Well, I helped get us into this mess; let’s see how far I can help us get out of it.

By Radgeek’s definition, does a greater affinity for family and friends than strangers make one a bigot? —Jonathan Wilde

No, not unless you think that preference for your friends and family over strangers is rationally unjustifiable. I think that’s obviously false in the case of friends (part of what ‘friends’ means is that you prefer them to strangers, or foes), and usually false in the case of family (although someone who’s more of a mad dog moral individualist than I am might object).

Of course, someone might go on to try to push the point in favor of overt racism or nationalism on the claim that the racial or ethno-linguistic groups we belong to are like a sort of extended family. (So extended that it extends beyond what normal people use the words “extended family” to mean, i.e. people who have traceable relations to you within some small number of generations.) I think this is sheer mystification, and frankly that it’s insulting to the ties of family to try to pass off my relationship to some dumb jerk who happens to come from my hometown or (worse) who just happens to share my native language or dialect or (worse yet) just happened to be born within the same State-drawn lines in the sand as I was, as something of a kind with my relationship to my sister or my parents or my cousins.

On the other hand, it’s also worth pointing out that there are some things for which it would be bigoted to prefer your kin, say, over strangers: for example, if you think that you have the right to slay someone at will unless they are your kin, that’s a bigoted belief. Specifically it’s a rather narrow form of tribalism. It’s worth noting that this is relevant to the open borders argument: I happen to agree with Micha about the ethics of “Buy American!” campaigns, but even if you don’t think that a boycott of foreign-made goods is rationally indefensible, the issue at hand in immigration policy isn’t just a consumer boycott; it’s whether or not you should call men with clubs and guns to attack foreigners who try to cross a government-drawn line in the sand without a permission slip. Part of the reason I’m as confident as I am about the claim is that opposition to open borders logically commits you to the claim that foreigners, as foreigners, lack at least some of the individual rights that you are willing to recognize for citizens.

It is not at all clear to me why being bigoted (as defined by Rad Geek) or racist (meaning to discriminate on grounds of race) is immoral, let alone unlibertarian. —Paul Coulam

Whether bigotry is unlibertarian or not depends on what you think “libertarianism” means. It’s true that being racist doesn’t mean that you therefore endorse violations of the non-aggression principle. (Although most racists actually have, historically, endorsed all kinds of brutal rights violations, it’s conceivable that you could have, say, a commitedly non-violent faction of the Klan that seeks to create a white separatist community solely through the exercise of free association and peaceful property rights.) But just because a set of beliefs is logically consistent with the non-aggression principle doesn’t mean that it can’t be unlibertarian. That follows if you think that the only ethical commitment entailed by libertarianism is a thin commitment to the non-aggression principle. But I think there are good reasons to favor a “thick” version of libertarianism (which requires strict adherence to the non-aggression principle, but which also calls for ethical and political commitments other than just non-aggression). For a start on the argument for that conclusion, see Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?.

As for whether bigotry (as I defined it) is immoral or not, well, the definition was framed in such a way that bigotry is a vice term: the intolerance has to be rationally unjustifiable (most people don’t consider intolerance towards serial killers a form of bigotry, for example). So in order to qualify as a bigot (as I defined it), you have to at least be indulging in a cognitive vice. I guess whether that means you’re also indulging in a moral vice depends on whether or not you think that it can be moral to treat one person worse than another without any rational justification. I don’t think it can.

Note that this leaves open the question of whether or not racism (as the term is commonly used) is a form of bigotry: to show that it is, you’d have to show that racial prejudice is rationally unjustifiable. I think most civilized people these days have a pretty good idea of the reasons why that is, but if you want to press the point we can argue about that. (The main thing is to get clear on where the argument actually is.)

Rad Geek says that [everyone who opposes open borders is, therefore, advocating a policy for bigoted reasons.] Apparently because he claims that there are no non-bigoted reasons for opposing open borders. Couldn’t someone simply be in error due to confusion? —Paul Coulam

You’d have to explain what sort of confusion you have in mind. Lots of people make errors due to confusion, but sloppy thought isn’t necessarily a defense against claims of bigotry (lots of bigots think sloppily; so what?).

In particular, failing to think seriously about a government policy that you endorse means for the victims of that policy isn’t an innocent confusion. The fact that people often endorse policies that entail treatment of foreigners that they would never endorse for fellow-citizens or their family is a sign that people often fail to think about things that they should think about. Why do they indulge in these cognitive vices for foreigners and not for fellow-citizens or their family? And why shouldn’t we chalk up that cognitive vice as part of a particular (fairly common) form of bigotry?

You might point out that there could be a consistent totalitarian who just thinks that the government has a right to assault anyone that it sees fit. True; but that just means that the person holds to another form of bigotry: bigotry in favor of government officials over their subjects.

If you have some sort of innocent confusion that you think would fit the bill, feel free to specify it, and we can discuss whether that avoids bigotry or not.

I think that everyone who is against open borders is against it for bigoted reasons; that’s because there are no non-bigoted reasons to oppose open borders.

This is nonsense. I’m heavily in favour of open borders, but I recognise there are plenty of non-bigoted reasons to oppose it: national security risk, fear of public services being overwhelmed by an influx of poor people, belief that major cities would be ringed with violent, desperately-poor shanty towns of new immigrants. I reject all these arguments, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. —Wild Pegasus

On the contrary, I think that all of those arguments are transparently bigoted. The notion that you have the right to discard presumption of innocence, due process of law, individual property rights, etc. for some set of people for the sole reason that those people are not (yet) citizens of the state that you live in—worse, in the name of mythical collectivist interests like “national security” and “public services”—are obviously bigoted. They may not be specifically nationalist or racist (some people favor immigration restrictions for reasons of class prejudice, for example, rather than racism or xenophobia), but they are bigoted all the same.

To put it another way, there’s nothing in the arguments you give above that essentially has any connection with national borders; you could press every single one of the arguments that you use above as an argument for internal passports, restricting immigration from Kentucky to New York, restricting immigration from rural Illinois to inner-city Chicago, shooting people from inner-city Chicago who try to buy houses in suburban Chicago, etc. The fact that most people—even if they don’t very much like the internal migrations that they’re experiencing in their communities—would be appalled by ideas like these, but aren’t appalled when the argument is used to justify the same summary policies against foreigners, should be a sign that something is rotten here.

(Of course, if they did feel comfortable endorsing these kind of internal immigration policies, they might not be xenophobes but it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that they are a particularly appalling sort of classist, racist, or what have you.)

As for the application of the same principles to “Buy American!” campaigns:

1. “Buy American” is not necessarily protectionism. One could advocate free trade and Buy American.

Well, whether it counts as “protectionism” or not depends on whether you think “protectionism” has to entail government policy or not. Whether you call it “protectionism” or not, I think there are some ethical issues in common between government protectionism and voluntary boycotting of foreign goods (even if the boycotters are principled free traders). E.G., both the “Buy American” campaign and the government protectionism usually operate on the premise that you ought to chip in for American companies just because they’re American. I think that sort of thing is stupid enough when the pitch is some kind of allegiance to fellow alumni of my University or to people who happened to be in a chapter of the same fraternity as you; it makes it that much worse when it is called for on the basis of the territorial lines drawn in the sand by a continent-spanning government.

2. It’s not just “Americans” they expect will be better off. The people who support Buy American believe that their livelihood, and that of their friends and family, depends on people purchasing American-made goods. They might even be right. I don’t see how it’s unreasonable or unjustifiable to prefer one’s one livelihood to someone else’s, nor why it’s unreasonable or unjustifiable to prefer the livelihood of your friends and family to someone from Ghana. — Wild Pegasus

Then they’re being gulled by ridiculous pseudo-economic arguments. This might be a perfectly good reason to (sometimes, at least) buy locally, or to favor your friends and family in your business dealings. But if that’s a good argument for buying locally, it’s a better argument for my buying goods from Toronto than it is for my buying goods from Los Angeles; and if I lived in Los Angeles it would be a better argument for buying goods from Tijuana than it would be for buying goods from Chicago. Of course, there are some further complications that are caused by existing government violations of laissez-faire principles; but that’s increasingly untrue in the age of NAFTA, and in any case it’s a good reason to curb the violations, not to join a Know-Nothing boycott.

Of course, there is a further question of why people are gulled by such bad arguments. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that most people just don’t know a lot of economics. But another reason is because people are gulled into thinking that fellow residents of the United States as such have more in common with them than people who live not so many miles away, but happen to be over a border. I think part of the reason that people tend to stop thinking about other people when they hit a national border is that they are buying into statist mystifications; and part of the reason is plain xenophobia. But both reasons are rationally unjustifiable, and both of them constitute a particular form of bigotry.

Have you and/or your kids seen any of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away…)? If not, you should see as many as you can get your hands on, and nearly all of them are available on Netflix. Brilliant, beautiful, delightful stuff.

Netflix also has a “Friends” service that forwards you recommendations automatically from people you know on the service. If you go to friends and send an invite to catallactics@comcast.net, for example, you can see ratings and recommendations based on L.’s and my rentals and ratings.

Kinsella wants to know what, specifically, Ghertner would disagree in in Hoppe’s comments pasted above. I don’t know about Micha, but as for myself there are so many places that I don’t know where to start. More or less arbitrarily, here’s one passage that struck me as, frankly, particularly laughable:

Accordingly, when the welfare state has imploded there will be a multitude of “little” (or not so little) Calcuttas, Daccas, Lagoses, and Tiranas strewn all over Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. It betrays a breathtaking sociological naivete to believe that a natural order will emerge out of this admixture. Based on all historical experience with such forms of multiculturalism, it can safely be predicted that in fact the result will be civil war.

For starters, I deny that there is such a thing as a “natural order;” I think the notion, at least as Hoppe deploys it, is dangerous, anti-human nonsense. (The most important part of our nature as human beings is our capacity for creating things anew and making and remaking our social relationships.) Maybe you could explain what you think a “natural order” means, Stephan, and why you think we should aim at getting one to coalesce.

For the follow-up, I had a good hard laugh when Hoppe predicted civil war inevitably following from the formation of ethno-linguistic enclaves—in Switzerland—and accused his opponents of a “breathtaking sociological naivete.” Switzerland is, in case you haven’t noticed, already a multi-ethnic, polyglot society; it has, compared to the rest of Europe, been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for over 700 years. While we’re at it, somewhere around 20% of the population are already resident foreigners or temporary foreign workers. Somehow, the Swiss seem to manage. This has a lot to do with tolerance, military neutrality, and an intensely decentralist political system, and very little to do with ridiculous notions like a Swiss “national identity.” (There is no Swiss nation at all.)

So why does Hoppe believe that the formation of new ethno-linguistic enclaves in Switzerland would inevitably lead to civil war when Switzerland has been a loosely-affiliated collection of ethno-linguistic enclaves for 700 years? He doesn’t say. It is, apparently, supposed to be taken as more or less self-evident; certainly anyone who doesn’t buy it is accused of “breathtaking sociological naivete.” Yet the facts are already on the ground. Res ipso loquitor.

Kinsella:

Surely you can see the analogy to immigration policy.

I sure can’t. Here’s why: immigration policy, as we know it today, is practiced against people whether they are using government “property” or not. (Would you propose using force to stop me if I operate a helicopter service to transport Mexican immigrants from Mexico to a house that they have rented, and from their house to their place of work, without using any government roads? La Migra would.)

Of course, if you want to claim that your attacks on “open borders” don’t have anything to do with immigration policy as currently practiced—or, for that matter, with borders (since you’re proposing enforcement at the entry to roads etc., not necessarily at the border)—you can do that. But then it’s incumbent on you to explain how your proposals for pre-anarchic immigration policy are relevantly different from those of the assorted Know-Nothing blowhards who are calling on La Migra and the Border Patrol to escalate their war on immigrants rather than fundamentally change their approach.

Once you’ve done that, it’s still incumbent to you to explain how imposing the restriction on coercively monopolized resources (e.g. roads) is morally any different from stationing gunmen to enforce the restriction on private resources against the owners’ will. If there is a salient difference, what is it? If not, then how are you not advocating a violation of rights?

Lopez:

That said, it then follows that someone can be against open borders because they haven’t given the matter too much thought and they don’t have the tools to think about it even if they did. There’s plenty of “law-n-order” asshole conservatives that are against illegal immigrants simply because they’re breaking the law.

Sure, but I don’t think that means that their reasons aren’t bigoted. It just means that the dominant form of bigotry at work is either (a) bigotry against non-citizens as such, rather than against a particular racial or ethnic or socioeconomic group (believing that the government has more-or-less unlimited authority to impose coercive restrictions on non-citizens that they wouldn’t accept if placed on citizens), or (b) bigotry against civilians as such (believing that, among other things, the government has the unlimited authority to attack anyone it sees fit if the right background conditions—e.g., an allegedly worthy goal, or alleged majority support—obtain). I think most conservative “law-n-order” immigration creeps are creeps of type (a); although there are probably some straight-up type (b) totalitarians, too. Either way, the reasons they have for supporting assaults on immigrants comes down to collectivist group-warfare; I take that to be, as such, a violent form of bigotry.

Ghertner:

Charles Johnson already adequately defined it previously in one of these No-Treason threads, and you never responded. I’m not going to waste my time looking up those posts since it will most likely be a waste of time when you choose to ignore it again.

Probably, but I keep links to my offsite comments around, so the marginal cost is lower for me to dig them up. So here’s the definition and the clarification. In case you hate following hyperlinks, the definition is:

bigot, n.: One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

… let’s add the qualifier: a bigot is one whose partiality towards members of one’s own group and intolerance of those who differ is irrational.

Ghertner apparently accepts this definition; I don’t know whether or not Lopez does.

Kinsella:

Here’s what I WILL DO. I will assert NOW that it will be ASSUMED, unless and until you explicitly deny it, that you DO in fact maintain that those who oppose open border are “nativists and racists.”

Lopez:

I don’t think that everyone who is against open borders is a nativist and/or a racist.

That’s Lopez’s prerogative of course. But I’ll be your huckleberry even if he won’t. I think that everyone who is against open borders is against it for bigoted reasons; that’s because there are no non-bigoted reasons to oppose open borders. They aren’t necessarily racist or nativist reasons (there are imaginable immigration policies that are based on socioeconomic class or sexuality or religion rather than race or nationality, for example), but I take it that the general claim of bigotry is what you’re interested in rather than its specific application in claims of racism or nativism.

Does advocating something for bigoted reasons always make you a bigot? I don’t know. Maybe in one sense and not in another sense. I don’t care much anyway.

So everyone who opposes open borders is, therefore, advocating a policy for bigoted reasons. Now what?

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.