[PEN-L:9418] RE: Re: Re: My Ideologies

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, now I see where you guys are coming from.

But frankly, aren't you understating the the magnitude and probability of downside risk of liberal  (pseudo autonomous subject) practice ?  I mean how can you ignore WWI and WWII , for example ?  The Viet Nam war ? and many more ? The U.S. liberal body count in Iraq is at a Pol Pot order of magnitude. For that matter, liberalism is the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and as disucssed on a thread here recently it rationalized the slave system.

Aren't a lot of the empirical facts of liberal practice in history invisible in your body counts ? You never seem to do real comparisons between actual liberal practice and communist practice in concluding that the pseudo-rights based perspective doesn't have the deepest valleys of death on the chart of its historical curve.

Charles Brown

>>> Max Sawicky <sawicky@xxxxxxxxxx> 07/21/99 10:08AM >>>
>(A) My--ideological--belief that the liberal ideological commitment
>to the autonomous subject is a good (although false) stance to adopt
>because it is less likely than other stances to lead to horrible
>crimes committed in the name of Reason or Utopia?

Brad, for us ignorati could you briefly explain what belief in the
"autonomous subject" entails and why you think it is false?
Bill
>>

My bet is that BDL recognizes the intellectual superiority
and higher potential upside benefits of a neo-marxian world
view, but out of fear of the magnitude and probability of
downside risk from this view (i.e., Pol Pot) defaults to
a rights-based perspective which may have a lower mean
result but less variance too.   In other words, he's not
a plunger.

mbs