians - those who are harmless because incoherent, and those who are frighteningly consistent.’

The present government seems a lot scarier to me than anything proposed by any libertarians I know about.  In any case, given the facts of voting I have already mentioned, it is extremely unlikely that more than a few libertarians will ever be elected to anything.  So what do you find so frightening?

re:By hkc, June 1 at 6:10 pm:

Agreed. “Libertarians” fly under a false flag. They mean to defend property, not
liberty.

They should be called “propertarians”.

Ed Harges,

Where did you get that nonsense from? Perhaps you need to spend some time at FIRE.

http://www.thefire.org/

What a comical election year game
the Dems and Pubs are pulling on
all those who want to play this diversion
game..

BLA BLA BLA….......

Ms. Dawkins refers to privacy rights where she would do better to speak of property rights.  My take on Mr. Paul’s comments to Rachel Maddow was that he holds the right of people to exercise their property rights over any other claim.  If this is Libertarianism it is a strange sort of liberty.  A liberty where your freedom derives from your ownership of property rather from your personhood.

I thought that Ed Harges got it exactly right.  This Libertarianism of Rand Paul is not about liberty but about property and his extension is also correct that the Libertarians would have all property be private so there would in the end be no liberty at all, only private property rights.

re:By Anarcissie, June 1 at 1:20 pm:

I was only speaking of libertarians who are not laughably incoherent. There are
two kinds of libertarians - those who are harmless because incoherent, and those
who are frighteningly consistent.

There is no such thing as the white race. When genetically identified, Europeans are 35% African and 65% Asian, and of course Asians have their roots in Africa as well. But this is genetically, this is not historically speaking. People make up all sorts of imaginary lines, concepts, borders, etc, and think they are real. And no one thinks whiteness is more real than white people.

Ohmygodnotagain, you are ignoring history. Your children, as one-quarter Pacific Islander, would have been (and still are, I would guess, by many Americans) considered “colored” in the U.S.A. of one hundred years ago. One drop of “colored” blood made one “colored.” NEVER has one drop of “white” blood made one “white.”

Every time someone talks about “getting beyond” race, I want to cram history down their throats. You cannot talk about “getting beyond” race until you deal with what this country has done to African-Americans, native Americans, Hispanic-Americans, many of whom have native blood. You cannot “get beyond” something you don’t acknowledge.

And I don’t buy the “I didn’t oppress people because my family didn’t come here until 1950” argument. If you are seen as white, you have many privileges in this society. You can move freely, you can drive without the police stopping you, you can go into stores without being followed by security personnel, you will never know what it is like to be refused service, housing, employment, credit, because of your skin color.

I understand exactly what Professor Harris means. Having lived in overwhelmingly white areas and areas where whites are a distinct minority, I know what a privilege my skin color is. I know it confers many benefits upon me, and it is certainly as good as having a nice sum of money in the bank. This does not mean I think that’s okay or good.

It is in all our interests to live in a society in which people are not persecuted for their skin color. When whites sit idly by and think it’s okay for that motel owner to turn people away when he has rooms available, or for the police to beat brown people, they’re not usually thinking of the day the police won’t confine themselves to brown people and that motel owner may detect something suspicious about their supposed whiteness.

Be Real.

What has allowed Paulto debate Civil Rights in 2010 is a racist backlash.  Paul and Palin, two Tea Party favorites would not exist without it.  They are all about ‘taking back OUR country.’.. the unspoken agenda.

Rand, and all apologists (Scheer) can talk forever about Libertarian ideology, blah , blah, blah.  It is a racist backlash pure and simple.  The election of an African American has not gone unnoticed.  In a country with a strong history of racism (lynchings in my lifetime), who was naive enough to believe there would not be ramifications of Obama’s election.

ohmygodnotagain - of course.  Science long ago established that there is no scientific basis to race as we define it.  In other words, each individual is a ‘race’ unto himself/herself. I think of the dog - shepherds, collies, setters, hounds…they’re all dogs. (The American Kennel Club recently decided to even include mutts as legitimate show dogs. Obviously, being a dog these days is better than being a human being?)

Ed—You seem unfamiliar with the variety of libertarian thought.

From the article, quoting Patricia Williams:

“The tyranny of what we call the private,” she argues, risks reducing us to
“the life crushing disenfranchisement of an entirely owned world where
permission must be sought to walk on the face of the earth.”

Patricia Williams is exactly right. The libertarians are AGAINST liberty.

They do not support true freedom of speech, for example. Libertarians point
out that the 1st amendment only says that Congress shall make no law
restricting freedom of speech. That means you have freedom of speech only in
places that aren’t “privately” owned. It means, for example, that if you walk into
a shopping mall wearing a t-shirt advertising your political views, the person
or corporation that “privately” owns the mall can kick you out.

Only in a public space, such as a public library or post office or public park,
would you have freedom of speech. And guess what? Libertarians don’t think
there should BE any public spaces, like libraries or post offices or parks. In the
ideal libertarian world, ALL space is privately owned, and so effectively you
don’t have freedom of speech anywhere.

“UCLA law professor Cheryl I. Harris argues that an individual’s racial identity, and specifically his or her white racial identity, can be considered a legal property interest”

This is a bizarre statement, first racial identity is very difficult to define. My children are one quarter Pacific Islander, Russian Jew, and half Irish, what racial identity do they have? Recently Muhammed Ali was given a heroes welcome in Ennis, Co Clare Ireland, his great grandfather, a man called Abe Grady is from Ennis, and Ali has relatives living there. Turning the one drop rule on its head, Muhammed Ali is really a White,Irish Man, a statement made obvious because he also has the “gift of the gab”.
What Paul is saying makes sense, we have to get beyond race because it is a meaningless concept. Soon with cheap DNA testing, we will all discover we have percentages of African, Asian , Caucasian, Middle Eastern. Except for those living in Basque country who can claim to be the original pure Europeans, (Celts).
Like Anarcisse mentions, we need privacy and freedom from government interference as a buffer against totalitarianism.

I just love the second paragraph in this piece in which the author says:

“Opinions abound. Some, like Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, believe….....For instance, Sarah Palin…..blah, blah, blah…....

Truly, we have become a nation OF the dunder-heads, BY the dunder-heads and FOR the dunder-heads if a “serious” essay about a libertarian uber-dunder-head can quote the likes of Steele and Palin as serious critics of anything. WTF?

Rewriting an opinion with which one disagrees to its disadvantage is called the “straw man” fallacy.

I’m a little bit confused about the last paragraph:

’... So, what to make of these controversial comments? If nothing else, Paul has invited us to continue a conversation about American identity and the roles of government in determining the rights of social groups and individuals. If nothing more, Paul has distracted us from other concerns about race and class that deserve our undivided attention on behalf of our fellow Americans.’

The frothing at the mouth which followed Paul’s remarks about the Civil Rights laws demonstrated that we have an urgent need to discuss the limits, if any, of state power.  Over on Salon, for instance, Michael Lind baldly stated that there were no limits to state power, in that public and private discrimination were one and the same and therefore within the purview of governmental prohibition.  According to Hannah Arendt (and Mussolini) totalitarianism can be defined by the absence of private life.  The question, then, is whether our social order is or should be totalitarian.  Apparently plenty of people who call themselves liberals or progressives believe the answer is “yes”, although they probably would use less forthright language than I do.

The author also says, following Scheer, that “Paul has distracted us from other concerns about race and class that deserve our undivided attention.”  Scheer was talking, basically, about Welfare, which as it is currently conducted preserves class and probably race as well.  Unless this is the same issue (because totalitarian politics and social welfare are often combined) it seems to me it is not so important as to shut down fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in.

Let’s cut through the flotsam and jetsam: Paul revealed what is really in the old Dixiecrats’ hearts, you know, the ones who left the Democrats because of Johnson’s “meddling” in their states’ affairs—re-establish the LEGAL right of Whites, particularly Northern European Whites, to create a walled-off gated society where non-whites can be excluded with impunity, therefore preserving their status as privileged.

It is nothing but a legal red-herring for re-establishing a certain segregation.