Comments Elsewhere

Look, Harel said, quote, “Political discourse in this nation centers on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and there is a real paucity of debate on matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans, such as the stunning loss of manufacturing jobs.” This clearly hints, if not outright states, that abortion is not one of the “matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans.”

You yourself glossed Harel by saying that he was encouraging us to “focus on real politics.” This clearly hints, if not outright states, that abortion is not part of the “real politics” we should be focusing on.

My point is that neither of these claims make sense if you include the daily lives of women or the political issues that affect women’s daily lives when you talk about “matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans” or “real politics.”

I agree with you that it’s ridiculou that we should have to spend time debating abortion; I also think it’s ridiculous that we should have to spend time debating unionism. The answers are obvious and the opponents illogical. But the fact of the matter is that we do have to debate these things, because both the availability of abortion and organized labor are under a systematic politicized assault from all three branches of government at the federal, state, and local levels. Such is life.

As for your “commenting on [my] disregard for the American worker,” you need to think harder about this. Or simply read more: I have posted repeatedly about labor issues on my website; in fact a few paragraphs down in the exact post you’re complaining about I offer some kind words for Harel’s defense of unionism as a serious issue for the Left. You may not realize this, but I do work for a living and I happen to be a dues-paying, card-carrying member of the labor movement.

Disregarding my fellow workers has nothing to do with it. The point that I was raising is that it is neither necessary nor acceptable to dismiss the importance of other people’s struggles (e.g. the struggle of women to defend their access to safe and legal abortions) in order to purchase credibility for your own.

Womble: No matter how significant a portion of Palestinians they represent, their racist, anti-democratic agenda, involvement in terrorism and the very fact of them being an armed group outside of the PA government’s control should have rendered them ineligible for elections in a real democracy. The Vlaams Blok in Belgium was the most popular party in Flanders, they were banned under the Anti-Racism Act regardless. The sheer armed force of the Hamas would likely make banning them dangerous, of course- but this is only a further proof of the non-democratic nature of the election process, because this means that the Hamas has thrusted itself into the election process while holding the Palestinian society at gunpoint.

Womble: In other words, your reasoning is not based on the logic of democracy or legality, but purely on the “realpolitik”. Well, at least it’s honest, for once. It doesn’t, however, justify calling the election of Hamas to the parliament democratic. It is, in the words of Nick Cohen, “barely political”.

So, just to be clear, Womble, you believe in having the government forcibly dissolve or suppress political parties (in the name of, what, “democracy”? Leftism?) when you find their political views sufficiently loathsome? And any view to the contrary to be a matter of crude realpolitik rather than any kind of principled political stance?

If not, I look forward to being corrected.

scott: “I mean that the US, EU, and others, should not cut aid or diplomatic contacts to the Palestinians because of a strong showing by Hamas, and that Israel should not increase its killing or assassinations either.”

I agree with you that neither the U.S. nor the E.U. nor Israel should escalate military conflicts with the P.A. (because I think as a matter of general policy that no governments should escalate military conflicts with anyone over anything). I’m a bit puzzled, though, by the reference to “foreign aid” (i.e., government-to-government transfers). Do you think that the P.A. should be receiving any tax-funded aid at all? Do you trust governments to pick and choose the best places and best people for the money to go to, or that governments are the best entities to receive it? Haven’t government-to-government aid payments historically been used as a fuel for tyranny and militarism throughout the Third World and the Middle East for the past several decades?

This dude went nuts at Ephraim saying that abortion is a serious issue… He wasnt saying otherwise dipsh!t. He was saying that all we focus on now is social issues.

I think you may be missing the point.

I was questioning Harel’s separation of abortion from “debate on matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans.” Because the availability of abortion does actually impact the daily lives of about 150,000,000 Americans. Viz., women.

I’d raise similar questions about your use of the phrases “real politics” as if it didn’t include abortion and “social issues” as if the availability of an important medical procedure were just a matter of the cultural beliefs people ought to hold, rather than a material reality in women’s daily lives.

Broadly speaking, it’s alarming when men who consider themselves to be on the Left talk as if an issue weren’t something that matters to most people’s daily lives, just because the people whose daily lives it affects happen not to be male.

Twisty wins at contemptuous invective!

Les: The thing about BDSM is that it gets people off by being transgressive, etc.

I believe that part of the point is that BSDM isn’t. It’s practitioners just really, really want you to believe that it is.

Aero: Many of the commenters need to remember that making assumptions about something you know nothing about is not an intelligent thing to do. Especially the comments about doubting the consensuality of a BDSM scene. Hell, that’s why I like kinky sex; because there is so much more communication going on before, during, and after than usual vanilla sex.

More than one commenter (Dim Undercellar, in particular) is speaking from personal experience in the BDSM “scene.”

Noting this in passing, I move on to ask: if one of the benefits of “kinky” sex is supposed to be the greater level of communication, what’s to stop you from communicating with your partner before, during, and after so-called “vanilla” sex? It seems like the alleged benefit here is not all that closely connected with BDSM and other forms of “kink.” So if that’s what it is that gets you off, why the specific draw to fetishes that have nothing essentially to do with it? (N.B.: it’s not as if anti-BDSM radical feminists haven’t criticized the attitudes that get brought into the bedroom with so-called “vanilla sex”, for involving, among other things, too little in the way of communication and clear boundaries. Andrea Dworkin wrote a whole book on the subject, entitled Intercourse, just to take one example.)

Jake:

It takes a $500 million and 12 to 15 years to discover and bring a significant drug to market today. Who is going to invest that kind of money without patent protection?

Boo hoo. Without tariff protection, who is going to invest in American automobiles?

Shannon Love:

If a decision-making about a resource cannot be effectively allocated to private entities via a property mechanism then state will allocate the resource via politics.

Property rights are not “allocated to private entities” by the State. They are earned by honest labor. The real choice is not between State-granted tenure to private monopolies (fascism) or total State property (state socialism); it’s between individual rights and State piracy of any kind.

How you apply this to the issue of government-enforced patent restrictions I’ll leave up to you.

Beck:

So are patent laws moral? I would argue that in general they are for the same reason that copyright laws are moral. If Person X devotes Y time and Z money towards developing a product or service, then that person deserves to benefit from the use by others of the product.

You’re right that the morality of patent restrictions is the real issue here, not the consequentialist pay-off. I’m baffled by your moral case for patents, however. People deserve lots of things; for example, I think that William Lloyd Garrison deserved a million dollars rather than a life lived constantly on the edge of penury for his long and difficult labors against the evil of slavery. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that somebody deserves a certain reward that they have the right to extract it by force. Which is of course what copyright and patents do: create monopoly profits by forcibly suppressing competitors.

You might claim: “Well, look, if I put my time and work and hard-earned money into making an automobile, that’s my property, and I have the exclusive right to sell it. Stopping competitors from selling the car I made isn’t extracting a monopoly profit by force, in any interesting sense; it’s just suppressing brigandry. It’s the same way with ideas for new drugs or with the book that I just wrote.” But there’s an obvious difference between the two cases: in order for me to take the car you made and sell it, I have to deprive you of your ability to sell or use it. That’s why it’s robbery: I deprived you of the property that you own. In order for me to “sell” an “idea,” I don’t need to deprive you of your ability to sell it. I can independently discover it by investing my own time, money, and labor without interacting with you at all; or I can discover it by investing my own time, money, and labor in taking apart and understanding your invention after I buy it; or you can tell me your idea and I can turn around and use the idea you’ve given me. But in all of these cases I’m selling things while leaving you in full possession of your idea. So what have I robbed you of? Nothing. You still have exactly what you had before.

You might point out that, while I’m not depriving you of the chance to sell the expressions of your idea, I am depriving you of the chance to sell the expressions of your idea at the rate you think you deserve. No I’m not: you can sell it at any rate that you want to, and customers will make their own decisions as to whether or not to buy it. You might point out that by underselling you on expressions of your idea, I’m depriving you of customers who might otherwise buy it at the higher price. Well, so what? You don’t have an ownership claim over customers. Sorry.

scott: ‘Good point, Rad Geek. I should’ve put “world governments” instead of “the world.” Admittedly, this entry wasn’t written from a very anarchist perspective.’

Well, fair enough, but I’m still not sure why. I mean, maybe “respect” for elections from other world governments will end up with better results for freedom and justice, and maybe it won’t. Part of it probably has to do with what “respect” means in this context. (If it means, e.g., not going to war over it, sure. If it means taking seriously the idea that the election makes the resulting coalition a proper collective bargaining agent with which to dicker about the rights of all Palestinians, probably not.)

I think the important thing here is that government elections don’t place any legitimate demands on anyone, and so aren’t “respectable” on their own account — at the very most they may be strategically useful for getting other people who buy into majoritarian popular sovereignty to hold back on doing nasty things that they might otherwise do. But I think that one of the most important insights in anarchism is the observation that at its very best, that’s just a means to exchange a more obnoxious band of pirates for a less obnoxious band of pirates. And thus that these kind of appeals need to be taken with a heaping helping of salt, when they are taken at all.

“… Assuming they are fair, the world must respect the results of the elections. …”

Why? As an anarchist, I don’t respect the results of any government elections.

Here’s my contribution: Geekery Today 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33.

Jason:

This reply surprised me, as I had understood you to favor a full privatization of marriage. If you do favor this option, then it seems you are forced to concede my point, and to admit that government acts at best to protect, never to create, a marriage.

Well, my position is that the concept of a marriage analytically includes recognition within a community; a purely private marriage is no marriage at all. But “private” and “community” can mean different things in different contexts, and “marriage” has at least two, and probably three distinct (though related) meanings: (1) a legal construct counting the spouses as under a single household in the eyes of the government, (2) a religious sacrament sanctifying a romantic and sexual union, and probably (3) some kind of more generalized form of union, recognized within civil society, that underlies (1) and (2). I think that marriage-1 ought to be abolished, marriage-2 is purely a matter for the churches (and has no meaning at all outside of the kinds of sanctifying rituals that churches are or aren’t doctrinally open to), and I don’t have very strong opinions about marriage-3, for a variety of reasons.

I would find this strategy [of striking “marriage” ought of the law books and punting the issue to case-by-case decisions in family court] both impractical and disingenuous. I want a set of rights and obligations that are basically identical to those of married heterosexual couples; as such, I feel I should be up-front and honest about this desire. I also mistrust a patchwork or piecemeal solution for two reasons: 1) Many of the most important rights — including immigration protection — will almost certainly never be obtained short of full civil marriage, and 2) A patchwork of rights and protections is both substantially less convenient for those seeking to obtain them — and substantially easier to revoke than an actual marriage. Notice how in Massachusetts, even those seeking to repeal same-sex marriage are not proposing to nullify the marriages that have already been contracted.

(1) Careful with the language here: if you think that gay marriage already exists even without government recognition, then you already do have a set of rights and obligations basically identical to those of married heterosexual couples; the government just fails to recognize the rights and obligations that you really do have. So what you want is for the government to respect your rights and recognize your obligations, not for you to get those rights and obligations.

(2) I don’t understand why you think that the strategy of punting the issue to case-by-case family law is disingenuous. I’m not proposing that gay marriage advocates conceal what they are about; what I am suggesting is appealing to people’s better natures, and their likelihood to understand the issue better when it’s a matter of understanding particular situations in real people’s lives than when it’s a matter of a cultural-religious turf war to be debated and legislated on. If folks tend to get it better at the level of particulars than at the level of universals, then dialectic should start with the particulars; but that’s a matter of seeking better understanding, not a matter of sidestepping understanding.

(3) I think that “many of the most important rights” discussed in these debates actually ought to have nothing to do with marriage at all in the first place. Exemptions from immigration restrictions are a chief example: the solution is an open border policy, not fiddling with marriage law. You might say that gay marriage has a better shot than open borders at political success in the near future. Fine, but so what? The best direction for political conversation isn’t always determined by the easiest option.

(4) I don’t know whether “a patchwork of rights and protections” is an apt phrase to describe what I’m advocating. What I’m advocating is a common law approach to the issue instead of the ex ante statutory approach that the entire contemporary debate over gay marriage presupposes. Part of the reason that I advocate that approach is practical: I think it will work better, will make it easier to make marginal gains rather than praying for the one decisive blow, and it will minimize the damage in cases where it fails. But part of it is also that I think that the current notion of “marriage,” as recognized in law, is itself a patchwork of a number of things that do not essentially belong together, and including a number of things that shouldn’t exist at all. It’s not that I’m advocating a patchwork; it’s that I think we already have an ugly, motley thing and I’m suggesting we unravel it.