New Sites, and Postliberalism

Here are the sites: the unexcitingly-named My Own Thoughts, and The Postliberal, a classics prof who claims it took him 40 years to see the postliberal light. Both fun, and may make it to my sidebar.

Here's the story behind it.

I encountered the word postliberal in an essay at First Things, and wondered if someone else had started using my original coinage. My search engine (Bing) revealed 33,000,000 hits. It seems there is something called Postliberal Theology, associated with Yale Divinity, that I would likely take to. It has its own Wikipedia entry, international conferences, heroes and villains. Huh.

I removed "theology" from the search and got down to a more manageable 10,000 hits. I am #11. Poking around, I found the two sites above. Sample quote from the former

In a private fee-for-service medical system, a dead patient is a revenue loss. In the National Health Service (UK), a dead patient was a cost savings.” -Harry Bailey MD 1930-2003, Sheffield (England) University Medical School 1950-1956; Harvard Medical School 1958-1981, US Navy Medical Corps 1982-1991.

The above quote is from my late father.

Sample quote from the latter

As far as the believers in Maximum Administration are concerned, the express train to the future has merely experienced a inconvenient delay, because somehow a wagon train of reenactors was permitted to cross the track the train is on: in other words, because somehow the "Right" temporarily figured out a better way to deceive the public. Are highly educated lawyers and journalists supposed to listen to the public? I doubt it ever crossed a single liberal's mind. The political fixers don't believe there's any public to listen to. It's the public that listens. What else could they do? Anybody who took Psych 101 would know that the public is just a herd of animals that needs feed, shots and exercise like the other animals. The fixers and spokespuppets produce polls telling the voters what they themselves think!

I particularly liked the coinage "spokespuppets."

Suzi at My Own Thoughts linked in turn to a blog that seemed to be named Well-Meaning Opposition, and quoted heavily from it. I liked the quotes. After two paragraphs, I believed I had found a kindred spirit. In the third paragraph I realised how kindred indeed: it was my own post from this March, Well-Meaning Opposition.

Suzi's husband also has a blog, where he claims they still have daily sex after 20 years of marriage, so I know that he knows that their children, if they have any, don't read his site. Two of my children do read my site, so I will mention only that Tracy and I try to have a daily conversation. The Postliberal does not comment on his exercise of conjugal rights, which is fine with me.

There is also a meaning of postliberal that I find more alarming. It refers to post classical liberalism, with its tradition of individual rights. I would call this subliberal, giving up our previous ideas of justice in favor of a model in which outgroups - even radical, violent, and exclusionary groups - seek power to defend their own conceptions of what they are entitled to against liberal democracies. It is the abandonment of classical liberal values of negotiation and accommodation. It seems to be a derivative of postcolonialism.