Bob,

I did, actually, understand the metaphor. The problem is I don’t like it, and I sometimes try to use flat-footedly literal readings to point out implications of metaphors that I don’t like.

I don’t mind “vulgar” language, and I certainly don’t mind giving William a shout-out for a brave and eloquent speech in front of the world, especially at such a time.

What does trouble me is metaphors that tend to identify courage with masculine sexual anatomy that more than half the population doesn’t have, because it identifies courage with masculinity (and in particular with an especially obnoxious form of male sexual aggression, i.e. proudly exposing your man-bits to an assembled crowd). And, contrapositively, it also suggests that there’s something wrong with not having balls — by identifying not having balls with being cowardly. That kind of metaphor points up irrelevant or nonexistent features in those who get the “praise,” and simultaneously excludes a lot of people (like, say, Betsy or Celia) who actually are both very brave and also literally ball-less.

It’s particularly troubling when the tenacity, endurance, and courage of that majority, in the face of suffering, terror, or death, have historically been, and often currently are, systematically blanked-out, denied, disparaged, or ridiculed and mocked (as silly, worthless, sanctimonious, or “bitchy”) — mainly because those forms of tenacity, endurance, and courage were and are practiced by people with no balls, and also because they were and are typically practiced outside of antisocial institutions devoted to killing foreigners or beating up demographically “suspect” locals — institutions such as the hollering, chest-thumping uniformed thugs trying to intimidate and assault their way through the streets in St. Paul. (And it’s largely from the vernacular talk within those military and paramilitary outfits, suffused as they are with a cock-swinging macho “warrior” mindset, that metaphors about things like balls of steel have generally entered our language.)

There are lots of good, visceral metaphors for courageous defiance — showing spine, having guts; even “courage” is one (etymologically, it means having heart). So why not use one of those metaphors, which would probably have worked just as well in the rhetorical context, and which don’t have the same sexual implications?

dhex,

Well, “politics” derives from the Greek root “polis.” At the time the word was made, “polis” was ambiguous between (or consistently conflated) (1) the organized government of the city, and (2) civil society within the city. So when Aristotle wrote about “politics” he was talking about government processes, but about public life broadly, including many institutions within the city (religious, civic, educational, etc.) which today would be thought of as part of the private rather than the government sector.

Nowadays most people use politics to refer mainly or only to the business of the government, but some traditions (especially on the Left and in the feminist movement) use “politics” in a broader sense to include not only government processes but also struggles within civil society, especially if they have a common impact on a lot of people and if the civil society dynamics are structured by the balance of power between different social classes (such as men and women, or white people and black people, or…).

So “political” is not being expanded so far as just to mean “affects other people” (presumably remembering your friends’ birthdays affects other people, but I wouldn’t call it a political commitment); rather, “politics” is being being used to describe anything that acts to systematically structure public life in terms of the power relationships between groups of people. That includes governmental processes but it also includes a lot of other things, such as the way in which rape dramatically constrains the freedom of movement of all women, as women, and puts women in a state of greater dependency upon men.

Does that help clarify?

Incidentally, I’ve discussed the use of the term “politics” at some more length in section 2 of the Libertarian Feminism essay that I co-authored with Roderick Long.

Constant: I have never said, “if you want to know what a libertarian is, look at Ron Paul”. Do people do that? I guess if people do that, then that’s probably a mistake if they don’t agree with his whole platform. But do people really do that?

I don’t know whether anyone’s done that, but a lot of people have given money to the campaign, or put up signs and banners (“Ron Paul 2008,” “Ron Paul Revolution,” “Google Ron Paul,” etc.), or made personal endorsements of Ron Paul’s campaign, all of which they’ve justified on the grounds that Ron Paul’s campaign literature, debate answers, etc. promote libertarian ideals, and so getting more attention for his campaign will, in turn, educate more people about libertarianism and perhaps persuade more people to embrace it.

Presumably that’s only a good argument to the extent that Paul’s campaign actually is promoting libertarian ideals. If the money, for example, goes to produce nasty nativist-statist propaganda rather than propaganda that actually promotes libertarianism, then the money may be going towards promoting Ron Paul, but it’s not going towards promoting, or educating people about, libertarianism.

Ah, I see. Well, I applaud your endurance, if you managed to scroll through the whole thing. When I started the blog almost seven years ago, I was not yet an anarchist, although I was interested in and occasionally sympathetic to libertarian and anarchist ideas. So there certainly are some posts in the older parts of the blog that I would not be willing to stand by today. I now believe that Leftist goals can be attained entirely through the abolition of coercive laws and through free association, and in fact will be attained more fully and more reliably through those means; and also that, even if they could not be so achieved, they would not be worth achieving at the cost of violating even one innocent person’s individual liberty. So I hope that what you had in mind can be chalked up to changing views over the years rather than to inconsistency.

On the other hand, there are many more recent cases in which I expressed a desire for a given piece of legislation to pass or to fail to pass, but I don’t see that as necessarily inconsistent with anarchism. Some legislation violates the rights of peaceful people and some respects those rights; some legislation makes government extremely dangerous and some legislation — e.g. bills to repeal the dangerous legislation — helps curb or ameliorate the danger. What I would repudiate from my days as a state Leftist is not concern with legislation per se, but rather the particular pieces of statist coercion that I was willing to support or excuse. As a practical matter, I have become pretty thoroughly disenchanted with the prospects for any meaningful progress through legislation or electoral politics, but I think the issue at stake is one of strategy, not one of anarchist principle.

Anyway, thank you again for the kind words; I’m glad you enjoy the blog. If I’ve managed to be provoke some interesting thoughts then that’s as much as I’ve ever hoped for.