http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/ Genetics Tue, 03 Apr 2018 05:20:42 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.27 http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16000 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:07:11 +0000 #comment-16000 The hell-raisin’ dudes at Emma Bovary’s wedding party sound like rednecks. But that was just the backwardness of rural Europe. When they were conquered, they stayed conquered. What stands out about the Borderlands is the stubborn refusal to accept central authority.  
 
While pursuing a medical genetics question for some relatives, I came across a guy who was around for Kings Mountain, but apparently didn’t particiate. He was born in the Ulster Plantation, 1763, emigrated as a 6 year old orphan and enlisted out of the Waxhaws district of SC in 1778 (age 15) and served until 1781. His papers list 7 named battles or campaigns, but no Kings Mountain or Guilford Courthouse. I think his career makes a statement about the fighting spirit of the Scots-Irish. Also their judgment.  
 
An ironic twist is that his name was Adams, from a family that originated in Somerset (SW England). Some people from southern England went to Northern Ireland and turned back. But a few stayed, intermarried,, became acculturated and came to North America in the great wave of immigration. Tracing his line back, many of the Somerset names are identical with ancestors of the Massachusetts Adamses. Trying to match individuals was pointless. By the time they’d been in Ireland 100 years all they had in common with the Boston bunch was a surname and some Y chromosome markers.  
 
Another irony was that he named a son born in 1827 “John Quincy”. This was before JQ became the leading advocate of abolition. The son remained true to stubborn redneck tradition and kept the middle name, which appears on his tombstone. Hee-yah!

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16001 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:26:31 +0000 #comment-16001 Roger Bigod 
 
Yes, the Highlanders who spoke Gaelic in North Carolina actually supported George III during the Rev War, according to Fischer & others—they were instrumental in Guilford Courthouse, if I remember correctly. On the other hand, Kings Mountain was a case of S-I frontiersmen kicking redcoat butt.  
 
I guess you’re talking High Medieval Burgerlich culture, but much of Europe was sunk in pre-medieval [Bretagne in France, par exemple] up until well into when England had developed an industrial base. Ask the French writer Celine, who captained Breton soldiers [he spoke the patois] in the First WW and thought them little advanced from farm animals. Like parts of the American South, many great French writers had a Bretagne connection—although the Tidewater must be separated from the Piedmont and the Smokies, I suppose, in Southern American Lit.  
 
But the Scotch-Irish did seem have a genius for living outside wider social and economic systems, compared to Quakers and the Virginia Tidewater aristocracy. Maybe the extended chaotic history of the Borderlands prepared them for self-sufficiency.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16002 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:37:00 +0000 #comment-16002 If you’d been reading Hopefully Anonymous the idea that I’d have anything to do with law school wouldn’t have crossed your mind. 
 
East vs West Germany and North vs South Korea are the common objections to Clark’s view of institutions. He takes a long-run view in which those are temporary aberrations that get replaced by better institutions (as happened to East Germany with the fall of the wall). China was for a long time wealthier than the west, Maoism screwed things up for a while but now it’s come roaring back. Burma has hope for the future, Bangladesh does not. Medieval England, contra Arnold Kling, had much better institutions for economic growth than most countries today. Yet for millenia the only increase in standard of living came after massive die-offs. After the British conquered India they set up textile factories similar to the ones back home, right down to having English managers. However, productivity was far lower simply because the workers were Indians rather than English. That’s part of why “neo-liberalism” was such a disappointment to developing countries outside of East Asia. A visit to Haiti will be evidence of nothing more than that it is full of Haitians.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16003 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:48:47 +0000 #comment-16003 I’d thought it obvious that institutions matter. Anyone who compares North and South Korea should realize that. Of course there are always other factors, but institutions certainly isn’t one that can be ignored.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16004 Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:36:37 +0000 #comment-16004 TGGP, 
 
Go spend some time in Haiti, then tell me that “institutions don’t really seem to matter.” All these statistics have made your head soft, like an overripe cantaloupe.  
 
My prescription: extreme reality immersion. Get thee to Port-au-Prince, preferably along with a copy of The French Revolution in San Domingo, and maybe The Bow of Ulysses as well. If you come home believing that “institutions don’t really seem to matter,” there is no cure – give up thinking, and go to law school or something.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16005 Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:11:42 +0000 #comment-16005 the principal problem of the Third World is bad government. 
You’ve heard of Greg Clark’s book. One of his points is that institutions don’t really seem to matter.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16006 Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:52:54 +0000 #comment-16006 TGGP, 
I’ll certainly agree that the state taking people’s children is rather an ugly subjective mess. 
 
I’ll admit it’s probably impossible to cleanly demolish Szasz/Caplan, but the Caplan draft does not impress me too much. I’ll just raise a couple points. 
 
The situation with Szasz trying to prove a negative boils down to these quotations employed by Caplan: 
 
When his critic Seymour Kety objects that “Our ability to demonstrate and elucidate pathological disturbances is limited by the state of the art, and to assume their absence because they have not been demonstrated is a non sequitur,” Szasz responds: “True enough. But I do not maintain that the nonexistence of pathological findings in schizophrenia proves there are none; I maintain only that a promise of such findings is only a promise, until it is fulfilled… If psychiatrists had to pay interest on their promises of pathological lesions, as borrowers must pay lenders, the interest alone would already have bankrupted them; instead, they keep issuing the same notes, undaunted by their perfect record of never meeting their obligations.” (1997, p.51) 
 
What Szasz’s parry elides is the fact that the brain is incomparably subtler and less understood than all the rest of the body. It’s not as though we lack a rationale for giving the brain science of neurosis and psychosis a few more “extensions” even though other fields have already “delivered” much more – quite the contrary. This fascinating little news item from Nature deals with rodent experiments suggesting that artificial stimulation of a single neuron can affect behavior. I haven’t read the actual paper, and I do have to wonder whether the neuron might be stimulated to an unnatural level of activity: 
http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/004169/index.html 
 
Progress is being made – in narcolepsy, a lesion in the hypothalamus was suspected decades ago, while others preferred a Szaszian “aberrant personality” etiology (an etiology which incidentally has been applied to almost every physical disease, sometimes even when the physical lesions were already known). The actual lesion was not found until 1998. This is an excellent history which unfortunately ends a little early: 
http://med.stanford.edu/school/Psychiatry/narcolepsy/narcolepsyhistory.html 
 
In spite of this progress, the early postwar period was fraught with psychoanalytical explanations for narcolepsy-cataplexy. Together with Kleitman, who believed narcolepsy was an organic disorder involving abnormal carotid stimulation reflexes (46), Daniels, was among the few to believe in the organic nature of narcolepsy. In a letter to Kleitman dated July 21, 1948, Daniels wrote: ?I was particularly interested in your views regarding the significance of narcolepsy, because I came to the same conclusion early in the course of my studies and have been decidedly annoyed by recent attempts of the psychosomaticists to revive the old idea that narcolepsy is simply a form of escape?. 
 
There are only ~10,000 hypocretin-secreting neurons in the brain, so the failure to discover this lesion until a few years ago is no shock. Evidence that most workers believe hypocretin deficiency to be the cause of most narcolepsy is found here:  
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&DbFrom=pubmed&Cmd=Link&LinkName=pubmed_pubmed_reviews&LinkReadableName=Related%20Reviews&IdsFromResult=15301991&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&log$=relatedreviews&logdbfrom=pubmed 
 
The history of migraine is somewhat comparable, though I am not as clear on it. Migraine was rather widely considered to be “imaginary” or hysterical even in the 1960s. 
 
I’ll address one other subject, Caplan’s “gun-to-head test.” As you pointed out somewhere on the internet lately, Mao “cured” opium addicts by offering to shoot them. I don’t doubt this. Caplan: 
 
Obviously most physical diseases would pass the Gun-to-the-Head Test. Pointing a gun at a paralyzed man will not enable him to walk, nor can you frighten a cancer patient into living longer. Conditions like mental retardation and Alzheimer’s disease are also highly likely to pass the Gun-to-the-Head Test. [...] The same cannot be said, however, for the large majority of mental disorders [ahem, schizophrenia is an exception I guess -EJJ]. Though the Gun-to-the-Head Test rarely happens, most people with mental disorders respond to far milder incentives.  
 
This notion of Caplan’s is missing the point about, say, depression, by being too simplistic. Mice exposed to depressogenic treatments do try to save themselves in the forced swim test AKA behavioral despair test, they just don’t try as hard or as sustainedly. A depression patient who has difficulty being industrious can surely be industrious for a good while if threatened with a gun. But if you pointed a gun at a depression patient for an extended period of time and tried to make him behave with normal energy and industry for months or years, he might eventually cease to respond to the threat/incentive. This is shown by the fact that people with a history of depression in fact do point a gun at their own head and pull the trigger, at a much higher rate than healthy people do – quite an irony on Caplan’s gun-to-head argument!  
 
I found some other of Szasz’s/Caplan’s arguments to be deficient or rickety in not-dissimilar ways.  
 
Again, I’m disputing the phenomena only; I’m not saying that all this necessarily renders simple and clear the questions about who ought to get state money/services or who ought to have their children taken away.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16007 Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:46:30 +0000 #comment-16007 daveinboca: 
 
To some extent, the features of Borderlands culture are part of the social stages between hunter-gatherer and kingdom, and you’d expect similar folks in Europe. The only thing that was special about the Borderlands was its stability and duration.  
 
The Scottish borders and Highlands and the Irish clans obviously missed out on most of these developments and arrived in the Appalachian Highlands with a medieval cast of mind and society plus a Protestant veneer. 
 
Some quibbles: The Hignlanders and Irish Clans spoke Gaelic and didn’t immigrate in large numbers in the colonial era. Some historians characterize medieval culture has having many specialized social roles (guilds, fiefholds, Church ranks) enforced by legalistic rules. Clearly, the folks of the Borderlands wanted nothing to do with that. So in that sense they were premedieval.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16008 Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:56:37 +0000 #comment-16008 TGGP: the principal problem of the Third World is bad government. 
 
Eric (and Roger), I feel it is possible for a perfectly reasonable person to feel that the abolitionists done right, and their opponents were just plain wrong. However, I feel it is imprudent to reach such a strong conclusion without at least acquiring some basic facility with the case for the defense. If not one roughly comparable to your obviously thorough education in the case for the prosecution. 
 
Unfortunately, understanding the Sith side involves reading the pre-1940 literature. In practice all that is properly available, thanks to our good friends at the Sith Library, is the pre-1922 literature. The only way to evaluate this on a level playing field is to compare it to the pre-1922 abolitionist literature, which I also posted links to above. Whether he be right or wrong, the Rev. Dabney is not responsible for the absence of a faculty of Sith studies at your local federally-supported research institution.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16009 Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:07:34 +0000 #comment-16009 There are some traits that are maladaptive in a modern society, such as poor social organization (no town greens in the Southern hills) and lack of emphasis on social advancement (including advanced education While reading Andrew Wheatcroft’s The Hapsburgs, a passage describing the feudal pre-Renaissance conditions in Europe north of the Alps and east of the Rhine [plus the Balkans] until the end of the 17th century reminded me of Fischer’s long description of the Borderlands culture and the frequent bloody feuds that prevailed between clans and families and other socially “backward” traits such as shunning and mistreatment of the old and injured. Also, extended hostilities between fortified towns and feudal castles prevailed until Absolutism in France & communications plus the Enlightenment/Industrial Revolution made central government more able to enforce its hegemony [except in isolated "backward" regions in various countries, of which the chief contributor to the US "originals" was the Scotch-Irish].  
 
The Scottish borders and Highlands and the Irish clans obviously missed out on most of these developments and arrived in the Appalachian Highlands with a medieval cast of mind and society plus a Protestant veneer. Other takes on this from different angles are Horwitz’s entertaining travelogue “A Voyage Rich and Strange” and Tim Blanning’s Pursuit of Glory, 1648-1815. Balzac and Hugo and Chateubriand all write of their Breton ancestors as basically aboriginals living in gentrified squalor.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16010 Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:01:04 +0000 #comment-16010 Eric Johnson, I have a Szaszian view of “mental illness”. Children within households can be viewed as the property of their parents, as with pets. This gives a fairly simple resolution to abortion debates over why a second before birth is different from a second after or whether the failure of a fertilized egg to implant counts as a wrongful death thanks to Plan B. It doesn’t require any sort of Child Protective Service bureaucracy to make any judgment as to what constitutes “good parenting” (as an emotivist/non-cognitivist, I don’t think that phrase has any objective meaning) and provide that role itself as nanny state. 
 
If it is OK for the state to regulate homicide committed on majors, why can’t it regulate homocide committed on minors? 
If it can be gotten, I’d prefer the sort of contractual law discussed in books like Bruce Benson’s enterprise of law. Adults would enter into contracts, but before children have become independent they would not be parties to any such contract and people other than their parents will have no say over them. As long as we have a state claiming a monopoly of violence though I’ll expect it to prohibit its subjects from initiating violence against each other (duels or boxing matches are consensual and okay though). The household though is like a mini-state within the state (not that strange, federalism and feudalism are old concepts). Parents inevitably exercise authority over their dependents, the concern of the state is only that their authority is restricted to its proper domain (their household). 
 
I’d say principal problems of the Third World seem to be civil war, disease and hunger. Reconstruction began after the Civil War and took place under a military occupation whose authority was not really challengeable. Was it also characterized by disease and hunger? 
 
Mencius, you say enough things that strike most people as ridiculous that you’re not really in any position to use that as an argument against Rothbard! There’s even biblical support for the idea of killing children that disrespect their parents. 
 
Beatings and murders of children do take place within nuclear families. Any evolutionary psychologist will tell you this primarily occurs when there is an unrelated adult male in the household. Parents are genetically wired to care for their offspring, not so for their slaves.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16011 Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:16:56 +0000 #comment-16011 Well Mencius, I’m glad you clarified that you are out to contest the value of the abolitionist path into war, rather than robustly rehabilitate chattel slavery. Knowing you I’m sure you didn’t leave that ambiguous in order to play the provocateur a bit.  
 
(I have read read your whole blog. Pretty interesting on the whole, especially with dissenting commenters pushing back. I guess no one can call you a pinko anyway.) 
 
You cite me a book brought out in 1867, which, it’s worth noting, belongs by your own lights to the era generally characterized by pro-slavery propaganda and political correctness. Dabney mentions publick reprobation as a check on the maltreatment of slaves; publick reprobation could also be a check on maltreaters allowing their acts to become broadly publick in the first place. I guess I am a priori pessimistic about what American slaves experienced, considering the abundance of torment in this world when there is no effective check on it and especially where there is an outgroup to victimize. Obviously empirical facts trump this consideration to the extent that they can be clarified, and I acknowledge the possibility that the received wisdom could be largely false, but I will have to bow out of the question now not being a historian.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16012 Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:59:24 +0000 #comment-16012 I’m afraid I find your prejudice more than a little unsavory. Surely those who despise the past, and feel free to express contempt for the dead based solely on the fact that they are dead and their opinions have since become unfashionable, can at least have the decency to find interests other than history. 
 
Perhaps this quick resort to personal slime says more about your character than mine or my grandmother’s.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16013 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:01:26 +0000 #comment-16013 “find it fascinating that your entire race has essentially been written out of American history – simply because it complicates the narrative, it seems.” 
 
Thanks, but more on “my race” a little later. The media conception of race nowadays is embarrassingly type-cast. For instance, a devout Catholic nun, Herietta DeLisle http://creoleneworleans.typepad.com/creole_folks/2006/10/betryal_of_moth.html,  
was famous in her day, 1810s-20s, for her work among the poor blacks and pocs in New Orleans. In appearance she was completely European, quite pretty and well-known as being of mixed blood. If current Hollywood got hold of her story she’d probably be played by Whoopie Goldberg. Whoopie’s fine, but Henrietta DeLisle she ain’t. Modern race politics conflate black with mulatto or even quinteroon (look that word up for an education in math and race) and is quite a problem even today among people who still identify with the “people of color” label. I don’t. It was my dad who whose parents were from that group and they left the area long, long ago and are long since deceased. Dad didn’t know and didn’t care though some of his brothers and my cousins did eventually. My mother is Euro-ethnic. I don’t look black by any stretch of the imagination and while I’ve met many blacks I like a lot, I don’t identify with them. Even many poc’s who do look a bit “colored” are not well received by blacks. There’s no point of claiming that identity and if I did I’d just be looked upon as ridiculous. A DNA test done showed my genetic heritage as 99% Caucasian and 1% American Indian. Who that Indian was I have no idea though I know names and dates galore for the blacks, pocs and whites in my genealogy. Yet in spite of all those blacks, I have no African genes in my pool that manifest. I had figured it would be about 6% at least.  
Still, it is a fascinating history. The interplay of black and white and Indian was far more complex than most people understand. 
One interesting thing I found out. The French priests in the early days used to encourage Frenchmen to marry Indian women, white women being in short supply and often demanding French born husbands. The priests opined that there was little difference in color between the Indians and French and that such marriage was better than illicit fornication. Many tribes of eastern seaboard Indians were different in type from plains Indians and their origins have been a source of speculation. Some think they may have middle eastern roots. Anyway, “Color” as shorthand for race was an important, though not always decisive consideration, and the Indians seemed more integratable with whites than did the blacks. I definitely got that impression in my studies of the histories. The black women who ended up as wives of white slaveholders — interracial marriage was legal under Spanish law, extant during the 1770s-90s or so — must have been exceptional people. Some of these interracial unions lasted for decades, despite the fact they could have been “dismissed” at any time. Under French and English law, the mixed unions were common law. 
After the initial African/European pairing, the descendants mated assortatively, generally mulattos married mulattos. It has been determined that the great majority of mulattos in the anti-bellum south had parents who were both mulatto. Mulatto could mean half black or 1/8 black or even less. It just meant “mixed”. Because their numbers were limited, there were a lot of cousin marriages, leading to very close family ties. I was always somewhat in awe of my macho father and his many brothers kissing each other in greeting and departure, like a bunch of Frenchmen. They kissed each other more in one Christmas weekend than my Irish mother kissed her own kids all year. So I began to investigate the culture. 
and then the genealogy.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16014 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:50:06 +0000 #comment-16014 The first was something written by the military guy (name escapes but it’s famous–he’s the character played by Guiness in the movie Khartoum). He’d been especially selected (recalled from retirement, I think, was the narrative, prevailed on by Wilberforce as a similarly-inclined opponent of slavery). My memory is that he wrote, at the very time of suppressing the slave-raiders, that the natives were so stupid and ignorant that it was hard to see how they could survive were it not for the kindness of the slavers in placing them in well-appointed, hospitable households. (I’m being facetious, of course, but not by so much.) 
 
Gordon. Fascinating character, but a bit of a nut, frankly. I wouldn’t be too quick to place much weight on any of his enthusiasms. 
 
The other is a fact, rattling around, that, in barring the continuation of the slave trade, that is, the further importation of slaves, the southern states wanted to make 1800 the cut-off year but were opposed (and beaten) by the northern states with a choice of an 1808 date (and which time permitted an augmentation of about 10% to the then-current slave population). 
 
I don’t know about this specifically, but it doesn’t surprise me – the slave trade was a New England industry. Those Yankees! And, as other commenters have noted, the belief that slavery was a curse was generally prevalent among Southern aristocrats at the time. It is difficult to find anything like true proslavery opinion before the first onslaught of the abolitionists, in the 1830s.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16015 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:45:00 +0000 #comment-16015 Eric, 
 
Is it not true that an American slave was rather likely to be beaten, raped, and otherwise tormented? 
 
I suspect that if there was a Wikipedia page for the beating, rape, and otherwise torment of American children, it could easily lead one to conclude that the nuclear family was a crime against humanity. Especially if all children were now raised communally, kibbutz style. 
 
Think of the slaveholder-slave relationship as equal parts parent-child, employer-employee, and ruler-subject. Corporal punishment is a normal aspect of the first and third forms. 
 
The fundamental question is: was sadistic physical abuse a normal and ordinary part of American slavery, or an exceptional case? When you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are you looking at the rule, or the exception? (Mrs. Stowe also produced a nonfiction Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which factual cases of the abuses described in the novel are listed. AFAIK these facts are not disputed, and if they were I’m sure others could be found.) 
 
The impression I get from the slave narratives I’ve seen is that sadistic abuse was unusual, though not nearly as unusual as parental child abuse. As this collection, whose editor is certainly no Confederate, puts it: “Nostalgia veils many memories for the former slaves… why is there no pervasive cry of rage from the former bondsmen? Why instead these protestations of affection for a condition which shames the civilized world?” 
 
On the Confederate side, here is the Rev. Dabney on the subject, from his fascinating and witty, if slightly theology-obsessed, Defence of Virginia: 
 
It is true again, that our law gave the master the power of corporal punishment, and required the slave to submit. So does the law of, England give it to parents over children, to masters over apprentices, and to husbands over, wives. Now, while we freely admit that there were in the South, instances of criminal barbarity in corporal punishments, they were very infrequent, and were sternly reprobated by publick opinion. So far were Southern plantations from being “lash-resounding dens,” the whipping of adult men and women had become the rare exception. It was far less frequent and severe than the whipping of white men was, a few years ago, in the British army and navy, not probably more frequent than the whipping of wives is in the Northern States of America, and not nearly so frequent as the whipping of white young ladies now is in their State schools. The girls and boys of the plantations received the lash from masters and agents more frequently than the adults, as was necessary and right for the heedless children of mothers semi-civilized and neglectful; but universally, this punishment by their owners was far less frequent and severe than the black parents themselves inflicted. We may be permitted to state our own experience as a fair specimen of the average. The writer was for eighteen years a householder and master of slaves, having the government of a number of different slaves; and in that time he found it necessary to administer the lash to adults in four cases; and two of these were for a flagrant adultery (resulting in the permanent reform of at least one of the delinquents.) His government was regarded by his slaveholding neighbours as by no means relaxed. 
 
One can, of course, impugn the credibility of the author. But one would need a better basis for impugnment than his color, creed, age, facial hair, resemblance to one’s grandmother, etc, etc, etc.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16016 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:18:03 +0000 #comment-16016 TGGP, 
 
just summarize what the actual problems with Reconstruction were. 
 
What are the actual problems with the Third World? That’s what the actual problems with Reconstruction were. 
 
I thought it was southerners who thought [a slave revolt] was a more distinct possibility 
 
No – the argument that the South could not militarily hold off the North and simultaneously repress the slaves was a common bit of abolitionist propaganda, which depicted them as in general “politically conscious” in the Marxist sense of the phrase. Of course this was the exception rather than the rule. 
 
I’ll go with Rothbard in saying that once a child homesteads themself by leaving they become self-owners and there is no reason for the rest of society to enforce any demands made by their former guardian on the child. 
 
Even for a nine-year-old? This is how Rothbard so frequently reasons himself from Lockean absolutes to sheer insanity. He is a master of the reductio ad absurdum, but so stubborn that he defends the absurdum.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16017 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:09:14 +0000 #comment-16017 me: The primary consequence of the antislavery movement was a war that killed 500,000 people – besides destroying the economy of the South, reducing the former slaves to abject destitution, and sending the Constitution into a tailspin of malignant consolidation from which it has yet to recover and almost certainly won’t. 
 
Roger: My impression was that the primary consequence was the eradication of chattel slavery. 
 
That’s exactly my point. You are so fixated on the eradication of slavery that you consider it the primary consequence, and half a million deaths and the destruction of the original Constitution a minor, secondary afterthought. Yet you are entirely unable to produce any argument that this change resulted in any substantial improvement in the lives of its nominal beneficiaries. 
 
The destructiveness of the war and the failure of Reconstruction don’t lead to the conclusion that chattel slavery was a Good Thing. 
 
I am not arguing that chattel slavery was a Good Thing. I am arguing that it was a Thing, like many other things, good in some ways and bad in others. Reasonable people can disagree on the ratio of good to bad. 
 
I am arguing that the American abolitionist movement was a Bad Thing – because it caused the Civil War, which caused the aforementioned death and destruction. 
 
Don’t you find it just a little surprising how, as a good liberal, you are so comfortable in endorsing military conquest, death and destruction – when your side is the conquering one?  
 
Here’s another way to think of it: if you think it was sweet and good and true for the North to conquer the South and abolish slavery, you must think it would have been a sin of omission for the North not to do so – thus selfishly preserving hundreds of thousands of Yankee lives, at the expense of failing to eradicate the peculiar institution. 
 
In that case, I note that in 1865, Brazil still had slavery. So why stop at the Gulf of Mexico? Can’t the Radical Republicans be faulted for failing to continue their crusade, sweeping south toward the pampas until every last African in the Western Hemisphere enjoyed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? For that matter, Arab slavery in East Africa was still going strong at the time. Zanzibar delenda est! 
 
(What’s scary is that present-day American foreign policy seems to be built on exactly this logic.) 
 
I downloaded and looked at the stuff you linked to. There were several books of the same ilk in my DAR/UDC grandmother’s library which I read as a boy. I adored my grandmother but thought the books were wrong, and worse, pathetic and depressing. Still do. 
 
So: because your grandmother, while adorable, is a stuffy old dingbat, Charles Francis Adams is not worth reasoning with. Why, if he were alive, he’d probably be a stuffy old dingbat too!  
 
I’m afraid I find your prejudice more than a little unsavory. Surely those who despise the past, and feel free to express contempt for the dead based solely on the fact that they are dead and their opinions have since become unfashionable, can at least have the decency to find interests other than history.

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16018 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:43:46 +0000 #comment-16018 > I see no reason to interfere with anything parents choose to do with their children up to and including murder. 
 
Oh sure, I guess only the most stoic and rational motives will cause modern parents to exercise the severe prerogative of the paterfamilias.  
 
Really, don’t you think most people today killing their children are just partly or wholly deranged?  
 
I’m all for liberal eugenics, but why not limit infanticide to babies under two years old – and strictly require orderly, regulated euthanasia? 
 
To scrutinize your analogy, Iraq is sovereign and outside our state system. What do Saddam and the Kurds have to do with our state stopping Andrea Yates’ psycho filicides? Am I missing some Swiftian irony here? Should you have to die as a child just because your mom gets some psychotogenic virus, and the state hasn’t restrained her though she already killed your siblings? If it is OK for the state to regulate homicide committed on majors, why can’t it regulate homocide committed on minors?

]]> http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/12/28/city-upon-a-hill/#comment-16019 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:22:06 +0000 #comment-16019 Is it not true that an American slave was rather likely to be beaten, raped, and otherwise tormented? (I ask non-rhetorically, not knowing much history.)  
 
Wikipedia reports lots of beating and rape: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#Treatment_of_slaves 
 
If this is true, the suggestion that a lack of job mobility is functionally equivalent to slavery, is laughable.  
 
Consider not just the tortures themselves, but also the brutal and unnatural extremes of labor that could be extracted from you day after day by the threat of such tortures.  
 
I don’t deny that “free” peasants in some feudal systems (eg Roman empire) sometimes faced regimes that were at least structurally/qualitatively similar – though I have no clue which feudal systems administered benign-ish thrashings to serfs and which were instead torturous to one degree or another. But anyway, having a non-compete contract in modern Ohio is nothing like this.

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