“He does have a contract,”

Sure, but like most academic contracts it’s unclear at best whether what is being done to him is actually excluded by any of the terms of his contracts. (Most academic contracts these days allow the administration a fair amount of leniency in punishing professors for violations of “discriminatory harassment policies.”) In any case, Kinsella didn’t just say that the University is breaching its contract with Hoppe in this specific case. He said that it’s “not libertarian” (i.e., promoting rights-violations) to endorse the actions of a student using a college disciplinary code to “punish” a professor “in this way”.

Another way to put it: Kinsella seems to be confusing violations of academic freedom (which are bad, but not necessarily rights-violating) with censorship of free speech (which is necessarily rights-violating). Maybe he’s not; maybe he’s just speaking loosely. But given that Hoppe’s defenders at the ACLU seem to be pushing the same confusion as an argument in court, it seems like there’s some good reasons to be a bit studious about being more precise.

“… and I must insist that, contrary to Kinsella’s statement, I never endorsed the student’s actions.”

Sure. I never intended to suggest that you did—and I’m sorry if that’s what I seemed to be implying.

littleviolet:

Your argument is that you provide a space for feminists to interact with people who oppose us. I’d say we’ve got the rest of the world where we do that all the time and the rest of the internet for that matter. I don’t think feminist discourse is assisted by sexists who continually try to elbow their way into feminist spaces and attempt to disrupt the discussion. It’s not a refusal to engage with arguments, we do engage, we have to engage, it’s a refusal to engage in feminist space with the bigots who make those arguments.

funnie:

Again, whose interests is this platform expected to serve? What is the point?

Amp’s trying to run a weblog that speaks out from a feminist or profeminist perspective and to keep active discussion going in the comments section. That much is clear. But do all feminist projects aim at creating feminist spaces in the sense intended here? Is Amp trying to do that? Should he be? (Is a public weblog run by a man really suited to creating the space of a c-r group?)

Raznor:

The thing is with bigotry, is it is possible that a person can say something bigoted out of purely innocent ignorance.

I’m not sure what you mean by “innocent ignorance” here. Do you think that (say) men’s ignorance is innocent? I know that, for myself, I’ve messed up and done the wrong thing many times in my life, and most of the time I either knew what I was doing (and defended or made excuses for it) or else bloody well should have realized it if I’d stopped ot think about what it meant for a couple seconds. (I think that both of these apply, for example, to different cases of my using pornography as a teenager.) And judging from what I have seen and what other men and women have told me, I’m hardly the only man for whom this is true.

You don’t have to be a Phelps-style monster to have shady motives and chalking up a mistake to ignorance isn’t necessarily enough to make a difference for how you ought to treat the person making it. I don’t think I’ve seen Q Grrl or Crys T or others make any real distinction on the basis of “innocent ignorance” or “culpable dishonesty”—mainly because the issues that they are calling attention to have a lot more to do with:

(1) whether the man making the mistake is belligerently defensive about it (as I think novalis obviously was) or listens to criticism (especially when that criticism comes from women), and

(2) whether contempt and belligerant defensiveness are being thinly veiled by “polite” diction (as I think Robert obviously was), and

(3) what it means when male interlocutors and male moderators seem to pay much more attention in comments to the veil than to what’s under it

I think (1) and (2) make much more difference for how productive it is to try to talk patiently with someone than questions of “innocence” do, and (3) seems to be at the root of worry much more than whether or not anyone happens to say anything bigoted in Amp’s comments section.

Of course there are more things going on here than just those points and I’m probably missing a lot. But I do think that both of those two are much more clearly important to the points being raised than the question of “innocent” vs. “dishonest” bigotry.

FoolishOwl:

On the first point, no. Ultimately, bosses aren’t necessary at all — we’ve long since passed the point at which there was real economic scarcity, and therefore a need to have social classes.

Ultimately, are men necessary at all? (I don’t mean human beings with a Y chromosome and testes; I mean as a cohesive group identity that confers some social role more substantial than, say, having hazel eyes or detached earlobes.)

Most men have problems in their lives which are clearly the result of sexism, and I find that many men will agree that this is the case.

Of course, bosses usually have problems in their lives as the result of capitalism: they are often extremely busy, may not have time to see their kids as much as they would like, may have feelings of ennui or spiritual emptiness, may find themselves subject to an unpleasant pecking order or to unfair office backbiting. There are whole movements of literature devoted to telling us how the managers and bosses of the world may have money and control, but don’t have happiness or spiritual fulfillment.

But does that have any burly consequences for how workers should agitate or organize? Should the labor movement spend a lot of time—or any substantial amount of time at all—pointing out that “Capitalism hurts bosses too”?

Of course, you might object that the salient difference is this:

On the second, strictly speaking, bosses are hurt by capitalism, but they benefit so much from it that the hurt is trivial in comparison.

This is not the case with men and sexism. Most definitions I’ve seen of male privilege seem to amount to, men don’t suffer as much as women from sexism. That’s not to say that men don’t suffer.

But that just raises the question: do you think that men don’t get benefits from sexism that benefit them so much that the hurt is trivial in comparison?

(It might help also to look at the classic examples of the ways in which sexism is said to hurt men—and what the hurt in those examples accomplishes.)

Macer:

Saudi Arabia allows NO immigration period. They only allow temporary workers in.

This is a form of immigration, just as Bush’s crackpot scheme for a bracero program is a form of immigration. Workers live and work in Saudi Arabia for substantial periods of time. The fact that they are denied legal rights that they ought, by right, to have, and that this results in very shitty treatment, says many bad things about the Saudi dictatorship but it does not say that they don’t allow immigration by non-Muslims.

Anyway, now what? What do you think that the shitty selective immigration policies imposed by Saudi royals entails about how you can treat ordinary Muslims? (I.E., people other than Saudi royals)

Macker:

You use other ideological concepts like “non-person” that I just don’t use.

People have rights. To claim that Jones does not have rights anymore just is to claim that you have no more obligations to her than you do to a rock, or perhaps a wild animal. It means that you can, without doing anything wrong to her, beat her, take the house she lives in or the things she uses, enslave her, or kill her. You might think that there are other reasons that you shouldn’t do these things (just as there are reasons you might not want to smash a rock) but on your avowed position, none of the reasons not to do these things to an avowed anti-propertarian involve her moral standing as a fellow human being.

That’s treating someone as a non-person. If you don’t like your position being so described, then you should change your position.

There are plenty of good reasons not to steal from someone who makes a phony assertion that property rights do not exist. If however his claim is genuine, then his property rights cannot be one of them. If genuine then he has rejected all claims to property so there is no reason for him to even complain. It would be physically impossible to steal from him, he has nothing to steal.

Whether or not Jones can consistently complain about you taking stuff from her against her will is immaterial to whether or not you are actually violating her rights. Property rights do not come from your claim to hold property and they don’t evaporate if you cease to make those claims. Jones could, of course, abandon all her property—by setting it out at the curb, for example, or inviting people onto her land to take it. But just saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything” is not an abandonment of your property; it’s just a statement of (mistaken) philosophical belief.

Suggesting that you have the right to use force to take stuff away from someone who holds foolish beliefs about property rights is, of course, both unhinged and totalitarian—whether or not you actually think you ought to do it.

(You can, of course, abandon property. But saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything”, while continuing to hold onto and to use your property exactly as you always have, may be hypocritical, but it’s not an act of abandonment.)

Besides where do you get the idea that all of the sudden I have this desire to steal from the other guy and beat the shit out of him (assault him) just because he denied the right to property. That’s just one right. He didn’t deny the right to be free from unprovoked assault, did he.

I think the distinction you’re trying to draw here is spurious: the reason that you have a right to alienable property is ultimately the same as the reason you have a right not to be assaulted; if you deny someobdy the one then you ultimately deny them the other. But suppose that it were not so. Then so what? If someone did say, “I believe that human beings have the right to assault or enslave other human beings if they can get away with it,” that would certainly a wicked belief. But does that give you the right to assault or enslave the person who utters it? If so, why?

People have rights because they are people. They don’t lose them by being bad people. Not even if they commit crimes. It would be bad enough if your theory entailed that criminals have no rights (what I originally took it to entail); but from what you have said it appears that you actually believe that having bad thoughts—a vice, not a crime—is enough to do the job. That’s not libertarianism; it’s totalitarianism, or possibly sociopathy.

is because “To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

The elephant in the middle of the airport is: nobody likes flying because it’s so goddamned unpleasant to be poked, prodded, and shuffled around by government agents; to have to show up several hours in advance of your flight just to wait in interminable lines to be poked, prodded, and shuffled around; and then to sit and wait for hours on your flight to leave because you had to budget so much time in advance not to be lectured by the government agents about how to schedule your time or end up missing the flight because you didn’t allow enough of a cushion for unexpected delays.

There are market opportunities for airports and airlines to improve their service, sure, but the dominant fact about the air transport market is that it isn’t a free market. The most unpleasant aspects of flying are forcibly monopolized and forcibly implemented by the federal government (which has no reason to care whether you fly or not). Moreover, even many airline companies have little reason to make things more pleasant for their customers, because the market is cartelized and subsidized; they can reliably count on receiving billions in bailouts from the federal government if their bottom line ever falters.

The major players in the contact lens market all have strong reasons to scramble to do a better job at following what customers want on the margin. That doesn’t happen with most of the unpleasantness that flyers face.

(Similar remarks, of course, apply to why the government-cartelized rail industry remains mostly useless to the vast majority of people in the U.S.)

FoolishOwl:

“I think that overcoming sexism will require both women and men, together — and that sexism hurts women and men, although not equally.”

Do you think that overcoming capitalism will require both workers and bosses, together — and that capitalism hurts workers and bosses, although not equally?

If so, why? If not, what is it about sex that you think makes the relevant difference from economic class as you understand it?

Kait Williams:

DT was, in fact, different from its predecessors in an important thematic way: the sexual satisfaction of the female protagonist was the issue; unlike the run-of-the-mill porn movie, male pleasure was not of paramount importance.

During the Victorian period, one of the most popular forms of pornography was the Turkish Harem story, in which a white European virgin is abducted and sold into sexual slavery in the harem of a Turkish Sultan. The pornographic content is a story of repeated rape; the arc of the plot invariably involves the once-reticent virgin coming to love being sexually violated. Sometimes a European rescuer comes along at the end of the story; the rescued woman is often reluctant to leave the harem.

These stories were told from the female protagonist’s point of view and are superficially about her sexual pleasure. Do you honestly think that that makes a story like this one in which “male pleasure was not of paramount importance”? Do you think that Deep Throat — a story based on a wild anatomical fantasy that makes the “female protagonist” take orgasmic satisfaction from sex acts that are normally only sexually stimulating to men — is different in any important respect? If so, how?

Given that Traynor was frequently sent away from the set, Lovelace’s tales of being forced to work at gunpoint beggar belief.

How is this any different from demanding of any other battered woman “Well, why didn’t you leave?”

Was she manipulated by him? Certainly, but it should be noted that her subsequent tales of violent abuse only surfaced after her failed foray into mainstream movie making, when she was fading into obscurity.

How is this any different from smearing any other woman who testifies that she was raped as a “gold-digger,” “publicity-slut,” etc.?

Whether you believe what Linda Boreman said or not, using these kind of smear tactics in order to discount her testimony is, frankly, despicable.

Kinsella: “I made a comment that it’s not libertarian to endorse the actions of a student in effect using a mechanism to punish a professor in this way.”

Since when did Hoppe acquire a natural right to keep his job whatever the administration thinks of his performance?

There are lots of reasons to think that endorsing the disciplinary actions threatened against Hoppe would be foolish. There are none to think that it would be “not libertarian.”

Macker:

I don’t see Muslim countries tolerating any sort of immigration by non-muslims or even equality for existing non-muslim citizens in their own countries.

Me:

This is false: there are in fact substantial populations of immigrant non-Muslims (especially from Europe, the United States, and South Asia) living in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (especially Dubai), Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Albania, etc., and there have been since these countries came into existence.

Macker:

You really need to learn the difference between citizen immigrants, guest workers, resident foreign nationals, and the like.

No, I don’t. I’m already well aware of the difference. And I’m already well aware that South Asian immigrants (for example) to Saudi Arabia are often treated very badly, and that the vagaries of their legal status (as, effectively, domestic service braceros) are often used in order to maintain control over them and treat them more badly than they would tolerate otherwise. So what? My statement said nothing about debates over the legal status of immigrants. It said something about whether or not “Muslim countries tolerating any sort of immigration by non-muslims”. If you want to talk about citizenship or the shitty way that immigrants are often treated, fine, but you should have made it clear that that was what you wanted to talk about to begin with.

Let’s take one specific example, Saudi Arabia. You claim they are just peachy when it comes to immigration.

No, I don’t.

As for your statement about there being lots of non-Muslims as citizens in Muslim countries.

I didn’t make one.

If I were going to say anything about non-Muslim citizens in Muslim countries, I’d point out that it’s very odd to try to make statements about a spectrum of different countries ranging from Indonesia, to Iran, to Iraq, to Turkey, to Saudi Arabia, to Bosnia-Hercegovina. And probably that most general claims you make about the treatment of non-Muslims in such a large swath of the world are very likely to be false.

Macker:

Why don’t you show a little moral fiber and use your real name.

(1) … because I have a website called Rad Geek People’s Daily (where, incidentally, anyone who wants to know my real name can find it easily in one click)

(2) … because there happens to be an raving imbecile (with similar beliefs to yours, incidentally) whose name is also “Charles Johnson”; the less confusion there is between us, the better

(3) … because it’s fun

I’m not sure what any of these has to do with a lack of “moral fiber.” Maybe you can enlighten me on the moral dimensions of using a nickname online.