Having Peter Singer edit Blackwell's Companion to Ethics is like having the Weathermen edit the companion to politics.

I was going to say Hitler, but Nazi jokes are just too obvious. And Singer's more of a moral anarchist in effect - more left-wing than right. Although his extreme utilitarianism is, in theory, not anarchic at all, but actually quite rigorous. Inhuman(e)ly rigorous.

"Liberalism" : the Word, the Entity

I do want to distance myself from the word "liberal" since it has become a pejorative term for the left, just as "fundamentalist" has for the right. Witness the amount of time Kerry & Edwards spent trying to convince people they weren't "liberal," or at least "too liberal." Of course the Ludwig von Mises "classic liberalism" crowd (today we call them libertarian - look 'em up at Mises.org, they're fascinatingly and intelligently wrong-headed) tries to argue that this isn't what "liberal" used to mean - it simply mean "individual freedom, pursuit of life, liberty, and property" Declaration of Independence-type stuff. But they're arguing against centuries of usage. The meaning has shifted and now I would argue that the use of such terms is unhelpful, at best. Connotation has swallowed up denotation.

This is a test, this is only a test (repeat)...

In the incestuous wasteland that is the Internet, I have now three (yes, that's right three) blogs. Of course, one is defunct and this one is only so I can comment on other peep's Blogger blogs, but anyway. This entry is definitely (definitively) pointless.