Brandon Berg:

If you do, you’ve failed. You had your chance, and you blew it. Then you had another chance, and you blew that one, too. And almost certainly several more. It may take magic powers to save adequately for retirement on minimum wage, but it doesn’t take magic powers to get a job that pays more.

Whether this is true or false, it’s irrelevant.

There is some population, greater than zero, of people who, whether for reasons that are culpable or reasons that are blameless or a mixture of the two, will make wages at or not very much above minimum wage their whole lives. Whether or not this makes them “failures,” whether or not it makes them bad people or foolish people or contemptible people or pitiful people, they are going to get old and they are going to reach a point in their lives where it will be very hard for them to continue working, and if they have neither accumulated savings nor a pension (gov’t issued or private), then they are going to suffer a lot in their old age.

But that doesn’t mean that they deserve to suffer, or to suffer that badly, whatever you may think of how they have lived their lives. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that a free society could — indeed ought to — include things like mutual aid for health, retirement, etc. needs in old age, charity for people facing extreme poverty, and so on. The only requirement is that people can’t legitimately be forced to turn over money for it. That’s what’s wrong with government “welfare” programs, not whatever vices or failings you might think the proposed recipients might have.

Moralistic contempt for poor people forms no essential part of the libertarian argument against the moral legitimacy of Social Security or other government “welfare” programs. In fact free market economics suggest that an end to government interventionism will help out the people with the worst economic prospects the most, since government intervention and ossified structural poverty systematically hurt poor people and aid the rich. The idea that libertarian theory is the body of economic thought of, by, and for Ebenezeer Scrooge has just got to die.

Numbers added for expository purposes.

Gonzman: Thing is, too, I’m not claiming – I’m pointing out [1] that ya’ll are claiming it, that people take the most radical rhetoric and hold it as representive of all feminism, [2] that it produces the “I’m not a feminist, but…” women because they are afraid of being associated with it. That such things are an issue speak loudly of a public image and perception problem.

Look, I don’t like it when feminists do this, because I think it’s a destructive tactic that caters to anti-feminist baiting. (On the other hand, I’m biased, because my sympathies lie with radical feminism anyway.) But in any case, (1) and (2) are separate claims, and, in my experience, most feminists who do say this sort of thing make claim (1) but not claim (2). The main people who blame radical feminists for fence-sitting or anti-feminist attitudes are the fence-sitters and anti-feminists themselves. Most actual feminists who make claim (1) are simply making the point that feminist thought isn’t a monolithic hive mind, and they blame anti-feminists, not radical feminists, for treating it as if it were. Now, maybe the opinions of fence-sitters and anti-feminists are signs of “a public image and perception problem,” and maybe they aren’t, but even if they are, I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that it’s feminists rather than you who are stressing this point. But the point of feminist theory and practice is not necessarily to persuade more non-feminists to become feminists. So how seriously to take such a “problem,” so far as it exists, depends on a lot more than just the reactions of non-feminists to radical feminist rhetoric, where it is aired.

Anyway, I don’t know that you’ve understood my original point. People (women, mostly) who actually identify themselves as radical feminists don’t generally feel that their views are widely aired or discussed, and that their positions and contributions have been marginalized and continue to be marginalized. Not only by others IN the movement, but also by those OUTSIDE the movement. (They are widely “quoted” by certain factions within the anti-feminist movement, but that’s itself a minority faction.) Maybe you think they’re just wrong about the content of the discussion. But, really, which of the following do you think is better known and more widely discussed outside of feminist circles?

• Betty Friedan, or Shulamith Firestone?

• NOW, or the Redstockings?

• The Feminine Mystique, or Sexual Politics?

• Ms., or off our backs?

(N.B.: if you think that, in any of these four pairs, both are examples of the “radical” or “extremist” tendency in feminism, then you’ve made it pretty clear that what’s going on is that you have a very different picture of what constitutes radicalism than self-identified radical feminists do.)

Hugo: Rad, do you honestly believe that Q Grrl’s whopping generalization about all Christians was less offensive than my reply?

Whether her claims were correct or incorrect, and whether they are offensive or inoffensive, they are not based out of simple ignorance of Christian feminist thought. I think it was a mistake for you to treat her on the presumption that they were, particularly in the pedagogical tone that you chose to take.

I hope you don’t mean to equate “radical” with “man-hating.”

I don’t. But I have a different view of what constitutes “man-hating” from the view that most anti-feminists have, so I don’t take charges of “man-hating” in their mouths very seriously or feel any particular need to cater to their views by trying to distance myself or others from the “charge,” such as it is.

Amp: Several people have suggested, more than once, that my blog is not a feminist blog because of my moderating policies. A few people have suggested that, by extension, I’m not a feminist. I believe that similar comments have been made about Hugo’s blog, and possibly about Hugo. This brings up the “big tent” issue; is “feminist blog” defined broadly enough to include Hugo’s blog and “Alas,” and is “feminist” defined broadly enough to include myself and Hugo?

Well, O.K., fair enough; but it didn’t seem like that was what was at issue in the thread that Hugo was commenting on, and Hugo seemed to me to be writing about it as if the issue at hand were his attitude towards the claims of third parties to the “feminist” name, not his own claim to it.

That said, the issue has come up explicitly now, so maybe you’re right that it was there all along. Anyway, not much sense in pressing the point now that it clearly is part of the debate.

Hugo: Q Grrl, anytime you want a feminist Christian reading list, let me know!

Hugo, that was a really patronizing comment.

Gonzman: I’ve heard a lot of feminists here complain that they are tired of being regarded as gender seperatist, female supremacist, man-hating radicals.

Hey. I can’t say that I personally know any female supremacists, but some of my best friends are gender separatist, man-hating radicals.

Gonzman: And even though I’m sure someone will point at me as being hostile but I will say it anyway – those are the voices coming loudest from the discourse of the “feminisms.”

See, here’s the thing. All the radical feminists I know feel that their views are unfairly marginalized, ridiculed, and used as rhetorical foils both within the movement and in discussions of the movement from the outside looking in. So there’s clearly a disconnect here. Either (1) you (and whoever it is you’re citing) have a very different impression of the content of public discussions about feminism, or (2) you (and whoever it is you’re citing) have a very different impression of what constitutes “radical feminism” (or “gender separatism” or “man-hating” or whatever) than many self-identified radical feminists do.

Mike: Is it ironic that ginmar exemplifies the negative stereotype of a feminist, and hence undermines the very movement she supports?

Mike, do you think ginmar’s goal is to persuade anti-feminists that the “negative stereotypes” they hold are mistaken? I doubt that it is. Or that it should be.

Hugo: As always, some (including this blogger) want to define feminism broadly; we’re the “big tent” folks. Others worry that we big tenters are “dumbing down” feminism, or setting the bar so low that virtually anyone (even those with ugly sexist rhetoric) can define themselves as feminists.

Hugo, this is an old argument but I don’t understand how this argument comes into play in the comments you’re discussing. The comments critical of you have generally been about your comment moderation policies and the way that you allow explicitly anti-feminist commenters to act on your website. Not about how broadly or narrowly you define “feminism.” Is there something that I’m missing?

Soulhuntre: Of course “don’t insult me” is generally followed by “but I demand the right to insult you pivileged mysoginist scumbags!’ – so it tends to lose a little of it’s impact. I know, I know… thats not rudeness or ignorance, thats the righteous anger of the vitim and it is “anti-feminist” to question such things.

You know, whether this is a fair representation of what the specific folks you’re referring to say and do (I don’t think it is), you haven’t actually offered anything, other than the tone of facile sarcasm, to show that there’s anything wrong with conducting yourself like this. Most people make a distinction between (1) righteous anger in response to a genuine wrong, and (2) belligerence that isn’t justified by the circumstances. There may be cases in which that distinction happens not to be relevant; or you might think that feminist women’s anger at anti-feminist men isn’t, actually, justified by the circumstances. But you can’t expect feminists to agree with you about the latter, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate the former. You’re just trying to get by on sarcastic references to different standards, as if that just by itself proved the difference to be unfair.

It doesn’t.

stanton: Even the most essentialist of feminists (MacKinnon? Gilligan?) acknowledge the role of genetics/nature in gender.

Elinor: Saying that gendered behaviour is NOT essential (MacKinnon) is essentialist?

My suspicion is that “essentialist feminist” is being used here more or less as a synonym for Christina Hoff Sommers’ “gender feminist.” That latter was itself pretty clearly used as an attempt to mean something like what is meant by “difference feminist,” which is why Gilligan gets included and also why you might think that the whole program can be described as “essentialist.” The problem, of course, is that “gender feminist” was also intended to mean something like “any feminist whose views Christina Hoff Sommers regards as too radical,” so it ends up meaning nothing coherent at all, and stridently anti-essentialist radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinon also get included on the list.

“Freedom,” as libertarians use the word, never seems to mean anything other than freedom from government intrusion. Real freedom, however, means having a wide range of attractive options. When someone’s options are eliminated by the marketplace, by illness, or by lack of available assistance, that is as real a threat to their freedom as government intrusion.

This is a common misunderstanding (and there are a number of libertarians, even, who encourage it by their practice). “Freedom” in the political sense that libertarians use it doesn’t mean “freedom from government intrusion;” it means “freedom from violent coercion” (hence the “non-initiation of force principle”). Government comes into the picture only when libertarians go on to suggest that government officials don’t have any special prerogatives to violently coerce peaceful people any more than ordinary civilians do. (But this entails — though vulgar libertarians don’t tend to recognize it — that systematic violence such as lynch law in the Jim Crow South, or union-busting gang violence, or pervasive male violence against women, are just as much matters for libertarian concern as invasive government is.

Nor do most libertarians claim that this is the only thing that can be intelligibly described as “freedom,” or that it’s the only valuable form of freedom, or even that it’s the most important form of freedom to any particular person at any particular time. What libertarian theory does demand is that you not try to promote other forms of freedom at the expense of freedom from violent coercion, because forcing people against their will to be “free” in other senses is (1) unlikely to work well, or (2) immoral, or (3) both. (Which one of these options the libertarian appeals to will vary depending on what kind of libertarian she is.)

(More to say, but it’ll have to wait until after work…)

Someone working for $5.15 an hour is not free to save for retirement; they’re spending their whole income on rent and don’t have enough left over for food and heat, let alone savings.

I don’t understand this argument.

People who make $5.15/hour are already forced to turn over 6.2% of their wages to FICA and another chunk to the state and federal government in tax withholding. The FICA withholding is, according to the government’s accounting fictions, “saving for retirement” in the form of funding Social Security and Medicare. So presumably if there were no FICA (or better, no tax withholding at all) they could voluntarily put aside up to 6.2% of their wages for savings in an IRA and be no worse off than they were before.

You might say, “Oh, but if they wouldn’t put aside that money if they’re not forced to, because they have all these other pressing costs that they need to pay now.” There are certainly cases where that’s true, but it doesn’t follow from that that being forced to put the money aside is the best thing for them. Having lived on around $5,000 a year myself (due to a combination of low-paying jobs and long-term unemployment), I can tell you that when you don’t have enough money to spare for savings, being forced to put the money aside anyway has a direct consequence: debt. If (ex hypothesi) I’m being forced to put aside money that otherwise could have paid off current bills, then those bills still have to be paid off somehow, and when I don’t have the money now, that means they have to go on the card. And the debt accumulates a lot quicker than whatever “returns” I’m supposedly getting on my “investment” in Social Security and Medicare.

That Girl:

Personally, I find it more informative to have certain kinds of trolls. Not only do they force someone to clarify their argument and hone it, but they allow a response to be made to an opinion that will be found in the “real world”.

Well, “people who disagree with you” aren’t the same as trolls. (To take a real-life example, can you identify anything that Robert has helped clarify or contributed in this thread, other than contempt and distraction?)

That said, as a lot of people have pointed out, it’s a mistake to think that just because a particular community is, say, limited to feminists (or even some particular faction within feminism) doesn’t mean that everyone is just sitting around agreeing with each other and clapping themselves on the back. It just means that disagreements, and the work in “clarifying” and “honing,” occurs on a different level. Instead of constantly focusing on apologetics to non-feminists (or, in this case, belligerent anti-feminists) and explanations of The Basics to be delivered to people who don’t get them, it allows space for feminists to talk and analyze and argue about different kinds and different levels of disagreements, or to come at it from a different angle than they would have to if they’re constantly trying to anticipate and ward off responses from the bellowing blowhard brigade. That can be valuable too and I think it’s true that there is not nearly enough space for it in public feminist spaces on the Internet, partly due to the deliberate disruption of belligerent anti-feminists.

Amp:

In short, I think there’s room in feminism for a variety of approaches to running a blog. I disagree with the folks who have told me that I can’t be a feminist unless I run my blog the way they want me to run my blog. Feminism isn’t all-encompassing, but neither is there one and only one True Path of Feminist Blogging.

Amp, in principle I’m really inclined to agreeing with this. But it worries me that it just so happens that the two weblogs where this kind of moderation policy is an issue just happen to be the two most prominent weblogs run by male feminists, and I, another male feminists, am ready to defend it. In principle it seems perfectly reasonable to say that we ought to let a thousand flowers bloom. But why is it that this particular style of moderation seems especially to appeal to male feminist bloggers? Even if it is, on balance, justified, it certainly seems like that’s a question that you and Hugo and I ought to be asking ourselves.

Maia:

I didn’t use the phrase ‘collective responsibility’, and I wouldn’t. The only way I would refer to childcare as a collective responsibility is in the sense that I think that the resources required to raise children (and by that I mean all the things La Lubu mentions, but also things like food and stretch and grows, and bikes, and toys and high charis) and also the resources to support those raising children, should be provided by people collectively, not just by the parents.

Right; that was beachcomber who used the phrase. Sorry for not making that clear.

I still do have some concerns about the phrase “collectively,” actually, because it tends to have some of the same ambiguities as “responsibility” (does it mean a burden everyone has to bear together, or does it just mean something that a bunch of people can choose to co-operatively take on?). I guess in your case the question I would ask is: suppose that I’m the aforementioned curmudgeon, and I don’t want to contribute either labor or material resources to child-raising, and I deliberately choose the work that I’m going to do and the transactions I’m going to make in such a way that I don’t. Can I be forced to go along with the child-raising scheme, and forced to support child-raising whether I want to or not?

If so, why?

If not, I have no problem with the arrangement (indeed, I think it’s a very good suggestion), but I think maybe “co-operative” (or one of the other phrases I mentioned above) might be a clearer way of putting the nature of child-raising as you see it than “collective.”

Grace:

Barbara Kingsolver (I think) made the argument that even if you’re child-free by choice, you still have a vested interest in the way kids in society in general are raised. Because when you’re old and sick, who’s going to be providing your medical care, repairing your house, doing your taxes, cooking your food, making the laws that affect you, and so on? … (The context of this was her argument against people who didn’t want to pay taxes that supported schools.)

Whether she’s right about this or not, I don’t think that the argument supports the claim that people who are “child-free by choice” should be forced to pay for schools.

Provided that she’s correct, all that she’s proven is that it may be foolish or imprudent for people who are “child-free by choice” not to contribute money to schools because they run the risk of losing out on some future benefit (just as it may be foolish of me to spend all my money buying DVDs and potato chips when I could be putting down money for a vacation that I’ll enjoy a lot more than the DVDs and the chips). But the suggestion here is not that childless people be encouraged or exhorted to contribute money to schools; it’s that they be forced to do so, whether they want to or not.

Merely showing that it would be foolish not to do something isn’t the same as showing that the government should make you do it against your will, unless you are employing a further premise that it’s the government’s job to force you and me not to be foolish. (I don’t think that it is.)

Maybe there’s some other reason why the government should make you pay for government-run schools, but I don’t think that this is enough reason as it stands.