Mark Fulwiler:

“I’m afraid democracy doesn’t “work” well anyplace—-it always end up as “mob rule” to some degree.”

“Here’s the bottom line: Once the majority figures out that they can use the ballot box and democracy to loot and oppress other people, they always do it. Always. And a written Constitution doesn’t offer much of a defense. Constitutions can be ignored or amended.”

I agree with you, Mark, that a rights-violating government doesn’t magically become OK just because there is popular input into it, and that the idea that protection of individual rights appears magically through the hocus-pocus of a plebiscite is silly. But the direction of critique here is a bit odd. It’s true that democracies can end in corruption and majoritarian looting of the minority. But how does that make them any different from any other political constitution? Certainly monarchies and oligarchies pretty quickly figured out that they could use minority rule to loot from the majority—and that written Constitutions were never much of a defense against them.

In fact, it’s true of any conceivable constitutional form that it could be corrupted and those with control over the guns could turn them on others. It’s even true of idealized anarcho-capitalist enforcement agencies. The will is free and people may end up choosing to do evil. The question is which constitutions are comparatively better and more resistant to encroachments on rights, and which ones are comparatively worse.

Is there any reason to think that rule by the many is comparatively worse than rule by the few, and more prone to rights-violating “mob rule” than rule by the few is prone to rights-violating cabal rule?

Or is this just a general complaint against the State as such, being applied to the limitations of democracy in this particular case? In that case, it’s a fair enough complaint, but it would be odd to suggest the other plausible alternatives for Iraq’s near future (e.g. a military colony headed by a U.S. proconsul or a tyranny run by some suitable client such as Allawi) are better, or even that they aren’t any worse.

The Military History Guy. There’s one of them in every history class.

Not to be picky, but what’s wrong with being an ugly bald man-hating miliant? Some of my best friends are bald man-hating militants. I don’t think they’re ugly, but I don’t think that anything should turn on the judgment that someone makes of your appearance.

It’s worth demanding that people realize how diverse feminists are, but let’s not do it at the expense of women whose attitude or appearance might come too close to the stereotypes our critics use to bait us.

Kennedy: “It’s also possible that he did not contract away his IP rights to inventions.”

Except that he doesn’t have any natural rights to demand tribute for the use of the invention—unless his employer made some kind of contract with him agreeing to give him exclusionary control over their use of things he made while he was working for them.

Maybe they did make such a contract, but there isn’t any evidence of that in the story, and it would certainly make the court case much more open-and-shut than it seems to have been, since the issue wouldn’t have been “IP” but rather breach of contract. Broadly speaking, if I’m paying you to show me how to make things, and I go on to make the things that you show me, the amount that you negotiated for your job up-front is precisely what you should have the right to demand. I may like brilliant inventors a lot more than I like the sanctimonious money-men who drive most of the intellectual enclosure movement these days, but that doesn’t make putting the fences up on other people’s rightly acquired property any less odious.

Brad Hutchings on folks who get their music for free over file-sharing networks: “They are kinda like people who cut in line or cut you off on the freeway.”

The difference, Brad, is that people who cut in line or cut you off on the freeway are annoying because, by being jerks, they interfere with your ability to make use of a shared resource. But whether or not someone downloading an MP3 and paying only for the bandwidth is doing something wrong, what they are doing neither interferes with your ability to enjoy your own music nor endangers your safety. In fact the worst you seem to be able to say about them is this:

‘For example, I am a “consumer” of Apple iTunes. It pisses me off to no end that other “consumers” are too cheap to pony up a few bucks a week for music they enjoy, instead leaching it from P2P networks.’

So other people don’t put their money into the same things that you do. Good Lord what a priggish busybody you are. Haven’t you got anything better to fume about?

Robert is comparing “Set A” (people who have sex exclusively with members of the same sex) with “Set B” (Roman Catholics). The contrast is supposed to show that there is some relevant sense in which Catholic people are grouped together in a way that gay people are not. Unfortunately, I find the putative contrasts confusing. I also don’t understand what they have to do with the context in which Robert brought the comparison up. So let’s look a bit closer at it. Here are some different types of contrasts that Robert makes, a bit out of order:

1. The group (does/does not) have a formal history of existence as a defined group:

Set B has an extensive formal history of existence as a defined group. Set A could aspire to such a history and may achieve it in the future, but does not have it at this point in time.

I’m not entirely sure what Robert means here. The idea that there is a distinct group of people—the gay ones—goes back at least to the late 18th century, and the modern language of homosexuality was firmly in place more than 100 years ago (unfortunately, not in the context we might like; it was used to pick out people falsely believed to have a common psychosexual disorder). That’s at least as good a stretch of history as, say, “Americans” (there weren’t any until 1788) or “Christian fundamentalists” (early 20th century) have. Since sexual orientation, as a notion, has been around, and been an important part of how people talk about themselves for several generations now I don’t see any salient differences between the two. It’s not like “gay” was a neologism we just made up last Thursday.

2. Membership is/is not centrally coordinated:

Membership in set B is expressed in group terms. A person who says I am a Catholic means that they are a member of the organization. Membership in set A is expressed in individual terms. A person who says I am gay is describing their individual self.

I don’t know what you mean here. It’s true that a person who identifies herself as a Catholic is, inter alia, saying something about a formal organization (that she is a member of it). And it’s true that who and who is not a member of that organization is coordinated by a central authority, or by a centralized structure of authority. But that’s certainly not all that she’s doing—she’s also, as you said, stating that, inter alia, she personally adheres to the articles of the Catholic faith, participates in the sacraments of the Church, etc. Which of these two descriptions is the primary function of the statement “I am a Catholic”? Well, I don’t know. I imagine it depends on the context in which it’s uttered. (If you say, “I’m a Catholic, so of course I believe that abortion is wrong,” I imagine that the second function is more important; if you say, “I’m a Catholic, so I need to be at Mass on Sunday and can’t go with you to the picnic” then I imagine that the first function is more important.)

It’s true that a person who says “I am gay” is only saying something of the latter sort, not anything of the former sort—there isn’t any centralized organization to appeal to. But so what? What follows from this? It’s true of Catholics, but that doesn’t extend even to other denominations or religions (there is no central institutional structure for Pentacostals, or Christians, or Muslims, or Jews). Surely the particular bureaucratic details of how the Roman Catholic Church works are not a significant issue here.

3. Membership (does/does not) derive from adherence to a common framework of beliefs and practices:

Set B has a common philosophy. There is some disagreement within the set about the philosophy – debate and dissent, etc. – but all adult members of the group are passingly familiar with the philosophy. Set A does not have a common philosophy.

Set B has a common spiritual culture. Set A does not have a common spiritual culture.

Set B believes in the transmission of membership in the set to descendants. A member of set B with offspring generally attempts to instill the tenets of set B membership into the offspring. Set A members do not attempt to transmit membership to the next generation.

Set B believes in the evangelization of membership to non-members. Set A does not believe in the evangelization of membership.

Sure; this is indeed a point of contrast between Catholics and gay people. But see the discussion below.

4. Membership is/is not defined in behavioral terms:

Membership in set B is defined in nonbehavioral terms. Membership in set A is defined in behavioral terms. A single change in behavior is not generally sufficient to disenroll someone from set B; it is sufficient to disenroll someone from set A.

I think this, actually, has got to be false. It is in direct contradiction, in particular, to the contrasts made under heading 1. Being a Catholic essentially involves facts about your behavior: for example, if you stop believing in God, you are no longer a Catholic; if you convert to Islam you are no longer a Catholic; if you withdraw from all Church sacraments, you are no longer a Catholic. (If you take one common interpretation of canon 1398, then if you have or procure an abortion you are also by that very fact no longer a Catholic.)

So what hinges on this question, anyway? Well, Robert will have to say more about his purposes in giving the list of contrasts before I can say anything definitively—and if what I say here does not represent Robert’s views, then I look forward to being corrected—but one reason that people commonly make a distinction like this is to argue something like: “Look, homophobia is importantly different from common examples of politicized hatred such as racism or misogyny because whether homophobic attitudes are wrong or not, you can avoid homophobia just by not sleeping with members of your own sex.” That is true and it is important, but it’s not a point of difference between Catholicism and homosexuality: Catholics have always been able to escape persecution just by converting to a different denomination or different religion. (I don’t think, incidentally, that any important ethical consequences follow from this distinction. Religious persecution and homophobia are both wrong, and just as wrong as racism and misogyny are. The difference is only important to understanding the differing nature of the oppression, not its oppressiveness.) In this respect, members of persecuted religious groups and gay people are more alike one another than either is like victims of racism or misogyny: we could avoid it, by denying an absolutely essential part of our lives in order to pass and so pacify the bashers. But why in the hell should we have to?

On the other hand, Robert might have wanted to stick with Type 3 differences—even though his (false) claim of the Type 4 differences contradicts it—because of another conventional tack he might try to take: the status of people-who-only-have-sex-with-people-of-the-same-sex as a group is hard to pin down because those people, unlike “Catholics,” don’t necessarily have anything intellectually or culturally in common with one another, and don’t participate in any kind of common formal organization as in the Type 2 contrasts. True; but so what? “Black people” (or even a more restricted grouping such as “African-Americans”) certainly are not defined as a group by adherence to any common beliefs or spiritual culture (they don’t evangelize, and the fact that they transmit membership to their children has nothing to do with their intent in the matter). There is no formal Black organization and no centralized coordination of membership. But no-one could reasonably argue that, for example, Black people in America don’t constitute a single group that have something importantly in common. What they have in common, if nothing else, is how they are (have been) treated. Racism just means making race politically relevant; even though most everything racists say about Black people’s alleged common traits is false, the legacy of racist political power in the United States is such that Black people do have something importantly in common with each other—they were all treated as niggers. In this respect, gay people are more like victims of racism and misogyny than they are like victims of religious persecution: what we have in common is, mainly, that we are all treated like fags and dykes. Our commonalities as a group are defined more by the attitudes and practices of the people around us than by anything positive attribute that we all have on our own. But so what? Why in the world would anyone think that groupings mainly imposed by outside pressures are somehow less real or less politically relevant than groupings that come from commonalities we bring to the table ourselves? Certainly this isn’t true in the case of race; why would it be true in the case of sexuality?

(N.B.: I actually reject the definition, stipulated at the beginning of this discussion, of “gay” as meaning “a person who only has sex with members of the same gender”. In fact, exclusive sexual contact with members of the same gender is neither necessary nor sufficient for being gay: for one, you can be gay and a virgin; for two, you can be gay and closeted and have heterosexual sexual contact; for three, for the same reasons, you could be heterosexual and due to unusual circumstances end up only having sexual contact with members of the same sex. Further, I think it’s actually a mistake to define bisexual people out of being “gay”; certainly, as a bisexual man, I am treated like a faggot by homophobes regardless of the fact that I also am sexually and romantically attracted to women. But I’ve set that aside here; I don’t think that much important hinges on the differences between “gay men and lesbians” as a class and “men and women who only have sexual contact with members of the same gender” as a class, and this was a stipulative definition that Robert agreed to, not something that he insisted on, anyway.)

I think this is a great idea. I’ve been mulling over some things about how best to go forward with Feminist Blogs’ growth, which I’ll probably post about in a bit. But sub-sites are definitely one great idea.

What do you think about setting it up under http://uk.feministblogs.org ? I’ll be in touch by e-mail about how it might be set up…

Amanda:

Of course, even the “can’t count intoxication” argument strikes me as being really disingenous. I would say that raping drunk women happens all the time. There’s borderline cases, of course, but plenty of men prey on drunk women full well intending to rape and then try to pass it off as bad drunk sex.

Good points. I definitely agree with you that this line of criticism is bunkum. For one, it rules out a lot of indisputable non-borderline cases of rape in which men rape women after they have passed out or been physically disabled by alcohol or date-rape drugs. For two, the criticism is usually based on distortions of Koss’s question—which was not whether the woman ever had sex while she was drunk / intoxicated, but whether a man had ever had sex with her when she didn’t want to, after he had given her drugs or alcohol. That’s pretty clearly a predatory dynamic, but Koss’s critics prefer to whitewash it by changing the question. And for three, it seems to be part of a larger pattern of acting as if feminists have to rule anything that passes for normal het male dating behavior as therefore out of bounds for criticism. To hell with that!

It’s just also worth pointing out, I think, that even if you concede all the cases they complain about, the numbers stay very close to what they were, whether in Koss’s study or in later studies such as the National Violence Against Women Survey, and that these numbers are very easy to find, and that the Men’s Rights bully-boys and professional antifeminists don’t bother to even look around for 5 minutes to check them out. Not everyone who’s skeptical of Koss’s findings acts like this, but many of them are very clearly interested in dismissing entirely by innuendo and armchair speculation, rather than looking at the readily available data. And that’s pretty indicative of how they are approaching the subject.

Five comments on NDAs, and none of them at all are to the point.

The reason that Apple’s legal brickbats are problematic from a free speech standpoint is not that the First Amendment somehow prohibits contractual NDAs. It doesn’t. But the publishers of ThinkSecret, AppleInsider, and PowerPage never signed an NDA with Apple. They never made any agreement with Apple that they wouldn’t leak any information that comes into their grubby little hands, and they’re under no legally enforceable obligation whatsoever not to do so.

Apple has every right to pursue legal action against people who have breached their contract, but they have no right at all to use legal force against people who never agreed to Apple’s terms in the first place. The legal maneuvering is nothing more than high-powered bullying to try to force innocent third parties to give up their sources when they aren’t under any legal obligation to do so. Copyfight is exactly right to frame this as an issue of corporate bullies attacking protected speech.

Amanda:

I still cannot figure out what they hope to gain by insisting that rape is slightly less common than Koss’s study indicates. Okay, so what if we find one day that only 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted. Does this mean anti-rape campaigns are a sham? If 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people had a car stolen, we sure as hell wouldn’t be quibbling over the numbers, but would be looking for solutions.

I fear that what they think they have to gain is explained by the simple fact that they are not acting in good faith. I try to keep conversations civil with people who repeat the hatchet-jobs on Koss (most of them copied, directly or ultimately, out of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet-job in The Morning After), but a lot of them are more interested in indiscriminately throwing mud on the survey (and therefore not having to discuss how prevalent rape is at all) than they are in finding out what the truth of the matter might be.

The standard-issue attack that Koss includes sex while intoxicated, for example, is completely trivial: Koss went ahead and ran the numbers over again with those cases excluded, and found that 1 in 5 college women had suffered rape or attempted rape if you stuck to a definition based only on direct force or threats of violence. Anyone who was honestly interested in the possible limitation of Koss’s figures or in making sure that feminists base their arguments on careful and accurate use of social science results could have found this out by reading either Koss’s primary articles or reports such as I Never Called It Rape. But they don’t, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the people who do this—and certainly those who do it in print—are just a bit more interested in cooking up an excuse to dismiss feminist analyses of rape than they are in finding out the truth.

A lot of the attacks on the Koss study are, quite frankly, nut much different from the tactics that rapists’ defenders use against individual survivors in the courtroom: discredit the woman who is sitting there telling you what happened to her as crazy, slutty, unscrupulous, hysterical, etc., and you don’t have to deal with the hard question of figuring out what exactly did happen. It’s slime-and-defend without regard for the truth, whether used to dismiss personal testimony or statistical research.