“Everyone knows about her silly statement to the effect that all penetrative sex is rape.”

Strangely, Andrea Dworkin did not know about this statement of hers. Maybe it’s because she never said it.

Michael Moorcock: … You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually read anything by Andrea Dworkin, from beginning to end?

Actually I don’t get why it would have been hard at all to portray a wall-sized screen in the film if they’d wanted to. Why not just paint a wall blue, and then project whatever you want onto it? It’s not like traveling mattes were something unheard-of in 1966…

“actually it seems like you’re both fucking republicans”

Then you ought to expand your political horizons. I’d point out that lots of people on the Left have ripped into Clinton over his 8 years of dirty little wars around the world (as, in fact, they have), and start naming some names, but the problem is this would only pander to the idea that team-loyalty rather than truth is the appropriate criterion for judging a policy.

Democrat bombs kill people just as surely as Republican bombs do. They killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands all told, in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, among others. If you want to give some kind of argument that his belligerence toward the Third World was justified (I don’t think that it was, any more than I think Mr. Bush’s is), you’re free to do so. But then you’d better give an argument that either (a) gives principled reasons to support Clinton’s policy while condemning Bush’s, or (b) give up and support Bush’s war policy too. I don’t think there’s any good argument on offer, but you might give one and persuade me. But it will take just that—an argument. Not calling your opponents names.

“But if, despite decades on the public stage and having published numerous books and articles, it is clear to only those who knew her best that she doesn’t harbor hatred for half the human race, I’d say she had a problem.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but your diagnosis of the “problem” seems to neglect an important fact. Her “decades on the public stage and … numerous books and articles” would only disabuse her critics of their misunderstandings about her if her critics actually bothered to read them. But no small number of the people who attack her — and especially those who like to traffic in the myths that she “hated men” as such or thought that “all heterosexual sex is rape” (which she did not believe and never said), as well as those who preferred to simply bypass any discussion of her ideas whatsoever to deride her as “ugly,” “fat,” “hysterical,” or a “vile, contemptible bitch” — never took the time to read a damned one of her numerous books and articles from beginning to end.

Have you?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether Mort Walker is a libertarian or not, he’s still not funny.

Political correctness won’t save the what is surely one of the worst comic strips on the planet.

dadahead: “… having a laugh at the expense of 1,000 dumbass cult members doesn’t really bother me.”

Two metal buckets of grape Flavor Aid laced with Valium and cyanide were brought into the assembly hall and the mixture was dispensed in small paper cups. Babies and children were the first ones to ingest the mixture as it was squirted into their throats with a syringe.

…

Hours after news of the mass suicide [sic] got out, local authorities found 913 of the 1,110 inhabitants dead, including 276 children.

Yeah, all those “dumbass” murdered infants. What a laugh riot. Maybe we can replace it with a topical zinger about, say, Andrea Yates’s kids—“Don’t get in the bathtub!” Hardy har har.

Brandon Berg:

Note in particular that Jim Crow laws were passed because white voters were unhappy that many merchants refused to discriminate against blacks.

Well, no, not quite. Jim Crow laws were passed because white supremacist terrorists systematically stopped Black people from going to the polls to stop them from being passed (or to stop candidates who would pass them from being elected). It’s not an accident that massive disenfranchisement of the Black population was one of the central planks of Jim Crow; there were many communities in the South, prior to the mass migrations of the 1920s, in which Blacks were the numerical majority, and they exercised substantial power in state politics when they had the chance (as they did in the 1860s-1870s, and as they did again in the 1960s-1970s) to vote.

Eric:

I have tried to say that Populism/Democracy leads to less freedom, not more, and you have presented irrelevancies that distract from that core concept rather than address it. The increased freedoms you constantly discuss did not result from Democracy.

Maybe you could explain more clearly what you mean when you distinguish the Republican parts of the American constitution from the Democratic/Populist ones. What makes a particular aspect of the government Republican as opposed to Democratic/Populist?

I ask this because a lot of libertarian discussions that I’ve seen on this topic end up simply defining Republicanism and Democracy in such a way that one’s guaranteed to have better outcomes than the other by linguistic fiat—e.g., by stipulating that part of what it means to be a “Republican” form of government is to have a constitution that effectively limits government power, while giving a definition of “Democracy” in some sort of purely structural terms (e.g.: election of legislators or 50%+1 referenda). Of course if you define one of them by reference to achieving the goal you want to achieve, and define the other only in terms of the means of decision-making, one of them’s going to look like a much stronger candidate for achieving that goal than the other. But it’s unclear what intellectual gains you make with that sort of apples-and-oranges comparison.

Well, I’ll definitely second the call for putting “… drinks the Kool-Aid” on the blacklist for 2006. In fact, I’d vote for a permanent spot. I don’t know how many people don’t know and how many people just don’t care that their snarky little catch-phrase is joking about the senseless deaths of nearly 1,000 people in a ghastly mass murder-suicide, but whether it’s through ignorance or sheer callousness that the allusion persists, the shorter its time remaining in this world the better.

I’m afraid you misunderstand my references to slavery. CIW has been involved in exposing and working to change two distinct things in southern Florida (and the Southeastern US broadly):

1. Extremely low wages and harsh working conditions

2. Enslavement of migrant farmworkers by large farming operations

I agree with you that (1) isn’t slavery in any but the metaphorical “wage slavery” sense, and that metaphorical phrases like “wage slavery” conceal at least as much as they reveal and usually don’t belong in serious analysis. But when CIW says “slavery in the fields” they don’t mean (1). They mean (2). As in, farming operations where bosses threatened to torture or murder immigrant workers if they left their jobs and pistol-whipped passenger van service drivers who had given enslaved workers rides out of the area. Here’s what CIW says about it:

Q: What does the CIW mean when it uses the term “slavery”?

A: When the CIW uses the word slavery, we do not mean “slave-like” or “resembling slavery” —- rather, we are referring to conditions that meet the high standard of proof and definition of slavery under US federal laws.

Modern-day slavery is a violation of the 13th Amendment. The cases we have helped bring to justice have been prosecuted by the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division either under laws forbidding peonage and indentured servitude passed just after the Civil War during Reconstruction (18 U.S.C. Sections 1581-9) or under the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which prohibits the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

In our latest case, three Florida-based agricultural employers convicted in federal court on slavery, extortion, and weapons charges were sentenced to a total of nearly 35 years in prison and the forfeiture of $3 million in assets. The men, who employed over 700 farmworkers, threatened workers with death if they were to try to leave, and pistol-whipped and assaulted — at gunpoint — passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. The case was brought to trial by federal authorities from the Department of Justice (Civil Rights Division) after two years of investigation by the CIW.

You can find out more about cases of straight-up slavery that the CIW has helped expose from the Feds or from from the CIW.

Because I agree with you that neither (1) above (sucky pay and harsh labor conditions), nor my definition (3) of “capitalism” (a boss-directed labor market) constitutes slavery, I also agree with you that neither is coercive, and that they can’t legitimately be met by government force (or any other kind of force). But that doesn’t answer the question whether or not it’s O.K.; it just answers the question of whether or not you can use force to stop it. There are lots of things that you have unquestionably legitimate authority to do that are nevertheless absolutely despicable ways to act. Justice is the only virtue that’s enforceable but it’s not the only virtue!

What I hold is that there are good reasons to think that we should be concerned—I mean that it is virtuous to be concerned, not that we should be forced to act concerned—about the living and working conditions of the people that make things we enjoy, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for the sense of solidarity that that concern entails to affect the decisions we make in a free market for goods. That’s a preference that most people act on, at least when it comes to family—few people are such scrooges that they wouldn’t help a child or a relation out in business, even at some economic cost—and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that you can (indeed, ought) to have and to act on a similar attitude—though weaker, and for different reasons—for all your fellow human beings. Also that it’s an attitude worth encouraging in other people, as long as you do it not through coercion but through education, persuasion, and peaceful incentives. Which is what the CIW has been doing.

As for the price of tacos—Jesus, do you really eat so many tacos in one sitting that a penny-per-pound increase in the cost of tomatos is going to make a difference in price on the margin to you? :)

The title of the post contains a category error. I have serious ethical qualms about prostitution, but whatever one thinks, women in prostitution are just doing a job to make a buck. If you want to find lazy, shiftless, greedy, shameless people trying to live off of others, you might look at pimps (who routinely employ coercion and graft to take money from others). Or politicians.

Or, for that matter, any number of corporations within the tech industry. I mean, this is lame, but it’s not like it isn’t Standard Operating Procedure in the tech industry for big firms to get out the legal club and use it to bar competition wherever they can get away with it. It’s just that the assault on substitute goods and services usually comes under the heading of a “patent”, so the companies can not only go around bludgeoning peaceful competitors with the law, but also piously proclaiming how they are doing it in the name of free enterprise (!).