quasibill,

And yes, I agree Keith overstepped the bounds with his counter. But again, I’ll ask you whether you think you’d be piling onto (and making offhanded jokes and jibes about) a woman who over-reacted to being ‘pantsed’ in public by permanently crippling her attacker.

While we’re playing the analogy game, I wonder what you would say about a woman who overreacted to being “pantsed” in public by grabbing a crowbar and beating the shit out of not only her attacker, but also everyone else in the room, regardless of whether or not they had ever done anything to her?

I ask because that’s actually more like the situation that’s going on when Keith replies to Aster calling him names by going on a tirade about “cock-ringed queers,” “pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair,” “homosexualists” (?), and “persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity,'” inter alia, and generally a bunch of other people who aren’t Aster.

This is not, actually, a two-person feud in which a bunch of bystanders have just inexplicably (or all-too-explicably, or whatever) picked on one side — the side you consider to have been the instigator — to pile on against. What happened was that Aster repeatedly insulted Keith and has in the past attributed positions to him that he claims not to hold, based on insufficient evidence; Keith in response has not only returned the insults; he has also, in the process, launched the most vicious sorts of broadsides against all sorts of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the purely personal aspects of the feud.

Perhaps this might just help explain why a number of folks who have mostly opted out of trying to intervene in the interpersonal sniping, have had something to say about Keith’s recent sorties of rhetorical saturation-bombing.

I don’t need to investigate or comment on the history of the fight in order to justify getting pissed off at Keith for punching me in the face, even if somebody other than Keith started the fight that got him swinging. If he doesn’t want to get piled on, he should start by fighting in a way that doesn’t involve bashing a lot of people other than his putative target.

Brandon,

Do you suppose that Keith Preston’s failure to call out the government’s violence against the free associations of peaceful immigrants, and his willingness to go further and call for dramatic expansions to the size, scope, and power of government surveillance and government force against immigrants, in a deliberate attempt to restrict free association along aritificially drawn government borders, might possibly have something to do with the kind of people — among them paleoconservatives, conservative Ron Paul voters, cultural isolationists, “race-realists,” “white nationalists,” “national anarchists,” and other supposedly populist hard-Right types; in the most recent essay there’s also what looks to me like a couple of clumsy attempts at outreach to a mythical contingent of nativist trade unionists, straight out of 1963 — the kind of people, I say, that Keith is trying to attract into his coalition?

I mean, I notice that a bunch of these people don’t really like immigrants very much, or just don’t like Mexicans very much, and that they are happy to chuck out anti-statism, civil libertarianism, and anti-militarist positions when it comes to maintaining their illusory sense of control over “our” government-fortified borders. Maybe trying to cater to those sorts of people tends to undermine a serious commitment to free association?

Brandon:

I wonder what you think about the several paragraphs Keith spends, in an essay which, according to you, is mainly defending freedom of association and dissociation, attacking what he characterizes as “the most extreme forms of pro-immigrationism,” by which he apparently means the plumb-line libertarian position against government border checkpoints, papers-please police state monitoring, and government prohibitions on hiring immigrant workers.

When Keith claims that the anarchistic position is in fact to enlist the United States government to enforce border checkpoints and police-state monitoring of national citizenship papers, to demand the use of government immigration enforcement to exile from the country those that the American government declares “criminals [or] enemies of America” (?!); when he suggests escalating government prohibitions against employing undocumented immigrants, and apparently also creating new government prohibitions against employing any immigrants at all during a government-recognized strike (?!) — when, in short, he calls, over and over again for the expansion of the state and an increase in the power of government border police, in the name of nationalist politics, for the purpose of a systematic assault on free markets and free association, and then attempts to justify this Stasi-statism by pointing to the majority opinion among those approved to vote in government elections by the United States government (?!) — what do you think of all that? Do you think that this is defending the claim that “people can associate however they want in a libertarian world”? Do you think that this propaganda for growing the size, scope, and intensity of government enforcement, is the sort of thing that would make libertarianism more attractive to “regular (?) anti-government” types?

No, no, I was never a football player. I used to be black, of course, but that was back when I was an acclaimed novelist. However, I eventually came to regret my ill-conceived criticism of The Color Purple.

Brandon:

I’m not saying there aren’t storm troopers now, but I doubt Paul would vote for increasing them, since they’d have to be paid out of federal moneys.

Again, Ron Paul has already voted for bills to increase the number of Border Patrol storm-troopers. As he himself has said,

I have also supported the strengthening our border and increasing the number of border patrol agents. It is an outrage that our best-trained border guards are sent to Iraq instead of guarding our borders. For national security, we need to give more attention to our own border which is being illegally breached every day, and yet the government shirks one of its few constitutionally mandated duties, namely to defend this country.

Brandon:

And there is a libertarian argument for closed borders.

There are some arguments for closed borders which are advanced by people who happen to be libertarians. But I deny that the arguments are libertarian arguments.

Ron Paul’s own favorite arguments on the topics are barefaced appeals to legal positivism, belligerent nationalism, and utilitarian arguments about the allegedly disastrous results of combining welfare statism and freedom of immigration. The kind of Hoppean argument that Rothbard favored is, I think, dead wrong, and obviously so, but it does at least attempt to justify exclusionary immigration policies in terms of individual liberty rights (generally, the right to exclude from either private or common property); the kind of arguments Ron Paul has been pushing, on the other hand, simply stomp all over libertarian principle in the name of desiderata (like uncritical deference to standing law, nationalistic strength-through-unity, sacrificing the moral rights of the minority in the alleged interests of the majority, etc.) which are, if anything, the exact opposite of genuine libertarian goals.

Brandon:

I’m sure Rand Paul isn’t for completely open borders but I can’t see him or his daddy voting for storm troopers or walls.

Ron Paul already voted for a border wall twice — in 2005 he voted for H.R. 4437 (the Sensenbrenner omnibus anti-immigrant bill, which ultimately failed to become law) and in 2006 he voted for H.R. 6061 (which broke out the border wall provisions of the Sensenbrenner bill in order to get parts of it passed piecemeal; this bill “Directs the Secretary of Homeland Security, within 18 months of enactment of this Act, to take appropriate actions to achieve operational control over U.S. international land and maritime borders, including: (1) systematic border surveillance through more effective use of personnel and technology, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, ground-based sensors, satellites, radar coverage, and cameras; and (2) physical infrastructure enhancements to prevent unlawful border entry and facilitate border access by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, such as additional checkpoints, all weather access roads, and vehicle barriers.”)

As for stormtroopers, I’m not sure what you’re thinking of. Do you imagine that storm-troopers would be something new in immigration policies? In fact, ICE and the Border Patrol already have plenty of stormtroopers in their employ, staging paramilitary raids on homes and workplaces, and maintaining regular armed patrols and “Ihre papiere, bitte” government checkpoints, both on the border itself and on highways well inside the U.S. in the southwestern states. Ron Paul supports the ICE storm-troopers; and if he opposed their paramilitary raids then I haven’t been able to find him saying so anywhere; everything I can find with him talking about immigration has insisted on the need for numerically more and more intensive enforcement. I do know that he supports, and has repeatedly voted for, increasing the number of paramilitary Border Patrol agents on armed patrol and at checkpoints along the border.

As for Rand, well, who knows? But if he votes like his Daddy, then he’ll be voting for a more extensive, better-funded, and more intensely-enforced immigration police state.

I really enjoyed the movies and I’m excited to see where things go from here. So what follows are quibbles.

william:

Can you see this sort of Trek ever openly embracing the degree of utopianism that had Picard kindly explaining the soft, enlightened, post-scarcity socialist future to the twenty-first century savage in First Contact.

Well, while TOS is supposed to have a lot of Roddenberry-utopia in it, Kirk’s era has never been nearly as “post-scarcity” as TNG. In TOS they don’t have any holodecks and they don’t have any replicators. The Enterprise is often busy schlepping basic food and supplies from one terraform colony to the next. Etc. There are episodes that revolve around a Szaszian “rehabilitation” planet (!) and a fugitive human war criminal who’d massacred dysgenic colonists during a food crisis. Their universe is necessarily more rough around the edges than Picard’s is, as a matter of the technological setting and so also the characters who dwell in it.

But the movie does definitely have lots of touches that make 23rd century Earth strangely darker than it is in the original-flavor TOS. (I mean, Nokia, yeah, but also, Robocops on hoverbikes? Wow.)

As for exploring as against military adventurism, I think this is probably a basic limitation of how script writers think about writing for movies as opposed to TV. The TV writers exploited the weekly one-hour format to write in new planets and new races without thinking that any given week had to be a blockbuster event; just about every Star Trek movie, on the other hand, has been focused on “Let’s all have a big fight!” and I’m pretty sure it’s because they (wrongly) think you can’t make a movie about discovering awesome things without getting involved in a big fight against an established menace.

To be fair, in addition to V (ugh) and IX (bleh), there is also I, which involves trying to Save The Earth from an alien menace, but it is about encountering a radically new form of life and having to learn to communicate with it. (So’s IV, actually, but in a way that makes us all stupider for having seen it.)

The movie treats the Vulcan way of life much less appallingly than Enterprise (Spock does take some opportunities to be Fascinated); but I’m also really wishing that somebody involved with Star Trek were still capable of writing a Vulcan plot that wasn’t immediately engaged with trying to get the poor Vulcan out of his Logic at the first opportunity.

And I thought the kissy-face with Uhura was the wrong thing to do — partly because, as above, it was part of the scriptwriters not giving Spock any narrative space to practice the way of Logic in a sympathetic way; and partly also because it just shreds the plot of The Naked Time, Amok Time, etc., (yeah, different timeline, I know, but still) and offers little or nothing in return by way of revealing or developing Spock or Uhura. (A tragic, Nurse Chapel-style unrequitable love for Spock? Sure, great. Makeouts on the transporter pad? Not so much.)

Richard Garner:

I wonder, though, if your example of a world owning alien gains its intuitively objectionable nature, though, not from the fact that the alien hasn’t been back for millions of years, but from the objectionable problems of complete world ownership. If he had come and mixed his labour with a square mile of desert in a Nevadan desert (pretending Nevada existed then), and then went away and didn’t come back for millions of years, would your example be as objectionable?

I think you picked the wrong patch of land to consider for your example.

I don’t think that the problem in the Galaktron thought-experiment has to do with whole-world-ownership. It has to do with the fact that he left for several million years and in the meantime rival claimants have come along who re-homesteaded the land that he left. So I agree with you that there wouldn’t be much objectionable in Galaktron’s reclaiming a patch of desert land that nobody else is currently using. Where there is no rivalry, there is no question of abandonment to arise.

But the isolating case is not a patch of currently desert land; it’s a patch of land currently occupied and used by new-comers while Galaktron was away. So, for example, suppose that Galaktron weren’t claiming ownership of the whole world. Suppose that he did some homesteading on an island, went away for a few million years, and came back, only to find that his old garden plot now happened to be Manhattan. Does he have the right to say, “Out, squatters!” and demand eviction or restitution? Or do those currently occupying the island get to maintain ownership, given that the land was not in use when the meddling hyoo-mons first came to it, and hadn’t been in use for millions of years?

Richard Garner:

If I were to leave my bike outside a shop whilst I go in to buy groceries, I would not be using or occupying it, but it is still mine. If somebody else were to use it, it would still be mine.

Well, there’s leaving and then there’s leaving. If there is some reasonable expectation that you will return to pick up your bike at a definite point in the near future, that surely does not amount to abandoning you bike. If you leave your bike sitting out there for a month, in rain and shine, never make any kind of arrangement about storage or maintenance with a third party, etc., then sooner or later I think any reasonable system of property rights would take that as constructive abandonment of the bike even without any express performative act on your part of saying “I abandon my bike forthwith.”

Mutualist views on real estate aren’t that different in this regard: the reason that occupancy-and-use mutualists don’t accept that, for example, leaving your house to pick up some milk or even for a long vacation would count as opening up the land for someone else to occupy and use, is because in those cases your lower-level action of leaving is part of a higher-level project which involves your returning at some more or less definite date in the not-too-distant future. The kind of leaving which would open up the property to other claimants is generally held to require a leaving that’s long-term and open-ended, among other things.

Shouldn’t that read “TEH strand.” Isn’t liberty the point of all commitments?

Some people might hold that view, but I don’t. (I don’t think Roderick does either, but he can speak for himself.)

The stuff on the varieties of thickness explains why I think that libertarians have at least some specifically libertarian reasons for committing to other projects such as radical feminism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-racism, wildcat unionism, internationalism, gay liberation, etc. So the commitments don’t just run alongside each other in parallel; part of your reason to be both a libertarian and a feminist is that the insights of (what I take to be) the most plausible versions of feminism play a substantial role in coming to what I take to be the best understanding of libertarian theory and practice. (And vice versa; there are specifically feminist reasons for feminists also to be libertarians, and specifically anarchists. I have a thick conception of feminism as well as a thick conception of libertarianism.)

However, to say that libertarians have some libertarian reasons for commitments to feminism is not to say that libertarian reasons are the only reasons for a commitment to feminism, or even the primary reasons. I think the primary reason for committing to feminism is that feminism is right, and not just on those things that can be cashed out as having some effect on questions as to the role of force in social relationships; and it’s worth pursuing on its own merits, and would be so even if it had no impact whatever on the advance of libertarian politics.