Roderick: “Well, I guess the first question is ambiguous. If the question is whether racism and bigotry are logically incompatible with libertarianism, then no, I don’t think they are. But I do think racism and bigotry tend to undermine libertarian attitudes (or vice versa); I also think racism and bigotry are wrong for some of the same reasons that statism is wrong. (But then I accept the Socratic unity-of-virtue thesis, so I think just about any two things that are wrong are wrong for similar reasons….)”

I think this is all correct; it might also be worth adding that there are at least some historical cases (and I think also some contemporary ones) where racism and bigotry have been directly connected with specific violent political orders, in more or less the same way that statist propaganda and ideology are connected with state aggression. (Think of the connexion between slavery or lynch law and the and public proclamations of white supremacist beliefs.)

In contexts like that it’s still true that you can be a bigot without endorsing a violation of rights (many white Southerners in the 1950s would be aghast at violations of Jim Crow racial etiquette but did not support Klan or WCC-style violence), but the connexion between the bigoted beliefs and the systematic violations of rights—and so the way in which the bigotry is corrosive to libertarianism—is in some important sense even more direct than just sharing a common (or analogical) fallacy.

Kinsella: “I was assuming arguendo that loding the complaint is not libertarian—because most of the defenders of Hoppe seem to agree that for whatever reason—contract, constitution, etc.—UNLV should not punish Hoppe.”

I don’t think that UNLV should punish Hoppe either, but I have not yet seen any very clear indication that by punishing him they would be violating his rights (by breach of contract or otherwise). When it comes to cases being fought in court, the difference between vices and crimes is important, yet nearly all of the commentary on Hoppe and his legal prospects seems to have glossed over this.

Kinsella: “As for the ACLU’s position, that’s just a quesiton of legal strategy or tactics. Real world, practical stuff.”

Do you think that “real world, practical stuff” is detached from the question of what rights Hoppe does or doesn’t actually have in the matter?

We left England for the right to worship [not] the right to abstain from it.

Who is “we” here? The Congregationalists who emigrated to Massachussetts? Sure—they left England to create a theocracy. The Episcopalians in Virginia? No; they already had the right to worship in England. The Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania? Well, they left England for the right to worship, but they also made religious tolerance (including tolerance of atheists) part of their basic laws.

Of course, I discussed none of these in my article, because my article wasn’t about the colonists. It was about the Founders, a century and a half later and in a very different climate of thought.

Our Biblical Christian principles need no defending.

Is using force through the government to favor one kind of worship over another a “Biblical Christian principle”? Is there no difference between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s?

You’d have trouble convincing the Danbury Baptists of that—Baptists at the time were the leading advocates of complete separation of Church and State. They created Rhode Island in order to put that into practice and escape the theocracy in Massachussetts.

The men who created this nation were not atheists.

Jefferson and Paine, just to pick two examples, were repeatedly referred to as “atheists” during their own times. It was true of Paine and untrue of Jefferson; but Jefferson wasn’t a Christian either. He was a deist; he did not believe that Jesus was God, or that He performed miracles, or that He died for our sins. (Jefferson infamously published a bowdlerized “Bible” which contained only Jesus’s ethical teachings and none of the mysteries.)

Of course, many other Founders were Christians of various sorts. And now what? What follows from that?

funnie:

by contrasting some phrases of littleviolet’s with your opinion of the answer to my question, perhaps in order to make your assumption seem perfectly reasonable and my question seem unnecessary and/or misguided.

I’m sorry that I put your questions alongside littleviolet’s remarks, and that I misspoke. I was mainly trying to ask about littleviolet’s remarks, not to answer your questions—much less to butt in and answer them for Amp, or to try to make your questions seem unnecessary or misguided (nor do I think littleviolet’s concerns about feminist space are unnecessary or misguided either; I’m wondering about how far the concept applies). I shouldn’t have set your questions beside littleviolet’s remarks at all, since those were my main concern and I misunderstood the direction from which you were raising the questions you raise for Amp anyway.

In other words, I apologize for butting in confusedly.

Pete Guither on pornography:

It’s been around forever and will continue to be around forever.

Pornography exists because men make it and men consume it. (Yes, I know, some women control porn production companies and some women buy pornography. So what? Look at what sustains the market as a whole.)

And again:

If, instead, you take a positive approach — educate people, change the conditions, offer something more positive that fills the same need — then you might be able to get somewhere.

“Getting somewhere” in what sense? If you think that pornography will continue to be around forever, then what sort of progress is being made?

Part of this, I suppose, has to do with the phrase “fills the same need.” What needs do you think pornography fills?

None of this, by the way, is to endorse a policy of litigation or State censorship. It’s a question of what you take the ends of activism around pornography to be, rather than the (very important, but different) question of what means you choose to adopt it.

“He does have a contract,”

Sure, but like most academic contracts it’s unclear at best whether what is being done to him is actually excluded by any of the terms of his contracts. (Most academic contracts these days allow the administration a fair amount of leniency in punishing professors for violations of “discriminatory harassment policies.”) In any case, Kinsella didn’t just say that the University is breaching its contract with Hoppe in this specific case. He said that it’s “not libertarian” (i.e., promoting rights-violations) to endorse the actions of a student using a college disciplinary code to “punish” a professor “in this way”.

Another way to put it: Kinsella seems to be confusing violations of academic freedom (which are bad, but not necessarily rights-violating) with censorship of free speech (which is necessarily rights-violating). Maybe he’s not; maybe he’s just speaking loosely. But given that Hoppe’s defenders at the ACLU seem to be pushing the same confusion as an argument in court, it seems like there’s some good reasons to be a bit studious about being more precise.

“… and I must insist that, contrary to Kinsella’s statement, I never endorsed the student’s actions.”

Sure. I never intended to suggest that you did—and I’m sorry if that’s what I seemed to be implying.

littleviolet:

Your argument is that you provide a space for feminists to interact with people who oppose us. I’d say we’ve got the rest of the world where we do that all the time and the rest of the internet for that matter. I don’t think feminist discourse is assisted by sexists who continually try to elbow their way into feminist spaces and attempt to disrupt the discussion. It’s not a refusal to engage with arguments, we do engage, we have to engage, it’s a refusal to engage in feminist space with the bigots who make those arguments.

funnie:

Again, whose interests is this platform expected to serve? What is the point?

Amp’s trying to run a weblog that speaks out from a feminist or profeminist perspective and to keep active discussion going in the comments section. That much is clear. But do all feminist projects aim at creating feminist spaces in the sense intended here? Is Amp trying to do that? Should he be? (Is a public weblog run by a man really suited to creating the space of a c-r group?)

Raznor:

The thing is with bigotry, is it is possible that a person can say something bigoted out of purely innocent ignorance.

I’m not sure what you mean by “innocent ignorance” here. Do you think that (say) men’s ignorance is innocent? I know that, for myself, I’ve messed up and done the wrong thing many times in my life, and most of the time I either knew what I was doing (and defended or made excuses for it) or else bloody well should have realized it if I’d stopped ot think about what it meant for a couple seconds. (I think that both of these apply, for example, to different cases of my using pornography as a teenager.) And judging from what I have seen and what other men and women have told me, I’m hardly the only man for whom this is true.

You don’t have to be a Phelps-style monster to have shady motives and chalking up a mistake to ignorance isn’t necessarily enough to make a difference for how you ought to treat the person making it. I don’t think I’ve seen Q Grrl or Crys T or others make any real distinction on the basis of “innocent ignorance” or “culpable dishonesty”—mainly because the issues that they are calling attention to have a lot more to do with:

(1) whether the man making the mistake is belligerently defensive about it (as I think novalis obviously was) or listens to criticism (especially when that criticism comes from women), and

(2) whether contempt and belligerant defensiveness are being thinly veiled by “polite” diction (as I think Robert obviously was), and

(3) what it means when male interlocutors and male moderators seem to pay much more attention in comments to the veil than to what’s under it

I think (1) and (2) make much more difference for how productive it is to try to talk patiently with someone than questions of “innocence” do, and (3) seems to be at the root of worry much more than whether or not anyone happens to say anything bigoted in Amp’s comments section.

Of course there are more things going on here than just those points and I’m probably missing a lot. But I do think that both of those two are much more clearly important to the points being raised than the question of “innocent” vs. “dishonest” bigotry.

FoolishOwl:

On the first point, no. Ultimately, bosses aren’t necessary at all — we’ve long since passed the point at which there was real economic scarcity, and therefore a need to have social classes.

Ultimately, are men necessary at all? (I don’t mean human beings with a Y chromosome and testes; I mean as a cohesive group identity that confers some social role more substantial than, say, having hazel eyes or detached earlobes.)

Most men have problems in their lives which are clearly the result of sexism, and I find that many men will agree that this is the case.

Of course, bosses usually have problems in their lives as the result of capitalism: they are often extremely busy, may not have time to see their kids as much as they would like, may have feelings of ennui or spiritual emptiness, may find themselves subject to an unpleasant pecking order or to unfair office backbiting. There are whole movements of literature devoted to telling us how the managers and bosses of the world may have money and control, but don’t have happiness or spiritual fulfillment.

But does that have any burly consequences for how workers should agitate or organize? Should the labor movement spend a lot of time—or any substantial amount of time at all—pointing out that “Capitalism hurts bosses too”?

Of course, you might object that the salient difference is this:

On the second, strictly speaking, bosses are hurt by capitalism, but they benefit so much from it that the hurt is trivial in comparison.

This is not the case with men and sexism. Most definitions I’ve seen of male privilege seem to amount to, men don’t suffer as much as women from sexism. That’s not to say that men don’t suffer.

But that just raises the question: do you think that men don’t get benefits from sexism that benefit them so much that the hurt is trivial in comparison?

(It might help also to look at the classic examples of the ways in which sexism is said to hurt men—and what the hurt in those examples accomplishes.)

Macer:

Saudi Arabia allows NO immigration period. They only allow temporary workers in.

This is a form of immigration, just as Bush’s crackpot scheme for a bracero program is a form of immigration. Workers live and work in Saudi Arabia for substantial periods of time. The fact that they are denied legal rights that they ought, by right, to have, and that this results in very shitty treatment, says many bad things about the Saudi dictatorship but it does not say that they don’t allow immigration by non-Muslims.

Anyway, now what? What do you think that the shitty selective immigration policies imposed by Saudi royals entails about how you can treat ordinary Muslims? (I.E., people other than Saudi royals)

Macker:

You use other ideological concepts like “non-person” that I just don’t use.

People have rights. To claim that Jones does not have rights anymore just is to claim that you have no more obligations to her than you do to a rock, or perhaps a wild animal. It means that you can, without doing anything wrong to her, beat her, take the house she lives in or the things she uses, enslave her, or kill her. You might think that there are other reasons that you shouldn’t do these things (just as there are reasons you might not want to smash a rock) but on your avowed position, none of the reasons not to do these things to an avowed anti-propertarian involve her moral standing as a fellow human being.

That’s treating someone as a non-person. If you don’t like your position being so described, then you should change your position.

There are plenty of good reasons not to steal from someone who makes a phony assertion that property rights do not exist. If however his claim is genuine, then his property rights cannot be one of them. If genuine then he has rejected all claims to property so there is no reason for him to even complain. It would be physically impossible to steal from him, he has nothing to steal.

Whether or not Jones can consistently complain about you taking stuff from her against her will is immaterial to whether or not you are actually violating her rights. Property rights do not come from your claim to hold property and they don’t evaporate if you cease to make those claims. Jones could, of course, abandon all her property—by setting it out at the curb, for example, or inviting people onto her land to take it. But just saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything” is not an abandonment of your property; it’s just a statement of (mistaken) philosophical belief.

Suggesting that you have the right to use force to take stuff away from someone who holds foolish beliefs about property rights is, of course, both unhinged and totalitarian—whether or not you actually think you ought to do it.

(You can, of course, abandon property. But saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything”, while continuing to hold onto and to use your property exactly as you always have, may be hypocritical, but it’s not an act of abandonment.)

Besides where do you get the idea that all of the sudden I have this desire to steal from the other guy and beat the shit out of him (assault him) just because he denied the right to property. That’s just one right. He didn’t deny the right to be free from unprovoked assault, did he.

I think the distinction you’re trying to draw here is spurious: the reason that you have a right to alienable property is ultimately the same as the reason you have a right not to be assaulted; if you deny someobdy the one then you ultimately deny them the other. But suppose that it were not so. Then so what? If someone did say, “I believe that human beings have the right to assault or enslave other human beings if they can get away with it,” that would certainly a wicked belief. But does that give you the right to assault or enslave the person who utters it? If so, why?

People have rights because they are people. They don’t lose them by being bad people. Not even if they commit crimes. It would be bad enough if your theory entailed that criminals have no rights (what I originally took it to entail); but from what you have said it appears that you actually believe that having bad thoughts—a vice, not a crime—is enough to do the job. That’s not libertarianism; it’s totalitarianism, or possibly sociopathy.