Now I am only going by that article, I haven’t read the book. But as it stands with the article, I am not sure I see how spammers are going to switch to RSS with any success at all.

Well, the article doesn’t say anything at all about spamming; it says that “web marketers” may turn from e-mail to RSS. Depending on how you define your terms, it may be the case that all spammers are web marketers; but it’s not the case that all web marketers are spammers. Their point may be that “legitimate” web marketers (however they think that term ought to be applied) are likely to get by spam filters and to have their messages go unread when customers are inundated with spam anyway, and so are more likely to move their means of communication to RSS feeds that users can voluntarily subscribe to (and unsubscribe from). Of course, some websites that specialize in advertising of employment or services that users have a significant incentive to seek out—e.g. Craiglist—already offer RSS feeds along these lines.

That’s my charitable guess at an interpretation, anyway.

This is not a meme. There are no such thing as memes. It is a game or a quiz or a thingy that you thought it would be a good idea to spread. You are not a passive host for self-replicating information patterns; you are a human being. Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind!

Rock on, by the way. Smash the State.

I was a bit puzzled to see some of the following quotes at http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/quotes1.htm#Femicommies, apparently intended to demonstrate that feminism is derived from Marxism:

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism — Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism…

— Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, 1989, First Harvard University Press. Page 3.

I wonder whether anyone involved with this page has actually read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, or “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism.” In fact, one wonders if you have even read the title of “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” since that puts it in a nutshell before you have even made it to the essay. I ask these things because the two pieces are extended discussions of the problems inherent in trying to combine feminist and Marxist politics. The first 1/3 of MacKinnon’s book is devoted to a lengthy feminist critique of Marxism and of attempted Marxist-feminist syntheses.

There are plenty of places to find Marxist influences on feminism, or attempts to combine Marxist and feminist politics. But MacKinnon and Hartmann’s essays are not among them. Frankly it’s hard to regard the selective use of these quotations as anything other than (i) incredibly sloppy, or (ii) dishonest.

I agree with most of the things that Lopez has to say about (in)civility and clarity of argument. But I’m a bit baffled by this:

Civility is neither moral nor immoral. You’re conflating vices with crimes. Vices Are Not Crimes. And vices are often incredibly problematic to uncover in others.

It’s certainly true that vices are not crimes. But since when does “immoral” mean the same thing as “criminal”? Given the choice, I’d say it’s far closer to being synonymous with “vicious” than it is with “criminal.”

There are lots of rotten things you can do without violating anybody’s rights. The fact that they’re non-violent doesn’t mean that no moral judgment can be rendered on them; it just means that moral judgments about them can’t (legitimately) be enforced at gunpoint.

(For what it’s worth, I don’t think that incivility as Lopez practices it is vicious, either. Incivility can be a vice, but only when it’s practiced in a way that detracts from the conversation; and Lopez’s approach doesn’t usually do that.)

Ghertner:

Actually, I should reword my response to Brian, for it sounds too much like Long and Johnson are crediting these economic factors as both necessary and sufficient, whereas what they are really saying is that these factors, while perhaps necessary, are not alone sufficient. Cultural changes are needed as well.

Well, the quotes from Spencer are mainly to demonstrate the feminist bona fides of 19th century radical libertarians, and to call attention to Spencer’s analysis of the relationship between patriarchy at home and militarism abroad; it’s not meant to endorse Spencer’s broader sociological (or archaeological) views. I can’t speak for Roderick, but speaking for myself, I think that Spencer’s points about militarism and patriarchy are solid, but that his claims about the economic history of patriarchy are vulnerable to roughly the same objections that MacKinnon raises (in TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE) against a similar account by Friedrich Engels. Essentially, the account ends up explaining male dominance only by assuming that the social relations that obtain under male dominance (for example, the mother of a child serving as its primary caregiver) also obtained in the primitive state of society before (on Engels’ or Spencer’s account) patriarchy arose in it. Maybe those relations did obtain, but if so you haven’t accounted for patriarchy in history; you’ve just shown that one sort of patriarchal society developed into another. I don’t think that historical political economy is either sufficient or necessary to explain sexual politics (although of course historical trends, such as the economic and political dominance of intensely patriarchal societies in Europe and the Muslim world for hundreds of years, have no small influence on the matter). Of course, it’s also questionable how far any desire to tie the rise and solidification of patriarchy to some over-arching world-historical principle—be it Spencer’s Evolution or Engels’ Dialectic—is supposed to help us in understanding the institutional structure of patriarchy today or the ethical questions concerning it.

Frank:

The easy simple answer is that the revealed preferences of those particular females is that particular “misogyny” is ok by them. The more tenuous and contorted answer involves some sort of claim of false consciousness inculcated by patriarchy. The problem is that, although the latter is an article of faith among anti-porn feminists,

Actually, it isn’t. Certainly there are some anti-pornography feminists who have made use of the notion of “false consciousness,” but Catharine MacKinnon isn’t among them; she has explicitly attacked the notion in her published writings.

Of course, MacKinnon and Dworkin and nearly all other radical feminists do think that patriarchy distorts the incentives and therefore the preferences that women have, often in ways that make most of the choices that women face in some respect destructive to deeper interests that they have. But why shouldn’t they think that? All cultural systems alter the incentives and therefore the preferences that people living under them have; that’s what cultural systems do. And it would be frankly batty to hold that there couldn’t be any such thing as a cultural system that, in at least some cases, prompts people to make choices that are destructive of some of their deep interests. Of course, that only militates against ruling out the theory on apriori grounds; it leaves open the empirical question of whether pornographic sexuality really is destructive of women’s deep interests. But that’s fine; that’s a question better addressed by the foundational works from the feminist pornography debate than I could hope to address it in the space of a comment box.

(You might say that any theory on which someone can be said to have deeper preferences that are somehow or another betrayed by their actions from revealed preferences is a theory of “false consciousness.” O.K., but then you are not using the phrase as Marxists or as radical feminists use it. You’re also not using the phrase to mean anything that anyone in their right mind would find particularly objectionable.)

Frank again:

“You say you are happy to perform in porn/consume it or you do perform/consume porn but these aren’t your real preferences but the result of patriarchal brainwashing”. This is the path towards totalitarianism. Surely you can see the extension of this line of thinking to areas other beyond porn?

I think this is a misrepresentation of the argument that most antipornography feminists give (as I mention above; the notion that women are “brainwashed” by patriarchy is fundamentally alien to feminists like MacKinnon and Dworkin). But suppose that it were an accurate representation. Would it follow that it’s the path towards totalitarianism? Only if you think that once “you may choose A under present circumstances but it is actually destructive to your deeper interests” is established, “there ought to be a law against choosing A” follows. But why should you think that? You can think that some people act in self-destructive ways without thinking that there ought to be a law to stop them from doing so; the whole institution of giving and taking advice rests on that assumption.

Dworkin and MacKinnon, for their part, don’t think that either—there are many reasons to object to some of the legal measures that they’ve endorsed, but those measures were never aimed at coercing women into making more “liberated” choices and did not rest on any particular theory about women’s real or illusory preferences. (Their antipornography ordinance, for example, had no provisions for ex ante bans on pornography, and the parts of it that are objectionable from a libertarian standpoint don’t rest on some theory about women’s “real” interests; they rest on imputing responsibility for violations of rights to pornographers in a broader way than libertarians ought to allow.)

Ghertner:

Now, unless you think that women form a different sort of category than blacks and Jews, I don’t understand the objection. As I said, all porn is not necessarily misogynistic, just as all performances with black actors are not necessarily racist. But a minstrel show is racist, and a Max Hardcore video (NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR ANYWHERE, REALLY) is misogynist, to take an extreme example of both. I don’t see how a person can defend either of these things as not extremely harmful to blacks and women, even if all of the participants claim that they enjoy this sort of thing.

Part of the problem that I have in pornography debates is that a substantial number (tho’ certainly not all) of the people on the pro side seem to be arguing, at some point or another, in bad faith. They’ll say things like “Oh, well, of course Hustler is misogynist; I’m just saying that there is good pornography out there” or “Yeah, I know that Max Hardcore videos are pretty vicious; I just don’t think you should treat everything as if it were like those.” But when push comes to shove these end up just sounding like feints. If everyone who said something like that backed it up by lending their support to protests of the transparent misogyny in Hustler (or, say, the farrago of lies in a film like “The People vs. Larry Flynt”), then anti-Hustler campaigns (say) would be a hell of a lot stronger than they actually are, whether or not the antipornography movement itself had much steam to it. But they don’t, mostly; the talk amounts to little more than the talk from anti-abortion demagogues who object that a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should’ve been more careful about contraception—and then doing nothing to make contraception more accessible (say, by lobbying the FDA to make EC available over the counter). All too often this kind of tactic amounts not to an analytic distinction amongst kinds of pornography, but rather as a way of begging off any kind of criticism towards any kind of pornography.

“well could you just clarify you question? What exactly are you asking?”

Sure. Here’s what I mean: you’re recommending a particular strategy by the ACLU on behalf of Hoppe because it’s “practical, real world stuff.” But I don’t know what “practicality” means unless you are choosing about different possible means to get something that’s worth having. If you manage to pull off getting something that isn’t worth having, you haven’t been “practical”; you’ve been wasting your time and effort.

But whether a particular result in court for Hoppe is worth having or not depends, in part, on what he does or doesn’t have a right to. Now, either it’s true or its false that UNLV’s decision to punish Hoppe is a violation of his rights (by breaching contract).

It’s not clear at all that the First Amendment ought to have anything to do with the matter at all: the First Amendment is a protection of speech from government censorship, not an entitlement to keep your job and your same salary no matter what you say. (You might point out UNLV is tax-funded. True, but so what? At the strongest that’s an argument to de-fund UNLV—which is a good idea on its own merits. In the meantime, though, state-funded Universities rightly punish professors all the time for Constitutionally-protected speech that doesn’t fall within the bounds of acceptable scholarly work or appropriate faculty conduct.) But the ACLU’s argument on behalf of Hoppe (I assume that Hoppe is consenting to the arguments that the ACLU is making on his behalf) is based, in part, on the First Amendment. So one of two things is true:

(1) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court in order to force results that he doesn’t have a right to force, or

(2) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court as a legal feint in order to force results that he does have some right to force, for other reasons.

Now of course you can say, “Hey, Hoppe is trying to get by in the real world, not in Libertarian La-La Land, so he has to try to work with the prevailing winds.” But if (1) is the case, then victory in court isn’t anything that would be worth winning at all (since it would be unjust); and if (2) is the case, then why use the deceptive argument when you could just point to the other reasons you have for seeking redress? (Is achieving some result dishonestly when there are honest means to come by it something that you should want to have?)

Cool. Except that it’s a game, not a “meme.” There’s no such thing as memes.

“The women who choose this work are going to be the women who have been so badly damaged by their parents or by others that their sense of self-worth is just destroyed – they truly see themselves as objects.”

Robert, the women who “choose” to work in pornography generally do it because they need money, often pretty desparately so. Often it’s because they are fleeing, or have fled, violence at home; sometimes it is for other reasons. They are not “damaged”; they are reacting rationally to an irrational but hideously ordinary situation.

There are lots of good reasons to think that the pornography industry is abominable and that the sooner it dies, the better. But the reason it exists is because men make it and other men buy it, not because women are “damaged.” Making men stop acting like dicks is the goal here, not “fixing” women.

“To answer Alyric’s question, masculinity must be changed because the pursuit of traditional masculine ideals makes most men very unhappy.”

Maybe traditional masculine ideals do make most men very unhappy. I’m not sure this is true, but if it were, is men’s unhappiness the reason that we ought to change masculinity? What about what the social and political prerogatives of masculinity do to, well, y’know, women?

“I do think rigid gender roles harm men.”

In some respects I’m sure they do. I’ve been on the business end of normative masculinity too many times in my life to think otherwise. But don’t we have to ask why those rigid roles exist, why those pains are inflicted, who inflicts them, and what they accomplish?

“Nothing from Wilson and FDR, who as I recall had a thing or two to do with our most successful modern wars.”

What, exactly, was World War I successful at? I mean, other than killing people and devastating large swaths of Europe?