“well could you just clarify you question? What exactly are you asking?”

Sure. Here’s what I mean: you’re recommending a particular strategy by the ACLU on behalf of Hoppe because it’s “practical, real world stuff.” But I don’t know what “practicality” means unless you are choosing about different possible means to get something that’s worth having. If you manage to pull off getting something that isn’t worth having, you haven’t been “practical”; you’ve been wasting your time and effort.

But whether a particular result in court for Hoppe is worth having or not depends, in part, on what he does or doesn’t have a right to. Now, either it’s true or its false that UNLV’s decision to punish Hoppe is a violation of his rights (by breaching contract).

It’s not clear at all that the First Amendment ought to have anything to do with the matter at all: the First Amendment is a protection of speech from government censorship, not an entitlement to keep your job and your same salary no matter what you say. (You might point out UNLV is tax-funded. True, but so what? At the strongest that’s an argument to de-fund UNLV—which is a good idea on its own merits. In the meantime, though, state-funded Universities rightly punish professors all the time for Constitutionally-protected speech that doesn’t fall within the bounds of acceptable scholarly work or appropriate faculty conduct.) But the ACLU’s argument on behalf of Hoppe (I assume that Hoppe is consenting to the arguments that the ACLU is making on his behalf) is based, in part, on the First Amendment. So one of two things is true:

(1) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court in order to force results that he doesn’t have a right to force, or

(2) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court as a legal feint in order to force results that he does have some right to force, for other reasons.

Now of course you can say, “Hey, Hoppe is trying to get by in the real world, not in Libertarian La-La Land, so he has to try to work with the prevailing winds.” But if (1) is the case, then victory in court isn’t anything that would be worth winning at all (since it would be unjust); and if (2) is the case, then why use the deceptive argument when you could just point to the other reasons you have for seeking redress? (Is achieving some result dishonestly when there are honest means to come by it something that you should want to have?)

Cool. Except that it’s a game, not a “meme.” There’s no such thing as memes.

“The women who choose this work are going to be the women who have been so badly damaged by their parents or by others that their sense of self-worth is just destroyed – they truly see themselves as objects.”

Robert, the women who “choose” to work in pornography generally do it because they need money, often pretty desparately so. Often it’s because they are fleeing, or have fled, violence at home; sometimes it is for other reasons. They are not “damaged”; they are reacting rationally to an irrational but hideously ordinary situation.

There are lots of good reasons to think that the pornography industry is abominable and that the sooner it dies, the better. But the reason it exists is because men make it and other men buy it, not because women are “damaged.” Making men stop acting like dicks is the goal here, not “fixing” women.

“To answer Alyric’s question, masculinity must be changed because the pursuit of traditional masculine ideals makes most men very unhappy.”

Maybe traditional masculine ideals do make most men very unhappy. I’m not sure this is true, but if it were, is men’s unhappiness the reason that we ought to change masculinity? What about what the social and political prerogatives of masculinity do to, well, y’know, women?

“I do think rigid gender roles harm men.”

In some respects I’m sure they do. I’ve been on the business end of normative masculinity too many times in my life to think otherwise. But don’t we have to ask why those rigid roles exist, why those pains are inflicted, who inflicts them, and what they accomplish?

“Nothing from Wilson and FDR, who as I recall had a thing or two to do with our most successful modern wars.”

What, exactly, was World War I successful at? I mean, other than killing people and devastating large swaths of Europe?

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.