There are independent reasons why Palmer, or anyone else familiar with anarchocapitalist writing, would be, e.g., familiar with and citing Bruno Leoni, or dealing with a stock set of objections. I doubt that he’s “ripping off” anything from LvMI, just talking from within (whether he likes it or not) a common tradition.

is 11111.

I don’t know if it’s an “Austrian” thing exactly (a lot of anti-IP libertarians these days are also into Austrian economics, but not necessarily because of something distinctive in the Austrian tradition — the present strength of the Mises Institute party line against IP notwithstanding, prior to the 1990s nobody much working in Austrian economics was particularly closely associated with an anti-IP position. (Rothbard opposed patents but supported copyrights, Hayek and Mises didn’t take any strong stance either way, etc.) But in any case, if you’re curious about Roderick’s position, he lays it out in The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights.

Roderick is anti-copyright and anti-patent, so in his view more or less the entirety of Microsoft’s business model depends on more or less aggressive enforcement of a portfolio of government-granted monopolies. (Of course, other businesses also get, and also enforce, and also depend on, copyright monopolies. But the point is presumably that Microsoft is an especially egregious example because it is an especially large and especially hard-driving exploiter of the legal privileges it has. No doubt you could mention other companies in its place; I think if anything AAPL has become a more aggressive and more threatening company in that particular captive market over the course of the past few years.)

I'm sorry if the style made it hard to read. For what it's worth this version of the essay is an academic paper from a couple of academic conferences where there were some definite reasons for dwelling on getting clear on the finer points of some of the conceptual issues involved (since it is written for a number of different audiences, some of whom would be unfamiliar with some of the concepts under discussion, and some of whom would be unfamiliar with other of the concepts under discussion). If it helps you out, though, there is also a much shorter version of the essay that I posted on my blog back in the day: <http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/>.

It's certainly true that in any discussion of statistics on sexual violence, the details of the definition used can significantly change the results. But neither of the sources under discussion (Mary Koss's 1985 study or the CDCP/NIJ National Violence Against Women Survey in 1995-1996) uses a definition of coercion that depends on active, expressed consent, or that would include various forms of, e.g., economic coercion. (These are of course important things to talk about, and Koss's study in particular did also study many forms of emotional, social or economic coercion in sexual relationships other than sexual assault. But the results she found aren't included in the numbers discussing "rape." Koss counted as rape any unwanted sexual encounter where the victim was either forced into sex by the use or threat of violence, or by disabling her with drugs or drink to the point that she was unconscious or could not consent. The NVAWS actually used a more restrictive definition than that: they only counted nonconsensual sex involving penetration, where the victim was forced into sex by violence or by the threat of violence. (So they did not attempt to gather data on rapes committed by disabling the victim with drugs or alcohol.)

The major, order-of-magnitude difference between the numbers that Joe seems to have found in a quick skim, and the numbers that I cite and discuss in the paper, isn't due to different definitions of rape. If he's drawing from the FBI's UCR numbers (as I take it he is), the major, order-of-magnitude difference is due to two things. First, he is presenting numbers that have to do with incidence of rape within a single year, whereas I am presenting numbers that have to do with the prevalence of rape in any year over the course of a lifetime, which is obviously quite a different thing to measure. And second, he is presenting numbers that are based on the number of reports made to the police, whereas I am presenting numbers based on broad, random-sample surveys that don't require contact with the police. But of course there are many reasons why someone would choose not to report a crime to the police, even if the crime happened, and for a lot of reasons rape happens to be a really dramatically underreported crime.

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I haven't any idea where your reference to Freud came from. Certainly not from Koss's or Tjaden and Thoennes's research reports, since none of them are Fruedian psychologists and their empirical methods for gathering data (largely through large, random-sample surveys of people in ordinary circumstances) have nothing at all to do with Freudian psychoanalysis. The book I spend the most time discussing in this paper (Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will) actually contains a number of long passages devoted to extended attacks on Freud's theories about the characteristics of rapists, as well as Freud's and Helene Deutsch's theories of female sexuality. (Early second-wave feminists were in general extremely hostile to Freud, which is not surprising, since orthodox Freudian psychology was in many ways dismissive or actively hostile towards women.)

Finally, I would like to reiterate the point that I make in the footnote discussing Koss's study (note 2): "Koss’s results have, occasionally, become a subject of controversy, including within libertarian circles. This being a philosophy paper, I can happily say that, while I find most of the objections raised against Koss to be ill­-founded, often to the point of intellectual negligence if not dishonesty, the truth or falsity of Koss’s empirical claims is largely independent of the analytical point that I wish to make about the relationship between Brownmiller’s Myrmidon theory and Hayek’s development of the concept of spontaneous order, and the former, empirical question is largely beyond the scope of this paper. However, see Warshaw (1994) for a detailed discussion of Koss’s findings and a defense against some of the most common objections; as well as later studies with quite different survey instruments, such as Tjaden and Thoennes (2000). Nothing essential to the empirical case for the prevalence of violence against women depends solely on the quality of Koss’s research."

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Joe, I don't want to be too high-handed about this, but I can't really find much of anything interesting to discuss in your unsourced judgments about what seems "believable" or "unbelievable" to you off the top of your head, or based on your quick scans of mass media news stories or the textual corpus of popular novels (?!). The numbers that I mentioned in that passage do come from a couple of much-discussed and much-reviewed empirical studies. (In particular, the numbers on male perpetrators come from Koss's study on American college students in the mid-1980s, and the numbers on female victims come from Tjaden and Thoennes's large-sample study of men and women in the US conducted in the late 1990s, which are cited with some discussion in the footnotes. These sources are imperfect and aging social-scientific studies; certainly not eternal truths written in letters of fire. But they are serious studies within a decent-sized research literature, and both their results and the methods used to get those results are extensively discussed both within the articles themselves (which I cited in the essay) and also in secondary literature such as Robin Warshaw's book <cite>I Never Called It Rape</cite> (1994). I don't know where you get your number of ~90,000 rapes committed in 2008; although my best guess (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the number comes from the FBI's number for "forcible rape" in its "Crime in the United States" (CIUS) report for 2008. Is that correct? If so, then you need to keep in mind, first, that CIUS reports are based on extrapolations from statistics reported by police departments that participate in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The number is therefore not an estimate of the number of rapes committed in the United States in 2008. It's an estimate of the number of rapes reported to the police. But virtually all the research on sexual violence since the 1980s has demonstrated that police reports are an extraordinarily unreliable source for information about the incidence or prevalence of rape: repeated social science and public health studies on sexual assault have shown that somewhere around 90% of all sexual assaults are never reported to the police. Also that there is an important difference, which you seem to be skipping right over, between numbers that have to do with one year incidence, and numbers that have to do with lifetime prevalence. We can talk about some of these issues if you want, but in all honesty I think if you want to discuss them intelligently it is going to be more important that you take some time to read some of the background literature that I'm citing, and to talk about the virtues and defects of the studies themselves (certainly they have both). Not just riffing on how intuitively believable or unbelievable the result seems to you, without any consideration of the evidence or argument cited from which those conclusions were obtained.

Now, if you don't think that fears about the possibility of sexual violence significantly shape the day-to-day attitudes and behaviors of many women, I can only suggest that you talk to some women you know (about, e.g., what it feels like to walk home alone at night, just to take an obvious example). Or failing that, you could at least read some of the chapters of Brownmiller's book — especially the four chapters toward the end of the book — which do talk at great length both about day-to-day anxieties, adjustments and conversations, and also actually about the treatment of sexual aggression and rape in cultural products such as novels, art, film, etc.
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PeaceRequiresAnarchy: In general I would say that most people tend to stress the commander’s responsibility for the war crimes a lot, but often forget about holding the soldiers responsible.

I don’t know; it seems to me this depends on a number of factors. Notably who’s in control of the investigation and the prosecutions. Calley went to prison for what he did in Vietnam; neither Nixon, nor Westmoreland, nor Colin Powell, nor even Capt. Medina, ever did. Nobody above the rank of Sergeant ever faced more than a reprimand for Abu Ghraib; Rumsfeld certainly will never face any serious legal or even social consequences for what he knew about or what he approved or what he ordered or what he covered up for.

@Hume22:disqus: I think you’re right that a distinction between “latent” and “manifest” functions, as you put it, is important here; and thank you for suggesting it. But I think this is pretty naturally intertwined with the reading of Brownmiller that I try to offer. Here’s how, if this makes sense: Distinctions between the latent and the manifest in social practices is a pretty central part of Hayek’s discussion of spontaneous orders as *emergent* rather than *consciously designed* patterns of social order. (This comes up in the form of discussions of latent or tacit knowledge embodied in actions; but also the distinction itself turns on a distinction between, for example, latent functions and explicit motives.) In any case, this seems to me to be importantly connected with Brownmiller’s understanding of police-blotter rapists as “perform[ing] their duty … so well … that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed” (209). So this seems to me like another pretty strong prima facie reason for thinking that Brownmiller’s account might be fruitfully understood by making use of the conceptual resources of spontaneous order theories.