The Boy Who Could Not Shiver And Shake is great, but it does involve some fairly intense ghostly things towards the end of the story. On the other hand, the main way that Our Hero wins out in the end is indeed by managing to be completely insensitive to absolutely any horror the supernatural can throw at him. If there is aesthetic work being done, Our Hero's great virtue is apparently supposed to be that he is completely unworked-upon by it.

It's a weird story.

all-left.net is run by Roderick, not by me.

For what it’s worth, I certainly agree that our essay should not be the only thing cited in a discussion of libertarian feminism.

The “Libertarian Feminism” essay was not written in ignorance of ALF or the work that y’all have done. It would not be too much to say that if it weren’t for ALF I probably never would have become a libertarian — it was specifically a couple of essays by you, Sharon, and some others by Joan Kennedy Taylor, which really opened me up to the possibilities of radical individualism, and taught me my first and most important lessons on libertarian and market anarchist approaches to social justice. (It’s the libertarian part that I needed convincing on. As a man I am come to feminism with a certain distance that women don’t have — but I’m not exactly writing from the outside looking in, either. While I’ve seen my share of ivory towers, I am not a professional academic, and I actually came to libertarian thought by way of years of prior work within local feminist groups, GLBT groups, and anti-rape/anti-battery activism — work which started for some pretty heavy personal as well as political reasons — and which eventually lead to anarcha-feminist organizing efforts, which lead…..)

It is true that men writing critical assessments of women’s work, including (especially?) in the feminist movement, are necessarily in a tricky position, and we are prone to all kinds of dumb moves and bad faith. No doubt in that essay and elsewhere I’ve neglected a lot that oughtn’t have been neglected and said things that are off-kilter or mistaken. But I don’t think it’s fair to infer from a failure to talk about something in the essay that we are oblivious, or don’t think that it’s important; lots of things we wanted to talk about, we didn’t get the chance to. I don’t think we claimed that no 20th/21st century libertarian feminists ever drew a connection between patriarchy and statism, or that Wendy McElroy is the only voice of “libertarian feminism” out there. Certainly the discussion (in section 2) of a number of common libertarian errors about feminism wasn’t intended to suggest that there aren’t any libertarian feminists who have pointed out and corrected those errors. If what we wrote, or what we neglected to write, does suggest that, then that’s absolutely a mistake, and I’ll publicly retract it.

For whatever it’s worth, in the essay we do allude to ALF and discuss an article by Joan Kennedy Taylor which appeared in the ALF News — but unfortunately, the format of the paper being what it is, we spend much more time (including in that section) talking about the points on which we disagree rather than the points where we agree. Similarly, we hardly canvass the whole range (as if we could!) of non-libertarian radical feminist thought (we only deal at length with one major instance — Catharine MacKinnon’s discussion of formal consent under patriarchy — and briefly mention a handful of other figures); and we hardly talk about any concrete examples of antifeminist libertarians by name (Hans Hoppe is in there, I guess). All I can plead is that the essay was presented live and so subject to limitations of time and the audience’s attention, never intended to be a comprehensive overview of anything, only an elucidation of a few conceptual issues that we see as especially important in finding the most promising strands of thought and action — by doing some totally incomplete and regrettably selective engagements on a handful of points that might help bring those conceptual issues out as clearly as possible. It’s certainly not intended either to be the first or the last thing that anyone reads on the subject of libertarian feminism — if it’s of any use at all, it will only be as something read alongside a lot of other broader, deeper, and more comprehensive material (which absolutely includes a lot of the work by Sharon Presley and other women in ALF, and I’m sorry if anything we said or anything we left out ever suggested otherwise). If the essay has been taken as an attempt at a comprehensive statement rather than a brief attempt to engage in a much, much wider conversation, then I can only say that I’m sorry for that, and the bit about pointing back and onward to the foundational works in the feminist tradition is really seriously meant — and work like “Government is Women’s Enemy” is as foundational as anything else I could mention.

dsatyglesias writes: “If you oppose universal health care, you by definition support letting people who can’t afford health care die.”

Maybe so. (Certainly, there are plenty of conservatives who are all too comfortable with — or even enthusiastic about — a lot of needless suffering in the world.)

But I hope that you realize that not everyone who supports universal healthcare supports government healthcare, and not everyone who opposes government healthcare opposes universal healthcare. The one might follow from the other if the only way to get universal coverage were by means of a political guarantee of coverage. But that’s not so: there are folks who oppose government healthcare because they think corporate healthcare is awesome and they don’t mind if people die; but there are also folks who oppose government healthcare because they support non-governmental, non-corporate universal coverage through grassroots social organization and community mutual aid. (See for example http://radgeek.com/gt/2007/10/25/radical_healthcare/ or the closing sections of http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/health-care-debate-meaningful/ .)

Of course, that leaves open the question of whether they (we — I’m one of ’em) are right about the best means for getting universal coverage. Maybe social means are inadequate; or maybe there is some reason, which has yet to be mentioned, why governmental control is preferable, as a means for getting it, to voluntary associations for mutual aid. But whether the position is right or wrong, it’s certainly not one that can be answered simply by defining it out of existence, as you do when you pretend that the only alternatives available are (1) corporate coverage of only those who can afford it; or else (2) universal coverage by means of government mandates; as if there were no (3) universal coverage by non-governmental means.

I can confirm that this did indeed get mentioned — in more or less exactly those words — at least a couple times in the thread.

Of course, the apparent criticism there really is just bizarre. If you’re supposed to answer the question of what happens to the guy right now, while taking the entire political-economic status quo for granted, then the answer to “Who will pay for his care?” is presumably either that he’ll be left to die, or that taxpayers will pick up the tab, depending on where he is hospitalized and on the particulars of his case. But presumably the point of asking the question was supposed to be that you’re interested in the question of who ought to pay for his care, and what might happen if you changed the statist quo in at least some respects?

But if you’re allowed to consider one way in which the statist quo might change (e.g. by zeroing out tax subsidies for care or coverage), then it seems odd to slam someone for saying that what really ought to happen is that the statist quo might change in some other way (e.g. by zeroing out subsidies, monopolies and cartels that ratchet up the costs of medical care). It’s exactly as if some Progressive had answered the same question by talking about single-payer and Roderick started yelling, “Don’t be irrelevant! We don’t have single-payer and the guy is in a coma right now. What are you going to do about that, whiz kid?”

This robbing at gun point metaphor is always trotted out by libertarians
but it is never accurate. The government is democratically elected, and
the robber is not.

Well, great: they haven't got your consent; but they have got majority support.

So before you just had a robber; and now the robber has a posse.

This means that the government has validity even when you do not agree with it.

That conclusion does not follow from the premises that you've listed. You will at least need an auxiliary premise that democratic elections are sufficient confer legitimacy on the use of legal force. But of course there's no reason why a libertarian need believe that that's true. Most libertarians believe that there are at least some limits on what any government can legitimately force you to do, no matter how popular that government or that policy may be.

So ask your 8 year old son this: "if a duly and constitutionally elected
body of government pass a constitutionally valid law, but you disagree
with it, do you still have to comply?"

Good Lord. If I had an 8 year old son, I'd hope that I would have brought him up better than to think that constitutions or majority votes ought to be treated as a veto on your conscience. As a notable Baptist minister once pointed out, "One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"

So Perry is another George Wallace . . .?

No. Rick Perry has killed far more people than George Wallace did.

Should Perry lose sleep for his participation in a system which the majority of Americans believe moral, and which is the law of the land in Texas, …

If your question is meant to be a rhetorical question, then this is an absurd appeal to popularity, followed by an absurd appeal to authority. If your question was not meant to be rhetorical, then the answer is, yes. Majority approval is not a reason to abolish your conscience, and neither is “the law of the land.” And if Rick Perry swore to uphold a law which requires injustice, then that may well be a problem for Rick Perry, but it’s not a problem he can get out of simply by doing the evil he once swore to do.

Losing sleep over your previous decisions leads to becoming indecisive on your next.

Well, good. If experience has shown that there’s a reasonable probability that what you’re about to do is seriously wrong, then maybe you ought to take a moment to second-guess yourself.

… for what they believe is justice

Right; what they “believe is justice,” in this particular case, is killing prisoners. So they were cheering for killing prisoners. How does that differ from what Roderick already said they were doing?

Seriously, where can I get ALL buttons?

sonv.libertarianleft.org/distro/#buttons

I’ve moved from Southern Nevada, and the Distro has moved with me, but the buttons are certainly still available, and when I have the new ALL Distro website set up in the next week or so, that link will still work (thanks to the magic of HTTP redirects).

How do you sleep after executing your job as elected governor of Texas?

It’s a fair question. Having a “job” isn’t a good reason to abolish your conscience. No job — not even any government job — is more important than the obligations to be decent and just.

If George Wallace rose from the grave in order to run for President again, I sure hope that someone would ask him how he slept at night after executing his job as the elected governor of Alabama. Because that domming governor sure hurt an awful lot of people, and if he wasn’t ashamed of it (as he never was, to his dying day), that doesn’t speak well to his humanity, and it also is a good reason to loathe and fear the prospect of such a man gaining even more power over other people.

The crowd may have been cheering for the people who may be able to sleep a little easier knowing that those who killed their spouse or child are no longer breathing on this earth. Barbaric.

Well, you lay on the sarcasm pretty thick, but the suggestion — that you might ought to cheer at the thought of killing a helpless prisoner, premeditated and in cold blood, in order to help the victims’ family with their insomnia — really is barbaric. Other people’s lives are not yours to sacrifice for the sake of somebody else’s emotional closure.

Well, OK. If that's how you want to use the word "free market," that's fine. Just as long as everyone else knows that that is how you are using it.

But it wasn't how I was using the term, nor how Juan Cole was using the term — in those contexts the term is being used to something that involves some considerable background conditions to be met — e.g. not only that the two people making that particular transaction at the margin have agreed to do so, but also that competitive entry and exit from the market must be possible without coercive interference; that they are exchanging things that genuinely and rightly belong to them rather than things which really belong to someone else (or in general that the exchange violates no identifiable third party's person or property); that other interrelated markets for the inputs and the outputs for the goods that were exchanged are themselves relatively free in the same sense; etc. And it is all of these features that the monopolized sectors of the so-called "free markets" of the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries have so notably lacked — due to government monopoly, government subsidy, legally-fabricated property claims, etc.

My recent post M@MM for July 2011 and August 2011: Vices, Crimes, Corporate Power, Privatization, and mo’ Problems.

Kevin didn't write this article. I did.

I don't think I described Hardin as an "economist."

What I said is that the "Tragedy of the Commons" is an example of "ahistorical hypotheticals or game-theoretic models," not an example of a historical argument. Which it is: Hardin hardly ever attempts to connect the problem he outlines with actual historical commons or episodes on them. This should not be surprising: Hardin wasn't an historian, either.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with Hardin's specialty (ecology), or with non-historical arguments; but when Anarchists are accused of being "ahistorical," in a conversation where they have been citing the actual historical record of accumulated fortunes, and their interlocutors have been arguing about the imagined outcomes in some purely hypothetical free markets, using game-theoretic models derived from the non-historical work of an ecologist — well, that sounds a bit like special pleading.
My recent post M@MM for July 2011 and August 2011: Vices, Crimes, Corporate Power, Privatization, and mo’ Problems.