If this doesn’t make your blood boil…
“The invariable pattern of such attacks gave me pause. Why did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such a passionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships? My book had clearly wounded these men in some way. Perhaps it had undercut their male pride, their sense of being an expert on world affairs, even when they weren’t. Perhaps they felt accused of being complicit in North Korea’s horrors, and converted that guilt into denial, a basic survival instinct. Whatever their motives, they felt a need to assert themselves over me. Some even denounced me, a South Korean woman, as someone who had merely returned “home” to North Korea; to them, I hadn’t gone undercover at all. Which is another way of saying that what I had written was personal, and therefore by definition not authoritative.”
Texas’ admitting privileges & surgical center requirements on abortion are unconstitutional.
@chrislhayes on the whole thing:
Here’s what’s so crazy about the Texas abortion case: the entire case is predicated on an OBVIOUS lie, clear to everyone involved. The lie is that the law was NOT passed with the explicit goal of restricting women’s access to abortions. Because if Texas had been honest about that (*of course* it was), then the law’s clearly unconstitutional under Casey. So the state of Texas and everyone on that side had to lie again and again in open court and say “No, no. This wasn’t about abortion.” Even though literally every single observer on all sides understood that obviously it was. The depths of bad faith here are astounding. Today the court basically said: stop lying. We see you.
New study shows victim blamers tend to value purity and obedience, be conservative, and be less individualistic. Which ties into this piece, Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis.
“As an ideology and as a governing philosophy, liberalism is fast losing ground. ‘Liberalism’ here is understood not as the American shorthand for those who vote Democratic in the United States, but as the philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets that in theory is shared by the U.S. Republican Party and Scandinavian social democrats alike.”
One thing that’s so fucked-up about the alt-right considering themselves part of libertarianism and people outside of libertarianism considering that the case as well is that the alt-right is fundamentally illiberal. When it comes to live-and-let-live, the central tenet of libertarianism, the alt-right has more in common with radical Islam than libertarianism.
Just as radical feminists and conservative Christians believe it’s okay to criminalize sex they disapprove of, the alt-right thinks it’s okay to punish people for cooperative behavior they dislike. That’s the threat. The question isn’t “What cooperative behavior should we punish?” That’s just asking which flavor of authoritarianism you prefer. That’s why it’s indicative of the rotten core of libertarianism that so many prominent libertarians openly support a wannabe fascist dictator.
The question is “How do we share a society? How can we all live according to our consciences without hurting anyone else?” That’s liberalism. That’s the solution. Illiberalism is the problem. Liberalism is the solution. The alt-right is authoritarian. It’s illiberal. Theocratic Islam is illiberal. Radical feminism is illiberal. It doesn’t matter what flavor your illiberalism comes in. It’s the authoritarianism that’s the problem.
They deleted the Tweet. But never forget that this happened.
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