Ron,

I think the “Jesse Jackson of dinosaurs” thing was a hamhanded attempt at making a little funny about the shifts in acceptable language for describing American black people (“colored,” “Negro,” “Afro-American,” “African-American,” etc.). For some reason this seems to be an endless fount of humor for certain white folks. And Steve Sailer was born with a rare genetic disorder that makes it impossible for him to discuss anything having to do with anti-discrimination activism without throwing out Jesse Jackson’s name, higgeldy-piggeldy, regardless of whether or not Jesse Jackson had much of anything personally to do with the issue he’s talking about, or whether he had even been born when some of the events took place.

Auguste:

Amp’s decision or lack thereof would not end all racist porn tomorrow, and decrying racist porn every time it rears its ugly head is not required to be assumed to be against it.

So, what, that makes it O.K. for him to personally profit from the trade in white supremacist pornography?

You could excuse doing absolutely any rotten thing that’s prevalent enough using exactly the same reasoning. For example, you could just as easily make this argument: “Well, Amp’s refusal to help market child pornography would not end all child pornography tomorrow, so why not?” Or this: “Well, I’m personally opposed to running guns into war-torn regions, but if I didn’t do it, somebody else would do it anyway. So why not make a bit of change off of it?”

It is not as if Amp were just picking up some money that racist pornography peddlers happened to leave sitting out on the ground. Amp is getting money and free services from pornographers because he has gotten himself involved in an ongoing business relationship with them, and they profit from the resources that he offers to them.

Whether or not you are right about this particular fracas over Amp’s decision, you need a better argument to show it.

On the theme of anarchist texts recently put online, I recently added an online edition of General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (trans. by John Beverly Robinson) to the Fair Use Repository. I was pretty surprised to find that it wasn’t available anywhere else on the web, actually.

Anonymous2,

Carson clearly does not hold that you’re entitled to enclose and seize land that someone else has worked (e.g. by clearing it of trees, or wild beasts, or creeps, or whatever) the instant they pause in working it. His understanding of mutualism as applied to land ownership has to do with the conditions under which land can be counted as abandoned (and thus available for being re-homesteaded). You’re attacking a strawman.

In any case, even on a radical Lockean view of land ownership I do not see how the tree-clearer would gain an exclusive entitlement to the copper veins underneath the forest. Homesteading land only gives you ownership of the land you actually cleared and brought into use. It does not give you ownership of everything in the heavens that’s over the parcel you own, nor everything in the earth underneath it.

If I clear the forest and bring the surface of the land into use, that gives me a claim to the surface of the land, not to the copper veins running far underneath it. If someone else figures out a way to get at the copper underneath my land, without interfering with my use of the land I cleared — say they buy an adjacent plot and start digging the pit over there, but then tunnel over to land underneath my plot — then the mine and the copper vein are properly theirs, not mine. I have no more right to demand a title to the copper vein than I have a right to demand that airplanes pay me for passage in the airspace miles above my house.

Page 13:

Rape was defined as an event that occurred without the victim’s consent, that involved the use or threat of force to penetrate the victim’s vagina or anus by penis, tongue, fingers, or object, or the victim’s mouth by penis. The definition included both attempted and completed rape. The following questions were used to screen respondents for rape victimization:

• [Female respondents only] Has a man or boy ever made you have sex by using force or threatening to harm you or someone close to you? Just so there is no mistake, by sex we mean putting a penis in your vagina.

• Has anyone, male or female, ever made you have oral sex by using force or threat of force? Just so there is no mistake, by oral sex we mean that a man or boy put his penis in your mouth or someone, male or female, penetrated your vagina or anus with their mouth.

• Has anyone ever made you have anal sex by using force or threat of harm? Just so there is no mistake, by anal sex we mean that a man or boy put his penis in your anus.

• Has anyone, male or female, ever put fingers or objects in your vagina or anus against your will or by using force or threats?

• Has anyone, male or female, ever attempted to make you have vaginal, oral, or anal sex against your will, but intercourse or penetration did not occur?

Page 3:

Exhibit 1: Persons Raped or Physically Assaulted in Lifetime by Sex of Victim

	Percentage		Number
Type of Assault	Women (n=8,000)	Men (n=8,000)	Women (100,697,000)	Men (92,748,000)
Total rape	17.6	3.0	17,722,672	2,782,440
Completed	14.8	2.1	14,903,156	1,947,708
Attempted only	2.8	0.9	2,819,516	834,732

17.5% of women is a little more than 1:6. 3.0% of men is a little more than 1:33.

Please note that this is not based on police reports. A good thing, too. Since over 90% of rapes are never reported to police, there is no serious research on sexual assault that you could possibly base on police reports. The research is based on carefully constructed anonymous telephone surveys of a (very large) random sample (N=~16,000) of men and women. There is no particular incentive for people to lie about it or conceal their experiences, as far as I can tell.

Sexual abuse against men and boys is appalling, and it happens to a lot more men and boys than people think. But it is very infrequent compared to sexual abuse against women and girls. I’d really urge you to make some serious effort at reading some of the social science research on this topic before you start trying to make up ways to get around what seems to be the obvious conclusion of that research.

About 1 out of every 6 women in the United States has been sexually assaulted at some point in her life.

That’s pretty fucking normal.

P.S.: There is no such thing as the “fallacy of constitution.” Maybe you are thinking of the fallacy of composition. If so, you’re misapplying the term. (The fallacy of composition is the fallacy of presuming that properties possessed by each of the parts of a whole severally must be possessed by the whole as well.) Perhaps the phrase you’re looking for is “hasty generalization?” Ben’s comments don’t commit that fallacy, either, but at least the term would match the charge you’re making.

Movies that lots of people love that I detest/don’t care for/am left completely cold by:

• A Beautiful Mind has been mentioned several times, but it’s a very good pick. The worst moment in the movie, among many, was the fabricated Nobel acceptance speech in which he nattered on about the schlock-romance we’d just spent the movie watching. Nash’s actual acceptance speech was about math. In general, this movie needed less love and more math.

• Kids. Pointless wallowing in depravity and despair, with no redeeming virtues whatsoever.

Movies I love that other people hate on:

• Bamboozled. A lot of people seemed to get pissed off at the movie because they expected a straight comedy but the movie had other plans. Well, they were wrong and the movie was right.

Movies I probably won’t ever bother to see:

• Napoleon Dynamite

• Crash

• Pulp Fiction, Resevoir Dogs, blah blah blah

Oh. I can’t believe I forgot the following for the I-hated-it—but-others-loved-it list:

• Fight Club. Oh good God what trash.

… And then Andrea Dworkin and other insane feminists go back in time and become publicly associated with the suffrage movement: “All men are evil, all sex is rape, all women are virtuous and no man can ever be.”

I know that this is tangential to the point that you were trying to make, but Andrea Dworkin never actually said this or anything like it. (Neither did Catharine MacKinnon, for what that’s worth.) In fact Dworkin rather angrily denounced the last two notions in her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. Whether you agree or disagree with Dworkin’s positions, these descriptions of her views are exposed fabrications, and should not be repeated.

Now, the substantive point:

Suppose that in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement wasn’t associated with nice peaceful ministers like MLK, but only with the “kill whitey” Black Panther types. Do you think legal segregation would have ended sooner or later, had that been the case? I’d say much later.

Just so we’re clear, Martin Luther King was certainly not very widely thought of as a “nice peaceful minister!” On the contrary, he was repeatedly slammed as an “extremist,” a reckless agitator, and a Communist, both by his open enemies and also by white liberals and “moderates” within the black clergy. He wrote about this in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, concluding “So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? … So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

I’d make similar comments about the principled radicals who were instrumental in the victory of the suffrage movement (Alice Paul, the Pankhursts), the abortion rights movement (NARAL, Redstockings), the abolitionist movement (Garrison, Douglass, John Brown), the gay liberation movement (the Stonewall rioters, GLF, Lavender Menace), etc. Broadly speaking, I think that social respectability and coming off as pleasing to either your open enemies or the stifling “moderates” and “centrists” means precisely nothing to the prospects for a social movement’s success. The people who move the world are very often treated by mainstream opinion as stupid, blinkered, reckless, over-zealous, or simply insane. The important thing is not diplomacy but honesty and tenacity; the problem with Mussolinists who sometimes pose as libertarians is not that they make libertarianism look crazy to the statists (who cares?) but rather because they make us look too “reasonable” to Power. If they make us look crazy to some people, the problem is that they make us look crazy for the wrong reasons; their belligerent bellowing drowns out the “crazy” ideas from genuine radicals who the mainstream dismisses as lunatics for all the right ones.

Jennifer,

I think that the basic problem with professional libertarians is that they accept the legitimacy of the State. And in order to keep their positions as policy wonks, instead of looking for an honest line of work, they have to continuously act and speak on the presumptions that written Constitutions can authorize government powers over non-consenting third parties, that there are “compelling State interests” that the government can legitimately pursue, etc. Once you’ve already signed on for governmentally organized, coercively monopolized, collectivist rot in the name of continent-spanning “National Defense,” you’ve already accepted the principle that governments can go around bulldozing individual people’s rights for the higher purposes of military strategy and power politics, in the form of foreign spying, war, diplomatic collective-bargaining, domestic repression, etc. From there on out, the rest—domestic spying, torture, Star Chamber courts, internment camps, world empire, etc.—is just haggling over the price.

Incidentally, Medved also rehashed the same material in a longer whitepaper for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies [sic], which he co-authored with Michael Lackner, entitled “The Betrayal of Captain America.” (I’m surprised they didn’t go for a title like “Subversion of the Innocent.”) Lackner is especially outraged by the suggestion that U.S. intelligence agencies would ever be involved in drug-running, and Medved is up in arms at the “blame-America logic” involved in stories about the use of African-American G.I.s for life-destroying medical experimentation.

God knows that could never happen here.