“Hamlet”: ‘The “neg” is designed for use on narcissistic young women in clubs, …’

Is the fact that you don’t feel particularly sympathetic to the women who are targeted by this tactic supposed to make it okay?

“Hamlet”: “Yet from a practical standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether female preferences come from the patriarchy or evolution, or both: men will still have to meet those criteria to have relationships or sex with women.”

Suppose this is true. Then so what? There’s no mandate or overriding obligation on men to have relationships or sex with women by any means necessary. If that is the way that these men think, then what they think is seriously fucked up. If it is not, then they will have to explain why they think that a lay, specifically, is more important than treating women like fellow human beings, equally worthy of respect.

Hersehele: “If this is these peoples’ sexual fantasy — if they get off on violent mutilation — it is orders of magnitude better that they get dolls for that purpose, and stay far the hell away from real women.”

Of course it is better to do creepy things or brutal and violent things to a realistic-looking doll than it is to do them to a real woman. But (1) just managing to be better than a rapist or serial killer is not enough to guarantee that you’re not a creep; and (2) I don’t know what evidence, if any, you have for the implicit claim that men who indulge in violent or pedophiliac fantasies with RealDolls will substitute that for acting out, or trying to act out, violent or pedophiliac desires on real people. This is a standard argument that you get from porn-liberals and prostitution-liberals, but the number of rapists, serial killers, and pedophiles in the real world who use violent pornography or child pornography to “prime” themselves (and, in the case of pedophiles, often to groom and then control their victims), and the number who begin their careers by using and attacking women in prostitution, ought to at least make you pause before suggesting this kind of substitution theory.

I’d be glad, personally, to make any kind of RealDoll that any man wants for any purpose at all, if I could make it a condition of ownership that the new owner had to go and live on a private island of my choice in the South Pacific, where he could enjoy the RealDoll to the end of his days but would never come into contact with human beings besides his fellow RealDoll Islanders. Barring that, though, I have trouble regarding this as obviously positive.

Vivid: “Why is it that if a man does not want or can’t have a relationship with a real woman, he must hate them? Maybe he simply doesn’t want the bother, because he doesn’t think it is worth the effort?”

Because it suggests that, at best (1) he thinks of his sexuality as a matter of “release” for an undifferentiated appetite, (2) thinks of intimacy with a a real woman as merely “bother” or “effort” that you have to go through in order to get that “release,” and (3) that therefore he prefers a lifeless tube for the purposes of “sex” that’s hard to differentiate, in any relevant respect, from necrophilia. If a man thinks that way, I’d certainly rather that he do it with a doll than with a real woman (but see above on substitution theories); but that doesn’t keep me from thinking that his attitude towards women, and towards sex, is profoundly creepy and anti-woman — indeed, anti-human.

Matt McIntosh:

Has anyone else noticed that the larger and more diverse a firm gets, the more it starts to resemble a state in some ways?

Yes.

The answer can be obtained by referring to chapter 9, pp. 612ff above, where we saw that the free market placed definite limits on the size of the firm, i.e., the limits of calculability on the market. In order to calculate the profits and losses of each branch, a firm must be able to refer its internal operations to external markets for each of the various factors and intermediate products. When any of these external markets disappears, because all are absorbed within the province of a single firm, calculability disappears, and there is no way for the firm rationally to allocate factors to that specific area. The more these limits are encroached upon, the greater and greater will be the sphere of irrationality, and the more difficult it will be to avoid losses. One big cartel would not be able rationally to allocate producers’ goods at all and hence could not avoid severe losses. Consequently, it could never really be established, and, if tried, would quickly break asunder.

In the production sphere, socialism is equivalent to One Big Cartel, compulsorily organized and controlled by the State. Those who advocate socialist “central planning” as the more efficient method of production for consumer wants must answer the question: If this central planning is really more efficient, why has it not been established by profit-seeking individuals on the free market? The fact that One Big Cartel has never been formed voluntarily and that it needs the coercive might of the State to be formed demonstrates that it could not possibly be the most efficient method of satisfying consumer desires.

— Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State Chapter 10, section 2-F

Part of the point here being that calculational chaos is not limited to states; it’s just that the organized force of the state is the only way in which calculational chaos above a certain level can reliably be sustained.

Of course Sony, as a beneficiary of government-granted and government-enforced monopolies on its gargantuan copyright and patent portfolio, is as good an example as any.

Brandon Berg:

Wal-Mart and Microsoft aren’t angels by libertarian standards, but government has arguably hindered their growth as much as helped it, unless you count copyright enforcement in the case of Microsoft.

And extensive use of “eminent domain” theft in the case of Wal-Mart. I’m not sure I understand the “unless” in regard to Microsoft, though; I mean, unless you count an annual budget appropriated out of tax funds, the government has arguably hindered Amtrak more than they’ve supported it. But why wouldn’t you count that?

Here’s a few limitations on the prerogatives of the several states that the federal Constitution clearly imposes based on any reasonable reading of the original text:

Article I, Section 10, Clause 1: No State shall … grant any Title of Nobility.

Article IV, Section 4. The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, …

If the legislature of Alabama convened and duly voted to make Roy Moore the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of Alabama and to dissolve itself as a legislative body, granting all legislative power to Lord Moore’s edict, then the federal government would stop them from doing that, probably by means of the Court, on the grounds that states have don’t have the right to grant titles of nobility or create non-republican forms of government. I imagine that you probably wouldn’t like Roy Moore being made Lord Protector (I know that I certainly wouldn’t); but does your support for “states’ rights” commit you to defending their right to do so against federal interference?

If it does, then what has your support for “states’ rights” got to do with federalism anyway, as opposed to outright dissolution of the federal government?

If it doesn’t, then don’t you have to revise your test for “states’ rights,” since you would then be supporting some kinds of federal interference with state prerogatives but not other kinds? And what makes the difference between the kinds that you support and the kinds that you don’t?

I agree that were the MTA private there wouldn’t be any issue at all, and that (like many other institutions that are currently controlled by the government) the public funding but quasi-private function puts these kind of claims into a gray area. But there seem to me to be at least three questions here that haven’t decisively been answered in favor of unwarranted searches:

1. Do presumptions of liberty counsel against (ex ante) invasive searches if there’s no evidence for or against them preventing crime?

2a. Is the counsel rendered by presumptions of liberty decisive on the question of what MTA officials have the right to do?

2b. Is the counsel rendered by presumptions of liberty decisive on the question of what it’s prudent to have MTA officials doing?

I take the answer to (1) to be clearly “Yes” and the answers to (2a) and (2b) to be probably “Yes,” as long as the MTA is controlled by the Port Authority. You may of course have good reasons for seeing it differently on these points; but what I’m worried about here specifically is the grounds for straightforwardly connecting “prudence” with a tighter regime of security restrictions. Setting aside the legal and moral questions involved in questions like (2a), aren’t there good reasons to think that prudence very often suggests higher rather than lower standards for government-mandated interference in our daily lives? Surely the merely possible benefits of the policy (if we don’t have any persuasive evidence for or against thinking that they’ll be realized) have to be weighed against the known costs when you’re doing prudential calculations, don’t they? Hence the question of where the burden of proof lies, at least as far as prudence is concerned.

Oscar: “I am not sure on what basis courts would rule, but to me the public/private division is not a particularly valid approach. As you note, the subway is fulfilling a public purpose. Part of that public function is as a public place (the cars themselves, the stations, any food joints on station premises, etc.) as well as a public means of transportation.”

Well, the issue is not (or at least should not be) a “public function,” but rather government funding and government control. I agree with Irfan that if the MTA were private then the issue would be unambiguously settled by whatever terms of business the owners wanted to set — just as privately owned department stores (which arguably serve an important “public function” of distributing needed goods) can demand that patrons submit to searches of their bags and remove those who refuse from the premises. Those kind of decisions might be wise or foolish, depending on the details of the situation, the search procedures, some facts about deterrance which we’ve stipulated we just don’t know yet, etc. But the wisdom or foolishness of a strictly private institution’s policy certainly wouldn’t (oughtn’t, at least) be a proper topic for courts to consider.

Irfan: “there isn’t enough data to support or undermine claims about the deterrent effect of searches, but in that case, all things being equal, prudence would dictate using them in case there is one”

If there’s no persuasive evidence for or against the claim that an invasive government procedures have a deterrant effect on crime, wouldn’t presumptions of liberty suggest not using them?

If so, does prudence not dictate that we should hold the government to high standards of evidence before they can override presumptions of liberty, especially in movement from place to place?

There aren’t many things in this world that Leo Strauss is right about, but I think the following may be one of them: the alleged problem between the scientific worldview and ethical norms has less to do with science per se than it has to do with the philosophical victory of mechanistic over teleological accounts of nature in the language used to discuss scientific discoveries. It becomes much less difficult to square the idea of moral facts with your conception of science and the natural order if the language that you feel entitled to use in descriptions of the natural includes terms like “purpose” and “end” and “form of life”, than if you are methodologically committed to burning those kind of terms out of the language wherever you can find them. If there is a distinctively human form of life and virtues can be explained in terms of the ways of being and kinds of activity that are appropriate to that form of life, then morality becomes much easier to fit into something that you might call a naturalist worldview. (See, for example, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, or more recently Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness.)

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that the same people who revolutionized mechanics, chemistry, etc. in the early modern period were also the people leading the philosophical charge against teleology and in favor of mechanism. So the victory of mechanism over teleology probably has had some concrete historical pay-offs. But of course that’s not the same thing as being true, and anyway the fact that teleological language was once abused and as a result (in the context of a rather complex set of historical, political, and intellectual factors) science stagnated, does not mean that it would have similarly harmful consequences today.

Hey, look, it’s another male Leftist pissing all over other social justice movements in order to demand attention for his pet cause:

Political discourse in this nation centers on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and there is a real paucity of debate on matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans, such as the stunning loss of manufacturing jobs.

It may very well be true that abortion has never actually impacted on Ephraim Harel’s daily life; but since in the real world over a million women have abortions every year, and about one in three American women will need an abortion by the time she reaches age 45 (and the women who need them are, incidentally, disproportionately working-class), it’s a pretty damn important issue for the daily lives of a lot of ordinary Americans. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this leaves not a few of us with the lingering impression that women’s daily lives just don’t matter very much to some male Leftists.

Harel’s perfectly right to remind the Left of the importance of labor organizing, to call for more aggressive unionism, and to question the AFL-CIO’s ongoing efforts to act as if they were running a PAC rather than a labor union. These are all things worth saying, and views worth promoting. But they are not worth saying or promoting at the expense of women’s struggle for control over their own bodies and their own lives. Goodbye to all that.

Holmes is right about the differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, and having dealt with some of the characters who make editing an article such as WikiPedia:Anarcho-capitalism such a tremendous pain in the ass, I think I have some idea why. WikiPedia is based on a surprisingly simple and surprisingly robust consensus process, but consensus processes have problems when faced with belligerent fanatics and self-appointed hall monitors, and controversial articles attract both. (The kind of editing that instant in-place revisions on web content makes easy also encourages certain kinds of incoherent mishmash that accumulate when the hall monitors make several lazy edits that attempt to do away with controversy by piling on endless qualifying phrases.)

As for the complaint that WikiPedia contributors don’t have an incentive to help produce good articles because they don’t make a profit from a good outcome, there are two things that I wish I understood better. (1) First, “profit:” when you assert that WikiPedia contributors don’t have a profit motive, what do you count as “profit”? Does it have to be monetary? (2) What sort of outcomes do you have in mind that would qualify as “good outcomes” for an information source? (Is it a single characteristic, or are there multiple characteristics? If multiple, are there any trade-offs involved?)

I seem to remember something in the U.S. Constitution (that long discarded document) called Amendment III. It states: . . .

If Congress and the several states repealed Amendment III, and authorized the Marines to force innocent people to quarter soldiers in their home, without their consent, would that make it okay to do so?

If it would, how in the world would it do that? If it wouldn’t, then who cares whether the Constitution says anything on the matter or not?