Twisty / Jill of “I Blame the Patriarchy” (a radical feminist who also suffered from breast cancer a few years back) has something of a regular series on the Breast Cancer Awareness/exploitation industry, and on the worthlessness of the Komen Foundation in particular. (Crunch for the Cure, It’s Gratuitous Erotica Month! etc.)

Of course, the notion that criticizing Breast Cancer Awarifying campaigns or the entrenched corporate interests behind them (and Komen is nothing if not a well-run corporation) is “migoynist” is a straightforward result of treating breast cancer awareness as a metonymy for women’s health. Just as governments have succeeded in branding themselves so that anyone opposing the dunderheaded belligerence or parasitism or international mass-murder of, say, the United States government is therefore taken to be “anti-American” (as if the U.S. government were America, rather than a tiny, parasitic minority oppressing and robbing from the country and people of America), so also Komen and the rest of the Pink-Ribbon brigade have managed to brand themselves successfully as being simply identical with women’s health (hey, it’s got lady-parts, and unlike other women-specific health issues — like women’s reproductive healthcare — nobody will get boycotted or firebombed for associating themselves with it), so that only someone who is against women’s healthcare, or indeed against women as such, could think to criticize them or to suggest that there are other, more productive outlets for people’s resources (including the resources of those who would like to do something about pressing women’s health issues) than that particular patriarchally-correct donation-hole.

@Alex Peak: “The problem with the whole it’s-okay-to-initiate-force-against-nonviolent-assholes idea is problematic because of the slippery slope.”

I suppose that there is a slope, and maybe the slope is slippery, but is that really what you see as the problem with the judgment that “it’s Ok to use violence against people who are being major assholes”? I mean, when I read something like that, my main problem with it is that it’s a despicable sentiment, which praises thuggishness and the use of violence with the explicit purpose of domination and control. It may also have downstream consequences on other people’s behaviors in different situations which also suck, but even if it does not have those downstream consequences, it’s still a pretty sucky attempt when it comes to being a human being.

@Alex Peak: “None of this ought to be taken as a rejection of what Charles Johnson calls thick libertarianism. My understanding of (certain approaches to) thick libertarianism is that it is the view that liberty would be most easily achieved or maintained if society also adopted certain norms—e.g., rejecting racism, sexism, and homophobia—but that an embrace of these norms needs not, and ought not, be coupled with a rejection of the nonaggression axiom.”

Thanks for the nod; you’re certainly right that the thick conceptions of libertarianism that I would defend are not conceptions where the idea is to provide loopholes for justified aggressive force or fraud, or where the “thickness” erases the content of the “libertarianism” in select cases. The idea is that there are forms of oppression, abuse, social evils, etc. which are acted out by means other than physical force or fraud, and it’s important to recognize these where they exist. Not so that you can respond to them with aggression, but rather so that non-aggressive forms of oppression or abuse can be met with serious, confrontational, nonviolent resistance.

@Alex Peak: “And libertarianism, very simply, is the belief that people should be free from aggression”

@Alex Gleason: “Apparently you have cast Egoists out of the libertarian movement, Mr. Peak.”

I’m not sure how. There is nothing in most versions of philosophical egoism which require the egoist to be in favor of aggression (as Alex defines it). Indeed, egoists have generally been against that, and thought that people should be free from it; although they suggest that it’s instrumentally or strategically valuable, rather than being valuable for its own sake. That’s rather the point of Stirner’s Union of Egoists — the claim that there are egoistic reasons for free selves to abandon aggression in favor of mutual alliance.

@Jacob Vardy: “are you familiar with the Spanish term ‘acracia?'”

There is a cognate term in English-language philosophical writing, usually spelled “akrasia.” Unfortunately it already has another, mostly unrelated meaning It got picked up because the Greek moral philosophers wrote about the problem of ἀκρασία, which used to be translated “incontinence” but now is more commonly just transliterated to “akrasia.” The Greeks (and hence now English-speaking philosophers commenting on the problem) used it to refer to the predicament of people who believed in a moral principle but didn’t live up to it — who acted contrary to it. Thus Socrates seems to have argued that akrasia was impossible (if you acted contrary to the principle, he held that you must not really have believed in it in the end); Aristotle thought that it was possible but had something nuanced to say about the best way to describe the predicament; etc. Anyway, that usage also came about because of the literal meaning of “without command”; but the English-language use is meant torefer to a lack of control over yourself (the Greeks’ idea being that akratics were enslaved by their own passions or appetites), rather than a lack of control over others.

@Drew: “How about this – the state is antithetical …to individual liberty”

Isn’t that what a libertarian (at least, the kind of libertarian who would refer to the State as a criminal gang) usually means by the statement that the State is criminal?

@Anok Kropotkin: “Oh, and ‘crime’ is a general term used to define what governing bodies consider undesirable behavior.”

I don’t think that’s the only meaning of the word “crime.”

Certainly, sometimes people use “crime” just to mean “whatever the government has forbidden.” But when someone describes, say, Donald Rumsfeld as a “war criminal,” or when someone describes the Holocaust or other examples of state mass-murder as “crimes against humanity,” that they mean to claim that Pinochet or the Nazis or whoever were somehow doing something illegal. What they did was perfectly legal, according to government law, and authorized by the governing bodies (since these criminals were in charge of the governing bodies). So to describe it as “criminal” must mean something other than simply disapproval from governing bodies.

What makes you think that the Kochs have “a bizarre anti-Ludwig von Mises bias.” They’ve funded Misesian economic research (especially at GMU) for decades. It’s certainly true that they have a very bitter conflict with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But not because of some mysterious beef they have with Ludwig von Mises (who was by then several years dead).

Rather, what happened is that, the year before the VMI was founded, the Kochs and Ed Crane had an extremely bitter conflict with Rothbard, who until then had been a founding member of the Cato Institute, and the main person writing their position papers. Rothbard was fired from Cato in 1981. Rothbard certainly did not “leave” Cato in order to “stick with Lew”; he was thrown out of Cato against his will (he maintained illegally — he had “shares” in Cato that the Kochs simply confiscated — but decided not to fight it in court), and Lew set up the VMI in 1982, after Rothbard was gone from Cato, largely in order to provide a new harbor for Murray and his ideas. The Kochs got pissed off about it because they were pissed off at Rothbard, and because the Institute was founded as a direct challenge to Cato’s approach to libertarian advocacy. Not, particularly, because the Institute was named after Ludwig von Mises.

You can read all about the whole sorry story in Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (Chapter 7-8), or (for Rothbard’s side of the story specifically), in Rothbard’s “It Usually Ends With Ed Crane.”

Crispy: “the very fact that a group would have ‘diffuse, locally based structures’ is extremely troubling to the naacp. i suppose now they will be attacking … the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for being too local and diffuse.”

Well, hell, why not? That basically was their criticism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s back during the 1960s — when the NAACP was constantly ragging on sit-in groups and then SNCC for not having “structure” (meaning unitary centralized chain of command) and for being too locally-driven, which supposedly led to adventurism and getting local movements into all kinds of messes that NAACP chapters and the Legal Defense Fund would then have to clean up after. (Hence, e.g., the recriminations over the fizzle-out in Albany, efforts to shut SNCC reps out of civil rights “unified leadership” summits and fundraising events, etc.) To abandon this proud tradition of pissing and moaning about diffuse, locally based movements, and those factions of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that actually got some shit done here and there, would mean abandoning all kinds of time-honored NAACP traditions. (Of course I refer here to the NAACP central command. NAACP local chapters did all kinds of courageous work alongside the direct-action movement, and generally didn’t waste time wagging fingers at SNCC’s lack of “structure.”)

@Angela,

I’m sorry if you find the essay disappointing. I certainly didn’t co-write the essay intending to make women “grateful;” I co-wrote it intending to argue for a specific point of view. I am glad where people have found it useful for clarifying or stimulating thoughts; sorry where they haven’t.

I also don’t think the point of the essay was to “rehabilitate” much of anyone, but rather than my trying to guess here, could you let me know who “the woman who destroyed feminism” is?

@Angela: “‘left-libertarian’ is just another name for another hen’s circle of white males.”

Maybe. Most libertarian circles are predominantly white, and predominantly male. To the extent it’s true, I think that’s a problem with the movement. But that’s not an argument against the content of the paper, is it? (And the fact that I know “left-libertarians” who are not white, and left-libertarians who are not male, is not an argument for it, either.)

@Angela: “You either believe in the NAP or you don’t. All these new names for libertarianism are bullshit”

“Libertarianism,” as I understand it, is a new name for “Anarchism.” (When it’s not — e.g. among Bob Barr supporters or Constitution fundamentalists or bomb-the-world Objectivists — “libertarianism” is generally not something I want anything to do with.) I’m not sure that makes a name bullshit; it just means that language evolves and people have shifting purposes in communicating.

In any case, Roderick and I both believe in the NAP, as we wrote in that essay and have said repeatedly all over the place. But he and I also believe in some other things that not all NAP-adherents believe in — for example, about the relationship between the NAP and some other social or political commitments that I have; and about the best strategy for achieving the political goal of a non-aggressive form of society; etc. So when communicating with other NAP-adherents about why I disagree with some of the details of their approach, it’s handy to have a label to help sum up where I’m coming from, and give a quick suggestion about the differences I have with them. Hence the “left-” prefix. I could just say (using the oldest term for our approach) that I am an “individualist anarchist,” like Tucker, Spooner, or de Cleyre). But that doesn’t mean as much to people now as it did in 1892, so sometimes “left-libertarian” is the best way of clarifying what I’m on about.

@Lassiter: “There is a percentage of left-feminists, female and male genders alike, who really, truly, deeply believe that women, by their nature, need government and laws to protect them from themselves.”

It is certainly true that there are statist feminists, and statist feminists often propose statist laws in the attempt to advance their political goals. Fortunately, there are many feminists (including the radical feminists we discuss in the paper) who have provided valuable critiques questioning that approach. Some are Anarchists; others are not. Those that are not haven’t carried their critiques through to consistent anti-statism; but I don’t need for people to be 100% ideologically consistent anti-statists in order to learn something from their writing or example.

In any case: whatever other “left-feminists” may believe, Roderick and I are Anarchists. We reject the claim that statist “protective” laws are necessary, desirable, or legitimate as means to feminist goals. For reasons that we discuss at some length in the paper.

@Tyler: “Why is there something about feminism written by two men?”

Well, why not?

@Tyler: “why would you not include women in the writing process”

Because it was written to advance a specific argument that Roderick and I had already discussed, in the middle of an ongoing conversation in which we represent only two voices. It’s not a manifesto written by committee, or intended (the Good forbid) to try and say everything that there is to say about libertarian feminism, let alone feminism as such.

@Bryan: “aside from a few questionable/unfortunate comments on homosexuals”

1. Well, aside from that, I think that Hoppe’s expressed views about immigration are both despicable and anti-libertarian (in the sense that he directly proposes continuing — indeed, escalating — massive government violence against innocent victims, solely on the basis of nationality and socioeconomic class).

2. While not involving direct proposals for state aggression, I also think that his expressed views on “internal ranks of authority” within the family (as discussed in the LibFem essay), traditional authority and “natural elites” within society, his qualified praise for hereditary monarchy, and his demand that “libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind” are all absolute rot.

3. I think Hoppe’s comments about homosexuality are rather worse than “questionable” or “unfortunate.” I’m not sure what you have in mind here — do you mean his (ridiculous and insulting) comments about homosexuality and time-preference in his UNLV lectures? His bizarre series of sexuality-related personal attacks on Tom Palmer? His frankly totalitarian insistence (in D:TGTF) that “the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered life-styles, such as, for instance … homosexuality … will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order”? I think these are all pretty despicable, and while you might be able to pass off the first two as personal idiocies of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s, which can be passed over in order to get at the core of his theory, the last — the stuff about his “covenant communities” — is part of the core of what his theory is, of what he thinks a free society has to look like in order to be sustainable. (Much the same goes for, e.g., his Know-Nothing views on immigration, which are also attached to the hip to his picture of “covenant communities.”)

For reference, here’s Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (p. 218): “In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. … There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They–the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism–will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

“It should be obvious then that and why libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind. The current state of moral degeneration, social disintegration and cultural rot is precisely the result of too much–and above all erroneous and misconceived–tolerance. Rather than having all habitual democrats, communists, and alternative lifestylists quickly isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization in accordance with the principles of the covenant, they were tolerated by society.”

Of course, none of this prevents one from citing Hoppe on those occasions where he is right. But may I just suggest that in a paper intended to discuss a radical form of libertarian feminism, I’ve found those occasions pretty rare?

“Against Intellectual Protectionism”

“Keep Your Laws Off My Brain”

“Pro-Market, Pro-Innovation, Anti-Monopoly”

Crispy: “the ‘fair sex’ never had to deal with white man’s burden”

Come on, really man? White women have never had to deal with criticism of their role, real or imagined, in hierarchies of race, class or nation? So, for example, “white feminism” has never been denounced as the “handmaiden of colonialism”?

Crispy: “never had to listen to the careful critique of their hormonal essence”

I’m not sure what “careful” is supposed to be packing into the content of this claim. I think it is obviously ridiculous to claim that women have never had to listen to a critique of their “hormonal” (!) essence, as, for example, supposedly prone to mysterious overwhelming passions and baseless rages.

Not to mention extensive and detailed criticism of being either true or untrue to their “essence” (misogynist men are usually not too discriminating on the point of whether it is part of or contrary to the Eternal-Feminine) by being too micromanaging, too controlling, or too aggressive towards other people, especially towards men. That these critiques are not “careful” critiques (in the sense that they are often obviously stupid, self-interested and largely fantastical, and often summed up simply in the single word, “bitch”) does not mean that they are not pervasive or powerful or consequential critiques, does it?

Brandon:

… how can anyone be more consistently anti-state than Rothbard?

1. By not advocating the enforcement of statist immigration restrictions, as Rothbard did later in his career.

2. By not advocating more stringent government policing, as Rothbard also did later in his career.

3. By not advocating the enforcement of statist copyright laws, as Rothbard did throughout his career.

4. By not advocating the forcible suppression of fractional-reserve banking among informed and consenting adults under the excuse of legal prohibitions on fraud.

5. By not advocating, even tentatively, the nationalization of military-industrial complex firms, as Rothbard did in the middle of his career, during his Left-and-Right phase.

Note that this is all largely independent of whether Rothbard’s savagely authoritarian cultural politics, during the paleo turn, has conflicts with “thicker” conceptions of anti-statism (like Roderick’s or mine) that include commitments to anti-authoritarian Left social and cultural projects. (1)-(5) all have to do with direct issues about calls for violent action by the state or other institutions of legal enforcement, which are issues even on the most emaciated conceptions of libertarianism.

I know that Rothbard very assiduously cultivated his reputation as Mr. Libertarian, as a sort of Parisian-meter-stick for what an resolute, absolutist anti-statist would say about any given issue. And he was really remarkable in his willingness to rigorously think through, to seek out and embrace unflinchingly — even gleefully — the logical consequences of his ethical and political principles, no matter how far out they were from the socio-political status quo and no matter how crazy others might call him. Unlike many a political thinker, his failures in consistency were rarely failures of intellectual courage. But there are plenty of times when he was wrong, plain wrong, sometimes even gleefullly wrong, about what those principles really entailed.

... Well, then there is a rival claimant, and things get correspondingly more complicated. That's a lame non-answer, but I doubt there is any good general

... *That* may be clear, but the would-be forecloser's burden isn't just to show that the current occupier *doesn't* own the house; it's to show that they (the