In other words, Comrade Halderman, Roderick’s reasons for failing to whole-heartedly support Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution may be subjectively neutral and nuanced, but clearly his position is objectively pro-fascist.

I also hear he’s a member of the international Trotskyist-anarchist conspiracy.

VRB: Why is Lincoln singled out when millions of lives had been ruined under all the presidents until then, even the ones that libertarians honor …

I can’t speak for libertarians as a group, but I am a libertarian and I can’t think of a single President of the United States that I “honor.” I happen to think that all of them were perfectly repulsive, and those who preceded Lincoln deserve special contempt, both for their ongoing use of Federal bayonets to enforce fugitive slave laws and protect Southern slavers from uprisings, and also for their repeated forays into ethnic cleansing and genocide against American Indians. Other libertarians, especially those who are minarchists rather than (like me) anarchists, might be somewhat less sweepingly harsh. On the other hand, they’re also likely to be somewhat less harsh towards Lincoln in particular.

However, the reason that Lincoln’s under discussion at the moment, rather than every other President in U.S. history, is that the post is about secession and the U.S. Civil War. Since Lincoln was President during the U.S.’s largest-scale secession crisis and during the U.S. Civil War, it makes sense to discuss Lincoln, but going on about how I loathe and despise most or all of the other Presidents in U.S. history would have been somewhat off the topic.

Jason,

Just so we’re clear, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest, in setting up my hypothetical, that I was under any delusions as to the motives of Lincoln or the other Federalis in the U.S. Civil War. I’m well aware that the liberation of the slaves was not in the least a war aim, at least at the beginning of the war. Part of the point of the abstractified hypothetical was to make an a fortiori argument: if anything could justify the reconquest and occupation of the South on libertarian grounds, it would be the liberation of Southern slaves. But the liberation of Southern slaves would not in fact justify the reconquest and occupation of the South, even if (contrary to fact) that had been the cause that the Feds went to war for. Thus nothing could justify the reconquest and occupation of the South on libertarian grounds. (There might be a legitimate case for something different — such as the use of armed raids to liberate slaves, when not followed by conquest and occupation — but what it might justify is different from what actually happened in the U.S. Civil War precisely to the extent that it doesn’t involve any attempt to forcibly override white Southerners’ decisions to secede.)

To the extent that the Feds engaged in a brutal war and occupation, killing, maiming, and ruining millions of people in the process, for reasons that had nothing to do with the liberation of Southern slaves, I think that that makes the Feds’ position that much more repulsive, and obviously indefensible.

As for the rest of your discussion, it’s interesting, and deserves a careful reply, but the reply will probably take more space than I have here. Perhaps soon, on my blog.

… big thinkers like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and the like …

May I suggest that Thomas Jefferson be excluded from consideration, along with any other so-called “liberal” or “libertarian” who unrepentantly presumed to dominate his fellow human beings and force them into an abject condition of chattel slavery?

As for genuinely libertarian heroes, off the top of my head, I’d like to recommend Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Moore Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Ezra Heywood, Angela Tilton Heywood, Benjamin Tucker, William Graham Sumner, Mark Twain, Dyer Lum, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Samuel E. Konkin III.

For what it’s worth, to-day is the 200th birthday of Lysander Spooner, one of America’s foremost radical libertarian heroes.

William H. Stoddard: The trouble with this sort of argument, though, is that it treats the legal term “animal” as synonymous with the biological term “animal.”

Well, I stipulated that I was considering the term as “used in contemporary English,” by which I mean ordinary English rather than a particular technical argot. If I were a wagering man, I’d wager that in most ordinary contexts of use “animal” is a deferential term in which non-specialists defer to biologists (not lawyers) for the referent-fixing criteria.

William H. Stoddard: Though whether Superman is nonhuman seems debatable. There’s lots of material from DC that suggests that he and human women are interfertile.

But I don’t think that being interfertile with human beings would make Superman human, or a member of the biological species H. sapiens. Species are constituted (among other things) by their common evolutionary heritage, which Superman — who has an unrelated alien lineage — does not share. (You can hybridize peaches, plums, and apricots; but that doesn’t make them all members of the same species.)

Roderick: If Superman doesn’t count as an animal because he’s not biologically related to homo sapiens, then perhaps Lois Lane doesn’t either, because homo sapiens is the name for a species in our universe whereas Lois Lane lives in the DC universe and is not biologically related to anybody in our universe.

Well, if homo sapiens names a natural kind, surely it names the same natural kind in every possible world, and in a given possible world W it is only the case that humans in W have to be related to all the other humans in W, not that they have to be related (how?) to humans in other worlds not actual relative to W. In order to prove that there are at least some humans in the D.C. universe, you just need to find at least one actual human who exists in the D.C. universe as well as in @. Any such must also be human in the D.C. universe as well as in @ (since humans have humanity essentially, not accidentally). There are in fact plenty of cases of transworld identity (e.g. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler have both appeared). So as long as it’s part of the story that Lois Lane et al. are appropriately related, evolutionarily speaking, to these known humans, Lois Lane et al. will also count as members of the human species.

Black Bloke: Nivens ignored a lot of things for the sake of comedy.

Too bad, I guess, since the essay is not very funny.

Etymologically, “bestiality” would seem to be best defined as “sex with a beast,” i.e. a nonrational animal. So I think Lois is O.K. to the extent that Supes counts as rational.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that he counts as an animal at all — at least, as the term is used in contemporary English. Your argument seems to presuppose that it’s the name of a functional or structural kind, rather than the name of a particular biological kingdom. If it’s the latter, then the natural kind can’t include anything that’s not interrelated with the other members of the kingdom, meaning that, except on a theory of panspermia, no alien life form at all could count as an “animal” except in a scare-quoted, analogical usage.

There’s no real trade-off between racism and statism involved in this scandal.

As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the nastiest things that were written about black people in the early-90s newsletter articles were said in the context of articles directly calling for more aggressive and violent police tactics. Or, sometimes, directly making excuses for actual acts of police brutality–among them the police beating of Rodney King (that was in the same article as the crack about the welfare checks, and also the line that about 95% of Black men in D.C. could be considered “semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” whatever that means).

So what we’ve actually got, in the case in question, is both racism and violent statism wrapped up in one vile package.

Steev,

Well, you can use a word to mean whatever you want it to mean, but if you hope to be understood by other people, your meaning should probably have some kind of connection with the way that other people have historically used the word.

The original “Progressives” — Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, etc. — were well aware of American anarchists, and they despised them. In fact, in the run-up to World War I, those with influence in the media blacklisted anarchists (such as Randolph Bourne) from publishing their writing, and during and after World War I, those with political power (such as Woodrow Wilson) had thousands of American anarchists (such as Emma Goldman) beaten, arrested, jailed, prosecuted, and/or exiled from the country.

I see no reason why anarchists should want to associate ourselves with a historical movement that has done everything in its power to hinder or destroy us.

Micha: And I see the milquetoastiness of IHS as a feature, not a bug. Inforcing ideological uniformity entails devolving into a cult, ala Ayn Rand’s inner circle.

I don’t understand this argument at all, Micha. Arthur was referring to the way in which the so-called “urbane” libertarian outlets tend either (1) to shy away from hard or unpopular applications of libertarian principles — such as anarchism or criticism of bayonet-point Unionism — in the name of public relations, or else (2) to hold positively the wrong view on what libertarian principles entail. If (1) they are dissembling about their views in order to avoid public embarrassment, and if (2) they are being inconsistent. In either case, criticizing dissembling or criticizing inconsistency is a distinct issue from intolerance of dissent, n’est-ce pas?

This is not to say that the paleos in particular haven’t been intolerant of dissent on many occasions. They certainly have been. But I think the reasons have to do with something other than the radicalism of their views.

Micha: I’ll take the minarchist, pro-interventionist deviationism of Beltway libertarians over the not-so-thinly veiled racism, homophobia, goldbug-crankism, evolution-denial, fundamentalist Christianity and Confederacy apologetics of the Paleo alternative any day of the week.

Well, O.K.; it’s your business which features you choose to treat as decisive or defeating for dealing with someone as a friend, ally, or comrade. But I don’t understand how this meshes with your previous argument. As far as “enforcing ideological uniformity” goes, how is treating anti-racism, gay-positivity, evolutionism, “urbanity,” “cosmopolitanism,” or whatever as a litmus test different in kind from treating anti-interventionism or Civil War revisionism as a litmus test? Surely both of these involve demanding a certain degree of ideological uniformity; it’s just that they differ in the particular ideological features that they require.

This is not to adjudicate whether the paleos are right about their litmus tests, or whether you’re right about your litmus tests, or whether you’re both wrong, or whether it’s just a matter of taste. But I don’t see that the difference between their standards and your standards amounts to what you seem to suggest it amounts to.

(Personally, I tend to think that you’re both right, or both wrong, depending on the level and purpose of association that you’re talking about — who you’re willing to form issue-based coalition with, who you’re willing to read and cite, who you’re willing to consider yourself part of a common movement with, and who you’re willing to be friends with are all quite different questions.)

Not being a hip or “urbane” libertarian, perhaps these questions were not directed at me. Nevertheless…

Mark: Do you judge Thomas Jefferson so harshly? He was no less than a slave owner!

Of course I do. What a stupid question. Why would you take it for granted that libertarians must approve of slavers, rapists, hypocritical scoundrels, and Presidents of the United States?

Mark: Do you distance yourself from the Declaration of Independence because you worry what other people think that says about your views of racism?

No. Admiration for a document or an argument, and admiration for its author, are two different things.

Mark: Do you think that it was a tactical mistake for the founders to establish the minarchist government they did …

Yes. Also a moral mistake.

Mark: … should they have established a familiar tyranny on American soil until such time as they agreed on an ethically pure political philosophy?

No.

They should have simply left people alone. You act as if this were not an option. Why?