Comments Elsewhere

FP: “Does it not allow women to evade responsibility as well? Or is the pill a natural function now?”

A heart attack is a “natural function”. A defribillator is an artificial intervention that prevents cardiac arrest from taking its normal course, i.e., death. It doesn’t follow from this that you are evading your responsibility to die.

Broadly speaking, “natural” is not a term with any intrinsic normative content whatsoever. Certainly not for human beings, anyway: invention is a part—perhaps the most distinctive part—of our nature.

I got hit with a similar flood of trackback spams earlier today. Unfortunately one of the reasons that I am still sticking with stupid old MovableType (spam control tools) didn’t come through as well with the pings as it has with past waves of comment spam. (Basically because there is no concept of “moderating” TrackBack pings in MovableType, so one of the layers of interdiction between your front page and the spammer is removed. The only filters that go through are the ones that are set up to block—e.g., known spammer URIs that have already been posted somewhere.)

Do you know what’s available for Drupal in the way of spam-quashing utilities? If this hasn’t been a matter of module development I should hope that people will get working on it soon…

The essay is also just strangely edited with regard to the “bad men” who are discussed. Where is Ted Hughes, who for all morally relevant purposes, can be counted as having killed Sylvia Plath? Where is Charles Bukowski, who is not just unpleasant or disturbed but actively abusive? (The “we don’t mean that he was a shotgun-toting, baby-kicking monster” bit particularly gets me, since I don’t know whether Bukowski’s ever kicked a baby, but I have seen a documentary in which he stops in the middle of an interview to scream abuse at his wife and then kicks her twice before she escapes off-camera. I felt sick and left the room shortly after that episode; and I’ve never had any desire to read a damn thing by Charles Bukowski since.)

Ghertner:

… I have no doubt that the consequences would have been the same if not worse if communism in practice had incorporated elements of Christian socialism.

Actually, I’m not sure that this last is true. Christian socialism, in Russia (e.g., Tolstoy) and elsewhere has traditionally been either (a) some mild form of social democracy, or (b) utopian, anarchistic, and pacifist. There are plenty of reasons to think that widespread adoption of a Christian socialist programme would have caused plenty of problems, but little reason to think that it would have collapsed into the sort of bloodbath that centralist and bloodlusting Marxist-Leninism did.

Of course, this isn’t any kind of argument against atheism, or any kind of argument that the Bolsheviks slaughtered as many as they did because they were doctrinaire atheists.

P.S.: the word is a-t-h-e-i-s-m, folks. As in the opposite of theism, derived from the(os) + ism.

Amp,

It’s true that the payoff to Maggie Gallagher are unlikely to be a substantial influence on her stated views. But I don’t think that’s really the issue. The issue is the use of taxpayer funds to subsidize useful journalists and columnists—whether or not the money are going to change their views substantially, they do funnel taxpayer money to people solely on the basis of their agreement with the administration on controversial political topics. (If the Bush administration decided to send $100 from the DoD budget to everyone who publicly supported the Iraq war in print prior in March 2003, this would be deeply objectionable—even though it couldn’t possibly change the views that have already been expressed.)

Yeah, I know that Gallagher was doing a “job” for the federal government in return for the pay. Ho ho ho. In reality it seems pretty transparently a sinecure granted to her in return for her views.

“This thread over at No Treason has been giving me a few chuckles. Apparently, this site is dedicated to showing that anarchists and libertarians are foul-mouthed tribalists incapable of using logical argument.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, Patrick, but a logical argument was made, at length in Lopez’s original post at http://www.no-treason.com/archives/2005/01/25/is-george-bush-a-traitor/ and more briefly in the first half of the first paragraph of Sabotta’s follow-up, on the subject of “treason trials” for wicked politicians and why the notion is absurd from an individualist standpoint. That is the subject from which this post takes it title, and yet nowhere here or in the comments of either article have I seen any argument in response to the case against the notion of treason. Instead there seems to be a lot of kvetching over whether or not John Sabotta was right to point out that Johnson seems to have a problem with Da Jooz and whether or not he was a bit rude in using the phrase “contemptible shit.”

So who seems to be playing the part of the tribalist incapable of logical argument so far?

Über-rationalist Yancey:

Basically, his only criteria are that no submission may advocate voting, government, or the Constitution. Good standards, in my book.

Ahem. How, exactly, does someone advocate a trial for treason—a federal crime defined, in the U.S., in the Constitution—without advocating either government or the Constitution? What else would it be treason against?

Lopez is exactly right to point out:

So folks chattering and foaming on about “Jews” and “organized religion” are, in the most charitable interpretation possible, missing the point entirely.

But I’m not so sure about the major premise:

The most murderous ideology in recorded history is explicitly [atheistic].

It’s true that Marxist-Leninism has a truly monstrous record, and that it alone is a good enough reason to stop laying exclusive focus on “organized religion” (or, worse, da Jooz—not that this will stop the mouth-foamers, since they have always considered Bolshevism to be one of the leading arms of ZOG perfidy).

It’s not clear, though, that the top body count goes to Bolshevism. That … honor … may actually go to militant Christianity after all: it’s easy to forget that the French Wars of Religion claimed about 2,000,000-4,000,000 lives, the Thirty Years War about 11,500,000, not to mention the millions or hundreds of thousands committed to the fire variously by the Crusades in the East, the special crusade against the Albigensians, the Reconquista, the central European witch hunts, the Inquisition, the English Civil War, the pogroms in the Ukraine and Poland, etc. Bolshevism has piled up a truly ghastly pile of bodies, but late medieval and early modern militant Christianity had a longer time in which to work and killed greater or comparable absolute numbers of people in a substantially smaller population.

People who rant about the monolithic evil of “organized religion” are wrong. But it is, in the end, not hard to see that there are some rather ghastly facts at the center of their delusions.

Again, let’s kill this one dead and stomp on it until we’re sure:

“If Think Secret prevails in its legal efforts, NDLs will be dead. No company will be willing to enter into an agreement in which the other party can use the free speech loophole to violate the agreement.”

Apple never entered into a Non-Disclosure Agreement with Think Secret. It entered into an NDA with unknown second parties who breached the agreement to leak a story to Think Secret. Apple has legally enforceable claims against those second parties if it can find out who they are. It has no claims whatever against Think Secret, which never made any agreement not to broadcast whatever information came into its grubby little hands and has not violated any terms that it ever agreed to.

Apple has no right to enforce the terms of a contract on people who never signed it. They are using this suit as an intimidation tactic to try to force Think Secret to disclose the second parties who leaked the information. Since they have no case, this is nothing more than using the force of the law as an implement of bullying. Thank goodness someone is standing up for Think Secret’s right not to be victimized by frivolous legal intimidation.

A couple further questions:

1. Why marginalize or abandon Robin Morgan? Of course, everyone has a mind of their own and people shouldn’t have to answer for every wack thing that another person who shares their political convictions says, but it would be a serious mistake to suggest that Morgan—who played an instrumental role in founding New York Radical Women and WITCH, putting on the Miss America protests, organized abortion speak-outs and put together Sisterhood is Powerful, and has been a formative influence on outlets such as Ms. Magazine—is some kind of nutty fringe figure. She’s a radical figure, yes, but “radical” isn’t necessarily a term of criticism, and radical feminism has always been an absolutely essential part of Second Wave feminist theory and practice. Any story of the movement that doesn’t centrally involve her in her role as an organizer, writer, and editor has got to be a seriously distorted one.

   And—let’s put the cards on the table after all—I can’t think of a single quote by Robin Morgan that the Men’s Rights bully-boys drag out that actually has anything at all objectionable in it. What specifically is the point on which she shouldn’t be defended against her accusers?

2. While we’re at it, what is supposed to be wrong with man-hating, anyway? If some feminists do hate men, would that mean that there is something wrong with their position?

   I, for one, hate men. Not all of them, but lots of them. And I hate them precisely because they act like men are supposed to act. I.E. because they are controlling, exploitative, rude, callous, and/or violent, just like they were brought up to be. I hate men who act like that and I hate myself when I realize that I’ve acted that way. I don’t think it’s because I’m a neurotic bundle of self-loathing or because I’m aiming to become one; it’s because I think that all of us men have a long way to go to break ourselves out of habits and beliefs that keep us from acting like decent human beings as often as we should. We grow up thinking that we have the right to do a lot of fucked up stuff and then we usually go on to do it at some point or another. Often at many points throughout our lives.

   There are many men that I love and mostly trust but I love them and mostly trust them for the demonstrable steps they’ve taken away from the way that men are normally expected to act. And I’m doing what I can to help the efforts to change those expectations and those actions—in myself, and in others when I can reach them—but I can’t say I blame a woman at all if she doesn’t like most men or doesn’t necessarily trust our motives straight off the bat.

   That doesn’t strike me as unreasoned bigotry; it strikes me as a rational response to the empirical evidence.