Lopez:

Are American blacks better off now than if their ancestors had been left alone in Africa? Let’s see: on the one hand you can have ignorant backwoods fucks calling you a coon, on the other hand you can have your neighbors chopping your family up with machetes.

1. If European marauders had left Africa, and the West African coast in particular, alone, then the political and economic situation there might be somewhat different from what it is today.

2. Who cares? At best you’ve offered a utilitarian argument in favor of free immigration here. But the question was about property rights, not about whether some other regime of theft and terror would have left them worse off in the end. From the standpoint of just compensation, what matters is how well-off they would have been if no theft had occurred, not how well-off they would have been if someone else were left to do the thieving.

Kennedy:

Being long dead, the slaves cannot be compensated and their masters cannot pay.

As an historical note, the era of chattel slavery was not the last time that Black people in the United States had their rights to person and property systematically violated. Lots of people living today remember government-enforced Jim Crow.

Kennedy:

Because B’s property is not anyone else’s. Only B’s rights are at stake. If you rob my parents you’ve violated their rights, but not mine because I had no right to their property.

If you murder my parents, do I (as an heir) have the right to demand compensatory damages for wrongful death?

Wayne Besen: People will learn how destructive the closet is, not only for gays, but also on the people caught up in the sham families created to protect these closets.

I understand Besen’s temptation to put things this way, but it seems like there’s something importantly wrong here. The heterosexual families that closeted gay men and lesbians created were not “sham” families; they were real families made up of real people, and they suffered genuine pain when those families were betrayed. The tragedies here were tragic precisely because real families and real commitments were built on sham feelings.

Note also that most crusty cultural conservatives who object to hip-hop care very little about the endless use of misogynist and homophobic invective. Typical complaints have usually revolved around (1) the use of dirty words, (2) hostility towards established authority in general and the pigs in particular, and (3) musically illiterate complaints about how “easy” it is and how there’s no musical talent involved and the rest of the usual claptrap.

Incidentally, just to be clear, when you say this: “Why couldn’t Rothbard just say that he didn’t care for certain types of music rather than develop a wordy critique that opens him up to look foolish on the subject?” — are you complaining about Rothbard, in particular, holding forth on things about which he was ignorant, or are you mounting some kind of general complaint against people offering “wordy critiques” of general aesthetic trends or genres, instead of merely confining their complaints to “I don’t care for it”? Because the first point seems to me to be obviously right, and the second one dangerously tempting, but in fact quite wrong.

Mr. Bad: “As for Arwen’s ad hominem against Richard, I’m slightly surprised that you let it slide; I thought personal attacks were out of bounds here.”

This is something of a pet peeve of mine.

The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed when you (irrelevantly) appeal to facts about the person advocating a view or advancing an argument, as a substitute for addressing the argument. In its circumstantial form, the appeal points out properties that are supposed to explain why the person is making an argument, and tries to use them to explain away or dismiss the argument. In its abusive form, the appeal points out properties that are supposed to make the advocate bad or untrustworthy, and so to dismiss or undermine the argument without considering it on its own merits.

Argumentum ad hominem is not committed whenever somebody insults another person, or engages in “personal attacks.” (It is only when the attacks are insults are falsely presented as a counter-argument to some point that the fallacy is committed.) Arwen didn’t do this to Richard. In fact, she didn’t engage in any personal attacks at all: she merely used sarcasm to point out that the standards that he was applying to the feminist movement, and to feminist theory as a whole, were unfair.

Hope this helps.

Could you give an example of someone who you do think was a hero or a martyr of the civil rights movement?

And maybe also explain why you think that the purpose of the civil rights movement was to please or cater to white people’s sensibilities?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that “faith” was once counted among the cardinal virtues?

“Where [is] the wise? where [is] the scribe? where [is] the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. … But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; …”

This is not to say that the theme of “just believe” in children’s fantasy is an intentional or even an accurate expression of the purported theological virtue. Or that people were right to regard this kind of faith as a virtue to begin with. But I do think that this obviously has to be part of the correct explanation.

Tlaloc, I agree with you that the question of what the law should be is more interesting, and important, than the question of what the law in fact is. But I do not think that this is nearly as essential to the argument as you seem to take it to be. Here are some quotes from you that I think are indicative of what is essential to the argument:

Tlaloc: This is why intent matter. Make sense now?

Tlaloc: Intention is critical. If the guy keeps the wallet because he thinks I’m thanking him for shooting the maniac behind me he did not rob me.

Tlaloc: I don’t think he should be charged with armed robbery since he had no intention to rob. He should of course be charged with B&E and assault.

Tlaloc: Because he is the one accused of a crime. Frankly this question has me stumped, why wouldn’t you consider the motivation of the kidnapper? Rape is a crime but sex is not. Motivation and action both play a role in distinguishing the two.

Tlaloc: Stating something does not make it true. You believe that consent is all important. I believe that consent is certainly important but that intent is also.

These comments clearly indicate that you are arguing at cross-purposes with the other commenters in this thread. Further that you are arguing at cross-purposes because you have the wrong idea, or a confused collection of ideas, of what “rape” and “consent” mean.

Rape is defined as non-consensual sex. I am going to simply stipulate this without argument, because it is obvious. If you don’t believe me, look it up in a dictionary. It is important to note that “non-consensual sex” does not mean “sex intended to be non-consensual;” it means sex that is, in fact, non-consensual.

Thus, what matters here — and also, incidentally, in other cases of assault and battery, robbery, and other similar crimes — is whether what happened was coerced or consensual.

And, here is the important part: when we say that something is coerced, that’s because of what happened to the victim. Not because of what’s going on with the perpetrator. If sex is coerced under duress (here, through the use of repeated physical violence, threats, and terror), then, under any sane moral standard, that sex is non-consensual, no matter what the coercer had in mind when he did the coercing. It’s non-consensual because the victim didn’t consent; not because the coercer intended for her not to consent. And if the sex is non-consensual, then it is rape.

If you want to argue about whether rapists should be treated differently by the criminal justice system, or in moral discourse, depending on the intent that they had when they committed the rape, then you’re free to do so. What you’re not free to do is make up your own definition for the word “rape” so as to make it dependent on the rapist’s, rather than the victim’s, condition.

I think before we can get any traction on this question we need to be clear about what the competing claims are about. When you “challenge those who argue that FDR ‘saved capitalism’” to provide further information, (1) what do you think your interlocutors are using the word “capitalism” to mean? and (2) what are you using the word “capitalism” to mean?

I ask because there are several different uses of the word “capitalism,” including (1) a voluntary economic order under conditions of laissez-faire et laissez passer (“the free market”), (2) active government support for big business through forcible accumulation, monopolization, and protection of industrial capital (“state capitalism” or “the corporate State”), and (3) a particular form of labor market, in which most goods are produced by wage-laborers working for a boss who owns the means of production (“the wage labor system,” or “boss-directed labor”). But (3) is orthogonal to either (1) or (2) (it could in principle exist under either system) and (1) and (2) are in fact mutually exclusive. (1) has almost never existed in its pure form in human history; (2) and (3) have been very common, especially over the past 150-200 years. (I discuss the terminological issues in more length elsewhere, e.g. at http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/03/31/anarquistas_por.)

So it seems to me that I need to know what “capitalism” means, before I can have any idea of whether FDR saved it, destroyed it, left it untouched, or never even came upon it in the first place.

“The person simply deserves to be punished in the criminal legal system regardless of the effect on restraint and deterrence.”

Again, whether or not a person deserves X and whether or not we can legitimately give her X are two different questions. I have very little in the way of confident positive beliefs about what murderers do or don’t deserve, but I am quite sure that even if a murderer does deserve punishment we can’t rightfully inflict that on him or her against her or his will. (Again, because as a libertarian I condemn all forms of violence not in defense of self or others, and we’ve stipulated that the punishment in question serves no defensive purpose. If you intend to show that we can rightfully inflict punishment on someone who deserves it, against that person’s will, you’ll have to give reasons to think not only that they do deserve it, but also that the ordinary ban on aggressive violence is repealed in the case of convicted criminals.)

“What kind of restitution are we talking about for murder?”

I mean damages for wrongful death, payable to the victim’s estate (since the victim is dead). The sort of thing that you could today gain through a wrongful death suit (or perhaps more, since a system that exclusively depended on restitution might tends towards higher restitution than one in which restitution is thought of as something taken in addition to punishment).

“There are some crimes that are so heinous, that yes, it really wouldn’t bother me — that is, were I the master civil magistrate, I would vet such a punishment — but I’m not sure if the parent murder hypo that we are discussing is one of them.”

But you are sure that killing the murderer (provided that there’s no chance of error, etc. etc.) would be a fit punishment?

(As far as the 8th Amendment goes, well, let’s set that aside. The 8th Amendment can be changed or repealed if it serves the aims of justice to do so.)