"Charles Johnson keeps demonstrating that he is an ultra-egalitarian reality-detached cultural communist."

Well, thanks. But you say that like it's supposed to be a bad thing. Oh well; at least I got a Facebook status out of that one.
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is back in los Estados Unidos.

Neverfox:

Thank you for taking this up, and for pointing to the comment. I don't know how much it helps, but I also talked about the sentence-parsing issue a bit in comments on the blog here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/#comme…

darius404:

I don't know if Neverfox's comments, or the earlier comments that have been cross-linked here, will convince you about the meaning of the infamous sentence on pp. 14-15. But I do think this thread though is a pretty good example of the reasons why I don't have much of anything to say about the proper parsing of Brownmiller's infamous sentence beyond what I've already said in the paper and in those comments. I just can't see any further utility in trying to argue about the best grammatical parsing of the clauses in a pair of programmatic sentences in the first chapter of a book, as if this were something important to settle in isolation and without reference to the arguments and analysis offered throughout the rest of the book.

My paper has a specific topic, which is more or less exclusively concerned with trying to understand the features and upshots of one of the central arguments of that book (as for example in the extended discussion of "police-blotter rapists" as "myrmidons to the cause of male dominance" in Chapter 6 of the book). I don't know whether you've read Ch. 6 of Against Our Will or not (or even if you've read all of Ch. 1). But my view is that this chapter is important and that one good way of understanding the argument Brownmiller makes is by applying concepts drawn from the literature on "spontaneous order" in human societies. But that getting the radical feminist peg to fit in the spontaneous order slot will take some creative attention to the shape and orientation of both of them; and that this may teach us something important and useful, both about radical feminist theory and also about the concept of spontaneous order.

Maybe Brownmiller's programmatic sentences in Ch. 1 are written in such a way that they make certain common misunderstandings of her natural; or maybe she wrote them in such a way that their plain meaning really is just in tension with, or flat-out contradicts the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis that she has to offer in Chapter 6. I'm not convinced that either of these problems is a problem Brownmiller actually has. But if it is, then perhaps that is a problem for Susan Brownmiller as a writer; but I think that the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis are infinitely more interesting than picking at the writing of the programmatic statements. And that coming to an understanding of the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis, and the relationship that they may have to the various senses of the ambiguous term "spontaneous order," and of what we might get to learn from all this, as radical feminists and/or as libertarians, is probably a more fruitful field for having a conversation. There is much more to be gleaned there.

Do you have any thoughts about that? About the analysis of rape culture as a malign spontaneous order; or about the delineation of three different senses of "spontaneous order" that's outlined in the paper, or any of the remarks towards the end about ways in which this might help clarify some important issues for both radical feminist and libertarian theory and practice?
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@neverfox:disqus:

Thank you for taking this up, and for pointing to the comment. I don’t know how much it helps, but I also talked about the sentence-parsing issue a bit in comments on the blog here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/#comment-20111207021701

@darius404:disqus:

I don’t know if Neverfox’s comments, or the earlier comments that have been cross-linked here, will convince you about the meaning of the infamous sentence on pp. 14-15. But I do think this thread though is a pretty good example of the reasons why I don’t have much of anything to say about the proper parsing of Brownmiller’s infamous sentence beyond what I’ve already said in the paper and in those comments. I just can’t see any further utility in trying to argue about the best grammatical parsing of the clauses in a pair of programmatic sentences in the first chapter of a book, as if this were something important to settle in isolation and without reference to the arguments and analysis offered throughout the rest of the book.

My paper has a specific topic, which is more or less exclusively concerned with trying to understand the features and upshots of one of the central arguments of that book (as for example in the extended discussion of “police-blotter rapists” as “myrmidons to the cause of male dominance” in Chapter 6 of the book). I don’t know whether you’ve read Ch. 6 of Against Our Will or not (or even if you’ve read all of Ch. 1). But my view is that this chapter is important and that one good way of understanding the argument Brownmiller makes is by applying concepts drawn from the literature on “spontaneous order” in human societies. But that getting the radical feminist peg to fit in the spontaneous order slot will take some creative attention to the shape and orientation of both of them; and that this may teach us something important and useful, both about radical feminist theory and also about the concept of spontaneous order.

Maybe Brownmiller’s programmatic sentences in Ch. 1 are written in such a way that they make certain common misunderstandings of her natural; or maybe she wrote them in such a way that their plain meaning really is just in tension with, or flat-out contradicts the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis that she has to offer in Chapter 6. I’m not convinced that either of these problems is a problem Brownmiller actually has. But if it is, then perhaps that is a problem for Susan Brownmiller as a writer; but I think that the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis are infinitely more interesting than picking at the writing of the programmatic statements. And that coming to an understanding of the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis, and the relationship that they may have to the various senses of the ambiguous term “spontaneous order,” and of what we might get to learn from all this, as radical feminists and/or as libertarians, is probably a more fruitful field for having a conversation. There is much more to be gleaned there.

Do you have any thoughts about that? About the analysis of rape culture as a malign spontaneous order; or about the delineation of three different senses of “spontaneous order” that’s outlined in the paper, or any of the remarks towards the end about ways in which this might help clarify some important issues for both radical feminist and libertarian theory and practice?

Jason Bessey: Rothbard of course did a lot to popularize the term “libertarianism” in the US, and to spread the idea that American libertarianism was a body of ideas and a political identity radically distinct from the emerging political conservatism of Buckley, Kirk, et al. But he was not at all the first person to use the term in the US. Here’s Benjamin Tucker using it in passing in the 1880s, for example: http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/liberty-and-the-george-theory, http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/a-libertarians-pet-despotisms (he also used it to translate the term “libertaire” in French Anarchist writing, e.g. here: http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/state-socialism-and-anarchism). Charles Sprading’s LIBERTY AND THE GREAT LIBERTARIANS (first published 1913, http://archive.org/details/libertygreatlibe00spra) was published before Murray Rothbard was born, but it was later circulated pretty widely in laissez-faire circles in the 1950s and seems to have contributed to the uptake on the term by Rothbard and a number of others in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Daniel Baber: I agree that “Intellectual Property” is a government-sanctioned monopoly, and that it ought to be abolished. But Rothbard did not. He opposed patents, but he specifically defended copyrights as a “prosecution of implicit theft.” (He also thought that in a market of total liberty (as he understands it) “Part of the patent protection now obtained by an inventor could be achieved on the free market by a type of ‘copyright’ protection.” See Man, Economy, and State, here: http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10e.asp#7._Patents_Copyrights.

I am glad that contemporary Rothbardians have more or less unanimously come out against “Intellectual Property” restrictions, and have come to see that these are in fact government privileges, not protections of any legitimate property right. They’re right to believe that. But this is a new development, and in fact a reversal of position that has happened pretty suddenly and dramatically (over the course of the past 15 years or so). There’s no basis as far as I can tell for projecting the belief back onto Rothbard himself.

MBH:

My responses are relevant to Rad Geek’s remark about the use of political liberalism.

No, they aren’t. They seem to be based on a fantasy that the remarks were made by someone who has anything less, or anything different, to say about the purposes or functions of political conservatism, or political libertarianism, or whatever this rambling digression and facile sarcasm are supposed to be about.

But I don’t. I have exactly the same thing to say about those. That is (part of the reason) why I do not waste my time on political candidates or political strategies. Here, as elsewhere, you seem to be spending a lot of time elaborately ridiculing positions that nobody present actually holds or endorses. What you think you gain from this, I don’t know.

Well, it all makes sense if you just recognize that the first and overwhelmingly important purpose of political liberalism is to get more liberals elected to political office. What does it matter if corporate backscratching and logrolling vitiates any possible progress toward liberal society or the emancipation of the working class? The point is that it got Roosevelt reelected, and kept Democrats in control of both houses of Congress for decades.