dhex,

Well, “politics” derives from the Greek root “polis.” At the time the word was made, “polis” was ambiguous between (or consistently conflated) (1) the organized government of the city, and (2) civil society within the city. So when Aristotle wrote about “politics” he was talking about government processes, but about public life broadly, including many institutions within the city (religious, civic, educational, etc.) which today would be thought of as part of the private rather than the government sector.

Nowadays most people use politics to refer mainly or only to the business of the government, but some traditions (especially on the Left and in the feminist movement) use “politics” in a broader sense to include not only government processes but also struggles within civil society, especially if they have a common impact on a lot of people and if the civil society dynamics are structured by the balance of power between different social classes (such as men and women, or white people and black people, or…).

So “political” is not being expanded so far as just to mean “affects other people” (presumably remembering your friends’ birthdays affects other people, but I wouldn’t call it a political commitment); rather, “politics” is being being used to describe anything that acts to systematically structure public life in terms of the power relationships between groups of people. That includes governmental processes but it also includes a lot of other things, such as the way in which rape dramatically constrains the freedom of movement of all women, as women, and puts women in a state of greater dependency upon men.

Does that help clarify?

Incidentally, I’ve discussed the use of the term “politics” at some more length in section 2 of the Libertarian Feminism essay that I co-authored with Roderick Long.

Eric:

It’s a criticism of the idea that this point is some shocking revelation to libertarians.

Well, I don’t know about “shocking revelations.” But I think that we can safely infer from the number of comments, by self-described libertarians, describing the article as making an interesting connection that they hadn’t thought of before, that this does come as “news” to at least some libertarians. It may not come as news to you, but you are not all libertarians.

Leonard:

Still, I find the tone of Johnson’s article off-putting. Part of it is the confrontational tone of it, combined with the lack of actions offered, that are any different than anything libertarians already say. How, specifically, are we supposed to “fight rape” with our new understanding of “rape culture” or whatever? Johnson doesn’t even offer the libertarian standby, of trying to convince women to arm themselves.

I understand that it can be frustrating to have a discussion of some big problem dumped in your lap without having much said about what you can do about that problem. But keep in mind that the post had a specific purpose, which was to consider Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger rape and the Hayekian notion of spontaneous order in relation to one another, as a means to getting a clearer understanding of each. It’s an intellectual exercise, not an attempt at offering either political strategy or personal advice. If you want to know what kind of antirape or more broadly feminist I think people should be doing, I’ve talked about that in many other places (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. etc. etc.), one of which I linked from the post, but honestly it’s a very big topic and a very hard problem, and it’s not something you can treat comprehensively, or even make much of an approach to, in the course of one article on the Internet which is already trying to deal with a related but distinct subject.

I also think that there are many sources other than me who can do a much better job than I can in providing ideas on what to do — especially women who are involved on a day-to-day basis in local antirape or feminist activism in or near your own community. My goal, as far as concrete actions are concerned, is mainly to get more libertarians to a place, in our analysis and in our priorities, where we are ready and willing to seek out those people and those groups, to ask them what they are working on and what they need help with, and to get involved. I think that’s unlikely to happen unless and until more libertarians have a sympathetic understanding of the feminist analysis of rape culture. Since that’s something I feel I’m in a good position to try to address, by means of trying to translate feminist analysis into terms that some of my readers may more readily understand, that’s where I’m trying to devote my labor and exploit my comparative advantage.

As for women arming themselves in self-defense, I think that’s a perfectly fine idea, as is organizing other forms of women’s self-defense training (e.g. Rape Aggression Defense and similar mixed martial arts systems for women). Neither is a comprehensive solution, or ideal for every woman’s individual needs, but, then, nothing is; I think that what we need are a bunch of small parts, loosely joined with each other, attacking many different aspects of the problem from many different angles.

That is, something undesigned is as evil as something designed, something intended. No. Evil requires intent: mens rea. This is a category error.

The word “evil” has many different usages in the English language. Some of them require specific individual intent and others do not. (Many do not involve individual action at all; for example, “natural evils,” often used in English to refer events like hurricanes or earthquakes, or “social evils,” often used to refer to conditions like ghettoized urban poverty, without any suggestion that the evil in question is the result of anybody’s conscious intent.)

Of course, if I were using the sense of evil you have in mind (something along the lines of a deliberate sin of commission), then I would be committing a category error. But I wasn’t. So, as far as I can see, I’m not.

Consider a village, in India perhaps, where a man-eating tiger is loose in the neighborhood. People there are constrained by fear, in just the same way as the fear of rape restricts women. They don’t go out far alone, or at night, etc. Is this a “coercive” social order?

No. Tigers are not deliberating moral agents. They aren’t the sort of being which could be said to have either coercive or consensual interactions with human beings.

Men who commit rape, unlike tigers, are deliberating moral agents, and, unlike tiger attacks, rape is a deliberate, coercive act committed by men who are morally responsible for their actions.

A spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger posed by a natural evil, such as random tiger attacks, will have some things in common with the spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger that some people within the society force on other people by committing deliberate acts of violence. It will also have some important differences, both in terms of how appropriate certain kinds moral and political criticism are, with respect to that social order, and also in terms of the best way to try to deal with the situation.

There’s no real trade-off between racism and statism involved in this scandal.

As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the nastiest things that were written about black people in the early-90s newsletter articles were said in the context of articles directly calling for more aggressive and violent police tactics. Or, sometimes, directly making excuses for actual acts of police brutality–among them the police beating of Rodney King (that was in the same article as the crack about the welfare checks, and also the line that about 95% of Black men in D.C. could be considered “semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” whatever that means).

So what we’ve actually got, in the case in question, is both racism and violent statism wrapped up in one vile package.

abb1:

But of course he has a defensible record – considering the time, place and circumstances. Certainly not less defensible than, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill.

Excuses are not the same thing as defenses, and if Lenin’s human rights record comes out “not less defensible” compared to that of two slavemasters and an imperialist terror-bomber, that does not strike me as a particularly high standard to hold him to.

abb1:

Why are you comparing Brezhnev’s Russia with Guantanamo Bay? It doesn’t make sense. Are you saying that under Brezhnev the Soviets were held in prison cells and tortured? Nothing can be further from the truth.

This is a plain lie. I do not know whether you are repeating it out of ignorance, or callousness, or deliberate dishonesty, but whatever the case, this assault on memory and truth is perfectly contemptible. Here is a bit about one of the most notorious programs of Comrade Brezhnev’s security forces:

Anne Applebaum:

Thanks to [Vladimir] Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad. It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky—so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead. The era of the psikhushka—the special mental hospital—had begun.

… In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents—a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of sluggish schizophrenia or creeping schizophrenia. This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure, wrote two Soviet professors, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas in the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled rights, and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to explit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.

And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. … In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they try to found new parties, organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.

… If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. … In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation. Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given treatment. As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned in the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers [antipsychotic neuroleptics, such as Thorazine and Haldol —R.G.] which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.

… Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. After all, he wrote, it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.

— Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History (2003), pp. 547–550.

Robert Whitaker:

The first rumblings that the Soviets were using neuroleptics to punish dissidents surfaced in 1969 and burst into public consciousness a year later. Dissidents would be diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia,” their reformist ideas seen as evidence of their “delusions” and poor adjustment to Soviet society, and then sent to one of twelve special psychiatric hospitals. …

What the senators heard chilled them. One expert witness, Canadian psychiatrist Norman Hirt, told of a mélange of treatments used to torment the dissidents. Wet pack, insulin coma, metrazol–all familiar to students of American psychiatry–were three such methods. “The fearfulness of these experiences cannot be described adequately by any words,” Hirt said. However, written appeals from Soviet dissidents, which had been smuggled out and given to the Senate, described neuroleptics as the worst torture of all. A person who is given aminazine (a neuroleptic similar to Thorazine), wrote Vassily Chernishov,

loses his individuality, his mind is dulled, his emotions destroyed, his memory lost … as a result of the treatment, all the subtle distinctiveness of a person is wiped away. It is death for creativeness. Those who take aminazine cannot even read after taking it. Intellectually they become more and more uncouth and primitive. Although I am afraid of death, let them shoot me rather than this. How loathsome, how sickening is the very thought that they will defile and crush my soul.

Comparisons were drawn between such forced drug treatment and the medical experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, all of which led Florida senator Edward Gurney to conclude: “Most horrifying of all in this psychiatric chamber of horrors were the many accounts of the forcible administration by KGB psychiatrists of chemicals which convert human beings into vegetables.”

Over the next few years, Soviet dissidents published further details of this “chamber of horrors.” Aminazine and haloperidol were the two neuroleptics most commonly used to torment them. In a samizdat manuscript titled Punitive Medicine, dissidents described the incredible pain that haloperidol could inflict:

The symptoms of extrapyramidal derangement brought on by haloperidol include muscular rigidity, paucity and slowness of body movement, physical restlessness, and constant desire to change the body’s position. In connection with the latter, there is a song among inmates of special psychiatric hospitals which begins with the words, “You can’t sit, you can’t lie, you can’t walk” … many complain of unimaginable anxiety, groundless fear, sleeplessness.

Doctors used neuroleptics, the Soviet dissidents stated, “to inflict suffering on them and thus obtain their complete subjugation. Some political prisoners do recant their beliefs, acknowledge that they are mentally ill, and promise not to repeat their ‘crimes’ in return for an end to this treatment. American psychiatrists also heard usch testimony firsthand. On March 26, 1976, Leonid Plyushch, a thirty-nine-year-old mathematician who had spent several years in the psychoprisons before being freed, spoke at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. That produced this memorable exchange:

Q: What was the most horrifying aspect of your treatment?

A: I don’t know if there are irreversible effects of psychiatric treatment, but all the inmates at Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital lived in the fear that there would be such effects. They had heard stories of those driven by the treatment into permanent insanity. My treatment, in chronological order, began with haloperidol in big dosages without “correctives” that avoid side effects, essentially as a torture. The purpose was to force the patient to change his convictions. Along with me there were common criminals who simulated [mental] illness to get away from labor camps, but when they saw the side effects–twisted muscles, a disfigured face, a thrust-out tongue–they admitted what they had done and were returned to the camps.

Such descriptions stirred newspapers and television networks in the United States to condemn, with great fervor, the Soviets’ actions. Not long after Plyushch’s testimony, the New York Times ran an extensive feature on “Russia’s psychiatric jails,” in which it likened the administration of neuroleptics to people who weren’t ill to “spiritual murder” and “a variation of the gas chamber.” Dissidents, the paper explained, had been forcibly injected with Thorazine,”which makes a normal person feel sleepy and groggy, practically turning him into a human vegetable.” Neuroleptics were a form of torture that could “break your will.”

–Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002), pp. 215-217. Emphasis mine.

For example, you quote Szasz- the well known anti psychiatrist that serves as the ’scientific’ background for Scientology’s absurd notions and fantastic beliefs.

This is as crass a textbook example of argumentum ad hominem (abusive form) as you could come up with. Szasz is not a Scientologist, so why even mention Scientology except in an attempt to tar the actual subject of your remarks (Szasz) by association? And if Szasz were a Scientologist, what would that matter? His arguments can be addressed on their merits, without dragging religion into it.

That makes the following very rich:

Finally, this conversation began when I pointed out that you were attacking Dr Sanity herself, rather than her ideas.

That still seems to be the case.

Actually, Mona was criticizing the methods by which she comes up with those ideas. There is a difference between criticizing method and merely attacking the speaker.

Furthermore, contrary to popular opinion, “personal attacks” on an interlocutor aren’t a logical fallacy. In fact there is nothing wrong with them at all, if the interlocutor merits them. The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed only when one claims or suggests that these abuse proves something about the interlocutor’s conclusion, or argument, rather than merely proving something about the interlocutor herself.

Mona’s critical remarks about Dr. Sanity don’t commit this fallacy. Your repeated efforts to dismiss interlocutors’ remarks on the basis of credentials rather than argument, on the other hand, do.

Why in God’s named would trained ATF agents fire first? Unless the eblieved they were about to be attacked or shot, it makes no Goddamned sense.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Did you really just suggest that there would be anything unusual about “trained” government officers precipitously opening fire on people who weren’t attacking them? Pull the other one. No, really. Seriously. I mean it….

Please try to be serious.

“That goes beyond eccentric and I’m aware of no defensive uses to which one can put car bombs.”

That’s easy.

Suppose the aggressor against whom you intend to defend yourself is a large, well-organized gang and tends to segregate itself into distinct residential compounds. Then driving a car bomb into one of their compounds and blowing it up would be an effective way of killing aggressors and destroying their material means of attacking you. That would in fact be a considerably more precise form of defense with less risk of killing innocents than the conventional way of throwing high explosives around, i.e. dropping them on urban centers from airplanes at high altitudes.

Of course, I know nothing in particular about this cult or its intentions, so take this as a purely hypothetical point.

I don’t understand Drum’s complaint anyway. Here’s a straightforward, constructive suggestion from an Iraqi politico, right in the Post article:

“We don’t want to bring any advisers,” said Nasar al-Rubaie, the leader of Sadr’s legislative bloc. “We are capable to arm our security and military forces. If the Americans withdraw today from Iraq, the next day there will be security in all of Iraq.”

Maybe that’s a good idea and maybe it’s a terrible idea, but it certainly is a direct suggestion about practical steps that the U.S. military can take in the immediate future.

But I suppose if the qualifier “constructive” is intended to limit the suggestions to only those suggestions which cater to the priorities and fixed prejudices of the dominant party, that one won’t cut it after all. And that unfortunately is what it usually does mean in discussions such as this one.

… And then Andrea Dworkin and other insane feminists go back in time and become publicly associated with the suffrage movement: “All men are evil, all sex is rape, all women are virtuous and no man can ever be.”

I know that this is tangential to the point that you were trying to make, but Andrea Dworkin never actually said this or anything like it. (Neither did Catharine MacKinnon, for what that’s worth.) In fact Dworkin rather angrily denounced the last two notions in her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. Whether you agree or disagree with Dworkin’s positions, these descriptions of her views are exposed fabrications, and should not be repeated.

Now, the substantive point:

Suppose that in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement wasn’t associated with nice peaceful ministers like MLK, but only with the “kill whitey” Black Panther types. Do you think legal segregation would have ended sooner or later, had that been the case? I’d say much later.

Just so we’re clear, Martin Luther King was certainly not very widely thought of as a “nice peaceful minister!” On the contrary, he was repeatedly slammed as an “extremist,” a reckless agitator, and a Communist, both by his open enemies and also by white liberals and “moderates” within the black clergy. He wrote about this in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, concluding “So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? … So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

I’d make similar comments about the principled radicals who were instrumental in the victory of the suffrage movement (Alice Paul, the Pankhursts), the abortion rights movement (NARAL, Redstockings), the abolitionist movement (Garrison, Douglass, John Brown), the gay liberation movement (the Stonewall rioters, GLF, Lavender Menace), etc. Broadly speaking, I think that social respectability and coming off as pleasing to either your open enemies or the stifling “moderates” and “centrists” means precisely nothing to the prospects for a social movement’s success. The people who move the world are very often treated by mainstream opinion as stupid, blinkered, reckless, over-zealous, or simply insane. The important thing is not diplomacy but honesty and tenacity; the problem with Mussolinists who sometimes pose as libertarians is not that they make libertarianism look crazy to the statists (who cares?) but rather because they make us look too “reasonable” to Power. If they make us look crazy to some people, the problem is that they make us look crazy for the wrong reasons; their belligerent bellowing drowns out the “crazy” ideas from genuine radicals who the mainstream dismisses as lunatics for all the right ones.

Jennifer,

I think that the basic problem with professional libertarians is that they accept the legitimacy of the State. And in order to keep their positions as policy wonks, instead of looking for an honest line of work, they have to continuously act and speak on the presumptions that written Constitutions can authorize government powers over non-consenting third parties, that there are “compelling State interests” that the government can legitimately pursue, etc. Once you’ve already signed on for governmentally organized, coercively monopolized, collectivist rot in the name of continent-spanning “National Defense,” you’ve already accepted the principle that governments can go around bulldozing individual people’s rights for the higher purposes of military strategy and power politics, in the form of foreign spying, war, diplomatic collective-bargaining, domestic repression, etc. From there on out, the rest—domestic spying, torture, Star Chamber courts, internment camps, world empire, etc.—is just haggling over the price.