From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Subject: Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 18:11:47 GMT

In article <BtLHzB.B9H@NCoast.ORG> cmort@ncoast.org (Christopher Morton) writes:
>> 
>> A market is where I make contracts for mutual advantage; I do not make a
>> contract with the author of a book to believe his ideas.
>
>You DO make an implied contract to RECEIVE his ideas in written form.  The

That's absurd.  For one thing, how do I make a contract with a deceased
author?  For another, I "receive" the author's ideas for my own
enlightenment and pleasure, NOT as an onerous task for which I must be
renumerated.  For yet another, the contract in book ownership happens
PRIOR to reading and is with the book seller...not the author.

>> 
>> This is the connotation of the market metaphor.  As such, it deludes
>> people without market power into believing that they have the market
>> power of a New York Times or a Knight-Ridder.
>
>In fact in many cases they WILL.  Or are you claiming that NYT publishes the
>ideological material approved by the fundamentalist right...?
>
The lies of the semiofficial New York Times are much more sophisticated
than the lies of the fundamentalist right.  As Noam Chomsky and others
have demonstrated, the New York Times is not so dumb as to outright
misreport.  Their distortions are more on the order of selectivity
(Chomsky has shown, for example, how they consistently ignored
Indonesia's crimes against human rights for years) and of telling a
story from a consistent ruling-class point of view.  Thus the NYT will
report free trade agreements (necessary and desirable such agreements
may be) from a management and stockholder perspective, almost never from
an employee perspective.

>> Thank you for explaining that to me.  It's the usual libertarian
>> shuffle.  Libertarianism purports to be a philosophy.  Upon inspection, it
>> is always found to deal in pre-philosophical distinctions which are
>> never unpacked and which have, in America, a racial and class-based
>> foundation.  I suggest that many of your ideas are convenient
>> rationalizations; prime among them is the comfortable view of a benign
>> market mechanism which (surprise) rewards white males.
>
>It seems to reward Alice Walker and Andrea Dworkin pretty well too.  An 
>inconvenient fact I thought I throw in your face....

Out comes the ill-concealed and ill-managed rage, which views Walker and
Dworkin as nothing more than economic players.  I am not privy, as you
seem to be, to Walker's and Dworkin's tax returns and it is perfectly
likely that in spite of their fame both may be on the edge of poverty
like the rest of us.  Or do you have a problem with authors like Walker
and speakers/authors like Dworkin being paid for their labor?  If so, is
this because they are women, and women should labor unpaid?  Just
thought I'd ask...

The fact that you are even less successful than Walker or Dworkin in a
society which tells us all that we're shit unless we live the life
portayed in Hollywood is not an argument, save for the possibility that
(1) most of us are economically up the creek and (2) those of us who
aren't are criminals.