Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

You ever hear him talk?..

How could you miss him....just another media whore.

Ron Paul: Hard Right Loon

I think it’s important to keep pushing back on the “progressives for Ron Paul” personality cult, so I’m pushing — Jonathan Chait has a must-read piece called “How Ron Paul’s Libertarian Principles Support Racism.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/how-ron-pauls-libertarianism-supports-racism.html

It’s all worth reading, but I’d like to address this part –

In a 2004 statement condemning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Paul laid out his doctrinaire libertarian opposition. “[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” he wrote. “The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”

The idea that the 1964 Civil Rights Act increased racial tensions is itself a racist statement. There was plenty of racial tension before the civil rights era; it’s just that it was mostly just racial minorities who were tense.

Paul views every individual as completely autonomous, and he is incapable of imagining any force other than government power that could infringe upon their actual liberty. White people won’t hire you? Then go form a contract with somebody else. Government intervention can only make things worse.

The same holds true of Paul’s view of sexual harassment. In his 1987 book, he wrote that women who suffer sexual harassment should simply go work somewhere else: “Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts?” This reaction also colored his son Rand Paul’s response to sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, which was to rally around Cain and grouse that he can’t even tell jokes around women anymore.

The comment threads are, as usually, full of people defending Ron Paul and saying that discrimination is not a POLIICAL issue unless government does it. What’s missing from this is any connection to the real world, to the actual lived experience of racism and sexism in our culture, and the way a majority faction can use local and state government to impose their bigotry, even to the point of allowing some people to get away with murdering other people. African Americans in many parts of the U.S. were not just being discriminated against; they lived under a literal reign of terror.

Have we really forgotten that? It appears some of us have.
http://www.mahablog.com/2012/01/03/ron-paul-hard-right-loon/