{"id":709,"date":"2009-08-28T00:04:13","date_gmt":"2009-08-28T04:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=709"},"modified":"2009-08-27T15:29:31","modified_gmt":"2009-08-27T19:29:31","slug":"qotd-trading-one-right-for-all-the-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/08\/28\/qotd-trading-one-right-for-all-the-others\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Trading one right for all the others"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>At some point we will come to see that the developed world\u2019s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It\u2019s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized &mdash; like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter \u201cI did it My Way!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And in the end even the sex doesn\u2019t do it. In the Netherlands, the most progressive nation in Europe, the land where whatever\u2019s your bag is cool, where naked women beckon from storefront windows, a certain ennui is palpable. Last week, the ANP news agency released a poll showing that the Dutch now derive more pleasure from going to the bathroom than from sex. It wasn\u2019t a close-run thing: eighty per cent identified a trip to the toilet as the activity \u201cthey enjoy the most\u201d &mdash; or, as the South African newspaper the Witness put it, \u201cThe Bog\u2019s Better Than Bonking.\u201d To modify Eliot, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flush.<\/p>\n<p>Mark Steyn, <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2009\/08\/27\/do-you-notice-anything-shrivelling\/2\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Do you notice anything shrivelling? We\u2019ve never had more personal sexual liberty. And less freedom of almost every other kind&#8221;, <em>Macleans<\/em><\/a>, 2008-08-27<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At some point we will come to see that the developed world\u2019s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,41],"tags":[196,222,217],"class_list":["post-709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-lgbt","tag-netherlands","tag-rights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-br","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions\/711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}