Tactically Speaking

Feminism is not simply a rich array of viewpoints sometimes at odds with each other, I would contend — but rather a philosophy that shifts its already vague claims as needed to avoid conflict with critics or to maintain its own reputation as a universally-accepted and uncontestable perspective. Were we more willing to make gender-rooted but non-feminist observations in public discourse, we might by now have begun to suspect that this pattern is rooted in the fact that feminism tends to be espoused by women who are more conflict-averse than their male counterparts in political and philosophical discussions. Or to put it more harshly, feminism survives in part because chivalry discourages subjecting its proponents to harsher grilling.

Feminism always seems to make demands…or make none…or have a consistency to it…or be diverse…precisely as necessary, I suspect, to maintain the vague claim that “Feminism is good.”

If someone calls it meaningless, that’s “preposterous!” If someone asks for a short explanation of what it means, though, that’s “oversimplifying!” If someone acknowledges that it has many forms — and that most seem statist — that’s “irrelevant” to its beneficial core purpose. If someone who happens to be libertarian asks what, then, it demands, he is told “simple legal equality!”

Fine, but that seems to render it redundant, even slightly dangerous and misleading, like saying “Redheads have the right to bear arms.” So feminism, like a hypothetical redheadism, can therefore be ignored as a mere corollary, not something more libertarians (like aged, white, angry, Cold War-era Todd) “need,” right? But the moment that someone says, well, feminists, you already have simple legal equality, he’s told “that’s not necessarily as important as social pressure, and it’s myopic to think so!” The moment he then says, “I’m concerned the libertarian conception of freedom is being dangerously watered down because these feminists seem to think social pressure is oppressive like law,” he’s called confused by Ladyblog — which insists that feminism isn’t concerned with social pressure!

And when all of these folks contradict each other while each insisting feminism is something readily understood — and that I’m the one being “painfully obtuse,” as a particularly arrogant commenter using the handle x. trapnel put it on Ladyblog — there’s Kerry Howley, with whom we began, to insist that feminist ideological diversity is being unfairly characterized as a sparking, malfunctioning, illogical computer when it is simply rich with varying viewpoints. Keep in mind, though, I didn’t start out by claiming feminism is meaningless — merely that it means something non-libertarian (at least in recent decades in the West) and is thus from a libertarian perspective (which I do not claim all readers share) a bad thing.

•••

After the past several weeks, I have no doubt feminism varies…but mostly in ways that lead to people claiming that market outcomes are only fully morally acceptable if women feel a sufficient absence of social pressure, such that they end up behaving in as diverse and socially-significant a range of ways as do men.

And that claim I reject, as should all market-respecting libertarians, since freedom in the libertarian conception is, first and foremost, something that is not hostage to certain patterned (and subtle) outcomes. That’s all. Pretty humble claim on my part — like saying, as any normal, market-oriented libertarian would, that the moral acceptability of the market is not contingent on Thai manufacturers playing as large a role as German manufacturers in the piano industry.

If there are forms of feminism that do not make some variation on the egalitarian claim that social outcomes morally must yield something like male-female parity (or at least that females are somehow aggrieved if “socially constrained” in the market by the preferences of sexist males), swell, but those forms of feminism are marginal, my admittedly imperfect sampling of the literature seems to suggest — as are non-property-focused forms of libertarianism (in the sense of “libertarianism” used in the English-speaking world for the past half-century or so, though context always varies, of course, and I realize times do change — the U.S. in the twenty-first century is not Europe in the nineteenth).

One well-meaning, intelligent feminist recently tried to eliminate my anti-feminist attitude by insisting that feminism is only the insistence that women have the same property rights as men. I think this was more of the sort of watering-down that will end the moment my back is turned, as it were, with demands for state-mandated or lawsuit-enforced equal pay, etc., ramping up once the laissez-faire libertarian is out of earshot.

By contrast, if I were asked what libertarianism, for example, demands, I would round off the edges of its competing — but very similar — formulations and offer a sort of consensus definition that would still have many, many very clear moral/policy implications rather than dissolving into universally-shared platitudes, or mere redundancy with some other philosophy.

Either way: what would we lose, exactly — from a libertarian perspective — if no one ever spoke of feminism again? How on Earth do libertarians “need” it (as I supposedly do badly), other than as a potential foe that might, if we’re lucky, be shoehorned into sometimes becoming an ally, as even a socialist party might in difficult enough (but rare) circumstances? It seems like libertarians need feminism and benefit from it about as much as we do from egalitarianism generally — which is to say, very little (except in so far as we need to keep our counterarguments effective).

Feminism, in short, is an immense, fetid, useless crock of anti-market complaining — or so I’m inclined to think, lacking any coherent explanation as of yet of why I should think otherwise. I suspect none will be forthcoming. A little more retaliatory invective, on the other hand, seems almost inevitable.

Debating Food, Feminism, and Bush

Ah, debate! Where would a free society be without it?

•Tonight, of course, is our momentous and holidays-appropriate Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Should We ‘Eat Locally’?”

•All month long on this blog, it’s the “Month of Feminism,” in which I’ll be trying to contend with a popular but misguided philosophy without seeming callous or oblivious to its concerns — all while resisting the temptation to be dragged down to the level of some of the philosophy’s more vicious and unreflective proponents, such as the ostensibly female (and libertarian) blogger by the handle Becky C. at the GirlinShortShorts blog, whose main method of argumentation about me in two posts now has been to call me a Neanderthal and post lots of nudie pics, I guess as a sort of brute-force argument that there’s no sexy fun to be had in Toddland or on this blog — an odd tactic for a feminist, I would have thought, but then, one thing we can all agree on is that I don’t know quite what feminism’s point is.

(On the more internecine libertarian front, Becky C. also says explicitly that the obstacle to libertarianism being more broadly accepted is that it doesn’t reach out to gays, etc. aggressively enough. I am not anti-gay, yet this strikes me as a classic case of how people assume their own preferences are also the key to tapping into the broader populace’s preferences. I’m an atheist, and it wouldn’t take too much effort to make atheism and anarcho-capitalism sound crudely analogous, but you don’t see me going around saying “If only the fuddy-duddy libertarian movement would stop kowtowing to the religious people and be proudly atheist, everyone would love us.” That’s not exactly what public opinion surveys suggest, to put it mildly, and unlike some libertarians, I’m more interested in freeing the human race from coercion to the greatest degree politically feasible than in shaping a movement around my own interests and tastes.)

•Meanwhile — and history will have to judge whether this is loftier or lower — Helen and I (thanks to Karol Sheinin) saw an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate last night on the amusingly drastic question “Is Bush the Worst U.S. President in Fifty Years?” featuring none other than Karl Rove and William Kristol arguing no and Slate/New Republic veteran Jacob Weisberg and the Economist’s Simon Jenkins arguing yes.

Karl Rove mentioned being very concerned that the Republicans, in trying to rebuild, ought to reach out to blacks and Hispanics more — and perhaps he should consult with Becky C. about outreach to gays. He was not entirely successful with outreach to the audience, though, being the one panelist to inspire hissing and groans of disapproval, in keeping with the general pattern I’ve long observed at public debates in NYC of leftists (as compared to their composed conservative neighbors) being rude, unpleasant, nasty little children (which will help Becky C. with her outreach in that direction, I suppose).

Rove and Kristol mainly focused on Iraq, though, frankly admitting that if we’d known Saddam didn’t yet have WMDs, we probably never would have entered Iraq — but Kristol admitted he’d still have thought we should, even though the public would never have been roused to favor such a move in the absence of WMDs. Rove made the important point that almost everyone — right, left, and Islamic-totalitarian — thought Saddam had WMDs, since he’d gone to great lengths to make it appear that he did. A tragic deception all around, but one that could very easily have occurred on Bill Clinton’s watch, likely without the left concluding he was the worst president of all time.

Interestingly, Jenkins identified himself as a libertarian, and even libertarianism-bashing (and “theocon”-hating) Weisberg claimed to favor limited government and free trade, seeing these as other good causes Bush has abandoned over the past eight years (though as Rove put it in much more detailed and accurate comments, Bush has fought tooth and nail for free trade agreements that the Democrats have spurned — even Democrats who, quite rightly, supported NAFTA under Clinton).

In a way, the most interesting presidential-evaluation wrinkle of the evening, though, may have been the unabashedly and amusingly partisan opening comments from the head of the Rosenkranz Foundation that sponsored the debate. At the risk of ruining all the suspense (maybe even swaying some votes in the overwhelmingly anti-Bush audience), he waltzed right out and made the case for Jimmy Carter’s weakness being the root cause of countless economic and foreign policy disasters during and after his presidency, not least the 1979 Iranian Revolution that has caused so many of our woes.

In short, though over 60% of the audience may have voted that Bush (not Nixon, not LBJ, etc.) was the worst, and though the before-and-after voting suggests that Kristol and Rove swayed the most undecideds with their arguments, the real message of the evening was that Jimmy Carter remains, as The Simpsons teaches us, “history’s greatest monster.” Let us hope he never rises from his grave. I mean, once he’s dead. Or, you know, whenever.

Kafkaesque Feminism

There are numerous reasons for a libertarian to reject feminism, and I may not get to all of them this month, but one thing that should rub most libertarians the wrong way is the Kafka-like inability of a well-meaning agent to be confident he has behaved justly under the arbitrary and unpredictable (not to mention never-clearly-stated) moral rules of feminism.

If you tell a woman she looks better in dresses than in pants, have you “coerced” her without using physical force? Is this contingent on whether nine out of ten other males told her the same thing? Who the hell knows. You just have to sit there waiting for feminists to pass judgment. I don’t think most people of a libertarian bent would consider even the harshest of wine or theatre critics in any meaningful sense coercive (freedom means experiment and feedback, speech and critical response, as Virginia Postrel says). Yet expressing biologically- or for that matter historically-rooted gender-related aesthetic preferences is somehow akin to truncheon-wielding, surprisingly enough.

Is fashion evil? Cosmetics? Male-dominated sports? They can always get you for something, and you just have to wait and see when the Sword of Damocles descends — and possibly even apologize afterwards for using violent imagery involving swords. Uh, I mean, unless feminists claim this week that “women like swords just as much as men.” (Then again, Swords of Damocles may be considered laughable Freudian castration imagery this week…or, on the other hand, is this one of those weeks when it’s considered laughably paranoid to think people still talk about Freudianism and deconstruction and semiotics? Be careful.)

Similarly, I gather that in these porny, Third-Wave-feminist times, we’re now supposed to think strippers are oppressive when they’re hot, busty blondes but non-oppressive when they’re tattooed lesbians with bisexual friends in the audience who find Weimar kitschy. I’m not joking. I guess the Third Wave-type feminists can send a memo when they decide all this for sure. In the interim, shamed and guilt-wracked, we can only await their verdicts. (Or not. Actually, I’m going with…not.)

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Should We "Eat Locally"?

This blog’s “Month of Feminism” starts today, mere days after Thanksgiving, which has probably left more than one feminist reader feeling fat — and thus oppressed by the patriarchy.

But before we can move on to a careful dissection of that unwarranted feeling of oppression, another food-related debate is upon us — and you should join us for it, this Wednesday (Dec. 3, 8pm) at Lolita Bar:

Should We “Eat Locally”?

YES: Jesse Anttila-Hughes (Columbia Ph.D. student, climate and disasters)

NO: Saife Ammous (Columbia Ph.D. candidate, sustainable development)

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar. Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

Would we be healthier, ecologically better off, and more organically socially connected to our fellow citizens if we bought from the farmer across town instead of a distant, possibly unfriendly agribusiness? This debate is, in a way, the nutritional analogue of an important tension recurring in several political philosophies: the degree to which we value decentralization and global interconnectedness. Sometimes the two jibe, and sometimes they’re hopelessly at odds.

Come find the answer on Wednesday — and keep reading this blog in December for more on the moral significance of offending fat chicks (and related topics), as alluded to above. For the larger picture on how to resolve some of the aforementioned local/global political tensions, of course, you’ll have to read this blog’s “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” in January as well.

Capt. Kirk vs. Klaus Nomi

On this, the eve of this blog’s Month of Feminism, let us pause for a moment to honor a manly man, James Tiberius Kirk, and a self-consciously girly man, Klaus Nomi.

There’s a marvelous and unexpected moment in the new trailer for next year’s J.J. Abrams Star Trek relaunch film when we hear a figure identify himself as “James Tiberius Kirk,” and between that and the urgent-looking action montage that follows — complete with the classic Red Alert Noise and shots of dangerously-tilting shipdecks (in space) — I suspect Abrams will be making good on his confession of being more a Star Wars/action film sort of guy than a cerebral Star Trek fan. And you know what? That’s still Star Trek.

I mean, let us not become so guilty of believing Star Trek’s own hype that we actually think the show’s greatest appeal, back when it started in the 60s, was simply math-problem-like cerebration. It was an intense, driving, action-fueled confrontation with the unknown, in which Kirk was frequently on the brink of death and had to angrily order his crewmen — and complete strangers from other worlds — to get a grip on themselves so that they could work together to blow something up or kill something.

We all complained for the next four decades that something about the spirit of the original series had been lost in later iterations. Well, it was largely Manly Kirk that was lost, with Capt. Picard, wonderful as he is, effectively hybridizing Kirk’s emotion and Spock’s cool rationality and putting an end to the tension that made the show come alive — sort of like when Scully finally admitted there’s an alien invasion going on.

Trek needed Kirk’s he-man adventure-seeking impulse, which the show Enterprise tried but failed to recapture by turning the clock way back to the primitive and emotive twenty-second century. (The Manny Koto-guided fourth season was fantastic for attentive nerds, but it was too little too late, even with a Khan- and Data-related explanation for the two different types of Klingons — not to mention seeing a CGI Gorn, Tholians, the moment of First Contact, and the Mirror Mirror universe all in one episode.)

•••

Absent that Kirk/Abrams tough-adventurer impulse, the emasculated future might very well look like Klaus Nomi’s memorable performance from the New Wave documentary Urgh! A Music War (which Helen and I saw at Brooklyn Academy of Music). Not that I’m saying that would be bad either, and Nomi sort of reminds me of the emcee from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with a little more Joel Grey and some Pee-wee Herman thrown in (particularly from the Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which had special guest stars k.d. lang, Little Richard, Magic Johnson, Cher, Grace Jones, a Marine Corps Choir, and even muscular shirtless construction workers building a new wing of the playhouse out of fruitcakes, I kid you not).

But diversity is good — there is room enough in the future for both Gary Numan’s motorized chair and Capt. Pike’s, so long as no one threatens, like Davros, to coerce others into doing things his way.

Thankful for P.J. O'Rourke, Less So for the GOP

One reason I’m thankful that P.J. O’Rourke has not succumbed to his recently-revealed (treatable) ass cancer is that his ongoing existence allows him to write great articles like this very funny one summarizing the grim and frustrating situation of Republicans at this juncture in history.

Where do we go from here? I for one spend December blogging about how not to philosophize and January blogging about how to do so with a proper regard for the centrality of property rights. Political parties and movements can agree with me or not, but at this late stage in history, I just gotta be me.

But lest we think self-mockery is possible for Republicans but not for the more elite band of Atlas Shrugged readers, behold this marvelous comedy piece from McSweeney’s, pointed out to me by co-worker Jeff Stier (and reminding me somewhat of the warnings over the past couple years from my ex-girlfriend Koli, who’s moving to DC, about the disconnect between laissez-faire ideals of productivity and some of the obfuscatory legal-semantic shenanigans she saw going on down on Wall Street). Sigh.

Lest we think there is nothing positive still to be said about proud, Randian-style capitalism, though, I will just have to make Atlas Shrugged one of my (seven) Book Selections of the Month for December (the Month of Feminism on my blog), using a first edition first printing copy ironically given to me as a gift by Valerie Jackson, a lefty friend from Brown now organic farming in upstate New York — and no doubt having a fine Thanksgiving dinner while, by principle or mere happenstance, eating locally (the practice at the heart of next week’s Lolita Debate, so join us for that — and bring leftovers if you like).

All Obama Needs to Do Is Remain Black

Many people have said Obama will inevitably disappoint people because he’s raised expectations for “change” so high. I don’t think that’s true. Despite everyone’s (healthy) pretense that the election had nothing to do with race, as soon as he won, professional broadcasters were openly weeping on-air over the fact that simply by electing a black man, America had achieved change. Obama pretty much said it himself in his victory speech.

So if — even with his campaign agenda rapidly removed from his website and former Clinton administration officials, not to mention actual Clintons, filling his administration — Obama just remains black throughout his administration, I think he can plausibly argue that he fulfilled at least the eleventh-hour expectations for his presidency.

Once the election was decided, it sure sounded from people’s reactions as if the election had been about race after all. Jeez, if we’d known poor old McCain was not merely up against “a different timetable for Iraq withdrawal” but up against “all our hopes and dreams for the fulfillment of the Civil Rights revolution,” we all could have written off McCain months ago – but we kept being told that Obama was “post-racial” and transcending old political divides and so forth and that the election was about other matters.

Was this really a chance for just over half of American voters to pretend they were completing the work of MLK? Maybe next time the Republicans should run someone Jewish and subtly imply you’d be re-defeating the Nazis by electing him.

And lest I sound too flippant about all this, I should from time to time concede that just before I was born, America’s racial situation, now fairly tolerable, was often very scary — witness 1960s characters like Gen. Edwin Walker, with his anti-communist, anti-UN but also anti-integration views (and near-assassination by pro-Cuban communist Lee Harvey Oswald).

This does not make everyone who voted against Obama — such as me, for example — retroactively some sort of Klan-supporter, though. In fact, after it was revealed that Obama collects Spider-Man and Conan comics (which I applaud, of course — but since he’s an accomplished Ivy League type, it’s no surprise), two people who came out as non-Obama-supporters were in fact…comic book creators Roy Thomas and John Romita, Sr., who’ve worked on those very comics (thank you to manga-selling Ali Kokmen for pointing out that video clip to me — and I wonder how comics fans Jonah Goldberg and Robert George feel about this revelation).

•••

One of the most postmodern developments since the election has to be al Qaeda invoking Malcolm X. I mean, who would have imagined three years ago that we’d be asking ourselves “How will Sec. of State Clinton react if al Qaeda continues to say the President is betraying the legacy of Malcolm X?” The world’s much less predictable than pundits pretend it is. You have no idea what we’ll be worrying about in 2011.

I don’t pretend to know what to expect from Obama’s administration and think its behavior will largely be dictated by external events no one’s even thinking about right now. I looked forward to an unambitious Bush presidency until 9/11 happened, and perhaps Obama, partly for the reasons sketched above, will prove significantly less audacious than, say, FDR.

I’m pleased Obama said in one interview that reading Hayek and Milton Friedman in the early 80s contributed to his belief that government must be humble, at least when attempting things like the Iraq war — though it remains to be seen if he’ll show similar humility when imposing Change on the domestic front.

One of the most encouraging things I’ve seen written about Obama was actually written by Gary Hart in his review a couple years ago of The Audacity of Hope, and I’ll be as delighted as anyone if Obama’s presidency reflects the general spirit of these words:

He is particularly evocative on the issue of ideological inconsistency, blaming liberals for demanding civil liberties but not deregulation and conservatives for wanting deregulation of markets but encouraging wiretapping.

P.S. Headlines like this one make me think he’s getting more Clintonian all the time (but then, I’ve long said I thought he’s arguably even more like triangulating-Bill than Hillary is, which is not the worst thing in the world): “Obama promotes fiscal restraint, big spending.”

Weird Moments in Advertising (I'm a Mac)

I don’t know if I can get someone whose name I don’t know and who I have little hope of tracking down fired, but it may be worth a try.  I’m talking about you, Person Who Cues Up the Commercials for Channel 11 During the Weeknight 7:30 Family Guy Reruns.

Someone’s clearly been leaning on a fade-in switch before it’s actually time to cut away to the commercial, with the result that a cued-up, frozen frame from the start of an ad appears for a few seconds, well before the Family Guy segment is complete.  On the night of November 11, it was the ghostly face of Regis Philbin appearing, bizarrely enough, just after Stewie complained about Tuesday afternoons at the strip club not bringing out the “A squad” and asked “Is there anyone in here who hasn’t had a c-section?”  And as if in answer: the still image of Regis lying on a psychiatrist’s couch.

It happened again this past Thursday, the 20th, though this time with the less-alarming image of a Pizza Hut box.  Somewhere out there is someone with the power to end this.

More complex is the problem of the “I’m a pc” ads that I gather are supposed to make us realize that (contrary to the impression given by recent Mac ads) each pc user is in fact an interesting, unique individual.  Well, I hate to sound snooty, but am I the only one who thinks that virtually every individual proudly proclaiming “I’m a pc” in those ads sounds like an annoying — and oddly unattractive — loser?  Those ads have done more to make me feel comfortable with my Mac than the original Mac ads ever did.

And I was pleased to hear that the plug was being pulled early on those creepy Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ads, which I guess were also meant to humanize and hip-up Mr. Gates but, what with Jerry’s nervous questions and fawning and Gates’s near silence throughout, just made Bill Gates seem all the more alien and disturbing, possibly even android.

I’m a Mac, I guess.  Someone fire the anti-Mac ad agency after we’ve finished getting rid of that video editor at Channel 11.

John Stossel's Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics (and Brian Boitano)

Today, I’m not only scheduled to do another PJTV appearance (here’s the previous one) but to have lunch with theatre guy/philosopher Richard Ryan and one of the John Stossel producers I used to work with, Kristi Kendall — with whose help I have made one more small but important mark on pop culture. I was the one who suggested to her that Stossel should say “What would Brian Boitano do?” (a question asked by Stossel’s fellow libertarians Trey Parker and Matt Stone in a memorable musical sequence from the South Park movie) in the opening segment of last month’s Stossel hour — in which Stossel uses skating in a crowded ice rink as an example of an activity best coordinated by individuals rather than a central planner.

The awesome hour, which aired on October 17, was called John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics, and I’m pleased it focused (as I always think we should) largely on pragmatic, economic consequences of government’s inevitable bureaucratic idiocy, rather than getting bogged down in largely irresolvable cultural/symbolic disputes (which ought rightly to remain in the private sector, where spontaneous orders from tradition to markets to anarchic individualism can sort them out).

•The skating/spontaneous order sequence is here.

•The second sequence covers the financial bailout.

•The third looks at recovery efforts after Katrina — and how much faster the non-governmental efforts tend to be (something I know market-friendly Louisiana governor and Brown alum Bobby Jindal has noticed). I’m reminded of the absurd case of World Trade Center 7 — no, not the conspiracy theories about it being demolished by the government but the far more relevant fact of its lightning-fast reconstruction relative to the rest of the Trade Center hole-in-the-ground — since that particular building was outside the bureaucratic, partially government-run zone where so little construction has occurred over the past seven years, compounding one of the nation’s greatest disasters (I’ve been to multiple New York Academy of Sciences events atop the snazzy new WTC 7, while most of Ground Zero remains literally a pit).

•The fourth Stossel segment is an infuriating look at the results of campaign finance “reform” (a misguided crusade that made it easier for conservatives and libertarians to withhold support from mastermind John McCain).

•The fifth looks at farm subsidies — if you’re doing absolutely nothing to help produce cheap, plentiful food, you may well qualify.

•And the sixth sums up our misguided notions about the presidency.

People who want this thing called government to continue existing do us no greater kindness than people who love having the Mob around.

P.S. One of many ironic side effects of McCain-spawned campaign laws: the makers of a documentary criticizing one of McCain’s rivals, Hillary Clinton, have had to fight the law to advertise the film.

UPDATE: Chinese Democracy...

…is available exclusively at Best Buy, it’s worth noting, and I’m listening to it now.

Given that the very first song (the title track) really does seem to be a hymn to the potential for political change in China — and rhymes “masturbation” with “rule a nation” in a verse also derisively mentioning “your iron fist” — I think Axl must have written the album for my G N’ R-loving Chinese-language professor friend Chris, which is only right [UPDATE 11/24/08: And Beijing has noticed, the tyrannical bastards, as noted on Drudge -- I haven't been this proud of American pop culture since Kim Jong-Il condemned Team America].

Three tracks so far, and so far we’re rockin’. “Now ah know you betta [GUITAR]…” Yeah.

Chris also shares the recent enthusiasm for locally-grown foods, as it happens, and I have a volunteer to argue against that idea at our next Lolita Bar Debate (Wed., Dec. 3 at 8pm), so if you, dear reader, want to defend it — and can get to Manhattan on your own — let me know before someone else steps up [UPDATE: Got him!].

GG Allin, ConPunk, Suffering

•One more Helen thought left over after yesterday’s entry, and then I’ll stop going on about her: If, as she’s blogged, she likes conservatism, punk, religion, and (contra utilitarianism) suffering, I really must ask her what she thinks of notorious punk GG Allin (whose Wikipedia entry is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read).

As I was discussing with a couple other friends, the late punk singer raises questions about whether living hard, suffering, engaging in crime and violence, and dying young — but doing so with intensity and a sense of mission — can in fact be more valuable than living a comfy, pleasant existence for eight decades or so. Allin was born in poverty, nicknamed after his attempts to pronounce “Jesus,” smeared himself with feces and committed roughly every other extreme act imaginable on stage while singing, then died on a sofa amidst partying friends who failed to notice he’d died for about a day. Disaster? Shining, legendary success? Both? Not the life of a cautious utility-calculator, in any case.

•Anyone interested, as some of the folks at that paleo conference Helen’s returning from today no doubt are, in stories that combine libertarianism, Catholicism, trouble-making, and ethnic identity in weird ways might enjoy this strange — and admittedly long and sort of petty — tale of a libertarian econ prof run afoul of a Jesuit university. People ought to be prepared for this sort of thing if they expect to learn from Walter Block, author of Defending the Undefendable.

•On a much less disturbing music note, I only recently discovered that the familiar, ominous, rising synthesizer tone from the beginning of THX tapes is nearly identical, as many people have apparently observed, to the opening sound from the song “Countdown to Zero” by Asia from their album Astra. It’s disorienting to hear the beginning of the song now — not that one often does.

Helen Fills My iPod -- and Guns N' Roses Fills My Soda Can

In 1997, I gave up on trying to keep track of what’s cool when even U2, who I had thought were not only cool (back in the 80s and early 90s, at least) but popular, had an ABC concert special and it got nearly the lowest ratings of any broadcast in the network’s history — the producer told me so herself when I bumped into her in the ABC elevator. Meanwhile, boy bands and Britney were conquering the world.

I began wishing a few years after that that I had a young hipster who could tell me whether there’s better stuff out there than the handful of alternative rock things I’ve heard and liked in the 00s — first, the ones that got big enough to attract mainstream attention (like White Stripes, Strokes, Hives, Sounds, Surferosa, Franz Ferdinand, etc.), soon followed by all the twee stuff I learned about in part via Michael Malice (My Favorite, Stars, etc.) — when I wasn’t listening to the hip dive-bar-like sounds of DevilsNight.com, with its mix of everything from Pixies to Patsy Cline (or my Pandora.com channels — I find Echo and the Bunnymen works really well, as does My Favorite, fittingly).

Then, in the past year, I started thinking that if I ever get around to filling the iPod that my friends Paul and Jenny Taylor gave me for being one of their groomsmen in 2007, I should just skip downloading my old favorites and instead put all the stuff I’d heard but not acquired in the past decade on it, giving me a fresh start in life, musically speaking.

Well, I have cut out the middle man (namely me) in the plan to get a young, hip person to tell me what’s cool so I’ll know what to put on the iPod: The young, hip person has offered to fill it directly. My girlfriend Helen has a vast knowledge of music from country to punk, and luckily (?) her tastes overlap substantially with my own (I mean, despite the country), so she’s going to educate me by putting dozens of things on the previously-empty iPod herself this very weekend (thanks!).

•••

Meanwhile, I may have to buy one last physical CD before the era of doing that officially ends.

It just so happens that this same weekend that Helen’s filling the iPod (interrupted by her paleocon road trip to a Mencken conference in Maryland, with her fellow Paleo Riders being Richard Spencer and John Derbyshire, Taki having bailed), Guns N’ Roses is finally releasing its fourteen-years-in-the-making album Chinese Democracy.

I need to hold it in my hands, not just hear it, to be sure it’s real. As Chuck Klosterman rightly says, this long-imagined album is like a “unicorn” for some of us of a certain age (speaking of which, luckily for young Helen, the prospect of a new G N’ R album also makes me feel like I, too, am in my early twenties, so it’ll be almost like we’re the same age when we see my parents for Thanksgiving).

One of my old G N’ R-loving college pals (many of them comedy writers back then and many also libertarians), Christine Caldwell Ames, who pointed out the Klosterman review to some of us, notes that the G N’ R album’s release means that the makers of Dr. Pepper are officially planning to make good on their promise to provide everyone in America who asks with a free soda, in honor of this long-awaited event.

And since I’ve developed a small caffeine habit over the past couple years for the first time in my life, I face the delightful prospect of listening to G N’ R, while getting my caffeine fix, after learning what’s on my iPod, thanks to my cool conservative-yet-punk girlfriend.

•••

I haven’t heard Helen praise G N’ R, but she does display a greater admiration, born partly of Nietzsche, for violence and emphatic tribal self-assertion than I do — indeed, that’s why she too thinks there are conservative/punk parallels (not quite my own reasons). So she should appreciate why Axl’s convincingly angry lyrics and downright dangerous attitude were a fun occasional escape for my largely well-behaved college circle.

And after all, the first rock video Helen ever recommended to me was “Kiss with a Fist” by Florence and the Machine, which is only conservative if your idea of conservatism involves thinking people should be thick-skinned enough to put up with the occasional beating — and she has, after all, said relatively nice things about those Jezebel controverts who pooh-poohed the emotional effects of rape. But I wouldn’t do her any harm, good utilitarian that I am (and the learning isn’t all one way — I’m the one who convinced her to read her obvious kindred spirit Florence King).

Speaking of philosophical differences, she recently blogged — in two parts — about odd things said at a recent ISI conference about where the future of conservatism lies, and the entry posted in between those two parts by one of her co-bloggers also happens to be an amusing reminder that I shouldn’t put too much hope in the idea of Newt Gingrich being a nice, safe figure around whom to rebuild a fusionist alliance.

No movement is too small to have its factional infights, though, as I’ll continue to demonstrate in the weeks ahead, even while gradually converting every last person in the world to my point of view, though it may take weeks — possibly months.

That Florence and the Machine video above probably won’t make feminists happy, incidentally, especially coercion-wary ones — unless they have good senses of irony. (Like I said, it won’t make them happy.) So to compensate, let’s declare December the “Month of Feminism” on this blog, followed immediately by the “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” in January.

P.S. G N’ R listeners might like to know that the talented and witty Regina Spektor’s song “On the Radio” is the only song I’ve ever heard with lines about listening to G N’ R, specifically “Novemeber Rain,” which gets rhymed with “That solo’s really long/ But it’s a nice refrain.” And that solo starts with what I think my friend Dave Whitney once declared the sweetest note in the history of rock. Dave says stuff like that.

The End of Time, the Curse of Batman, the Legend of Bionicles

Is it just me, or does the question asked by this trailer for Roland Emmerich’s upcoming doomsday movie, 2012, kind of make you think of the financial crisis?

Emmerich is responsible for such dopey films as the American Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC — but he’s got a brilliant viral marketing idea in that trailer in asking people to Google search “2012.”  He’s basically just using all the already-existing mystical conspiracy theories about that year being the end of the world as his marketing campaign.  Ingenious.  It’s like doing a movie about Napoleon and asking people to Google “Napoleon” — but better because if they Google “2012,” they’ll find all sorts of crazy nonsense that will make them think they have to see the film to survive the Apocalypse.  My friends in advertising should take note.

I’m not the only one who’s thinking about the financial crisis — and the bailout itself, which is like a gigantic hole torn in the ship of state, eliminating the barrier between the public and private sectors — as if it all portends the end of the world as we know it.  I see the president of the Cato Institute, Ed Crane, is giving a luncheon talk in NYC today cheerily entitled “It’s Always Darkest Before the End of Time.”  I love that.  He may give fellow speaker Tucker Carlson a run for his money, humorwise.

And still, I was one of the recipients of an e-mail from a guy who says he’d never pay to hear Cato speeches because Cato is a “fifth columnist” organization doing more harm than good to the movement.  Jeez.  You excommunicate Cato and what’s left of the libertarian movement?  I will try not to sound like that, over the next month or so, as I explain in more detail my reasons for tying the ideas of liberty and property together more tightly than some of my compatriots do.  I really am a big-tent sort of guy at heart who fears that others will be more exclusionary than they intend (you don’t want to tell a world already skeptical of adopting your view of property rights that to do so they must also adopt your attitude toward gender relations, for example, but more on that later).

•••

In more trivial political news, both Jacob Levy and ACSH co-worker Jeff Stier pointed out to me that the city of Batman, Turkey is suing the makers of the Batman movies (now that they’re filthy rich) for using their city’s name without permission (you know, Gotham, as NYC is sometimes called, could use a boost to its finances, too…).  I am reminded of the only slightly less absurd case of Maori tribes suing the Lego toys called Bionicles because the story of the Bionicles warriors was drawn from Maori legends.  I know there are plenty of examples of indigenous people being granted special legal privileges to compensate for past exploitation — and I’m a traditionalist in some ways — but imagine the ludicrous and wide-ranging legal ramifications if no traditions could be used without paying royalties.  The Turks and the Maori are both wrong.

And there may be an opportunity for feminists to be wrong here, too, since part of the city of Batman’s argument, according to the Wikipedia entry about the place, is that the Batman movies are oppressing women:

On November 7th, 2008, Batman Mayor Huseyin Kalkan began looking into legal possibilities toward suing Christopher Nolan, director of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight for naming infringement and “placing the blame for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate on the psychological impact that the film’s success has had on the city’s inhabitants.”

Murder?  Suicides?  I’m reminded of my favorite-ever New York Post front-page headline (which is saying a lot), after cops boycotted a Batman movie to punish Time-Warner for distributing the song “Cop Killer.”  The headline was “Cops Pin Rap on Batman.”

We’ll hunt him, because he can take it.  Because he’s not a hero.  He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector.  A dark knight…

Heinlein, Plato, Voting, Servitude, and Obama

While one of the two most famous “response” books to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (all three books depicting a galactic war against a hive-mind insect race, with major sociological consequences), Ender’s Game, may or may not get turned into a movie, it now looks likely that something even better will happen: Ridley Scott, after working for decades to get the rights, appears likely to make Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, the story of near-light travel stretching a war over multiple, drastically varied periods of future Earth history (including one phase where the governments encourage homosexuality to combat overpopulation, even in the military, which should get some critics reacting).

In related news, I recently spoke to an Institute for Humane Studies alum who said he thinks the U.S. should follow his native UK in adopting a policy that — without him being conscious of it — happens to be the exact opposite of one in Starship Troopers: in the UK, about the only people forbidden to vote are those serving in the military, the thinking being that the military should stay apolitical (in Troopers, you can only vote if, a la Plato’s guardians, you’ve proven your selflessness by serving in the military).

I don’t think GOP prospects would be helped much if the UK method were adopted here, for what it’s worth. Say, how about a progressive voter reform plan like this:

•No military votes
•Prisoners and felons can vote (and for Congressional apportionment purposes are counted as residents of the [blue] areas where they committed their crimes, not where they’re imprisoned)
•No proof of identity necessary
•Families of resident aliens can vote by absentee ballot from their home countries
•Two votes for each Bush, Clinton, or Kennedy family member
•DC statehood, because slavery is wrong
•No votes for people tied to private corporations, as they may be biased
•Union members’ votes to be cast collectively, by head of union

On a more serious and depressing note, Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, may not want us all to become Starship Troopers but does want to make three months of servitude to government (receiving civil defense training and the like) mandatory for all eighteen to twenty-five year-olds (as described in his book and repeated in at least one interview online).  I can’t help thinking that fanatical, knife-wielding Emaneul may have inherited such Spartan attitudes from his parents, his father having been in the arguably-terrorist Irgun in Israel and his mother having been a union organizer.  Now we — and the new president — get to experience a little of his esprit de corps, though we can hope he has little impact on actual policy.

But given Obama’s popularity among the young, surely they could get plenty of volunteers for an Obama-corps.  And while they’re serving, perhaps they should be forbidden to vote.

P.S. Speaking of voting, the guy I voted for in the primary (for strategic reasons lost in the mists of history now), Romney, pleased me by writing a New York Times op-ed yesterday entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”  Nice to see someone still taking the hardass position these days — and someone from Michigan.  For property rights advocates, it should get easier and easier in the next few years to demonstrate our consistency by pointing with disapproval to more and more cases of businesses, not just poor people, being on welfare.

The Personal Is Not the Political -- In Fact, Almost Nothing Is

The world is full of people with preferences not only about how to live but with tons of advice for others on how to live. Freedom means they can give all the advice they want, and you are free to ignore it — as long they don’t violate your property rights (including your right to your own body). Libertarianism’s chief strength, then, has always been in recognizing the vast gulf between, on one hand, myriad, never-ending social complaints (along with the conflicting social philosophies built around them) and, on the other hand, the minuscule and tightly constrained range of things that rise (or, if you prefer, fall) to the level of political/legal complaints.

The great danger for humankind, whether from the Taliban or the communists, has always been the totalizing impulse to turn all social complaints into justifications for political action — to a totalitarian, there is no preference about how other people should act that does not become a political claim. Feminism, like most “positive liberty” philosophies (as opposed to assault-forbidding “negative liberty” ones — such as libertarianism, with its leave-me-alone legal framework), obliterates the distinction between social and political philosophy and inevitably sows the seeds of politicized dissatisfaction with mere unplanned — and potentially very sexist — market outcomes.

As my Arkansas legislator friend so wisely put it, one of libertarianism’s greatest strengths has always been that it counsels us to say, to the feminist who claims “I am politically oppressed because my boyfriend calls me stupid,” the enlightened and freedom-affirming response: “You’re not oppressed, you’re just stupid.”

The more causes for political complaint people believe themselves to have, the more likely a total state becomes. If selling trans fats — or simply calling a woman fat — is deemed an assault on social justice, a Kafkaesque web of petty laws becomes more likely. If such views become commonplace: libertarianism, R.I.P.

•••

I wrote an article for Liberty in 1993 — which I’m flattered to find Jesse Walker still remembers — that pointed out (in the admittedly different context of the political concerns of fifteen years ago) that despite the richness of local traditions — such as those of the Amish, say (of which I promise I’ve only become more appreciative over the years) — a large, diverse society cannot hope to avoid the decline into a welfare state, with each interest group fighting for its narrow vision of the good life and slice of the communal wealth, unless there is a very strong prevailing loyalty to the shared, universal ground rules of the society, even stronger than the loyalty to many aspects of the local, more tribal culture. If anything, this was in some sense an argument against culturally-rich ethical allegiances and in favor of a strong, rational loyalty to a “thin” set of basic rights, namely (and unequivocally) property rights.

Milton Friedman, to my delight, wrote a response saying that I should not despair because Sweden at that time had managed to roll back some aspects of the welfare/taxation state. Jacob Levy wrote that I should think of America as born not so much of a strong attachment to a limited set of rights as born of a pragmatic truce between factions and sects each with its own very strong conception of the good life, to which it was primarily loyal.

•••

Since 1993, if anything, I’ve become more convinced of the Levy position even than Levy is (live, here in New York City a few years ago, we debated near-opposite positions relative to each other from the ones we took a decade earlier in the pages of Liberty on these issues). That is, I’m more convinced now of the importance of letting local/tribal/traditional cultures be left alone to do their own thing, so long as they don’t violate property rights, the one universal ground rule — which means precisely that fewer of our cultural norms should be “smuggled” into the meta-ethic of libertarianism as a sort of shallow, ersatz mega-culture.

In any case, under libertarianism, Amishness is as permissible as an egalitarian feminist commune. You can argue either is distasteful, but that’s a separate issue.

Maybe it’s high time we formulated a more-explicitly tiered language for talking about such distinctions, though: wrong vs. illegal vs. ought-to-be-illegal — grey area, merely unpleasant, bad idea but not really morally-loaded, etc. — since these things so often get lumped together. Libertarianism, though, like no other philosophy, hinges on recognizing these distinctions rather than treating That Which Is Bad as necessarily deserving of simultaneous avoidance, moral condemnation, outlawing, punishment by God, etc., etc., etc.

There are layers of appropriate response, and most of them are simply none of libertarianism’s business, just as they are none of the state’s business.