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Toby Rogers's avatar

Nurturant parents know about https://openvaers.com/covid-data and https://c19early.com/

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Linda Hagge's avatar

As a former academic who taught linguistics, I really loved this essay. As I said in a comment on an earlier essay of yours, I think the term progressive has been coopted by authoritarian liberals and so has become meaningless. It has become necessary to explain to people that one is a leftist, but a libertarian leftist and not an authoritarian one. This causes great confusion because to many people libertarianism can only be on the right, and communism or socialism can only be authoritarian, so all leftists must be authoritarian. So I think we're in a period in which we are going to have to convince people that if you are on the left, you can be part of the libertarian movement as well. No matter whether you are a left libertarian or a right libertarian, it is the personal liberty that is the primary value. It helps if I have people imagine their ideal society, so that then we can talk about possible ways to organize it. I have begun to talk about the recent book The Dawn of Everything, about the more egalitarian societies in early city states. Some of them are very very early, either pre-agriculture or a combination of hunting and agriculture, and excavation shows that they did not have a top-down structure. They lived both as free individuals with private property, individually owned houses and gardens, AND as part of a community where they were expected to contribute. Some of these city states were large enough to have wards and ward representatives on a city council. There was no elite, no aristocracy. Everyone was expected to contribute part of their labor for the common good of the city, either tending common fields, herding animals, or hunting and gathering. But they were free to opt in or out, since they could freely move away and not participate.. The point of the book, as it goes around the world to talk about cities in every early culture, is that many forms of political organization are possible that we have come to think are impossible.

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