Well, you could always say what the maker of the ad closes by saying: “Here’s to the Greatest American Ever!”

Chairman Ron is the Red sun of our hearts!

William H. Stoddard: The trouble with this sort of argument, though, is that it treats the legal term “animal” as synonymous with the biological term “animal.”

Well, I stipulated that I was considering the term as “used in contemporary English,” by which I mean ordinary English rather than a particular technical argot. If I were a wagering man, I’d wager that in most ordinary contexts of use “animal” is a deferential term in which non-specialists defer to biologists (not lawyers) for the referent-fixing criteria.

William H. Stoddard: Though whether Superman is nonhuman seems debatable. There’s lots of material from DC that suggests that he and human women are interfertile.

But I don’t think that being interfertile with human beings would make Superman human, or a member of the biological species H. sapiens. Species are constituted (among other things) by their common evolutionary heritage, which Superman — who has an unrelated alien lineage — does not share. (You can hybridize peaches, plums, and apricots; but that doesn’t make them all members of the same species.)

Roderick: If Superman doesn’t count as an animal because he’s not biologically related to homo sapiens, then perhaps Lois Lane doesn’t either, because homo sapiens is the name for a species in our universe whereas Lois Lane lives in the DC universe and is not biologically related to anybody in our universe.

Well, if homo sapiens names a natural kind, surely it names the same natural kind in every possible world, and in a given possible world W it is only the case that humans in W have to be related to all the other humans in W, not that they have to be related (how?) to humans in other worlds not actual relative to W. In order to prove that there are at least some humans in the D.C. universe, you just need to find at least one actual human who exists in the D.C. universe as well as in @. Any such must also be human in the D.C. universe as well as in @ (since humans have humanity essentially, not accidentally). There are in fact plenty of cases of transworld identity (e.g. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler have both appeared). So as long as it’s part of the story that Lois Lane et al. are appropriately related, evolutionarily speaking, to these known humans, Lois Lane et al. will also count as members of the human species.

Black Bloke: Nivens ignored a lot of things for the sake of comedy.

Too bad, I guess, since the essay is not very funny.

Etymologically, “bestiality” would seem to be best defined as “sex with a beast,” i.e. a nonrational animal. So I think Lois is O.K. to the extent that Supes counts as rational.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that he counts as an animal at all — at least, as the term is used in contemporary English. Your argument seems to presuppose that it’s the name of a functional or structural kind, rather than the name of a particular biological kingdom. If it’s the latter, then the natural kind can’t include anything that’s not interrelated with the other members of the kingdom, meaning that, except on a theory of panspermia, no alien life form at all could count as an “animal” except in a scare-quoted, analogical usage.

Robert, there’s certainly no evidence of such a position in his platform. Here’s what he says. Boldface is mine.

• Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
• Enforce visa rules. Immigration officials must track visa holders and deport anyone who overstays their visa or otherwise violates U.S. law. This is especially important when we recall that a number of 9/11 terrorists had expired visas.
• No amnesty. Estimates suggest that 10 to 20 million people are in our country illegally. That’s a lot of people to reward for breaking our laws.
• … Pass true immigration reform. The current system is incoherent and unfair. But current reform proposals would allow up to 60 million more immigrants into our country, according to the Heritage Foundation. This is insanity. Legal immigrants from all countries should face the same rules and waiting periods.

In other words, Ron Paul apparently advocates:

1. … having the government aggressively and rigidly enforce admittedly incoherent and unfair immigration laws; and
2. … having the government adopt a new system of immigration laws which will still enforce “rules and waiting periods” — which have to be designed in such a way that they will prevent any substantially increase the number of immigrants entering the country above current levels.

The position would still be statist even if it were what you’re describing, but it’s not. Paul has already ruled out any system of immigration liberal enough to substantially increase the number of immigrants legally entering the country as “insanity.”

William,

Well, the question you posed was not whether “Leftist” properly refers to “people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx,” but whether there was another short word that could do the same work just as well. If there is such a word then there are independent reasons (already explained) for preferring that other word to “Leftism” when what you mean is “state socialism” or “government economic planning.”

I am not sure that I understand your objection to using “state socialist” in particular. Doctrinaire Marxists famously believe that the “workers’ state” is a transitional phenomenon, which will become unnecessary with the emergence of communism proper. Does that make the label “state socialist” inappropriate for, say, V.I. Lenin? Well, in one sense yes, and in another sense no, since he advocated state socialism in the short term and a form of anarcho-communism in the long term. But whatever complications this may introduce into applying the label, it will introduce exactly the same complications for your usages of “Leftist” and “socialist,” since you’ve made those identical with state economic control, and it was advocacy for state economic control during a “transitional” period, but not after, that supposedly generated this problem.

As for the common usage of “Leftism,” you’re right that when most people use the term, they are referring to state economic control. When most people think of “free trade,” they are referring to IMF-financed state corporatism, and when most people think of “anarchy,” they are referring to riots or civil war. What Wittgenstein advised looking to was not just the unordered facts about usage, but the logic of the use, and if the usage is incoherent or confused, the thing to do is to disentangle the confusion, not to pander to it. In any given case, depending on the breaks, it might be better to disentangle it by abandoning the word for a different word, or it might be better to keep on using the word, so long as you use it more rigorously or precisely. One should often do the latter when there is something challenging and genuinely valuable embedded in the package-deal which it is important to emphasize or affirm. I hear that some Russian radical once made similar efforts to reclaim or redeem the package-deal term “capitalism” from advocates of government privilege for the business class. While I disagree with the application on this point, I see nothing wrong with the method.

William H. Stoddard: Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Well. “Marxist”?

If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”

Holmes,

I don’t think you’re fixated on winning elections, and I can’t find anywhere that I made that claim. What I think you are fixated on trying to influence people through electoral means. But as I’ve already tried to explain at some length, electoral politics is structurally ill-suited to the kind of influence that you want to exercise. The message you’re trying to spread is fundamentally antagonistic to the very process you’re trying to use, and the dynamics of electoral campaigns are such that they tend to drum up a lot of noise and very little concrete progress.

As for the success of the Socialist Party’s domestic platform, I’m familiar with the story. But I think that its success depended much less on electoral pressure politics than it depended on shifts in the surrounding culture outside of the electoral arena. It is also had the advantage of a domestic platform which would enhance the power of the American political class rather than antagonizing and undermining that power. Any consistent form of libertarianism lacks the latter “advantage,” and so has a correspondingly much worse chance at any kind of uptake in political circles.

Holmes: Let me be clear, then: if the education doesn’t work, the practice is going to get crushed.

Any oppositional effort, including electoral politics, is going to “get crushed” if education and persuasion fail. But the relationship between practice and education depends on how you’re practicing, and whom you’re trying to educate and persuade. Unlike electoral politics, successful counter-economics doesn’t necessarily require a shift in the consensus among either politicians or mass political parties or 50%+1 of the tens of millions of voters. The opportunities for success on the margin in counter-economics are much greater, the number of people you have to convince to keep yourself and your friends safe is much lower, and the people that you’re aiming to educate and persuade are much less likely to have a pre-existing bias against individual freedom.

Me: You seem to be suggesting here that the only “political consensus” worth trying to sway is the consensus of incumbent politicians and political office-seekers.

Holmes: I suggested nothing of the sort.

As you like, but if you didn’t mean to so limit the “consensus” that you’re interested in shifting, then you’ve offered no argument in favor of adopting electoral strategies over counter-economics.

There are lots of ways to shift consensus outside of the coterie of incumbents and office-seekers, and I think there’s very little empirical evidence that electoral politics has much effect on that. Successful maverick politicians generally attract a groundswell of enthusiastic support, then their ideas are promptly quarantined and marginalized by appeals to electability, etc. After they (more or less inevitably) lose the general election, the enthusiasm dissipates, the ideas are more or less forgotten, and the organization bleeds down to a small hard core that already supported the ideas anyway. The enthusiasts who hopped on the bandwagon will find another maverick in the next election, often one with more or less contradictory ideas to the previous one. Cf. Ed Clark, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, etc. etc. etc.

Counter-economics, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on mass outreach, doesn’t depend on converting some significant chunk of a national constituency numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions, doesn’t operate on 2 or 4 year cycles, doesn’t suddenly splutter out after a single loss, doesn’t cost millions of dollars (indeed, is often profitable), and offers lots of opportunities for individual success on the margin.

As for overthrowing the State, that’s a secondary goal, and strategically a ways off. But that’s true for all theories that don’t involve a big helping of magical thinking. The primary goal is not to overthrow the State, but to widen the scope of your own individual freedom. That goal can be acted on immediately, through intelligent direct action, and to persuade your friends and neighbors to do likewise, or at least not to turn you in. Which I suspect is much easier to do than trying to influence either a sizeable chunk of the mass electorate, or the establishment politicians, towards libertarian policy or libertarian candidates. Especially when your vehicle for trying to do so is the Republican primary campaign of an anti-immigration Constitution crank.

Holmes,

The idea of “counter-economics” is something a bit broader than just “work off the books” and “participate in black markets.”

Part of the point of the counter-economic strategy is to shift the cultural consensus towards conscious opposition to State efforts to crush black markets. In Konkin’s theory, the proposed means are a combination of education and persuasion, organization, and direct practice, with different aspects phased in at different times.

You seem to be suggesting here that the only “political consensus” worth trying to sway is the consensus of incumbent politicians and political office-seekers. But that’s not at all true. And it’s a good thing that it’s not true, because there is absolutely no reason to expect that people who are already professional usurpers, or aspiring to become professional usurpers, are going to be very much interested in your arguments in favor of liberty.

Point of information.

As far as I know, Ron Paul has only said that he supports unrestricted access to emergency contraception, not to Mifepristone (RU-486).

Mifepristone is not what’s usually referred to as “the morning-after pill.” “Morning-after pills” are emergency contraceptives such as Plan B or Preven, which use high doses of hormonal contraceptives to prevent ovulation or implantation if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. (You can get about the same effect by taking several doses of a regular oral contraceptive at once.) EC pills only prevent pregnancies from beginning; they cannot abort one once it has begun.

Mifepristone, on the other hand, is a chemical abortifacient that can be used to terminate a pregnancy during the first two months.

As an Ob/Gyn, Ron Paul would be acquainted with the differences, so I expect that he considers EC drugs to be morally no different from traditional oral contraceptives, which work the same way. (Some of the antis believe that hormonal contraceptives and EC are equivalent to abortifacients, at least for purposes of faith and morals, but lots don’t. I expect Paul is one of the latter.)

As for his current views, his website currently offers the following. I take it that the presence on his campaign website indicates that this still reflects his beliefs.

… In Congress, I have authored legislation that seeks to define life as beginning at conception, HR 1094.

…As an OB/GYN doctor, I’ve delivered over 4,000 babies. That experience has made me an unshakable foe of abortion.

… Many talk about being pro-life. I have taken direct action to restore protection for the unborn.

One such action, which his issues page doesn’t mention, was to vote in favor of the recent federal procedure ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion.” An unfortunate lapse from his putatively federalist position.

Fun fact: my grandfather actually knew Ron Paul decades ago through the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and through politicking within the Texas Medical Association. Granddad had Paul over to his house for several conversations about libertarian ideas, and introduced him to the notion that the government medical licensing should be abolished, which Paul found to be quite shocking at first. He also tried to convince Paul that abortion should be decriminalized. Fortunately, in time, he managed to win Paul over to the former idea. Unfortunately, he failed to win him over to the latter.