(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Who has the duty to uphold these rights, and how shall that dut(ies) be enforced?

So, it's no worse to destroy a community than any other equal number of people? That a serial killer who randomly kills twenty individuals is equivalent to someone who exterminates a village with a language, a history and a culture that only existed in the minds of those people?

There's a reason why the latter is a war-crime, and the former is not. Don't you see how you're reasoning is similar to the wingnuts? It's the same refusal to see all aspects of the question, and tie it down to one simple logic. Where some of the nutters say "America!" you say "individual!" The point is to not tie all of our analyses (legal or otherwise) into one simple logic. If you do so, you are inevitably wrong.

Nothing in your remarks, which are thoughtful, requires blame as a component, in order to achieve what you claim to be your end.

My questions were specific as to what blame provides, and hence my implication of the tyranny of that idea.

What you have described, as valuable, is the identification of misuse in hindsight, to be reapplied in a more beneficial way. Okay, still, blame is not in this equation, nor is the original "stain" you mentioned.

What you are talking about then is the ongoing application of discernment, evaluation and refinement. This is markedly different than assigning a retroactive blame to the upstream source of ideology.

Agreed.

Frankly, you make another good point. We don't know exactly what Jesus said do we? Since, if you've read any direct to English translations of Jesus' native language, even the "lords prayer" is vastly different than its long ascribed version. Neil Douglas Klotz, I believe, is a scholar who has done some of that work, and it is fascinating how invested some (a lot) of people are in mistakes of translation.

L.W.M -- I'm not sure what you mean -- "have anything else?" -- but I suspect you've put me somewhere on an ideological grid that I would try to resist. I would rather -- much, much rather -- watch Olberman any day, and some of his broadsides against Bush & Co. have been absolutely invigorating. I think O'Reilly's claims of indepedence are absurb, but so are Olberman's.

But it's fair to note that both people do commentary, and a lot of us who like our journalism old-fashioned still believe in the idea of reporters (or even anchors) who try to provide information in a neutral tone and fashion, and who don't just take sides and start swinging.

What I object to here is a kind of fevered nit-picking over this AP article in an effort to prove, once again, that the big bad media is out to get Democrats. And in the most of the comments posted here, it's clear that this message is simply red meat for people who would rather get worked up about "the Olberman scandal" than to pay attention to perhaps more important issues in the world today -- issues about which, I believe, you can still inform yourself to an imperfect but reasonable degree by being a smart consumer of "the media."

But blame is sometimes a useful rhetorical device. Get people riled up, out of their comfort zone. Sometimes it can lead to actual re-thinking by pushing folks into a corner.

"and a lot of us who like our journalism old-fashioned"

I had no idea you were old enough to have seen Edward R. Murrow on the little B&W TV. Would I be correct in assuming that you probably had a small color set your parents provided for you in your bedroom during the 80s, and that's what you mean by old-fashioned journalism?

So, it's no worse to destroy a community than any other equal number of people?

No. Do you care if Hitler is viciously torturing and then killing you because you are Jewish, Stalin because he thinks you side with Trotsky, or Franco because he thinks you are not sufficiently Catholic?

Or do you just want it to stop?

"But rights as against the state or depredation of criminals are individually held."

If you steal from IBM or commit fraud against the Teamsters, you have criminally violated property rights held collectively by a group of people. The First Amendment rights enjoyed by the New York Times belong to the New York Times Company, not to any individual. Which isn't to say individuals don't have property rights or free speech rights. One of the things that makes property rights so useful is that they can be transferred and shared.

yes, but it more often causes people to become more deeply entrenched in the dis-eased ideology...in my experience.

Just go tell a hard-core Christian that you blame Christ for the Inquisition...they don't question Christianity...they go very deeply into the ready tautology.

Anyway, good stuff...thank you, I'm signing off.

The right wing libertarian argument (i.e., you can be libertarian but the economy must be private, rather than voluntarily democratic) has mostly been uninteresting as any sort of logical attempt to propose a better society.

However, it seems to have an enormous aesthetic appeal for many people.

Many libertarian capitalists assume, as do many libertarian socialists, that the listeners or readers are assumed to share an aesthetic desire for the lifestyle described when 'we' start moving toward the chosen utopia.

There's obviously a huge difference, then, between arguing what *should* be done as a democratically decided communal effort, and what *may not* be done in such a manner.

If you had a 'libertarian' society of the private enterprise variant, at some stage it is entirely possible that a group of people decide voluntarily to work together in a mutual organization in which some economic functions, perhaps most, are shared, and that market transactions take on less and less of a priority in their lives.

At that point, the only question is how large that set of people are, and whether they constitute a commune or an entire city or an entire nation.

Would the libertarian capitalist model then forbid such people from voluntarily abandoning the market as a priority, should people do so?

And if so, on what grounds?