All Thoughts Being Equal

I. The other day (N.B. months ago at this point) I got into a very interesting discussion with C. Michael Pickens, a prominent member of the Washington State Libertarian Party, on what principles should form the proper ground of a theory of liberty. In his original Facebook post, Michael claimed that "Liberty is an optimistic concept based on the philosophy of self-ownership." Someone else asked whether liberty could be grounded in concepts of free will and autonomy; Michael replied that these are themselves based in self-ownership. In the discussion, I (and the other guy) both raised the possible issue of indentured servitude—I had in mind specifically the condition of indentured servants during the early American colonial period, which was a condition of chattel slavery in all but name. Michael wasn't arguing that slavery was permissible—obviously it isn't, regardless of your libertarian principles, unless you're a Confederacy-fetishist douchebag like, s...

or, Something from Nothing Last week, I attended a presentation by Dr. Kim Yong-Taek, my professor for Japanese 302 during winter quarter, called “Linguistic Descriptions of the Same Event in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English.” A talk about how we do things with words! Okay, so it wasn’t about performatives per se , but it did make me think a lot about language in general, and continue to pester me with thoughts of linguistics study even though most of it makes my eyes glaze over.