One of the central powers of TTP was this very ‘ rise of extraterritoriality’ : For example, Corporations could bring suits against its signatories, via a claim of ‘loss of profit’, for enforcing pollution laws against trucks, that didn’t meet existing laws, about pollution regulation.
The technocrats and scribblers have a convenient memory lapse? Not to speak of the once enthusiastic members of the American Political Class? TTP was supposed to be the triumph of the now collapsed ‘Free Market’, a ‘vision’ for the Radiant Future, to borrow from Zinoviev! Predictably the villians , here, are the ‘Russians’ and ‘Chinese’ , although America does garner a mention : The New Cold War is the template, its political elasticity its virtue. Yet the question remains about the responsibility, of the technocrats and the scribblers, to think ‘holistically’? Herman Kahn’s imperative was to ‘think the unthinkable’ while the men we are asked to pay our homage can’t even consider ‘the possible’.
The closing paragraphs of Mr. Rachman’s essay are about the value of ‘common international rules’ ,and a quote from Thucydides steeped in political fatalism:
The US, and perhaps China, have the power to enforce their laws around the world. For midsize powers that is not an option. Instead, smaller countries need to prop up international rules-making bodies, such as the World Trade Organization — which has ruled against both China and the US on occasion.
Without common international rules, third countries may increasingly find themselves torn between the competing extraterritorial demands of Washington and Beijing. In that situation, our world will look increasingly look like the one described by the Greek historian, Thucydides, in which — “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
In a Political World, that is slipping out of the control of the American Empire, and its invasions, wars e.g. white phosphorus in Fallujah, Agent Orange in Vietnam, the collection of NGO’s well funded foreign subversions, garnished with a heaping helping of self-proclaimed victimhood…
All of this so brazen, that it can’t be ignored, except by ‘Enthusiasm Gap Biden’ as reported in this newspaper! Joe and son Hunter made a bundle out the 2014’s Ukrainian Coup!
Enter stage-right the current technocrat from the FBI- should the reader recall the Comey/Mueller Keystone Cops Act of recent memory? Or the smarmy, mendacious record of America’s most notorious Closet Case J. Edgar Hoover?
Even the mercifully brief video from Posh Boy Luce, with ‘guests’ Neo-Con Ghoul Anne Applebaum, and the Professional Zionist Apologist Simon Schama, looks like journalistic haste, pasted together to meet that Friday deadline.
Old Socialist
P.S. Not to forget the collapse of Capitalism, in the face of The Pandemic, a Political Class that has failed the pressing needs of the the 99%, while kowtowing to the 1% etc., etc…
Mr. Ganesh’s usual political feuilletonism devolves into a long commentary on Joe Biden’s mundanity, as his saving grace, in the the Age of Trump.
But first, just to clarify, Delaware is a Tax Haven:
Headline: How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven
NOTHING about 1209 North Orange Street hints at the secrets inside. It’s a humdrum office building, a low-slung affair with a faded awning and a view of a parking garage. Hardly worth a second glance. If a first one.
But behind its doors is one of the most remarkable corporate collections in the world: 1209 North Orange, you see, is the legal address of no fewer than 285,000 separate businesses.
Its occupants, on paper, include giants like American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Wal-Mart. These companies do business across the nation and around the world. Here at 1209 North Orange, they simply have a dropbox.
Headline: Forget Panama: it’s easier to hide your money in the US than almost anywhere
Sub-headline: The term tax haven may evoke images of exotic locales, but Panama actually ranks as the 13th most attractive spot for hiding assets, while the US lies third
…
Welcome to Delaware
A while back, Shah sent her husband to return an overdue book she had borrowed from the library. When he returned, he told her her library card was expired and that to renew it she would have to bring her driver’s license showing her current address or a utility bill with her address.
“If I were to open a shell company, I wouldn’t require any of those things. I would actually need less information to open a shell company in the US than I would need to get a driver’s license or a library card,” pointed out Shah.
There is nothing illegal about setting up a shell company. US states are proud of their business-friendly policies. Delaware, for example, prides itself on being the incorporation capital of the US. “More than 1,000,000 business entities have made Delaware their legal home,” claimed the state’s Division of Corporations website. “More than 50% of all publicly-traded companies in the US including 64% of the Fortune 500 have chosen Delaware as their legal home.”
Mr. Ganesh begins his essay, with a small, but important bit of propagandizing about the fact that Delaware is a notorious Tax Haven. With that attempt at rhetorical prestidigitation, what can his reader expect?
Delaware can reasonably claim to be the most innocuous state in the US. The tax-advantageous peninsula seldom incurs hatred, its opposite, or even a second thought from those outside its nearly 1m residents.
Not content with this first exercise in faint praise, Mr. Ganesh continues in the same vein:
Not all politicians take after their states, but despite being Pennsylvania-born, Joe Biden is Delaware incarnate. In half a century of public life, the Democratic candidate for president has never assembled an intense fan base or many dedicated enemies. His politics are middle-of-the-road and his charisma is of the functional, baby-kissing sort.
After more of the same Mr. Ganesh discovers ‘the enthusiasm gap’ between the Trump Ideologues, in the loosest sense, and Biden’s political deficit ‘disturbs the sleep of some of Mr Biden’s supporters.’
But the reader is then confronted with this pronouncement of Joe’s utter mediocrity as a virtue:
It is also the most precious thing about him. The US has had two consecutive presidents with messianic followings, and it is worse off for the 12-year surge of emotion. No democracy is riper for a period of tepid leadership.
What follows is the usual cliche ridden History Made To Measure, of the apologists for the Political Present. What escapes Mr. Ganesh historical grasp, is one of the literary observations on American political life, in ‘The Last Hurrah’ the 1956 novel written by Edwin O’Connor.
While not a perfect descriptor of Biden in 2020, it does make plain the fact that this run for the presidency, is indeed Biden’s last hurrah. While Biden has no political charisma, like Frank Skeffington, he represents the final gasp of the New Democrats/Neo-Liberals. As the ‘reformers’ are winning seats in Congress as ‘insurgents‘ , in the face of The Pandemic, and the economic collapse that has placed a majority of American in jeopardy of loosing all that they have worked so hard to build. The vexing question that Mr. Ganesh avoids, by way of his rhetorical/political ploys, is the utter failure of the whole of America’s Political Class, to even govern with a sense about the shared destiny of The Republic: E pluribus unum?
This newspaper provides space for a Bill and Melinda Gates press release. No surprise! Oligarchs and their apologists, this newspaper, stumble over themselves to kow-tow to this ‘Man of Vision’. Gates’ answer to the AIDS Crisis is the circumcise every male on the planet!
Yet in Iran nearly 100% of the male population is circumcised, yet AIDS is epidemic: 66 thousand people living with HIV.
Headline: Iran Struggles To Deal With Its AIDS Problem
‘Despite the government’s pledge to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, the number of individuals suffering from AIDS/HIV in Iran has been steadily rising.
According to a 2016 survey by the United Nations, there were roughly 5000 new infections between the years 2010 and 2016, adding up to the total of 66 thousand people living with HIV. However, some estimates claim that there may be over 100 thousand Iranians suffering from HIV, highlighting significant discrepancies between official statistics and reality.
The AIDS epidemic in Iran has a significant drug-related dimension. Being part of the Golden Crescent, a region spanning Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan with prominent illicit opium production, Iran has served as a pathway for drug traffickers in the shipping of narcotics from Afghanistan to Europe.’
But AIDS is rising in Iran, not because of sexual relations, but drug addiction:
While the Iranian government does not treat drug trafficking lightly, the illegal drug trade has fueled the country’s growing problems with drug addiction.
According to a survey carried out by the Iranian Drug Control Organization, there are about 2.8 million Iranians who regularly use narcotics. Out of those, roughly 67 percent take heroin as their primary drug.
The widespread availability of heroin and other opiates, which are often taken intravenously, has served as an important vector spreading AIDS/HIV among drug addicts, with UN statistics claiming that9.3 percent of Iranian drug addicts currently have HIV.
Bill and Melinda are political/moral conformists who are unable question the practice of circumcision, rationalized sexual violence, in American life because it has been normalized. Leonard B. Glick provides a revelatory history of this practice:
The Gates’ judgement is really at question here. This newspaper prints the opinion of these two people, who have no qualification, except that they are wealthy nearly beyond the comprehension of us mortal beings. They somehow possess a knowledge, indeed a prescience, that demands our collective attention?
Mr. James, thank you for your comment. Your argument: ‘their hearts in the right place, and considerable life experience’. To call this an argument is to give power to the cliche of social convention.
Apply your standard as you will. Yet the paternalism that the Gates’ exemplify in all its various expressions is/are toxic. ‘We’ can see the preventative value of ‘social distancing’ wearing masks and other measures that recognize the values ‘we’ place on ourselves and others. But to surgically alter the genitalia of man, woman, child in the name of not just religion, tribal custom, or hygiene is to deny personal agency, the sine qua non of freedom. ‘ I know what is best for you’ is its paternalistic rationale.
You admonish me to ‘clear my mind’ : in American Law ‘Buck vs. Bell’ decided by the Supreme Court, that women deemed to be ‘imbeciles’ should be sterilized. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. helped to decide the reproductive fate of 100, 000 women, over time. In 19th Century terms, was his ‘heart in the right place, and considerable life experience’ a factor in his judgement? Or was it steeped in the social conventions, of another era you, might hold as determinative?
My inquiry into the history and belief’s of Christianity began here:
James J. O’Donnell does not write hagiography, he narrates the life, times and the thought of Augustine, without the destructive excess baggage of ‘Faith’.
Karl Barth’s commentary on ‘The Epistles to The Romans’ : a record of Paul’s hysterical anti-intellectualism. The Christian obsession with Heretics begins with Paul !
Robert L. Wilken’s ‘The Christians as the Romans Saw Them‘:
Charles Freeman’s ‘The Closing of the Western Mind:The Rise of Faith and The Fall of Reason’ :
Alastair Hannay’s Kierkegaard : A Biography
Jon Stewart”s ‘Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, & the Crisis of Modernity’
Jon Stewart’s ‘The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen Kierkegaard’.
This essay, in the TLS, about Jonathan Edwards, was the precipitating rhetorical event of my polemic!
Title: Jonathan Edwards: Total depravity and empiricist philosophy
Sub-title: A thinker who was both ‘a nemesis and an avatar’ of the Enlightenment
…
His preaching, which also had room for beatific visions of redemption, is remembered even now for its darkness and use of terror as a rhetorical strategy. What he insists on, he says in “Sinners”, is that “there is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God. – By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will”. That is, God has absolutely no obligations to us; no action of ours makes any claim on his mercy. As he preaches, Edwards both constructs an argument and directly confronts his auditors. When the “unregenerate” (“you”) face God, he says,
He will have no regard to your welfare, nor be at all careful lest you should suffer too much in any other sense, than only that you shall not suffer beyond what strict justice requires … Now God stands ready to pity you; this is a day of mercy; you may cry now with some encouragement of obtaining mercy. But when once the day of mercy is past, your most lamentable and dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain; you will be wholly lost and thrown away of God, as to any regard to your welfare. God will have no other use to put you to, but to suffer misery; you shall be continued in being to no other end; for you will be a vessel of wrath fitted to destruction; and there will be no other use of this vessel, but to be filled full of wrath. God will be so far from pitying you when you cry to him, that it is said he will only “laugh and mock”.
Edwards preached the total depravity of human beings, asserting flatly that all of us, including babies and saints, are infested by original sin and deserving of eternal hellfire (“every unconverted man properly belongs to hell; that is his place”). And whether we are among the “unregenerate” or the “unconverted” is not up to us, for we cannot in any way redeem ourselves by our own voluntary efforts, all of which are beset by sin: a “disease of the heart”, an irremediable condition of our inmost constitution. Only God’s entirely arbitrary grace, arbitrary in that the likes of us cannot possibly explain why some people receive it and others don’t, can redeem us.
One of the great realizations during my ‘Coming Out’ was that I had absolutely no obligation, to celebrate Christmas, or other holidays. While recalling the good and the bad memories , the beautiful music, television and movies, that marks these holidays As a child I wallowed in Christmas kitsch!
But realizing that that was the past, like so much else! In my 76th year I finally confront the fact that that Christmas kitsch is the ‘public relations’ mask for the reality of Jonathan Edwards sadistic hatefulness. Edwards is the ideological ally of Cotton Mather, of the ‘Spectral Evidence’ of The Salem Witch Trials!
Queer Atheist
(September 14, 2020)
I forgot to post links to two of Martin Luther’s influential Disputations:
What more important political actor than a Brookings ‘fellow’ to add to the Mythology that Putin is ‘The New Stalin’ : such is Putin’s ‘evil’, in the patois of Political Theology, that all these mysterious poisonings- where are the Skripal’s ? that were also ‘poisoned’ by ‘Novichok‘, its mythical toxicity was nearly fatal in minutes, or less? Brookings and its Policy Technocracy has brought the production of human suffering – this coterie is the natural inheritors of Herman Kahn, and his ‘thinking the un-thinkable’.
Constanze Stelzenmüller constructs a plausible narrative from press reports of Merkel and her domestic critics. Not to forget the part that other E.U. members play in this melodrama:
Divisions are also evident at EU level. While Josep Borrell, the EU foreign minister, has condemned the use of novichok against Mr Navalny, member states are not united. Poland and the Baltic nations are fiercely opposed to the Kremlin, while Hungary, Italy and France have cultivated warmer relations, argued for lifting of EU sanctions, or attempted a policy “reset”.
Followed by this ‘evidence’ as reported in ‘a German weekly’ of Putin’s guilt, but note the appearance of ‘perpetrators’ :
…
There can be little doubt that Mr Navalny’s poisoning was undertaken with the knowledge or tacit permission of the Kremlin; a German weekly has reported that the type of novichok used is a new and particularly lethal version, leading investigators to conclude that the perpetrators were authorised by the Russian government.
…
What follows is a Party Line admonition for Germany ‘to take the lead’, and assert ‘Europe’s sovereignty and self-respect require a crisp, hard answer.’
…
Germany should now take the lead and pronounce that enough is enough. The Kremlin’s cynical message is directed not just at its domestic critics, but also at western governments. It says: we can act with impunity anywhere and you can’t stop us. Its purpose is to humiliate, enervate and paralyse its rivals — both painfully and publicly. Europe’s sovereignty and self-respect require a crisp, hard answer.
…
That ‘crisp, hard answer’ is not a missile aimed at The Kremlin, but about ‘suspend Nord Stream 2 (reserving the option of cancelling the project altogether).’ Hit Putin in the ‘pocket book’, what a surprise! As if economic sanctions are the answer to Putin’s ‘political thuggery’ ? On such thin, or just non-existent ‘evidence’, printed in Western Media as fact!
Constanze Stelzenmüller provides the ‘reason’ for her political polemic, in the baldest of terms:
Meanwhile, the EU should pursue illicit financial flows and corruption, and help renovate the Ukrainian transit pipeline. In the short term, there are many other suppliers of liquid natural gas than Russia; in the long term, the EU needs to move decisively to green fuels. It must modernise energy infrastructure and supply security across Europe, allowing no national exemptions from EU energy regulations. It should also offer refuge to those persecuted by Russia and study visas to the young.
The renovation of the Ukrainian transit pipeline is the necessary check on Russian revanchism, one of the cornerstones of The New Cold War mythology. Stelzenmüller maladroitly embroiders on its themes.
The Second American Civil War is just evolving as the ‘norm’ , in our country, with the bad actors The Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, and the Political Class’ favorite Antifa– Mr. Luce ‘conjures’ QAnon, as the epitome of what fuels Trump and Trumpism: not just in extremis, but as the American variant of Political Islam, al-Qaeda. Mr. Luce trades on the Orientalists tropes exposed by Edward Said, that have metastasized, since 9/11, into an over-ripe political toxin.
Mr. Luce’s fear-mongering, at such a pitch, leaves this reader to speculate about this pundit’s desperation, to seem relevant, or even prescient, in an evolving collection of political moments, that seems out of reach of rational descriptors, thought.
Look at the pre-revolutionary situation in America: the murder, by criminal police, of black people, political protesters, BLM and others, attacked by those same police, mass evictions due to the political class’ indifference, to the lesser being who cannot match Corporate Power and influence. In California wildfires burning out of control, smoke so thick that it blots out the sun…
In America, the two houses of Congress, The Senate and the House of Representatives, not to speak of the Electoral College, are the checks against ‘too much democracy’ of The Founders. The Good Grey Mr. Walter Lippmann advocated a cadre of technocrats, as another effective check against that menace. The rise of these ‘Experts’ brought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and The War On Terror. The cost of this latest exercise in the murderous insanity of the experts :
Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror
Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.
The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.
…
Who can forget John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge other best-selling books:
If there ever were two more stalwarts of the bankrupt tradition of The Economist’s ‘Liberalism’ it its these two propagandists. For a telling history this newspaper, and of their particular brand of toxic politics, see:
Liberalism at Large: The World According to The Economist by Alexander Zevin
The Wake Up Call, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge latest reactionary polemic, in the guise of a commentary on the pandemic: Mr. Ganesh employs the help of Mr. Garrett Jones’ “10 per cent less democracy” , that does not so much as make an argument, as state a belief, or more plainly, enunciates an ideology, that is the worldview of both Conservatives, of what ever hue, and Neo-Liberals who are presiding over the Economic/Political collapse, in the present. The origins of which are in the failed policies of the very experts that Mr Ganesh doesn’t quite praise, as the voice of political reason, but merely a check on ‘too much democracy’. Mr. Ganesh is guilty of the political crime, of trivialization, in a time of grave political/civic crisis!
Ms. Foroohar, in her essay, on the deteriorating relations between China and Trump, offers some thoughts on the fate of Neo-Liberalism, or have I misread?
Headline: China wants to decouple from US tech, too
Sub-headline:Washington’s restrictions have only sped Beijing’s development of its own ecosystem
…
Certainly, it sounds simpler than what the US is now trying to do, which is rebuild the supply chains it has spent the past several decades outsourcing to the East. That is the advantage of having a coherent national industrial policy, as China does. The US abandoned such planning decades ago with the rise of neoliberalism, which held that capital, goods and labour should flow freely without any government restriction.
The problem is that the free market first approach doesn’t work quite as well in a crisis. Right after the pandemic began, for example, I interviewed the chief executives of numerous apparel companies, who were ready and eager to retool to make masks in order to fill the shortage in hospitals. They were the ones prodding the White House to help them co-ordinate these efforts, rather than the other way around. Nobody in the administration had a clue about what manufacturing resources might be immediately available to fill the PPE gaps, or how to better deploy them in a crisis.
In the watershed of the complete collapse of The Mueller Report & Schiff’s well rehearsed Mini-Series, that produced Stars Vindman and Fiona Hill – while the political longevity of this melodrama was non-existent. The release of the original testimony secured that well deserved fate! ‘Russian Interference’ is now the lingua franca of the Anti-Trumpers, in this case Joe Biden’s ‘Richard Nixon’, Kamala Harris.
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris warned Russian election interference could hand US President Donald Trump another four years in the White House.
In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Ms Harris said she believed Moscow would attempt to interfere in the 2020 presidential election in the same way that US intelligence agencies say it did in 2016.
“I am clear that Russia interfered in the election of president of the United States in 2016. I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Ms Harris told CNN.
“We have published detailed reports about exactly what we believe happened. And I do believe that there will be foreign interference in the 2020 election, and that Russia will be at the front of the line.”
Pressed to answer if Russian interference could cause the Democratic ticket to lose the election, Ms Harris responded: “Theoretically, of course, yes.”
The ‘as if’ here is that America’s record on internal interference in the politics of other nations is ? America ‘sanctions’ , or just invades, and occupies, those nations who would resist its hegemonic ambition. And enlists its coterie of well financed NGO’s, to heighten their internal subversion.
Ray McGovern briefed presidents on National Security issues:
Headline: Ray McGovern: Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda
Sub-headline: The New York Times is leading the full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump.
The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle. The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don’t know what’s going on.
The LSM should be confronted: “At long last have you left no sense of decency?” But who would hear the question — much less any answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine in journalism, is a thing of the past.
Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls.
The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided the occasion to “catapult the propaganda,” as President George W. Bush once put it.
The Financial Times not just content with Harris’ hysterical Anti-Russian diatribe, has published this political stenography:
Headline: Russian troll farm makes US comeback
Sub-headline: Internet Research Agency said to be behind leftwing website was also active during 2016 election
After the FBI tipped off Facebook that the obscure leftwing website Peace Data was a clandestine front for Russia this week, the site’s anonymous administrators responded the only way a troll knows how: by brazenly posting through the scandal.
“We’re assured that Peace Data became a victim of a collaborated provocative effort from Facebook and FBI who want to shut up independent leftwing voices prior to the presidential elections and to disguise it with the fight against made up Russian threat,” the trolls wrote in a lengthy post riddled with grammatical mistakes and clunky Russian syntax.
Researchers say Peace Data, a small group of about a dozen accounts that hired unwitting American freelancers, is the first known attempt this year by people linked to the Internet Research Agency, the infamous St Petersburg troll farm, to meddle in the 2020 US election.
The US says the IRA is funded by Evgeny Prigozhin, a caterer-turned-warlord known as “Putin’s chef”, and indicted 13 of its employees for their attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.
The Left-Wing is the perennial bad actor, and or ‘dupes’, dating back, at least, since the Republican Party deemed ‘The New Deal’, ‘A Generation of Treason‘ in the late 1940’s. The New Democrats have embraced a political variant of that strategy, based on the failed, but potent propaganda residual, from Media’s morning till night coverage, of The Mueller and Schiff manufactured political crises.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 
Mr. James, thank you for your comment. Your argument: ‘their hearts in the right place, and considerable life experience’. To call this an argument is to give power to the cliche of social convention.
Apply your standard as you will. Yet the paternalism that the Gates’ exemplify in all its various expressions is/are toxic. ‘We’ can see the preventative value of ‘social distancing’ wearing masks and other measures that recognize the values ‘we’ place on ourselves and others. But to surgically alter the genitalia of man, woman, child in the name of not just religion, tribal custom, or hygiene is to deny personal agency, the sine qua non of freedom. ‘ I know what is best for you’ is its paternalistic rationale.
You admonish me to ‘clear my mind’ : in American Law ‘Buck vs. Bell’ decided by the Supreme Court, that women deemed to be ‘imbeciles’ should be sterilized. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. helped to decide the reproductive fate of 100, 000 women, over time. In 19th Century terms, was his ‘heart in the right place, and considerable life experience’ a factor in his judgement? Or was it steeped in the social conventions, of another era you, might hold as determinative?
Regards,
StephenKMackSD