Tuesday, December 02, 2014

A commenter at CT hopes that the choice if image isn't "entirely ironic". Rockwell had a better sense of irony than Brighouse. Look at the bottom right corner of the image.
Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child’s interest in autonomy severely limits parents’ right to shape their children’s values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children.
A confused mix of idealist individualism and statist moral authoritarianism, bound by the imperatives of non-contradictory logic and the need for "truth." So much for instilling a sense of republican virtue in the young.

repeat. Peter Thiel is right.
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.” 
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
The Thiel quote originally through Corey Robin (I don't remember where) who (repeats of repeats) doesn't understand the the implications of his own arguments. You can't be for revolution and against disruption. Permanent revolution is Modernist fantasy and capitalism's fantasy of itself.

Democracy is an ideology; virtues are inculcated or they're not. In order for the people to remain free, persons need to be raised into the role of citizens.
Brighouse’s philosophy, like Cohen’s, like all the liberalism of ideas, is deeply anti-social, laced with the melancholy superiority of a schoolmaster of a school for wayward youth. [p.30]
Again and again:
"If her interests have the same value as his, then my interests must have the same value as yours." 
The opposite of virtue. And a license for the state to impose virtue on those without it.

Brighouse and "Legitimate Parental Partiality"
Rockwell, as artist.
Brighouse and Quiggin, (and again) prefer kitsch.

The Golden Age of Ozzie and Harriet, Ken and Barbie.
update, and repeats, for comedy's sake
comment 79 by engels
Congratulations!
My favourite kid’s comment on a book was GA Cohen’s kids on Jonathan Glover’s ‘What Sort of People Should There Be’ (according to Cohen): “That’s easy, they should be like us!”
Cohen, also in the quoted reference above: "I'm not a morally exemplary person, that's all.”
I wrote a book called If you're an Egalitarian How Come You're so Rich? And the final chapter discusses fourteen reasons people give for not giving away their money when they're rich but they profess belief in equality, twelve of which are, well, rubbish. I think there are two reasonable answers that a person who doesn't give too much of it away can give and one of them has to do with the burden of depressing yourself below the level of your peer group with whom you're shared a certain way of life, and in particular, depriving your children of things that the children around them favor. And also, and slightly separately, the transition from being wealthy to being not wealthy at all can be extremely burdensome and the person who has tasted wealth will suffer more typically from lack of it than someone who's had quote unquote the good fortune never to be wealthy and therefore has built up the character and the orientation that can cope well with it.
What an asshole. And what fucking idiots.

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