Comments Elsewhere

Brad: “I mean really, who writes 40-page monologues into a novel?”

Well, Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to pick a couple of examples off the top of my head.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Rand’s writing but the mere existence of Galt’s Speech is not really one of them.

“Fourth, even if we waive the preceding, we confront another problem: if executions deter crime, why confine executions to murder? Why not execute all criminals and reduce crime en masse? That seems unjust, which suggests, in turn, that deterrence theory cannot be a free-standing rationale for the DP.”

This is an excellent point, and one that death penalty advocates mostly just drop completely (I guess because they’ve already convinced themselves that murderers do deserve death—something like “an eye for an eye” seems to be about the beginning and the end of the process—and proceed without thinking that any further argument on that point is needed).

I think there’s a similar point to be made against deterrance arguments—not only that you can deter more crimes than murder using execution, but there are more ways to deter murderers than execution. For example, you could torture and/or mutilate them without killing them. If killing people after many years of imprisonment and a lengthy appeals process could deter murderers on the margin it’s hard to imagine why some medieval torment or another wouldn’t do so more or less as well. But it’s pretty widely accepted that those kind of punishments are wrong, and even that they are wrong because they do something wrong to the criminal. But what grounds do we have for thinking that any execution, even the most “humane”, is treating a criminal any better? One could make arguments to that effect (some people would rather die than suffer certain kinds of torture), but the arguments have to be made, and have to be both general and unambiguous enough to justify the death penalty as a matter of policy. It seems to me that this—like the question of what further reasons make killing-for-deterrance acceptable in cases of murder but not for just any old crime—is something that deterrance advocates just blank out.

Great post.

1. “I was going to tear these people a new one for supporting a philosophy that has past its prime and its usefulness. . . . I’m just sick of feminists going around touting how much change they’re in favor of when all the changes they talk about have already occured [sic].”

When, exactly, do you think was feminism’s “prime,” and what “changes” are you thinking of that have “already occurred”?

1. “Andrew Dworkin ring a bell?”

Just out of curiosity, have you ever read anything by Andrea Dworkin? (I mean, actually read it, from beginning to end.)

Also, just out of curiosity, are you aware that Ice and Fire is a novel and the quotation you’ve pasted here is taken from a character in that novel?

Portraying quotes from characters in a novel as if they straightforwardly represented the views of the novelist is a bit disingenuous, don’t you think?

Congratulations! (That’s also about the third most adorable stock photo I’ve ever seen, by the way.)

As it happens, I’m a third-generation libertarian along my paternal line. That might seem like good anecdotal evidence for the inheritance theory. On the other hand, in the countervailing evidence column, my great-great-grandfather was a slaver. That might fly with the folks at the Von Mises Institute, but it won’t fly with me.

3) Democracy should be pervasive; not limited to some small area of life.

Our democracy is not pervasive. A lot of the most important things in your life are not set by government. They’re set by your employer: How much you’re paid, how you spend most of your day, whether you have a job, and so on. Do we get a say in this? Nope.

Why in the world would you want the government to set (1) how much you’re paid, (2) how you spend most of your day, (3) whether you have a job, etc.? I understand why it’s objectionable that your boss has so much power over your daily life, but isn’t putting the government in control of these things just exchanging one boss for another one?

One that you have no meaningful control over (see #1 and #2 above) and cannot even escape without fleeing the country?

1. I am not interested in whether statements are “bigoted” or “promote hate.” I am interested in whether they are true or false, and whether the arguments given for them are good arguments or bad arguments. You may think the former is more important than the latter, but I can’t see why.

2. Having a serious discussion of whether the statements made by radical feminists are true or false and whether their arguments are good or bad requires putting some effort into understanding what is being said and getting a grip on whether or not it’s representative of radical feminism as a whole. But it’s only worthwhile putting any particular time into that if there is a basic level of honesty from your conversation partner about the positions of the people under criticism. Haphazardly assembling a “horror file” list of quotes from works that you have not read, by authors that you know nothing in particular about, without citations to their works, including people who never were members of the radical feminist movement and also including quotes taken from characters in novels and quotes that were demonstrably not written by the person they are attributed to, does not reach that basic level of honesty. It is spreading lies—whether through intentional dishonesty or through incredible sloppiness (as is probably the case here). It is precisely as much a waste of time trying to argue with that as it would be trying to talk about Plato’s ethics with someone who pulls a bunch of quotes from Thrasymachus in the Republic to prove that Plato thinks that justice is the interest of the stronger, and adds some quotes from Ayn Rand about Plato and claims that Plato said them. If you intend to discuss radical feminist thought then you need to do the homework to find out what it actually is, just as you would with any other sort of political theory. Unless and until folks like you or the author here bother to do that, it’s a waste of time to do anything other than document a few of the specific lies that are being repeated, in the hopes that they won’t be repeated by others.

1. “You don’t HAVE an argument”, “There is nothing even remotely resembling an argument in what you have said,” etc. is useless bluster. I clearly do have an argument; that is, I gave general grounds (concerning, for example, the contexts in which courtesy is and is not obligatory) for drawing specific conclusions. You may disagree with my conclusions; you may think that my premises are undermotivated. Fine, but then your problem is you think the premises of my argument are themselves underargued, not that I haven’t got an argument. You’ve given no reasons above to suppose that the premises, if granted, do not support the conclusions. (If you have reasons for thinking my arguments are invalid or weak, and not merely unsound or uncogent, you should feel free to bring those reasons forward. In the meantime, your complaint is rather with the premises.)

2. The grounds for saying that the students were coerced has already been in evidence, both from myself and Roderick. You replied to the claim (but without claiming that the students weren’t being coerced; you just claimed that the school’s edicts shouldn’t be compared straightforwardly to the government’s laws) and were in turn replied to. At this point the question was dropped; you now come back and claim that there is “No answer” to the question of how the kids were coerced. Yes there is: the answer is that they are required to attend the damn thing and if they try to avoid it government officials will use force against them to make them attend or punish them for not doing so. You may think that this is not coercion; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. You may think that it’s coercion but that its coerciveness doesn’t erase ordinary obligations for courtesy; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. In neither case is it responsible to go around declaring that nobody has said anything to support the claim that they were being coerced into attending.

3. Nobody said that scholarly distinction is “required to speak at a school”; it is offered as one of the reasons that Blair’s appearance (which was a standard press conference for Blair to stump for his political campaign, using the school as a backdrop) is not plausibly connected to the students’ education. There are lots of reasons to bring in people of no particular scholarly distinction to speak at a school; there are even reasons to bring in people (such as Blair) who neither have any particular scholarly distinction nor any particular experience with what the students are learning about. But if you are bringing such people in then one wonders what connection their appearance does have with the students’ education. What were the students to learn by quietly attending to Blair’s press conference? What relation does it have to what the school curriculum aims to teach them? What are they losing out on by booing him? What would they have gained by not doing so? How does any of this justify the enforcement of mandatory attendance and standards of “decorum” on those who are thus forced to attend, as opposed to (say) making attendance purely voluntary or having the students spend the same amount of time watching Minister’s Questions on the television? All of these are important questions that need to be answered if you want to have a plausible case for claiming that a political press appearance of no particular direct connection to classroom work or curricular activities has an important connection to the students’ education. They are not answered above because you are too busy taking rhetorical swipes and unilaterally declaring “dialectical victory.” You may, of course, regard the conversation however you want to regard it, but you can hardly expect anyone else to care that you so regard it.

1. You claim that you are returning in kind the sort of discourse that people on this weblog promote. This would make sense if people on this weblog claimed that rudeness and bluster are appropriate in all rhetorical contexts. But they are not. Brady’s post does not entail or even suggest anything of the sort, and those of us who’ve replied to your complaints have specifically claimed that it was specific features of the situation that erased the ordinary presumption against acting that way (specific features which do not obtain, for one, in online discussions at L&P—nobody is forcing you to participate and the purpose of our discussion is argumentative give-and-take, not a press appearance). Decorum and politeness are intellectual virtues in some contexts and irrelevant in others. I take this to be a common-sense point of etiquette; if you disagree you can offer an argument against it, but judging from your claim to be responding “in kind” I take it that you don’t. We’ve already made it clear what it is that might excuse treating Blair like that at his press appearance; the question is what it is you think obtains here that justifies treating us like that. And why you think the two rationales are similar enough that it justifies the claim that you are merely “responding in kind”.

2. Supposing, however, that you were actually responding in kind, the question remains what purpose you could possibly have in doing so. If the level of discourse on L&P is bad, then what does “responding in kind” do? Improve it? (How?) Encourage someone else to improve it? (To what end?) Punish the offenders? (How, and to what end?) Amuse yourself? (Haven’t you got better things to do?)

Irfan,

The reply to you consists of six short paragraphs. You may find that a lot of space in which to discuss an argument. I don’t.

The point of it was that there are three potential worries about the students’ behavior which you seem to be raising, but none of them get a grip on the situation. (1) Booing or shouting down a speaker is a discourtesy, but the school was already far more disrespectful to the students by forcing them, as a captive audience, to sit as props for a campaign press conference for a politician that they loathe. Since there’s no particular obligation to be courteous to people who are coercing you, and no particular obligation to respect “standards” that are disrespectful towards you as a rational human being, the concerns about disrespect for the school’s standards of decorum are misplaced. (2) Neither Tony Blair nor any other government functionary is owed any special courtesies just because of his government office; this is part of the basic set of ideas about the proper relationship between citizens who hold offices and those who don’t in republican societies. So the concerns about boorishness towards an “important” guest such as Blair are misplaced. (3) It’s true that booing and shouting down speakers is not conducive to rational discourse; but Tony Blair was not there to offer rational discourse or anything at all plausibly related to the students’ education. He was going to the school, as a man of no particular scholarly distinction, to talk at them and give a press conference hawking his party’s campaign for maintaining government power. Since the event bore no plausible relationship to the students’ educations and offered no opportunity for intellectual discourse, the concerns about lowering the level of discourse are misplaced.

None of this has anything in particular to do with anarchism. I mentioned it in order to lay it aside. Since both I and many other people on L&P are anarchists, it might be thought that that’s the point of disagreement; but it’s actually not. (2) is the only one of the three points on which it might be thought to bear; but (2) is actually a part of the ideas about equality and political authority that come along with the rejection of feudal theories of sovereignty. I happen to think that the civic virtues that are sometimes priased as “republican virtue” turn out to entail anarchism in politics, but you don’t need to agree with that conclusion for point (2) to hold.

Note that these are in fact three separate points, each in direct response to a different aspect of your complaint against the students, none of which were responded to, except to say that (2) touched on an ancillary point while apparently misunderstanding the reasons given for it. It would be more edifying for you to reply to them than to nitpick my prose style, or to make blanket condemnations of the level of discourse on L&P as a whole.

Irfan: “Don’t quite see how schoolchildren have carte blanche to say what they want on school time while receiving an important guest.”

I don’t quite see how schools have carte blanche to use institutionalized force to compel students to attend “visits” from “important guests” that they’re not interested in. Since the schools have men with guns to back up their rudeness and the students generally don’t, I tend to find the former a lot more worrisome than the latter, and am also a lot less inclined to find fault with the latter when it’s in response to the former.

I also don’t see what any of this has to do with the “importance” (to whom?) of the guest. If shouting down a speaker is inappropriate in a given context I can’t for the life of me imagine any reasons that would make it more inappropriate just because the speaker is “important.” In a republican polity government functionaries are people just like you and me. They are not owed special courtesies that aren’t owed to other ordinary people.

Irfan: “A school is not a municipality, its rules are not laws, and one would think that the school has some standards of decorum, which ought to be upheld.”

This would be more convincing if both attendence and funding of government schools were not compulsory. But it is. So what difference have their edicts got from laws, other than the point of origin?