When the events surrounding pederast Jerry Sandusky surfaced, I venturedthat, to an outsider, the American football scene was obscene—starting with its incestuous fraternities, the rock-star status surrounding handlers and players, their pompom-waving, knickers-baring groupies, and the tantrum-prone fans who experience bare-fanged fury when their heroes let them down. The problem with this freak show is that the participants are pathologically invested in it.
Besides, how did the words “coach” and “legendary” ever come to be paired? Ridiculous.
Now comes the news that the NCAA, whatever that stands for— reporters no longer follow the convention of first writing out acronyms in full—has leveled a punishment on Penn State that will likely affect every student at the university.
Collective punishment for transgressions (crimes included) committed by certain individuals (who are no longer at the helm)!
The football program will also be excluded from playing in bowl games and post-season games for four years, as well as having its football scholarships reduced from 25 to 15, and having to pay a $60 million fine, the equivalent of one year’s revenues from the football program.
Thirteen team victories have been voided. So many kids must have worked hard and played their hearts out. Why are they are being penalized?
Career and camera-conscious individuals will do anything to look as if they are busy doing something. This is all Brownian Motion, and terribly unfair.
That’s the “Big Number” you won’t hear repeated on “news” entertainment shows that sport such trivial segments.
The landmark is “the day of the year when the average taxpayer has earned enough income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burden of government. This year,” advises the Cost of Government Center, “the taxpayers worked 197 days to pay off the cost of government.”
The top 10 percent of income earners paid 70 percent of all federal income taxes.
The bottom 50 percent of income earners paid less than 3 percent of federal income taxes.
This celebration—“the Cost of Government Day”—masks that 6 to 7 months into the year is when a tiny, much-maligned segment of the population has almost completed slaving for the rest.
Do come up with a better name for the day on which the few finish working for the many, while getting pounded for their drive and productivity.
Trust RT to present a cool-headed, reasoned antidote to the hysteria that ensues, invariably, in mainstream media, each time the reality of evil asserts itself.
These events, and gun murders in general, are rare and getting rarer every year, says Doherty, who is the author of a book about guns. This, despite the fact that all states have liberalized their gun laws, many more Americans are carrying weapons—and four million Americans each year apply for gun-ownership licenses.
Alarmist news headlines notwithstanding, gun violence has plummeted by half, says Doherty.
There will never be a policy prescription that will preempt or stop the lone “lunatic” from carrying out his evil intentions.
It is clearly untrue to say that a paleolibertarian is one who always opposes a woman’s absolute dominion over her body, as a poster on Wendy McElroy’s Facebook Wall has implied.
Abortion is one hill I do not care to die on; I’ve committed enough professional Seppuku over the years. However, I have repeatedly stated that, for a classical liberal (at least), “it’s [highly] problematic to say that by virtue of her fertility, a woman loses a title in her body.”
Otherwise, here is Wendy’s brilliant articulation of self-ownership. Watch Wendy on Stossel’s, 7:28 minutes in:
Wendy McElroy: As far as I’m concerned, this is my skin. Everything beneath this skin belongs to me, or I don’t own anything. I am a self-owner-
John Stossel: Even if there is a living being inside you?
Wendy McElroy: If there is a living being inside me, I’m glad you used the word “being” and not “individual with rights,” if there is a living being inside me, it exists on my breath, it exists by my, the blood pumping through my veins, by the food I eat. It is within my skin, and if you say to me that there, that I do not have jurisdiction over my body, that, in fact, society or someone else has jurisdiction, the, the word that describes someone else owning my body is slavery.*
UPDATE I: Glad people have remained civil on Facebook, so far. That’s the way. Always. However much one disdains the procedure, you can’t get away from the fact of self-ownership. You have no right to take custody of another person’s body. They either own themselves or don’t.
You can’t “own” your body in conjunction with other busybodies.
Your tortured analogy, MW, does not hold or even come close. Any reasoning about this fraught topic must proceed, at the very least, from a correct analogy. This is why this debate cannot proceed from logic. People lose their logic (or perhaps they never had the ability to reason to begin with) when it comes to abortion. Enough, now folks. The most honest position the anti-a-woman’s-right-in-her-body proponents can advance is this: a woman, by virtue of her biology, does not have total title in her body. As a propertarian, I find this position untenable, but agree that individuals who hold it will try to finesse it. So this is the final word. “Respek,” as Ali Gi would say.
JV: This is what I mean by a lack of reasoning faculties on the topic, and plain dissembling. What irks here is not only that I said, “enough,” and this is my Wall. But that you, JV, frame your “distinguishing” argument” as exhaustive. The initiation of force is most certainly not the only distinguishing feature between the mother and the fetus. (Unrelated: there is a prerequisite for Facebook Friendship.)
UPDATE III (1/1/021):
Libertarians view women as having dominion over their bodies! My comment, then, is on the cultural specter of females freed from men, morality and tradition: how quickly they turn into diabolical libertines. Most women need traditional strictures to balance exhibitionism and promiscuity.
NEW – Argentina becomes the first country in Latin America to legalize abortion after a landmark vote.pic.twitter.com/obFbMJrLiv
You're libertarian, @WayneWs40. You distinguish the illegal from the immoral. Lib women should feel free to scrape their wombs, over which they certainly have dominion–but not on the public dime. #Abortionhttps://t.co/HHZlhur4i3
