Comments Elsewhere

Barbara,

I agree with you that different rhetorical postures are appropriate to different circumstances. My point in quoting Garrison was to reply to Uzzah’s claim that “If you have to resort to the angry rhetoric to make your point, maybe its a point that doesn’t hold much water.” I think this is false, and obviously so. Sometimes it’s worth pulling punches to get a point across and sometimes what the matter deserves is more severity and harshness in our language. When that’s the case it does absolutely nothing to undermine or to delegitimize the point that you are making, whether or not it makes individual listeners more or less likely to agree with you. (As I take it you agree, from your comments.)

I also think it’s worth noting, though, that whatever sort of language is most conducive to persuading people, the point of feminist writing is not always to convince sexist men to become less sexist. Persuading more men (or for that matter more women) to become feminists is one way that feminism can make progress towards its goals, but it’s not the only way, and sometimes neither the most important nor the most beneficial.

I think the plausibility of Volokh’s counter-example depends on the fact that it is clearly unjust to steal stuff from a store. Volokh adds a bunch of consequentialist worries (fewer people will own stores, etc.), but this is just hocus-pocus: the reason that government intervention is uncontroversially justified here is because property are uncontroversially at stake.

Now, if the anti-IP argument were just, “There are other business models available that free copying wouldn’t make unprofitable, so therefore the government shouldn’t prohibit free copying,” then it would of course beg the question in a rather crass way, and Volokh’s counter-argument would demonstrate that. But I’ve never heard the argument that Volokh makes used in that way. Rather, the dialectical context of the argument is always a response to protectionist arguments in favor of IP restrictions: “If we don’t have IP, then how ever will the movies get made / the musicians get paid / the drug research get done / etc.?” Answer: try a new business model; your broken business model is not my problem. This is a perfectly legitimate consequentialist response to the attempt at a consequentialist argument in favor of IP restrictions; it doesn’t address the justice of free copying, but that’s because it’s responding to an argument that explicitly disregarded questions of legitimate property rights in favor of a plea for protectionism.

Taken from the standpoint of justice, Volokh’s response here puts the argumentative cart before the argumentative horse.

And insofar as this and other points are intended solely as consequentialist replies to the argument, and not as appeals to justice, the entire argument depends on the presupposition that socialist calculation of the “right” levels of drug research, songs, movies, etc. is possible. Which it isn’t.

Vince: If not for the illegitimate force of government, Horowitz, et al would not have had their homestead terminated. Anything that occurs as a result of the illegitimate action should be null and void. The property should revert to the original homesteader.

Anything at all? No matter how long the property has remained abandoned and no matter what Horowitz himself did with respect to it?

Horowitz abandoned his claim to his share of the plot for 15 years before he took the city to court — not claiming that the land had belonged to him all along (which would have justified only a share of the land being returned to him without compensation to the city government, NOT the piratical “sale” of the entire property in return for a pay-off), but rather that the city was the owner of the land for the last 15 years but was under a contractual obligation to sell it to him.

Whatever imaginary quasi-Rothbardian defense you might be able to put in Horowitz’s mouth for his claim over a parcel of the land, he IS NOT making that claim in fact. His public actions constitute a quitclaim of his claim on his share of the land to the city government from 1985-2003, and thus an abandonment of a direct claim to the property. The urban farmers were thus justified in treating the land as abandoned property, available for homsteading and transforming by personal occupancy and labor. If Horowitz changes his mind NOW, and starts demanding compensation for an illegitimate seizure in 1985 (rather than asserting the non-existent rights that derive from a piratical “sale”) then he has a right to demand restitution from government officials but no right to take even his share of the land, let alone the WHOLE LOT, out from under farmers who homesteaded it while it was left abandoned by him and the other former owners of the land.

Here are a couple of questions that may help us to break out of the circle into which the conversation has fallen.

1. As it happens, there are a number of people who lived or had businesses on land that was seized by their city government and then turned over to Wal-Mart, who then set up stores and parking lots on it. Are you claiming that the homeowners or business owners victimized by the land seizure have a right to come in 15 years after abandoning the land to the city government, forcibly seize control of the plot on which the Wal-Mart sits, blow up the store and tear up the parking lot, and then take over control of the plot, after more than a decade of continuous operation? I don’t think this is true even of cases where the store directly colluded with the city government in order to make the initial theft — let alone of cases where the new occupant played no role in the theft, and only came along years after the theft had been made.

2. Are you claiming that Horowitz has a just claim to seize the ENTIRE farm, as he did, or only that he has a claim to seize a parcel of it equivalent to his share of the land?

2a. If the latter, what basis could he have for seizing the land that never belonged to him before the seizure, which would not provide just as good a basis for the farmers claiming rightful ownership of ALL the land, including Horowitz’s share?

2b. If the former, then which parcel of the land has he got a right to claim? And do you think that there is ANY length of time that Horowitz could have left the land unused, or ANY public actions he could have taken, which would constitute abandonment of the property for the purposes of future homesteaders? If so, how long and what are they?

Hugo,

I don’t think that sophonisba was claiming that there’s a conflict between faith and reason in general, or accused you of denying that people can come to feminism through the exercise of natural reason. But she can explain and defend her own argument better than I can. I was just trying to mention it by way of explaining why I didn’t understand your claim that this post replied to her point.

Uzzah: If you have to resort to the angry rhetoric to make your point, maybe its a point that doesn’t hold much water.

Oh please.

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

It is pretended, that I am retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of my invective, and the precipitancy of my measures. The charge is not true. On this question my influence, — humble as it is, — is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years — not perniciously, but beneficially — not as a curse, but as a blessing; and posterity will bear testimony that I was right. I desire to thank God, that he enables me to disregard “the fear of man which bringeth a snare,” and to speak his truth in its simplicity and power.

—William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” from The Liberator No. 1, 1831.

Joe Pulcinella: “In either case, coming down on any side other than that of the owner in immoral.”

I agree. But Horowitz is not the rightful owner of the property.

The farmers are. The lot had been abandoned for seven years when they came to it, and they have transformed it with their labor for the past decade and a half. Horowitz’s claim to the lot is based on his “purchase” of it from the city in 2003. But the city government cannot rightfully sell what it does not rightfully own, and in fact its claim to the land was no more valid than a pirates’ claim to “his” buried treasure. Horowitz’s “title” to the land conveys no more legitimate authority than the arbitrary grants of feudal fiefs from one warlord to another.

M. E. Hoffer,

They do not want the land to be “undeveloped.” They want their own development of it (viz., productive gardens that they’d been raising for 14 years, and which fed about 350 families) not to be bulldozed. As it happens, they have been trying to raise money to pay off Horowitz for the land. It remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to meet his asking price (which he jacked up at the last minute after they managed to meet his initial price through some foundation grants).

However, since Horowitz has no moral claim to the land, this money should at the most be considered a ransom, not a payment for something that Horowitz owns.

Jim,

As I mentioned in my article, Horowitz did not own all of the land that the city “sold” him. The real estate investment firm in which he was a partner owned about 80% of the lot. So even if he had a right to demand the land itself back, he would at the most have a claim to a fraction of that 80%, not to the entire lot. Sources such as the L.A. Times which portray Horowitz as the original owner of the land prior to the 1985 government theft of it are either ignorant of the details or else lying.

Vince,

I’m not disputing that the government recognizes Horowitz and not the farmers as entitled to the land. I just don’t care.

The details of government law in this matter are irrelevant as anything other than historical trivia; from the standpoint of justice they are no different from the details of a case under pirates’ codes or highwaymen’s compacts.

Horowitz has a right to demand restitution for the land theft in 1985 but at this point he does not have any right to demand even his share of the land back, let alone land that he never owned in the first place. He has a moral right to demand restitution from the city officials who stole the land from him, but no right to recover the specific land now that it has been homesteaded and transformed by other people (the farmers, not the city gov’t) for over a decade. It is as if I had discovered a cache of pirates’ loot, and then used it to buy myself a car; and then you, rather than seeking restitution from the pirates who stole it from you, called in the police to repossess my car.

Jim,

(1) Horowitz doesn’t have any claim to the entire lot, but rather only to a share of it, as mentioned before.

(2) Whatever Horowitz’s “intentions” were, he had abandoned the property for sixteen years before taking the city to court in order to force them to “sell” it to him in 2001. Whatever justifications he could, in theory, have given for his demands, his actual public actions indicate that he had no effective intentions to use the land for anything from 1985-2003 because he did not consider himself the owner of the land. His argument is not that he rightfully owned the land all along, but rather that he now owns it because the city “sold” it to him as (he holds) they were obligated to do under terms set down during the eminent domain seizure.

The land was abandoned property in 1994 when the farmers homesteaded it. The city never had any rights to it, of course, and at the time Horowitz and the other owners had at that point effectively quitclaimed their ownership of it for nine years. If the farmers had never showed up and transformed the land, Horowitz would have a perfect right to take his share of the land back as the restitution for the theft from him. But since they did, and since it was abandoned at the time, it now rightly belongs to them, and his only legitimate claim is against the city officials who took it from him twenty years ago.

candid:

(2) Similarly, while your great-grandparents were able to arrange their lives to be Yiddish-only, I suspect it was much more difficult for their children, who did not have a panoply of Yiddish-language TV and radio stations to choose from.

This is not true.

candid:

(5) Your great-grandparents certainly did not belong to organizations claiming that New York was the rightful property of the Eastern European Jews, and certainly did not engage in protests demanding it be returned.

No, but while I don’t know about his great-grandparents personally, but many Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants did belong to anarchist, communist, and socialist organizations (some of them democratic, others revolutionary), including both multiethnic organizations like the Communist Party and the IWW, as well as Yiddish-specific groups such as Arbeter Ring.

Hugo,

While this is a perfectly interesting reply to Steve, I can’t see how anything you’ve said here engages with the points that sophonisba raised. I don’t see anywhere in her comments where she criticizes a lack of overt anger or sarcasm in your writing; she objected to what she saw as the presentation of feminism as a form of faith (when actually it’s a political program that ought to be obvious by the light of natural reason), and to the presentation of it as uncomfortable, difficult, cold, suffocating, etc. I don’t see how that has anything to do with your tone, or your style, or whether your self-expressions happen to be genuine or prideful in any given case.

Well I don’t think Hugo is as bad as some have painted him here. Yet I too must admit to being puzzled by his continued friendships with MRA types. … I mean they HATE his guts … I don’t pretend to understand, maybe it’s a Christian thing. He feels like he’s reaching out to sinners or something in the hope of redeeming them.

One of the things that seems to happen with Hugo and MRA bully boys, or other anti-feminist commenters, is that whenever there is a round of criticism over his friendship with some of them, or with his attitude towards their participation in his comments section, one or two regular MRA/anti-feminist comenters will pipe up about how they think he’s a great guy, how they learn a lot from his site, how it’s changed their views about feminism even though they still disagree with Hugo about many things, etc. etc. etc. These individual commenters may very well be sincere in what they’re saying, but whether they personally are sincere or not, it allows Hugo to think that they, as a group, have a better opinion of him as a person than most of them actually do, and that they are more receptive to what he’s saying than most of them actually are.

In this connection, you might check out the first comment posted in reply to Hugo’s reply to this post.

R.E.: I completely agree that invading Iraq was a mistake and that the U.S.’s continued presence there isn’t helping things, but that does not mean our presence there isn’t critical or that we don’t owe it to the Iraqis to try and fix things.

1. If the U.S.’s continued presence there admittedly isn’t helping things, how do you expect them to go about trying to fix things, at this point, by staying in Iraq? How is that a better strategy than trying to put out a fire you set by dumping more gasoline on it?

2. What do you mean, “We”? I don’t owe a cent to any Iraqi, and unless I’m mistaken neither do you. I, at least, opposed this war and this occupation from the start, and neither I nor you played no role in launching or sustaining it. The criminal gang that launched this disaster of a war owe quite a bit to quite a few Iraqis, but continuing the bloody occupation is no way to pay down that debt, and they certainly have no right to try to pay off their debts on my dime.

R.E.: We need to clearly define to the Iraqi people the terms under which we will stay in Iraq.

The U.S. government has no moral authority to define any terms “to the Iraqi people,” whether they are clear or unclear, short-term or long-term. It is, after all, the Iraqis’ land that they are on, and not the U.S. government’s. As invaders, their duty is simply to remove themselves from the invaded territory as quickly as possible.