Thursday, August 18, 2005

Best Wishes to Coretta Scott King+ Arthur Silber's The Light of Reason

Mrs. King
My thoughts and prayers go out to Coretta Scott King, the 78-year-old widow of one of the greatest figures in Black/American history, civil and human rights visionary Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a major civil rights figure in her own right. On Tuesday she suffered a stroke. Since her husband's assassination in 1968, Mrs. King has not only worked tirelessly to ensure that his life and life's work are carried forward, creating the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, pushing for the national holiday in his honor and promoting his philosophy of nonviolence, but she's also spoken out and supported a range of other civil rights issues, like women's rights and gay rights, and HIV/AIDS prevention, sometimes in opposition to other Black leaders and public figures (including her son, Martin Luther King III). Her leadership, courage and love have been beacons over the last five decades. Please pray for a full recovery for Mrs. King.

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Although I generally and regularly disagree with the standard libertarian ideology (on the Libertarian Purity Test I score a whopping 22 out of 160), including in its objectivist form, I periodically drop by Arthur Silber's The Light of Reason blog to read his take on a range of issues. Silber consistently offers thoughtful, thorough and sometimes humorous takes on a range of issues ranging from politics to aesthetics (his critiques of Ayn Rand's aesthetic theories deserve booklength treatment.) Unlike some of the libertarians I've come across over the years, Silber, at least in The Light of Reason post, tends not to analyze issues by bracketing them off in the realm of the abstractions (or as he's said, as if dealing with Platonic form), but within the socially contextualized world we're living in today, which he rightly identifies as the standard liberal approach. Even when I disagree with him, I find his thoughts provocative, and suggest checking out what he has to say.

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