Just out of curiosity, what do you mean when you describe the fate of the American South “after the Civil War” as “forced industrialization”? Are you referring to Reconstruction, or to a bunch of other stuff that happened decades after the civil war (thanks to the TVA and other assorted thieves)? If you’re referring to Reconstruction, what specific aspects do you have in mind?

Glaivester:

But a lot of people would never think of that unless they asked the question “why didn’t she just leave?” and then search for the answer.

There is more than one way to ask a question. If all you’re saying is that we ought to be willing to honestly inquire into the conditions that keep women in abusive situations, I can’t think of anyone who would disagree with you. (At most, feminists will — rightly — point out that we also need to inquire into why men abuse women, rather than simply treating that as a given fact.) If women who have survived abuse volunteer the information, all for the best. But if you mean that we are entitled to demand an accounting of her reasons from any woman who is battered or raped (rather than presuming that she did have her reasons, like any other human being, and letting her explain them or not explain them as she sees fit); and that we ought to interrogate specific women in specific cases about why they didn’t leave, and suggest that — whatever reasons they may have had — it’s that that’s necessary and sufficient for systematic male violence against women to continue — then what you’re doing is fucked up and it needs to stop. Because yes, that is victim-blaming, and yes, that is making excuses for the rapists and batterers, and yes, that is a hostile and hurtful way to treat survivors of violence. This kind of attitude can be either ignorant or malicious. Often it’s a bit of both. If it’s malicious then there’s precious little reason to care whether your response helps the interrogator to understand or not, because people who do this maliciously generally don’t care and don’t want to understand. If it’s ignorance, then I don’t think it’s obvious that sympathetically catering to ignorance is always either obligatory or helpful as a means to getting people to understand better. And, on the subject of ignorant interrogations that weren’t malicious in intent, you should be aware that it’s very easy to ask a question that you think is just honest inquiry, but which really comes across as a demand or an interrogation. Particularly to someone who has been through hell and is already struggling with self-doubt and self-blame.

Avenir:

Punish the individual men, for sure, but cure whatever societal disease is producing these men, too.

Glaivester:

I am not questioning why society is treating them like they are helpless. I am questioning what society is doing to make them helpless.

Avenir:

I do think that society raises women in a way that makes them vulnerable to victimization.

Y’all keep talking about “society” as if it were a gaseous medium or an airborne disease instead of a bunch of individual men and women living in roughly the same area. “Society” doesn’t “raise women,” or treat anyone like they’re helpless, or make them helpless, and male violence against women is not a medical condition that “society” contracted. Men and women raise children; men and women can choose to, or decline to, treat people as if they are helpless or make them helpless; and male violence against women is something that men choose to do to women, every day, everywhere. I mention these things because when you start to talk about “society” doing this or that you are quickly and thoroughly changing the subject from the real facts of real men and women’s daily lives to some reified abstraction, treated as if it were some looming presence outside of us (when in fact it just is you, and I, and our neighbors), and in the process nicely obscure questions such as: who in “society” is doing the actual hitting and raping; who in “society” is making the excuses for it in conversation, commentary, and high theory; who has the most power to determine what we learn to say and do when we are being brought up, and so on. Here’s a hint: it’s mostly men. If you sincerely want to stop encouraging passivity and irresponsibility, maybe you should start by talking in a way that actually demands that actual men be actually accountable for the specific things they do wrong, rather than passing the buck to “society” and treating male violence as if it were a given natural fact.

No. I don’t see the need to document every single thing I repeat that I have heard from many sources throughout my life.

I see. So you took the opportunity of Rosa Parks’ recent death to confidently assert, as matters of fact, sensationalist, defamatory >> rumors about her which you have absolutely no basis for asserting other than half-remembered gossip.

I hardly see how it’s defamatory to have been a civil rights organizer. It just detracts from the mystique.

Read back a bit before you shoot off your replies. It’s not defamatory to claim that someone was civil rights organizer. Especially not when that’s demonstrably true. What is defamatory is asserting without any evidence whatsoever that Rosa Parks was having an affair with Martin Luther King Jr. before (or for that matter after) her arrest in 1955. Which is what you made clear you were doing in the passage that I quoted.

Just because of what I have heard, again, from a few people. Someone even told me it was mentioned on the radio in Texas after her death. Many people think it’s even more admirable that she was already a political operative beforehand. This is based in something.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever bothered to actually read something about Rosa Parks’ life or the Montgomery Bus Boycott? (I mean actually read something, like a book- or chapter-length treatment, from beginning to end.) If not, then you ought to read something about it before you start flapping your yap about it.

No, because I don’t find it interesting. It was just a comment on an inner thread of a message board. Get a grip. I even said on that thread that I am not sure at all.

It’s no sin not to read about things you don’t find interesting, but it is totally irresponsible to go around making confident assertions about the topic if you haven’t done anything in particular to make yourself less than ignorant about it. If you didn’t know what you were talking about, then why did you talk about it?

I also think that seeing that kind of perserverance pay off in spectacular ways is, when it happens, a wonderful, inspiring thing. Don’t you?

Actually, the only good thing to have happened was that the government stopped forcing segregation. They immediately began forcing integration which is almost as bad, and they got to take the credit for “ending institutional racism” — as if they were just victims of the status quo previously.

I’m not sure what “forcing integration” has to do with Rosa Parks or the Montgomery Bus Boycott — the bus boycott first sought better treatment for blacks on segregated busses, and then an end to bus segregation, by means of a voluntary boycott; the legal case (culminating in the Supreme Court’s Browder v. Gale decision) did nothing more than strike down city and state segregation laws concerning public transportation. As it happens, I think that any honest accounting of what Jim Crow meant for blacks, as compared with what the rights-violating portions of antidiscrimination law mean for whites, ought to make it incredibly obvious that government-enforced integration — though bad — is not even remotely as bad as Jim Crow was. But in any case the shift from Rosa Parks’ legacy to the legacy of the Freedom Movement as a whole — however mixed that may be — is just a change in subject.

As for the government taking undue credit, well, what else is new? Governments lie and aggrandize themselves without basis all the time. That’s not the Freedom Movement’s fault, let alone Rosa Parks’s personally. So I don’t see how it has anything to do with how we should or shouldn’t remember her.

No. I don’t see the need to document every single thing I repeat that I have heard from many sources throughout my life.

I see. So you took the opportunity of Rosa Parks’ recent death to confidently assert, as matters of fact, sensationalist, defamatory rumors about her which you have absolutely no basis for asserting other than half-remembered gossip.

Just because of what I have heard, again, from a few people. Someone even told me it was mentioned on the radio in Texas after her death. Many people think it’s even more admirable that she was already a political operative beforehand. This is based in something.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever bothered to actually read something about Rosa Parks’ life or the Montgomery Bus Boycott? (I mean actually read something, like a book- or chapter-length treatment, from beginning to end.) If not, then you ought to read something about it before you start flapping your yap about it. If so, you ought to know that what the statements about Rosa Parks’ political activism are based on are (1) her civil rights activism throughout the 1950s (she was an organizer and activist for the Montgomery NAACP, and attended the Highlander Folk School (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Folk_School) in summer 1955, where she was trained in the theory and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience); (2) her friendship with other leading civil rights figures in Montgomery (in particular E. D. Nixon, Clifford Durr, Virginia Durr, but not — for what it’s worth — including Martin Luther King Jr., who had been in Montgomery only 2 years, was known by few people outside of his own congregation, and had practically no involvement in the civil rights movement at all until the Bus Boycott had already begun); and (3) the fact that Nixon, one of Montgomery’s leading Black attorneys, had already been planning a legal strategy for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation ordinance in court, and was awaiting a test case. (There had been two young Black women — Claudette Colvin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin) and Mary Louise Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Louise_Smith) — who had been arrested under similar circumstances the same year; Nixon and Parks helped organize Colvin’s defense, but Nixon made a controversial decision not to pursue their cases because he was afraid that the white press would make hay of Colvin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and rumors that Smith’s father was a drunkard.) However, there is absolutly no evidence at all, from the Durrs, Nixon, Parks, or anyone else, that Parks spent any time intentionally boarding busses in an effort to get arrested. Maybe what you are half-remembering is the fact that E. D. Nixon spent the better part of a year trying to prepare his legal strategy for a challenge to the segregation statute (Claudette Colvin was arrested in March; Mary Louise Smith was arrested in October; and Rosa Parks was arrested in December). Or maybe whatever dude you happened to hear this from just isn’t a very reliable source.

Jason Ditz:

I don’t think it makes a huge difference either way, but there’s something a little more romantic about the idea that she didn’t like it, and accepted it, and just one day had an epiphany that what was going on had to stop as opposed to riding the bus day in and day out hoping for the chance to make a statement.

Well, she *didn’t8 “ride the bus day in and day out hoping for the chance to make a statement”, or if she did, I’m certainly not aware of any evidence whatsoever to that effect. (She did ride the bus day in and day out hoping to get to work. But the only arguments I’ve heard for any premeditated effort to get arrested contain, at best, nothing more than sheer speculation based on her organizing experience and her friendship with Nixon and the Durrs.) On the other hand, even if she had I don’t see what would have been even un-romantic about that. Lots of times defiance of tyranny takes a long time, and I think perserverance in the effort to stop systematic injustice, even when it’s not pleasant and even when it’s not immediately paying off, is an admirable trait. I also think that seeing that kind of perserverance pay off in spectacular ways is, when it happens, a wonderful, inspiring thing. Don’t you?

Thus Jeremy:

Um, literal — she was MLK’s mistress. What, dead people automatically deserve respect no matter what? or is it that black people deserve respect no matter what? Sorry, I don’t play that game. I meant exactly what I said — it cuts the coolness factor in her actions because she was a slick political operative and not a tough-as-nails old broad.

A few questions.

1. Do you have any particular evidence for the sensationalist claim that Rosa Parks was having an affair with Martin Luther King Jr. before (or for that matter, after) her arrest on December 1, 1955? If so, what is this evidence and where can documentation of it be found?

2. Rosa Parks herself repeatedly explained her actions in interviews and in writing. She was neither just a tired old woman nor a political plant — her refusal to move was an intentional act of political defiance but it was not premeditated. (Here’s what she said about it: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or any more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in…. There had to be a stopping place, and this seemed to have been the place for me to stop being pushed around …. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.” But she also said that she hadn’t gotten onto the bus intending to get arrested; in fact, that if she had seen that the driver was James Blake — a notoriously nasty bus-driver, and the same driver who, 12 years before, had thrown her off the bus for refusing to get off and re-enter through the back entrance after she had paid up front — she wouldn’t have gotten on. You can find this information in many places, including Lynn Olson’s 2001 history of women in the civil rights movement, Freedom’s Daughters). Were you aware of Ms. Parks’ own testimony about her reasons? Do you have any overriding reasons to doubt it?

3. Why would it “detract from the coolness factor” if it turned out to be true that Rosa Parks refused to move because she thought that government-enforced segregation was wrong, and she intended to help end part of it through an act of political defiance? Is deliberate resistance to tyranny somehow less admirable than refusing to move because you’re tired?

As far as “the existence of ‘substantial and often gruesome atrocities’ in postwar Cambodia” goes, I think Orwell said it best:

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.’ Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

“The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”

—“Politics and the English Language” (1946)

For what it’s worth, I don’t think breaking backward compatibility with the Atom link munging is a great idea. Two basic reasons:

1. preserving the convention that $item[‘link’] means the rel=”alternate” link, and thus the same thing that $item[‘link’] means in RSS feeds, would impose the need for some kind of sorting logic to guarantee that the first link element in the array is always the rel=”alternate” link. Breaking the convention would break virtually all Magpie software everywhere, and make normalizing with RSS a horrendous pain in the ass.

2. in practice, anyway, a generic Atom link element means absolutely nothing to a program consuming the feed; it is only in the context of being a link rel="alternate" or link rel="self" or link rel="enclosure" or whatever that it actually means anything that a feed consumer would be interested in understanding. I can’t think of any reason that I’d want to be able to search through a straight list of all the link elements without regard to their “rel” value; and if there is some reason that you’d want to, you can always store some special kludge element somewhere that will keep track of all the link rel values that are used in a particular item.

wade:

I don’t think the free market would have waged a better war against the germans than nation states managed in 1939 – 45.

What do you mean by “a better war against the Germans”? What do you think makes a war effort better, as opposed to worse? And why do you think the war that Stalin’s USSR, the UK, the US, and France fought against Hitler’s Germany, counts as a better war than could have been fought without the involvement of the Allied nation-states?

Castillon: The solution for patents is trade secrets, which do deal heavily in contracts and are relatively successful.

Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. If “trade secrets” are binding on third parties who have made no agreement to respect or conceal them, then they are just as objectionable on free market grounds as patents or copyrights. If they are not, then it’s pretty likely that at least some products will be easily reverse engineered by people not bound by trade secrets. (This is at least the case with products that can be reverse-engineered using chemical analysis, most software, etc.) Of course, without the bludgeon of patent law and copyright law to bully people with, firms might try demanding that their customers sign on to trade secret agreements as a condition of sale. But that’s a fairly novel approach for most of the products concerned and it’s unclear whether, given the choice, customers would take it. It’s also unclear how successful it would be given that it has no binding force over third parties who innocently come into possession of the product without having signed the agreement.)

It may very well be true that the end of patents will make capital- and labor-intensive research unprofitable for many fields in which it is profitable today. Maybe there is some way of patching that up, but I don’t think that it would be any argument for intellectual protectionism if it couldn’t be patched up. There are reasons for doing research other than making an immediate profit through monopoly control over the engineering results of the research; and there is no good way of centrally planning the best modes of research to allocate money to. The best thing to do is to leave it open to market competition and see what falls out of researchers’, sponsors’, and consumer’s economizing decisions.

Castillon: As to copyrights, the original inspiration for them in Anglo-American law had nothing to do with contract law, property rights, or anything else like that. They were a utilitarian means to encourage production of some very limited varities of largely artistic endeavours.

Well, that depends on the date you are attributing to the origin of copyright law. If you’re dating them from the Statute of Anne then you’re right to say that they had this explicitly protectionist purpose. If you’re dating them to the extension of letters patent to the use of the printing press with regard to particular works (which were sometimes granted to particular printers and sometimes to particular authors), or the Licensing Act of 1662, then the purpose wasn’t even connected to the promotion of “useful books” at all; it was simply a brute grant of privilege from the Crown, combined with the desire to control printing for purposes of censorship, suppression of heresy, etc. In any case, the discussion above was not directed to the purposes originally cited for copyright law, but rather to the kinds of stories that pro-copyright libertarians try to tell themselves to justfy the claim that copyright is compatible with a free market. (Randians favor the claim that it is a form of private property; Rothbard argued that it is a form of contractual agreement; Matt seems to be vacillating between the two different accounts; and I argue that neither is right or even particularly plausible.)

Don Lloyd: Your description is mis-applied. It’s not my use of the file that is threatened, but rather its exchange value to me if I want to sell it to others for their own use value of a copy.

Where in the hell did you get a legitimate proprietary interest in the “exchange value to you” of any good or service, let alone a computer file? Exchange values are not the property of the seller; they are made by two or more people acting on subjective values in the context of a market. (N.B.: the theory that you own the exchange value of a good or service would justify any and every form of protectionism, not just intellectual protectionism.)

Matt McIntosh: Below a certain congestion level, roads and highways are nonrivalrous, but I doubt you would argue that this means nobody should be allowed to exclude others from using their private roads.

This is a crude and obvious category error. Roads and highways, even when not congested enough that the use by one vehicle excludes the use by another, are still such that an additional vehicle on the road will bring the road closer to the condition in which use by one vehicle excludes use by another. I don’t care whether you call this condition “being rivalrous” or “being potentially rivalrous”; in either case it is different in kind from the condition of ideas, which come no closer to being exhausted no matter how many people partake of them, and in either case, this is the difference that libertarians against IP are interested in, not the contingent question of whether in fact right now my use of a particular resource on the margin would exclude someone else from using it on the margin.

Matt McIntosh: Likewise, my genetic code is nonrivalrous, but would you argue that anyone should be able to take it and clone me without my consent?

Of course I would. Jesus. Provided that they have some way of accessing the pattern of your genetic code without violating your rights of self-ownership. If I jab you with a needle against your will in order to get a DNA sample, of course that is assault, but that has nothing in particular to do with “intellectual property.” If you sell a vial of your blood no-strings-attached and then I decide to use the genetic information contained therein to produce a clone, what gives you any rights of exclusion at all over the clone that I intend to make?

Matt: In any case, you’re gliding rather blatantly over this little thing called copyright, which rests on an implicit contract between the producer and the purchaser that the purchaser shall refrain from doing certain things with the product they’ve been sold. We can have reasonable disagreements over how these implicit contracts are defined and what their content should be (I myself favour fairly broad scope for fair use, and I think Creative Commons is a fantastic idea), but to pretend they don’t exist is not a tenable position.

Of course it’s a tenable position. First, because copyright restrictions are enforced on people who cannot plausibly be claimed to be bound by any contract with the copyright holder. (For example, say you buy a copy of my book, and rip out the copyright page and white out my name. You then sell it to Micah — who has no reasonable way of knowing that I wrote it and claimed copyright on it — and pass it off as an anonymous tract released into the public domain. Micah then prints up a thousand copies and sells them over the Internet. Do I have the right to force Micah not to print them? Copyright law says yes; a strictly contractual theory would have to say no. Whether or not you are liable to me for breach of some contract, and whether or not you are liable to Micah for fraud, there is no plausible case at all for suggesting that Micah entered into any contract with me, implicit or otherwise. Ergo copyright restrictions are not contractual agreements. If you want to make up some social practice that sort of resembles copyright but stays within purely contractual limits, you’re free to do so, but if you want to defend the use of copyright restrictions against innocent third parties the contractual argument won’t do it. (A notion of property in ideas will, of course, but that is precisely what is being contested.)

Secondly, if you seriously intend to read the symbol “(c)” as an extensive and binding contract you have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. For example, just what are the terms of the contract? Without a concrete answer to this the claim that “(c)” is actually code for a huge implicit contract is nothing more than empty hand-waving. But can these terms be spelled out in any detailed way? Can they change over time according to Congressional fiat? Did I, buying the book, agree to accept whatever changes Congress and the courts may impose over time? Or did I only agree to accept whatever terms Congress and the courts imposed at the time that I bought the book? Or did I not understand that I was agreeing to any terms at all? How do you know? How does the copyright holder know? Did the copyright holder make the book available under the terms set by Congress at the time, or under whatever terms Congress happens to set at any time at all? How do you know? How do I know? What evidence of any kind do you have for any mutually understood and agreed-upon terms at all? I submit that there isn’t any conventional set of terms because copyright was never a matter of conventional law in the first place; it was made up relatively recently and is governed entirely by statute, not by convention. The statutes all operate on the presumption that they are giving a limited grant of property rights in ideas, not on the presumption that they are formalizing a kind of contract. You could make up some kind of conventional social practice in which people did understand “(c)” to be code for some specific and widely-understood set of terms (science fiction is a diverting enough passtime), but pretending that it has anything at all to do with copyright law as it currently stands is really a bit much.

And, of course, as has been widely recognized even by those (e.g. Rothbard) who swallow the copyright-as-contract theory, none of this can give any excuse at all for patents.

Matt: For example, it takes enormous sunk costs to develop a new drug, so if someone else can reverse-engineer it relatively cheaply and take away all your profits, then drugs will no longer be profitable and hence undersupplied.

If drug research is not profitable, then only not-for-profits will do drug research.

I’m waiting for the argument that this will cause a problem that could be described as “drugs being undersupplied.” (Undersupplied compared to what?)

(Incidentally, your argument here is not at all different in form from any other protectionist argument—some resource, judged to be critical, will be undersupplied if exposed to market competition, and therefore somebody or another is justified in forcibly excluding would-be competitors from the market. Of course, being “protectionist” is not logically equivalent to being “uncogent,” but it is further evidence for the claim that “intellectual protectionism” is an apt choice of words.)