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John Stossel: "right to be racist"

Full Transcript

KELLY: But that's not what Rand Paul said. Rand Paul agreed that if it's run by the government, yes intervention is fine. He took issue with the public accommodations, with private businesses being forced to pony up under the discrimination laws.

STOSSEL: And I would go further than he was willing to go, as he just issued the statement, and say it's time now to repeal that part of the law

KELLY: What?

STOSSEL: because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won't won't ever go to a place that's racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.

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Megyn Kelly is a fucking moron. This is unfortunate, given that were an intelligent person participating in this segment with Stossel, something interesting could have happened.

Let's grant Stossel's premise: It ought to be your right, as a private business owner, to be racist and so enact racist business practices. Or, to take it further, "In a free country, we consenting adults should be able to do whatever we want with our bodies as long as we don’t hurt anyone else."

You ought to be free to do drugs, to rent your body for sex, to sell your organs, to be a racist. In a free country, in a free society, one ought to have the freedom to do whatever one wants, so long as no one hurts anyone else.

Which is fine, until we think about what "hurt" means...and the fact that we are social, societal creatures reliant upon others for our survival. Given that we all exist within a communal causal nexus what you do impacts me, what I do impacts you.

So, I'll agree with John Stossel that in a free society anyone ought to be able to do anything they want so long as they do not hurt anyone else. The problem being, of course, that as social beings living in a communal causal nexus?

Anything anyone ever does hurts someone else.

Stossel's argument participates in the problem shared by all arguments for freedom and liberty: Freedom and Liberty make sense, until you realize there is causality. Once there is causality no longer is there freedom, and liberty is an impossibility.

So, since we are societal, communally-reliant beings existing within a mutually-shared causal nexus? Whence the problem with passing laws which make it illegal for persons to be fucking assholes? The problem cannot be that such laws limit or stifle freedom, because we never fucking had freedom.

Because causality.

Or, you know, there is no causality...so we have freedom...but we do not have will or volition and rather are naught be random, haphazard randomness randomly randoming unconnectedly from one isolated time point to the next isolated, uncaused time point. And since we don't have will we can't have liberty, either.

Basically, John Stuart Mill was an idiot and a drunk. And John Stossel doesn't understand the meanings of the words he uses.

Thank Christ for Leibniz's solution to the problem.

Maddow v. Rand Paul

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I think we need to be clear. This is not a First Amendment issue.

The Civi Rights Act of 1964 was about ending institutional racism nation wide. But it follows that by breaking down the institutional structures that support racism, we begging to break down the more problematic and more destructive cultural racism.

An Open Letter to Rand Paul

Before we get to this letter, please watch the following video.



Rand. Buddy, how are you doing? I bet the last few days for you have been a blast. You just won the notation to be the Republican candidate in the Kentucky! High Five!

But Rand, sometime you just need to shut the fuck up. Like, big time.

INTERVIEWER: Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that.

INTERVIEWER: But?

PAUL: You had to ask me the “but.” I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

See. That is the sort of bullshit that you need to stop. This is not something to laugh off. If you are going to take positions on major policy issues, people are going to ask you to justify those positions. Welcome to politics. You are not an eye doctor any more*.

Saying you are not racist and that you are a fan of MLK in one breath, than in the next breath say that a private business can openly discriminate is complete bullshit. First off, anytime anyone begins by saying they are not a racist, you know they are about the say something super racist. Second, yes, Martin Luther King was a great speaker and true believer in his cause. But fuck Rand. FUCK. Setting aside the 175+ years of social, structural and legal racism, people were brutalized in Selma and Birmingham and rural Mississippi just because they wanted to be treated as humans. In 1963, six hundred students marched through the streets of Birmingham to protest the cities segregation. They were attached by dogs and fire hoses. Rand, I think we can agree that is fucked up.

But sitting in a chair nearly 50 years later you cannot say that Bull Connor had a First Amendment right to do that. That is the dirtiest false-equivocation I have heard in a long time. That "boorish" behavior that you would stand up against now rings hollow in the light of your comments. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of many attempts to break the very long very destructive cycle of structural discrimination. The structural discrimination that allowed for a culture in which it was okay to attack people for wanted to eat a fucking grilled cheese.

So Rand. Shut up. We here at EoiaS like it when you rant against the Federal Reserver and promote the gold standard. We eat that shit up. But this bullshit is a bullshit bridge to far.




* Please see vonnegut on why that is a problem.

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