Horizon

Ha, I've made my way through a fair amount of the jargon file as well on a slow day or two.

But, uh, that sheep parable you linked to claims to be written by Charles Riggs.

The comments following the Orwell piece are interesting. One person claims that he was "socialist and libertarian at the same time" and cf's Homage to Catalonia. What in the world can this person mean?

claims to be written by Charles Riggs

Thank heavens.

The comments following the Orwell piece are interesting. One person claims that he was "socialist and libertarian at the same time" and cf's Homage to Catalonia. What in the world can this person mean?

Well, it was at one time commonplace to use the description "Tory Anarchist" for Orwell's idiosyncratic brand of politics. Maybe this person was offering a readjusted thought along the same lines?

Well, both appellations strike me as wildly innaccurate. "Tory anarchist" was a rather tongue in cheek exaggeration, or so I'd always thought.

Glancing through the comments on some of ESR's other posts, it appears that he attracts quite a community of readers for whom English is not a primary language.

...and who speak primary languages which do not include words like socialist? Yeah, perhaps.

Arguably one of the most important tensions in Orwell's work is the question of whether, and to what extent, the goals of freedom and equality are in conflict with each other. I don't necessarily think they always conflict. Neither did he.

I've never understood how you can have liberty without equality.

From Fischer's Liberty and Freedom, p. 67:

But even with that change, Virginia's idea of liberty remained an expression of inequality and hierarchy for many in its ruling class. John Randolph of Roanoke gave it a classic expression when he said, "I am an aristocrat; I love liberty, I hate equality."126 To those who did not share this way of thinking, Virginia's hierarchical idea of hegemonic liberty seemed false and even hypocritical, increasingly so as it faded into the past. But in its time and place it was a genuine ideal. A militant writer who signed himself "A Virginian" wrote with no sense of contradiction in 1774 that if Britain was determined to take away his liberty, "and from free born subjects supplant us slaves," the freemen of Virginia would prove that their colony has "Caesars as well as Ciceros" and "open in one day ten thousand graves."127 It seems not to have occurred to him that the liberty he demanded for himself should be extended to his "people". But to liberty-loving slaveholders of old Virginia, this hierarchical idea of liberty was more dear to them than life itself. It lived on for many years, secure in its own world.

I really thought about this while writing that privacy text for Chelsea House: especially when you think historically, there are different definitions of privacy, and they overlap with the different definitions of freedom, and some of them have to do with the right of the master of a household to command those 'beneath' him without outside interference, while others have to do with the right of an individual, regardless of any status within any household, to claim equality and independent dignity before the law. So interesting, who acts and who is acted upon; who claims the right to preempt another's actions; the extent to which individual persons are genuinely understood to be the fully vested owners of themselves. You see some of this stuff even now in things like the parental-consent abortion laws.

I certainly wouldn't go as far as Randolph, but do think that one of the lessons of the English Civil War is that in some strange way property serves as a guarantor of liberty, insofar as the levelers end up being pushy busybodies who start regulating every sort of private behavior they find objectionable as soon as they get into power.

Of course, most of my knowledge of the English Civil War comes from Churchill, and that's probably precisely the moral he wants his readers to draw.

Also, does anybody know if we can modify Movable Type to accept <sup> and <sub> tags?

some of them have to do with the right of the master of a household to command those 'beneath' him without outside interference

You may be getting at this with your sentence about the "right of an individual", but I think that the line between laws regulating what a head of househould may do with/to members of that household and laws regulating what an individual may do by themselves is a very blurry one. May a woman smoke a cigarette? May she smoke one in public? May she smoke near her children? May a pregnant woman smoke?