The Vaccination Thing: Interplay of Issues of Freedom and Common Good — Valuable Commentary

It's entirely possible not everyone in the world (or in the U.S.) shares my near-obsession with the "debate" about vaccination that has suddenly emerged from some dark undercurrents of American culture to become a real political thing. I'm interested in this topic because it illustrates so clearly, I think, a fatal propensity of many Americans across party, ideological, and regional lines to fetishize "liberty" in a way that's dangerous to the well-being of all of us, and of the whole planet. I tried so say some of this several weeks ago as we were discussing the Charlie Hebdo massacres and freedom of speech, and got the same kind of fierce pushback I get anytime I mention guns here — pushback against my insistence that no freedom of any kind is an absolute value, and that in a sane society, liberties must always be measured against the common good to be meaningful.

Frank Cocozzelli's Critique of the Neo-Confederate Views of Thomas E. Woods: A New Installment in the Series

As a footnote to what I just posted about the seeming rise, in many places of the world, of overtly racist and homophobic movements that seem to hark back to political experiments many of us hoped the human community had put behind itself:

Charles Blow Explains to Rand Paul How the GOP Lost the Black Vote

Charles Blow's rejoinder to Rand Paul in the New York Times today about precisely how and why the GOP has lost black voters is priceless. Paul naively (as in faux naiveté) asked yesterday in a speech at Howard University how it could be that the party of the Great Emancipator lost the black vote.