T. J. Madison: Rad Geek, most tyrants seem to do rather badly.

This is certainly true. In fact, I think it’s analytically true that all tyrants do badly, because one of the things that tyrants have to do in their lives is be tyrannical, and living your life by lording it over other people and living off of their honest labor is a pathetic and rotten way to be.

If you mean that tyrants also suffer from psychological or material evils (like anxiety, frustration, loneliness, discontent, material deprivation, etc.) then that is certainly also true more often than a lot of people realize. But given that a life of cannibalism, bullying, and phoney posturing at martial glory is pathetic even if it is pursued in absolute contentment and full of the most exquisite pleasures, that sort of appeal to the external punishments that a life of monstrous vice may, empirically, end up inflicting on you, seems to me to be wholly beside the point.

Stefan: Then on what basis can we condemn Agathocles for slaughtering old men for his personal gain if he was happy with the results, secure in his position, and had successfully repelled Carthage and governed Sicily peacefully for many years before dieing in old age?

The basis on which we can condemn him is pretty obvious: he’s a murderer and a tyrant. (If condemnation, as a social practice, was not made for murderers and tyrants, who was it made for?) You might think, though, that having condemned him, there is still an open question about whether or not we can convict him of being irrational, or give him reasons not to do what he did. I think that you can; they are roughly the reasons that I sketched out in replying to T.J. above. (If you could be absolutely sure that you could get away with murdering a rival and taking all his possessions, would you do so? If not, why not?)

Echidne: But it is odd that some take advantage of the gains while doing their utmost to make sure that there will be no more gains in the future, or for other women even today. I think that is what some of us find a little upsetting, because it looks two-faced.

Sure, and it is two-faced, and it is maddeningly frustrating. Just to be clear, I wasn’t objecting to anything you said in your post along these lines. I think you’re completely right. What I was objecting to is the way that some of the things comments that other people made, which seemed to go from making that point, to making the vindictive claim that some women don’t have a right to complain about sexism, or deserve to benefit from feminist achievements, because they are on the wrong side of the political line.

Echidne: I am not sure what you are referring to here. Dowd was criticized for doing sloppy research for an article. Maybe you are talking about something else.

Nancy was referring to specific post at Bitch Ph.D., where Bitch Ph.D. objected to the sexism that she saw in some of the common criticisms of Dowd. Nancy seems to be suggesting that this was foolish or wrong because of Dowd’s role in attacking or undermining feminism. (As it happens, I think a lot of other comments in this thread also expressed similarly vindictive attitudes towards the appallingly sexist assaults on Ann Althouse.) Nancy said that Bitch Ph.D.’s position was hard to understand; I think it’s easy to understand: she objected to rhetoric that she saw as sexist because sexism is wrong, even if the woman targeted by that rhetoric isn’t an objective ally of feminism and even if the position she has taken really is mistaken or weakly argued. That’s not to take any particular stance on whether or not Bitch Ph.D. was right to think that the criticism of Dowd was tinged by sexism. It’s just to say that she’s pretty clear about her reasons, and if you accept that the attacks are sexist, they’re pretty good ones, even if the target of those attacks is Maureen Dowd. And there are similarly good reasons to object to the way that Ann Althouse was treated at LGF (where there just isn’t any quesiton at all that the attacks were sexist). Broadly speaking, sexist attacks are wrong no matter who the victim is, and we shouldn’t be telling women “You’re on your own, sister” out of partisan spite.

Did Savage claim that there isn’t a right to privacy in the Constitution? As I read his column, he seemed to be saying that whether there is one or not, it’s a matter of dispute and that the dispute could be settled unambiguously by adding an explicit amendment protecting the right to privacy. And further that it would be politically advantageous for supporters of the right to privacy to do so. But of course you can believe that while fully believing that the constitution already recognizes the right to privacy.

(You could make a similar argument that the whole first section of the 14th Amendment merely makes more explicit what any reasonable reading of “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” in Article IV Section 4 would demand; but that it was helpful, ca. 1868, to pass an amendment in order to make sure to settle a particular dispute over the kinds of state governments that white Southerners could get away with imposing.)

Howdy. I noticed your post through Technorati.

Are you still having problems getting FeedWordPress to work? If so, what problems are you having with it?

vulture: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s women who don’t identify with feminism at all — and who, indeed, will grab any opportunity to dump on it — yet will eagerly take advantage of all the gains feminism has won for them.”

Shouldn’t all women be able to take advantage of all the gains feminism has won for them? Wasn’t that the point?

Nancy: “You guys are exactly right. Which is why I don’t understand why feminist bloggers like BitchPhD defend Dowd. Clearly Dowd is no sister.”

I think it’s because sexism is wrong. Even when the woman suffering from it also happens to be a bad person.

Well, one way you could automatically cross-post occasional selected posts is to use FeedWordPress together with WordPress’s category feeds. So, you could create a category named (say) “Crosspost: Acme Technologies Zeitgeist”, place all and only the posts that you want crossposted to ATZ under that category, and then have FeedWordPress syndicate the Atom or RSS feed for that category. That would get you something automated with existing tools but with more precision than just syndicating everything from the front page.

Well, then, do you think that Paterson is right or wrong?

Stefan:

Also, “rain falls on the just and unjust alike”. Many evil autocrats and murderers have also led long, satisfying lives and then died wealthy and with their family as well.

Well, this presupposes that you can give some kind of account of what a “satisfying” life is without making reference to terms like justice, kindness, moderation, etc. If by “satisfying” you mean that they felt pleased with it on reflection, then I’m sure this is true. But if by satisfying you mean something more like a life that meets the criteria for having lived a good life, then it’s not at all clear that it’s true.

If it’s just a matter of felt contentment, then it still may very well be the case that being a tyrant is its own punishment — that it is, as Plato claims, the most miserable kind of life. If it’s a matter of living a life that’s fulfilling in some more objective sense, then it’s not clear that any tyrants have ever enjoyed this.

This turkey is fake.

Lawrence: Even using your definition of homesteading – which, as I pointed out, wasn’t the understood basis of property in those times and places – …

If this is what you were trying to point out, I don’t know what its relevance is supposed to be. People have had lots of wacky ideas about property rights. For example, in the American South ca. 1850 most large planters believed that they could own other human beings; and even further that if they owned any one human being they would also own all of her or his descendents. But they were wrong; the people whom they enslaved were not actually their property, but rather free and independent human beings. The moral of this story is that the proper question is what property rights people actually had, not what property rights some set of people thought that they had.

Lawrence: the plantation owners did apply their own labour to the land. You’ll see a literary example of it in Scarlett O’Hara’s father setting up Tara in “Gone with the Wind” (she later applies her own labour to it).

The fact that you have to resort to fiction — a rather notorious example of wistful apologia for slavery, incidentally — in order to bolster your historical point doesn’t speak well for it. That said, there are certainly plenty of historical examples of white planters who spent a bit of time doing some work on the farm. But so what? I’d be glad to see a land reform plan on which former slaves were recognized as the owners of parcels of land proportionate to the amount of their labor that was spent in cultivating and maintaining it, and in which the planters retained control over parcels of land proportionate to the amount of their labor that was spent in cultivating and maintaining it. I doubt the planters would have been very happy with the results, but it’s not their happiness that I am, or that you should be, concerned with.

Lawrence: But in any case, the slaves were only part of setting up the plantations – the actual “planting”.

This is a plain lie. Slaves ploughed, planted, tended, and harvested. They also cleared land, worked on roads and structures, tended to animals, built and maintained their own houses, built and maintained the master’s manor, cooked, cleaned, cared for children and adults, greeted and entertained guests, ran errands in town, and did any number of other tasks which were set for them by the slave-driver, his family, and his overseers. Slave-drivers also extracted more money from their slaves by forcing them to work on other plantations or in towns or on public works projects, and taking their wages; and by “selling” them and their children. (Even if “all” that slaves were doing was tilling the soil, I can’t imagine why in the world you wouldn’t think that they are doing a substantial and essential part of the labor necessary for running a bloody farm.)

Lawrence: You get a better insight bu looking at the Dutch Patroons of upper New York state

A better insight on what? Why would it offer a better insight on the question of land ownership ca. 1866 in the American South than … considering facts about the American South ca. 1866?

I don’t think that the arbitrary grants of the Dutch West India Company conferred any more right to the estates that the Patroons claimed than the Southern slave-drivers had over the land they claimed. But I think there’s an open question in the theory of property whether you can homestead land by voluntarily arranging for others to cultivate it. If you can, then the Patroons had a legitimate right to as much of their land as was worked by either themselves or by free tenants. (I don’t know how many of their tenants actually were free, and how many were held to illegitimate forms of servitude which were quite common in early modern Europe. Whatever the proportion of free to unfree was, that’s the proportion of land you could say they rightly held.) If you can’t homestead land by voluntarily arranging for others to cultivate it, then the Patroons had only a leigitimate right to as much of their land as they personally worked. I don’t think either of these answers is obviously wrong. (I suspect Kevin has more fixed beliefs than I do on the question.) There is, on the other hand, no open question as towhether you can homestead land by coercing other people to labor on it. The reason that working unowned land is a means to owning is that the labor is yours. If the labor was never yours to begin with, then neither is the land. Conflating this latter case with the former case, where exchange is voluntary, is not an insight into the issue; it’s merely changing the subject.