Comments Elsewhere

I don’t mean to be rude, but if you admittedly haven’t read much (or any) of Andrea Dworkin’s work, how do you have any idea whether Andrew Sullivan is right or wrong about her? Do you normally take confident stances on the merits or demerits of political theorists based solely on second-hand information, mostly provided by their critics?

Richard Fagin: “Of course Andrea Dworkin was cracked. She stated that ALL sex between a man and a woman constitutes rape.”

Where did Andrea Dworkin say this?

“Everyone knows about her silly statement to the effect that all penetrative sex is rape.”

Strangely, Andrea Dworkin did not know about this statement of hers. Maybe it’s because she never said it.

Michael Moorcock: … You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually read anything by Andrea Dworkin, from beginning to end?

Actually I don’t get why it would have been hard at all to portray a wall-sized screen in the film if they’d wanted to. Why not just paint a wall blue, and then project whatever you want onto it? It’s not like traveling mattes were something unheard-of in 1966…

“actually it seems like you’re both fucking republicans”

Then you ought to expand your political horizons. I’d point out that lots of people on the Left have ripped into Clinton over his 8 years of dirty little wars around the world (as, in fact, they have), and start naming some names, but the problem is this would only pander to the idea that team-loyalty rather than truth is the appropriate criterion for judging a policy.

Democrat bombs kill people just as surely as Republican bombs do. They killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands all told, in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, among others. If you want to give some kind of argument that his belligerence toward the Third World was justified (I don’t think that it was, any more than I think Mr. Bush’s is), you’re free to do so. But then you’d better give an argument that either (a) gives principled reasons to support Clinton’s policy while condemning Bush’s, or (b) give up and support Bush’s war policy too. I don’t think there’s any good argument on offer, but you might give one and persuade me. But it will take just that—an argument. Not calling your opponents names.

“But if, despite decades on the public stage and having published numerous books and articles, it is clear to only those who knew her best that she doesn’t harbor hatred for half the human race, I’d say she had a problem.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but your diagnosis of the “problem” seems to neglect an important fact. Her “decades on the public stage and … numerous books and articles” would only disabuse her critics of their misunderstandings about her if her critics actually bothered to read them. But no small number of the people who attack her — and especially those who like to traffic in the myths that she “hated men” as such or thought that “all heterosexual sex is rape” (which she did not believe and never said), as well as those who preferred to simply bypass any discussion of her ideas whatsoever to deride her as “ugly,” “fat,” “hysterical,” or a “vile, contemptible bitch” — never took the time to read a damned one of her numerous books and articles from beginning to end.

Have you?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether Mort Walker is a libertarian or not, he’s still not funny.

Political correctness won’t save the what is surely one of the worst comic strips on the planet.

dadahead: “… having a laugh at the expense of 1,000 dumbass cult members doesn’t really bother me.”

Two metal buckets of grape Flavor Aid laced with Valium and cyanide were brought into the assembly hall and the mixture was dispensed in small paper cups. Babies and children were the first ones to ingest the mixture as it was squirted into their throats with a syringe.

…

Hours after news of the mass suicide [sic] got out, local authorities found 913 of the 1,110 inhabitants dead, including 276 children.

Yeah, all those “dumbass” murdered infants. What a laugh riot. Maybe we can replace it with a topical zinger about, say, Andrea Yates’s kids—“Don’t get in the bathtub!” Hardy har har.

Brandon Berg:

Note in particular that Jim Crow laws were passed because white voters were unhappy that many merchants refused to discriminate against blacks.

Well, no, not quite. Jim Crow laws were passed because white supremacist terrorists systematically stopped Black people from going to the polls to stop them from being passed (or to stop candidates who would pass them from being elected). It’s not an accident that massive disenfranchisement of the Black population was one of the central planks of Jim Crow; there were many communities in the South, prior to the mass migrations of the 1920s, in which Blacks were the numerical majority, and they exercised substantial power in state politics when they had the chance (as they did in the 1860s-1870s, and as they did again in the 1960s-1970s) to vote.

Eric:

I have tried to say that Populism/Democracy leads to less freedom, not more, and you have presented irrelevancies that distract from that core concept rather than address it. The increased freedoms you constantly discuss did not result from Democracy.

Maybe you could explain more clearly what you mean when you distinguish the Republican parts of the American constitution from the Democratic/Populist ones. What makes a particular aspect of the government Republican as opposed to Democratic/Populist?

I ask this because a lot of libertarian discussions that I’ve seen on this topic end up simply defining Republicanism and Democracy in such a way that one’s guaranteed to have better outcomes than the other by linguistic fiat—e.g., by stipulating that part of what it means to be a “Republican” form of government is to have a constitution that effectively limits government power, while giving a definition of “Democracy” in some sort of purely structural terms (e.g.: election of legislators or 50%+1 referenda). Of course if you define one of them by reference to achieving the goal you want to achieve, and define the other only in terms of the means of decision-making, one of them’s going to look like a much stronger candidate for achieving that goal than the other. But it’s unclear what intellectual gains you make with that sort of apples-and-oranges comparison.

Well, I’ll definitely second the call for putting “… drinks the Kool-Aid” on the blacklist for 2006. In fact, I’d vote for a permanent spot. I don’t know how many people don’t know and how many people just don’t care that their snarky little catch-phrase is joking about the senseless deaths of nearly 1,000 people in a ghastly mass murder-suicide, but whether it’s through ignorance or sheer callousness that the allusion persists, the shorter its time remaining in this world the better.