Bianco Luno’s notes on June Stephenson’s Men are Not Cost-Effective
I | II | III
Conclusions
318
Not all men are criminals, but nearly almost all criminals are men. By a ratio of 94 to 6, men outnumber women in prison, a fact that raises the questions of whether and why crime is a masculine statement. [I wonder why […]
Notes on Gertrude Stein and Adolf Hitler
In 1938 Gertrude Stein led a campaign to urge a Nobel Prize for Adolf Hitler. The story is disclosed by Gustave Hendrikksen, a former member of the Nobel committee. The committee, according to Hendrikksen, rejected the proposal: “politely but firmly, citing among their reasons the attitude of the Nazi […]
Notes on Jeffrie G. Murphy, “Marxism and Retribution”
Editor’s note: The contract theory of punishment gets a well-deserved lashing from Murphy with a borrowed Marxist whip. But Luno lashes out indiscriminately with the utmost discrimination: Let’s go after the theorists…
218-222
The only moral way to punish is the Kantian way but the Kantian way forbids the use […]
Notes on Rush Rhees, “Postscript” (on Wittgenstein)
Editor’s note: Luno comments on Rush Rhees’ published recollections, a chief source for biographical understanding of certain perceived peculiarities of Wittgenstein’s makeup, specifically, his relationship to his Jewishness, to Otto Weininger, women, and politics. In the course of these notes, Luno offers one of his more remarkable summations of […]
Notes on Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfranchisement of Women
[The essay first appeared in the Westminster Review (1851), then in 1868 in a pamphlet under her name, and in John Stuart Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions in 1875. After some confusion as to its authorship, J. S. Mill attributed the essay to Harriet Taylor (1807–1858). Mill elaborated […]
Notes on J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 1
[The “feeling” Mill addresses is that the legal subordination of women is somehow justified.]
…So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a […]
Notes on J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 4
[All emphasis in the quoted passages is added by me.]
The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon […]
Notes on Mill, On Liberty, chapter 5
Self-sale into slavery
Not only persons are not held to engagements which violate the rights of third parties, but it is sometimes considered a sufficient reason for releasing them from an engagement, that it is injurious to themselves. In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by […]
Notes on Catherine MacKinnon, “Pornography: On Morality and Politics”
264
In contemporary industrial society, pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, sexual access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit. It exploits women’s sexual and economic inequality for gain.
This understanding of the reality of pornography must contend not only […]
Notes on Isaiah Berlin,“Two Concepts of Liberty.”
119
Tobias Wong,Another notion of possibility
Berlin paraphrases Heine who was thinking of Kant: “philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.” [Heine, a friend of Karl Marx, was trying to weigh in on the side of philosophers, who, by and large, are ignored […]
