Limited, Inc.

Dope Words written in anger. LI finds this incredible: writers are treated so badly by the media that it either stupifies us, forces us to quit, or demoralizes us beyond repair. This is the second time in the last five days that LI has had to go without food for a day. The reason? No money in the bank. The reason: One company has deliberately floated me -- not paid me -- for work I turned in in June, and that was published in July. One company has "lost" my invoice -- this makes the second time in the last month. For that company, I have reviewed approximately ten to fifteen books in the last five weeks. Result: I am living by leeching on my friends. Leeching only goes so far, however. So, today, I didn't have the money to buy ten dollars worth of groceries from the clerk, who makes more than me, and who is paid biweekly. The time divide is the major divide in this country: a company can take its time about paying you, in spite of the contracts they have you sign in

Remora September 11. LI was not going to post today. But then we thought, reading the NYT, and various media, that it might be a good idea to post today. After all, this is the week that Bush has chosen to press forward with his war against Iraq, with his address to the United Nations. And we were surprised to see Bush's comments on the NYT op-ed page -- surprised because we didn't expect to see a Washington Times guy like Bush appearing in same space used by Susan Sontag Monday. So we decided, one year later, to take a look at Sontag's much condemned response to 9/11. It was easy to find on the web. A NYU finance professor has even taken the trouble to combine Sontag's 9/10 piece in the Times and the New Yorker piece . Here's the first paragraph, the one that drew down the wrath of the heavens last year: "The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled

To continue from our last post� the Eyre affair. Governor James Eyre�s suppression of a �rebellion� in the Crown colony of Jamaica, and his subsequent trial by commission, is so much antiquarian dust today, but it shouldn't be. So we are grateful to two economists, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, who have publicized this affair. In an interview with Reason magazine, these two sum up what they think they have discovered: the dark connection between opposition to laissez faire economics and racism. They are particularly focused on the chief disputants in England: Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. These men, for Levy and Peart, stand not only for themselves, but also for two different ideologies: one statist, paternalistic, ultimately socialist, and one laissez faire, individualistic, and liberal � in the classical sense. Q: What were the connections between the contempt for markets and defense of slavery? A: Markets bust hierarchy. Carlyle also coined the term "consum

Dope LI was on the horn with our friend, MB. MB mentions an article she's writing for a book on Philosophy and Race, which gets us onto the topic of philosophy and race. So LI mentioned that if the editor expanded his mandate, he ought to include the Eyre Incident. MB hadn't heard of the Eyre incident, and --- putting our cards on the table -- LI has gone many moons in complete Eyre ignorance too. We came across a reference to it in a biography of Mary Kingsley. So we explained what we knew -- that Governor Eyre, in Jamaica, brutally put down a revolt of agricultural workers there, mostly black, in the 1860s. And that he was put on trial for murder. And that the case became a sensation in England, where two different committees were formed, one pro-Eyre, one anti. The pro-Eyre committee was openly contemptuous of the idea that a white man should be prosecuted for murdering black men. Alas, Charles Dickens was on the pro-Eyre committee, as well as the ever racist Thomas Carl