A Quote To Remember

I never thought I would live to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places that they now do.

— Will Rogers

And that’s a problem because…
— me

___________
Edited to correct Will Rogers’ name. I blame Geordge Bush.

Emotions as knowledge?

 

Or is it emotions, i.e., feelings, as “the only certain knowledge”?

This post is not an argument in favor of “emotional knowledge” whatever that might be taken to mean. Nor is it about some theory of psychological health, involving the integration of all aspects of the human personality.

Instead, it is a momentary reflection on the degrading effects of skepticism, both moral and perhaps epistemological as well, on the ability of the convinced skeptic – if such a term is permissible – to actually engage in moral argument.

This was brought forcefully to mind by a YouTube video posted by Yorkshire on First Street Journal.

In this video we see a youthful British woman clad in sandals and a baggy red shift-like garment reaching to well below the knees, bemoaning the manner in which radical Moslems now inhabiting her old Luton neighborhood are protesting the arrest of the wife of Moslem who had set off a bomb in Stockholm.

What seems to really upset the British girl is the Moslem vitriol; their loudly antagonistic, hateful, and contemptuously hostile way of expressing themselves with respect to the institutions of both the culture and the country which has harbored and sheltered, and if news reports are right, often literally housed and fed them.

She seems especially disturbed by the marchers’ chant that the British police should burn in hell.

Attempting to engage one contemptuous burka clad protester in conversation, she’s informed that she looks naked; and is asked if she is trying to seduce.

Put on some clothes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is told to “Go and put on some clothes”.

She becomes indignant, sputtering, “How you chose to dress like that, I chose to dress like this”.

The British woman then protests that her female critic is “judging” her.

The female marcher cheerfully admits that she is indeed judging the indignant and whiny western woman.

The westerner babbles that she should not be judged because she is not judging the Moslem woman; just as if the Moslem woman actually believed that she and the western woman were moral peers inhabiting the same moral plane.

“I don’t judge you, because I’m above that” says the western woman, while flailing her arms about for emphasis.

“Don’t you dare speak to me like that.” she rails.  ‘This is my hometown as well”:  again, implicitly referring to a moral framework based on respect for persons – even the stupid, weak, and misguided – which assumes a vision of living space and power “sharing”,  at which the Moslems marchers obviously sneer.

The now emotionally wounded westerner continues her own feelings-jihad with, “I try my hardest to sympathize with people who may be different to me, and it’s this tiny minority …”

Ah yes, dear, please say again for the cameras how broadminded and accepting you are. I am sure that that will make the desired impression on the marchers. Once they are sure, you know, that you mean no harm and will respect them.

Hoping then to score rhetorical points along this line by appealing to a male marcher with the concept of “fairness”, she is informed in short order that it is indeed OK to shout that British police should burn in hell.  Because you see, Britain has free speech. And further, in response to your question dear lady as to whether Koran-observant Moslems ought to respect the laws of the country that hosts them?

Well, the answer is, “No”.

Eventually, she encounters some scholar type who informs her Koranic-like chapter and verse that Moslems need not observe non-Moslem law in their host countries, and, that she is going to hell to boot.

She responds with, “It hurts me to think that you think that of me because you don’t really know me …” As if that would make a difference.

To which the scholar-type replies that he knows quite enough. He knows she is not a Moslem.

Well, she tried to be understanding and fair and considerate of everyone’s feelings. What else is there to say?

A little, apparently.

She sets the tone of the wrap-up of her video adventure with a voice-over wherein she announces she, “finds it sad that anyone would preach such a damning message”.

Then, tremulously facing the camera: “To sum up in words to tell you how I’m feeling now …  I feel … gutted, completely gutted that this is happening ….”

Words failing her she goes silent; and saying no more, turns her head away from camera and toward the protesters.

A pause …. to let the profundity of the feelings sink in ….

Feelings … hurt … feelings … are her frame of reference. Along with mutual sympathy and respect for all differences; emphasizing the notion of a tolerant and accepting  “fairness” among presumed “equals”.

But she is obviously not their equal. Not in physical fact clearly, and not according to the moral theory they announce.

And what does she have in her ideological armamentarium with which to respond to them?

Feelings. She has feelings. And she wants to tell you about her feelings and how hurtful you are being to them.

I guess she imagines the Moslems must care about her feelings. Or that they should care. It is almost as if she sees her feelings as some great scale by which moral principles ought to be weighed and evaluated.

But the Moslem marchers obviously don’t care. And I don’t see how they could care, given her pathetic intellectual performance. I certainly don’t care, and like her, I am a westerner myself.

Western culture, the postmodernist, modern liberal portion of it, is not only skeptical of religious dogmatism, it is skeptical (and increasingly outright nihilistic) regarding moral knowledge in general, and quite often about the possibility of solid or enduring knowledge concerning reality itself.

Positive, empirical science, the one practice that is still thought by some of this ideological stripe to yield what can be called certain knowledge, is held by these same persons to be value free, and incapable of yielding any “is” information, which leads to “ought” conclusions.

When it comes to moral questions then, all this kind of person can do when confronted by other some person having dogmatic and insistent views is, just as C.S. Lewis and others before him long ago observed,  to remark on the state of their feelings.

Of course “way back when”, when Lewis laid out the implications of such relativism and skepticism, and then described its inevitably hapless and pathetic end-point, his reductio ad absurdum depiction had a certain flavor of the comically ironic about it. Certainly, and whatever their 20th century progressive opinion leader rhetoric, no broad segment of any society would actually embrace skepticism and relativism to a point wherein they would wind up quite so stupid and hapless in the face of a strident and mocking challenge to their assumed “values”, as we saw here?

Well, with enough propagandizing social affirmation and encouragement, they obviously can.

What then, Lewis and others presented as a warning via their careful exercises in hypothetical logic, and the inevitable conclusions of their chains of reasoning, this young woman is now living out in fact.

She embraced the skeptical milquetoast meta-values presented to her. She internalized them. She then lived comfortably among similar enabling others who had no motivation to rock or test their relativist boat,  exposing its virtually non-existent freeboard, and lack of seaworthiness.

Now however, she confronts hostile and vehement others who, in an act of modern values sacrilege, sneer at her feelings and test her values with their life and death commitments.

And all she can do is announce to the world how THAT makes her feel; and theatrically shake her head with sadness as a means of trying to elevate herself  to her lost honor and dignity. After all, she’s “above that” other stuff.

Yes … I guess she is. Just as long as those vestiges of western moral ideals more potent than the relativism and skepticism and values emotivism which she represents and lives out, continue to hold the moral barbarians somewhat at bay.

 

[Update note. I’ve made some wording changes in the first 2/3rds “narrative portion” of the post. Changing word order, tightening up slightly, checking punctuation and coherence, and doing the things real bloggers do when they write a draft before posting.  The more analytical remarks about postmodern culture are unchanged.]

 

 

Obama and a Presentment of Englishry?

This Incredible Slinking Men of the Obama Administration never cease to amaze.

Not just in their leftoid, parasitical on the productive class effrontery, but in their lack of logical acumen; their inability to recognize that in breaking legal bonds in one direction, they are broken in the other.

Or perhaps they don’t believe that there is a reciprocal dynamic between leftist conqueror and the American conquered.

As the Obamanaughts phrased it: “We rule now”.  The operative term here being rule, not govern or administer. And if the legislature, that is the American Congress, will not give the Little Imperator what he wants, why he will do it by Executive Order, he threatens.

So why should we be surprised by this report which states that the Obama Administration is proposing what is basically an ethnic based regime of law in Hawaii?

AOL didn’t bury this report

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just a few years ago no one would have believed that such a report could be credible. But now, with what we have already seen out of this administration, our natural skepticism is reduced.

Law is the embodiment of the moral sense of the people,  Blackstone is alleged to have said.

Now it is proposed we accept the notion within our polity of different laws for different moral moieties; which implies, though the advocates no doubt wish to ignore it, that we have fundamentally different peoples with irreconcilably different moral sensibilities, jostling in the same political space.

This doesn’t seem to line up with leftist moral rhetoric.

But, as we have seen in the past, leftists seem incapable of grasping simple deductive inferences, so caught up are they in their “world-creating” fantasy existence.

 

Yeah, I remember law just like that from my school days.

 

“Such of the crimes as might be prosecuted by an appeal, and for which the criminal’s lands were forfeited to his lord or to the King, and his chattels taken, or for which he lost life or member, or was outlawed, were called felonies. Misdemeanours, such as were subsequently known under a fully developed common law, were practically ignored by the justices of Henry the Third’s reign, and on the eyre rolls of that period may be said not to appear. Homicide and rape are the crimes that here pass before us. The former is the only one that need be considered. In some few cases homicide was held to be justifiable, and when such happened the slayer suffered no punishment.

Neither did he where death was caused by misadventure or in self defence.

Every other case of homicide, that is, that which was neither justifiable nor excusable, was felonious.

The difference between murder and manslaughter was then unknown.

In Glanvill’s day secret homicide, which is murdrum, had to be distinguished from homicidium, but the distinction soon died away.1 The term murdrum however survived as the name of the fine paid by the hundred when a person was slain and the slayer not produced.

The law presumed that everyone killed was a foreigner unless his English birth was proved. Possibly the origin of the doctrine is to be found in the statutes of William the Conqueror, which decreed that all men whom he brought with him or who had followed him should be in his peace.

And if one of them were slain the lord of his murderer was to seize the slayer.

But if he could not do so then the lord was to pay forty-six marks of silver as long as his possessions held out, and on their exhaustion the hundred in which the killing took place was to pay in common the balance owing.

The presentment of Englishry (Englescheria), that is proving the slain to be an Englishman by birth, was at first one of the few formal badges of distinction between the conquering and conquered race. Its practical need could not have lasted long, for at the end of the twelfth century it was impossible, except in the very highest or very lowest ranks, to distinguish Norman from Englishman.” [Pleas of the Crown for the Hundred of Swineshead and the Township of Bristol by Edward James Watson]

Looks like the Obama Administration does in fact believe itself quite capable of distinguishing Saxon from non-Saxon. At least when they see a political gain in it for themselves.

So much for any notion that the left believes or ever really believed in the first place, that mankind constituted one moral species … no matter how rhetorically useful they happen to have found the spouting of Christian and natural law doctrines in order to advance their cause – at least far enough along to subvert and displace the same.

 

 

 

Dishonest David Dewhurst Dumped

TEA Party alive and well in Texas

Two years ago, David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz were vying for US Senate. Dewhurt’s ads were all over Conservative talk radio. And the consensus was that what Dewhurst had to do was to keep on lying about Cruz in order to be elected, but all Cruz had to do was keep on telling the truth. And we all know how that election turned out.

Yes, I’m an unabashed Ted Cruz supporter. And it looks like so are most Texas Republican voters. In a Republican run-off for Texas Lieutenant Governor, Establishment Republican favorite David Dewhurst ran up against TEA Party favored Dan Patrick. And the seat Texans had re-elected Dewhurst to previously, that seat, the Lieutenant Governor’s chair, was overwhelmingly taken away from the sitting Republican Lieutenant Governor and handed over to the TEA Party. (You might want to remind me that it was only the Republican run-off, but if you do that, I’ll remind you it’s Texas, not some state where Democrats are competitive state-wide.)

How bad was the Establishment drubbing? How easily did the TEA Party candidate win? How about by a 30 POINT MARGIN?

Note to the McConnell/Boehner camp: The rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated.

HT Twitchy

With Hillary friends like these …

One has to wonder whether the apparent solicitation for support for a draft Hillary movement, as presented on AOL was really sincere.

Is this a joke?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If it is really put up by bona fide Clinton supporters, rather than those seeing to mock her as a dour, badly aging, socialist she-troll, then with friends and supporters like that, one would think she hardly needs enemies.

On the other hand, just maybe, and given what we have learned of the peculiar mentality of the left, that image is inspiring to some?

 

Hi. I’m stubby, ugly, and amoral, and I like sunglasses, and hordes of idiots worship me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, I held my nose and followed the web address, and it is apparently a sincere, not mocking, celebration of all political things Hillary.  Seems these were put up by her dedicated supporters.

In command

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Ready for Hillary Teams Up with Top Obama Campaign Veterans to Build National Grassroots Army

July 10, 2013

MCLEAN, VA – The national grassroots organization Ready for Hillary today announced it is partnering with consulting firm 270 Strategies to harness the energy of the growing number of activists around the country who are inspired and motivated by the idea of a 2016 Clinton candidacy. 270 Strategies, whose partners engineered President Obama’s historic grassroots organizing model, will lead Ready for Hillary’s national organizing strategy and build the group’s field operation. …”

Remember to smile

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I never expected to see this many people here to encourage Hillary to run,” he said. “And this goes to show you the kind of depth she has in the LGBT community for this many people to come out on a Wednesday night and basically give her the message that we want you to run. We’re ready for her.”

Added Fowlkes, “We had a black president and now we’re ready for a woman president. I’m ready.”

Gay Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Anthony Lorenzo Green, who represents an ANC district in Ward 8, said he too believes Clinton is the best-qualified candidate to succeed Barack Obama as president.

“I prefer Democrats with a backbone,” Green said. “And she has continuously proved that she is not afraid to stand up to these Republicans and let them know that there are people in this country that we really need to look out for and she is the right person to do that.”

 

 

Oh geez …

 

Maybe some of us need to start a new country with people who are interested in something other than living as a pack of nuzzling, snuffling, and mutually grooming polymorphous perverts.

 

 

 

Like The Days Of Sodom And Gomorrah

Jesus’ return will be like the days of Lot and Noah, so Jesus proclaimed. Like the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, with their absolutely evil sexual immorality. When two angels of the Lord visited Lot, the entire town came out and raised a ruckus. Lot offered to let the town rape his two virgin daughters. They refused. They demanded to rape the men who came to visit.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11

9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a] 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Footnotes:
a.1 Corinthians 6:9 The words men who have sex with men translate two Greek words that refer to the passive and active participants in homosexual acts.

Every “church” leader who declares homosexuality to be acceptable will find himself separated from the Kingdom of Providence. Every last one of them.

Take a look around the US. People are being fired from their jobs for standing up for righteous marriage and against the sexually immoral crapola that is being forced down our throats today. The US has fallen deeply into its Sodom and Gomorrah stage, and Providence will punish the US for it. We are in the End Times, just as it was prophesied, and the coming of the Lord (and the 7 year Tribulation) are close at hand.

Got a problem with that? Take it up with the man you now mock, but whom you will bow down and prostrate yourself before, while declaring him Lord over all. (Philippians 2:9-11)

But, how can this be?

I spoke with John Hitchcock yesterday, and discovered something new. Mr Hitchcock, despite some smidgen of Indian in his ancestry, is as white a white man as there could be, mostly Irish, fair skinned and red haired. As as everyone who has read his work, on the now-defunct Common Sense Political Thought, on The First Street Journal, and here, is aware, he is as conservative as conservative comes, TEA Party through and through.

According to the left, that means that he must, simply must, be a total racist, nativist, sexist and utter patriarchist. But, if you look at his Endorsements section on the right-hand sidebar of this site, you’ll see four listings, all from 2012:

• (Sarah) Palin/ (Allen) West for President 2012
• Ted Cruz for US Senate (Texas)
• Jamie Radtke for US Senate (Virginia)
• Mia Love for US House (Utah 4)

So, looking at that list, and those are the only four endorsements he has, I see

• A white woman and black man;
• A white Hispanic man;
• A white woman; and
• A black woman.

I’m trying to find the racism and sexism in that list, and can’t seem to find it!

But, of course, those are political endorsements, and who knows how nefarious those racist, sexist patriarchists can be in concealing their perfidy. Well, Mr Hitchcock has taken a further step to disguise his racism, because Jessica, his new girlfriend, isn’t white and she isn’t an American! How devious, how Machiavellian, how outrageous, the depths to which a Christian, white American conservative will sink to hide his cisheteronormative patriarchal makeup.
____________________________________
Cross-posted, in slightly different form, on The First Street Journal

The Vast Majority Of America’s Poor … Aren’t

I want you to go to work 9 hours each day, 6 days each week, for 10 months. In this 10-month experience, you will pay no taxes, no rent, no utilities, no insurance; you will buy no food, no gasoline, no bus fare, no clothing, no toiletries, no nothing. You will instead save every penny you earned working those 43 54-hour weeks, at the end of which, you will take all the money -every last cent- to the electronics store and buy a middle of the road laptop computer with Linux installed (not Mac or Windows) and a decent printer. You will pay the cashier every penny you have, and leave none in reserve. After which, ladies, you will spend the next 9 9-hour workdays saving every last penny you earn so you can purchase a black one-piece swimsuit.

Because that’s what those three items cost a particular working woman in the Philippines. 9 hours a day for 198 Philippine Pesos. 22 PHP per hour. 50 US cents per hour. 54 hours a week. And she’s not running around looking for handouts. She’s looking to work to get ahead, by her own merits.

The vast majority of America’s “poor” just flat-out aren’t.

Are ‘Modern Liberals’ fit to be free?

We’ve mooted this issue before in the course of some heated exchanges on the old “Commonsense Political Thought” blog.

So, it’s not a new question, but it remains one worth considering on its own: Are political progressives, those human biological expressions we term modern liberals, in some way radically unsuited for life in the system of political liberty once bequeathed to us by our ancestors? Are they, modern liberals, in some ways and on average congenitally defective, or maybe “just fundamentally different” with regard to the possession of the (“lower case”) kind of self-governance and self-reliance capacity which presumptively (according to our Founders’ theories) makes participation in Self Government in a (“Upper Case”) political sense, a workable proposition?

Are modern-liberal hedonic utilitarianism and values nihilism even, say, the mere result of biological dispositions or attributes, rather than intellectually arrived at conclusions?

Perhaps, as Hoagie suggested the other day, while he was exasperatedly engaging in a bit of unapologetic invective, modern liberals really are, in a statistically meaningful sense, a distinct sub-population within this polity: a politically co-existing but distinguishable population of humans who have certain kinds of distinct behavioral or psychological or even morphological traits (or deficits) which make life in a constitutional polity – a limited republic – very unpleasant, un-meaningful, and even frightening for them.

The answer is probably unfolding before our very eyes.

“Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim.” Daily Mail | UPDATED: 19:39 EST, 16 May 2013

Given Their Manifest Natures, that is to say the somatic, the morphological and psychological manifestation that constitutes “them”, perhaps a classically liberal constitutional polity suitable for self-directing individuals just doesn’t fit with what they are capable of or able to appreciate in life.

The Depressive and Anxious Liberal

Perhaps the most revealing difference is the enhanced tendency that Liberals have for depressive and anxious disorders. We stumbled onto this phenomenon in our Spring 2005 survey, and filled in some of the details in our Summer 2005 survey.

Liberals report higher rates of major depression, mild depression, bipolar disorder, agoraphobia, OCD, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and general anxiety. This is true for both males and females. Liberals also report higher stress levels and lower confidence levels (both soon to be reported).

Liberals are also much more likely to use anxiolytics and antidepressents. Liberals report more difficulty in maintaining attention during conversations. Liberals on average spend more time in “negative” emotional states. By “negative”, we mean mental states that seem to be contrary to their own self-interest. They also report lower rates of involvement in pair-bond relationships. Neuropolitics.org Ezine February 2006

Now we might take this too far, and certainly racists in the past have. They did so by imagining for example, that they could discern an invariable and universal gene link between somatic expressions and character traits which manifest as morally evaluable behavior.

But that seems to me to be a rather different proposition than to notice that, say, feminized males and masculinized females for instance, tend to identify as political progressives; whereas conservatives are more strongly sexually dimorphic.

Multiple research disciplines have found evidence that our male ancestors used physical aggression to compete for status. The evidence shows how this competition led to the evolution of numerous physical and psychological sex differences. Sell and team’s review highlights the sheer number of physical and mental features that show evidence of special design for physical aggression in men, compared to women. These features include abilities to dissipate heat, perceive and respond rapidly to threats, estimate the trajectory of thrown objects, resist blunt-force trauma and accurately intercept objects.
While fighting ability was undoubtedly essential when man was a hunter-gatherer, how important and influential is it today? According to Sell and colleagues’ work, man’s fighting ability is still a major influence on his attitudes and behavioral responses. Springer Select New York / Heidelberg, 10 April 2012 in “Why are action stars more likely to be Republican?”

Just how that actually works itself out in detail, is another matter.

For example, whether people who are marginalized or who feel marginalized for whatever reason tend to be more politically “liberal” on what are pretty obvious socially motivating grounds, or, whether the physical phenomenon or trait itself is what prompts a “liberal” social attitude, is a question I don’t pretend to have an answer to.

Maybe it is a mixture of both … first, congenitally divergent interests among people who find themselves associating in a political arrangement with strongly divergent others, and second, a particular strategy for jockeying for place, and status, and for the distribution of economic spoils, within that polity.

But the difference seems to researchers to be as plain as the nose on your face:

” … when it comes to female politicians, perhaps you can judge a book by its cover, suggest two UCLA researchers who looked at facial features and political stances in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker’s voting record,” said lead author Colleen M. Carpinella, a UCLA graduate student in psychology.

The researchers also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less stereotypically feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the greater the distance the politician’s appearance strayed from stereotypical gender norms.

In fact, the relationship is so strong that politically uninformed undergraduates were able to determine the political affiliation of the representatives with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, and the accuracy of those predications increased in direct relation to the lawmaker’s proximity to feminine norms. Science Daily
September 27, 2012

Nonetheless, whatever the details, I think we see an interesting phenomenon developing in the United States, as the progressive programmatic invariably passes beyond the achievement of transactional dominance in the public realm, and relentlessly seeks to percolate all the way down to every last private relation and interpersonal transaction.

Who, or whatever these people are, it does not appear they are prepared to recognize any limits.

Now, yes, admittedly, this totalizing impulse on the part of leftism is historically well-known. It even follows from an explicit tenet of Marxist theory: base and superstructure, which rejects the realms of civil society and political society as legitimately distinct from each other – viewing such a distinction as creating a disjunction or a break in the life of the whole man.

It – classical political theory – does this they [Marx] claim[s] by formally granting man the status of a political peer or “citizen” wherein he is entitled to experience the impartial operation of the public law and to participate in public affairs, but nonetheless remains liable to the contempt of and exclusion from others within the private realm. This possibility results from allowing those potentially excluding others [through the concepts of the private family and property, and through other forms of private relations] a socially unregulated access to the material world, and to “selfishly” benefit from their “unearned personal powers”; which, in the end, gives these persons an opportunity to advantage and distance themselves from those whom they may view as unappealing or unworthy of self-sacrificial solidarity, for whatever reason or reasons.

Thus man’s nature, is itself a problem to be socially addressed through social, and other, engineering. Eventually, you may wind up with this:

“So that just as. to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a -temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility – the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ – would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.” Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm

With then, the quote above, we have obviously passed beyond the simple question of whether “modern liberals, [are] in some way unsuited for life in the system of political liberty” to one of whether they are inevitably aiming toward another kind existence altogether. At which point the question of a shared polity becomes perhaps, the least of the questions requiring our attention.

But even the original question seems unlikely to survive as a “moral” question, if the research continues toward the conclusions which it at present seems pointing.

Ironically, the issue may have been most recently framed along these lines by political progressives themselves when they announced that “The personal is the political”

Yes, well, ideology and revolutionary rhetoric aside, we may be on the verge of finding out just how personal the political really is.