Code Monkey Ramblings

This blog is going into hibernation for the winter*

2009-10-22T10:09:06Z

We're starting to move to a new place now. We decided that our current place was just too expensive for our needs and are busting our humps to get out over the next two months. Blogging has proved to be incompatible with this and other priorities for the time being, so I'm effectively putting my blog in read-only mode until life settles back down.

*Till about mid-December

More on cultural libertarianism

2009-10-21T11:54:14Z

Reason has posted the debate that I referred to in a previous post. Here are some of Kerry Howley's points, including the ones to which Ed Feser was referring:

"True libertarianism is not cultural libertarianism," the philosopher Edward Feser wrote on the paleolibertarian website LewRockwell.com in December 2001. This statement was immediately preceded by a call for the stigmatization of porn, adultery, divorce, and premarital sex-in other words, an argument for a particular kind of culture. Feser claimed that small government and an ethos of "personal fulfillment" were incompatible, and he argued for the former over the latter. In the guise of an attack on cultural libertarianism, Feser demanded that libertarians espouse different patterns of cultural behavior.

As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural libertarians. We just don't share the same agenda. Some prefer to advance their agenda by pretending it doesn't exist: that social convention is not a matter of concern for those who believe in individual liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no cultural content-has nothing to say, for instance, about society's acceptance of gays and lesbians-he is engaging in a kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the mob while balking at that of the state.

This prioritization can be difficult to confront because it is most often expressed in strategic silence or casual conversation. The tendency to dismiss feminist complaints about social pressure as "self-victimization," for instance, is not something one is likely to encounter in a philosophical meditation on the centrality of property rights. It emerges in the choice to write about one freedom-limiting aspect of the world rather than another, bubbles up in Internet chatter, and spills over into informal interactions.

Beyond the realm of social psychology lie more obvious markers of social pressure-brute, external restrictions on freedom maintained by intolerance or cultural inertia. Libertarians will agree that laws requiring racial segregation and prohibiting victimless, though controversial, sexual practices are contrary to their creed. But if the constraints on freedom of association suddenly become social rather than bureaucratic-if the neighborhood decides it does not want black residents, or the extended family decides it cannot tolerate gay sons-we do not experience a net expansion of freedom. If a black man who cannot hold employment by law is unfree, so too is a black man who cannot hold employment because social custom decrees that no one will hire him. If a gay couple that cannot legally marry is being wronged, so too is a couple that must stay closeted to avoid social ostracism. A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is not living a free life, even if no one has bothered to codify the rules in an Important Book and call them "laws."

None of this is to say that it is the state's place to force a family to accept its children, a church to welcome all comers, or a sex worker to embrace all lonely hearts. There is a difference between emotional coercion and physical force. But it is the role of someone who professes to believe in the virtues of individualism-and emphatically the role of someone who believes that social persuasion is preferable to legal coercion-to foster a culture that is tolerant of nonconformity.

The reason that Feser is correct about the nature of "true libertarianism" is that cultural libertarianism does not respect the costs that come with attacking social values the way it does. Libertarians like Howley believes it is possible to cleanly make war on a few values that they and they alone know are genuinely coercive without starting a greater conflict that will lead to a net loss of freedom in the form of a puritanical campaign against anything which remotely smacks of intolerance. The modern corporate workplace is an excellent example of what happens when you declare war on anything which could be considered intolerant; say something which someone finds intolerant and chances are, you'll be fired! It is a nearly perfect junction between freedom of association and making war on "illiberal values." Even so much as a man saying that he personally believes that women should stay at home with their kids is enough to make many corporate women storm the H.R. Bastille and roll the guillotine out of the cleaning closet.

The conceit of cultural libertarianism is that it can make war on social values which "limit freedom of association" without effectively attacking freedom of association. Freedom of association is as much the right to form a clique as it is the right to freely associate with anyone who wishes to associate with you. There is no way to respect the right of freedom of association of people living in a racially homogeneous neighborhood while putting social pressure on them to become racially heterogeneous. Fortunately, libertarianism and minarchism in general do not require individuals to respect the way that others live their lives; it is merely cultural libertarians who find themselves wringing their hands over the dichotomy of needing to be tolerant toward everyone and not creating some de facto limit on individual rights.

In a way, Howley is arguing that ideas do have consequences. On that, cultural libertarians, political libertarians and conservatives can agree. A culture that is deeply racist will create an illiberal environment for the targets of that racism. However, racism is an extreme example, almost to the point of being a pointless distraction because it (blind racial hatred, and by that I mean bona fide hatred) is a view which simply cannot be defend. However, it does not stand to reason that someone who, for any reason, finds homosexuality to be repugnant or a man who expects his mate to live as a traditional house wife is an enemy of individual freedom. What cultural libertarians find objectionable here is that someone might arrange their life in a "conformist way." That sort of thing is cute from a teenage punk who thinks that they're rebelling against conformity, but it's cliche everywhere else. Non-conformists must accept the fact that non-conformity carries with it a break from normal social ties.

There will always be limits on individual freedoms. Cultural libertarians will likely never convince society in general that it is a net loss of freedom that matters to make someone who tortures animals that they have bought or bred, into a social outcast. Likewise, they are more likely to harden social conservatives against individual freedom than convince them that individual freedom can coexist with a comprehensive moral code that rises above their ludicrous reduction if they persist in painting all "limiting values" with the same brush. For example, those who liken the "gay rights movement" to black civil rights sweep aside the distinct differences between homosexuality and being black; homosexuality is a behavior pattern, being black is part of foundational physical make up of a black person. The reason that the Catholic Church allows homosexual priests is because a gay man can turn off his sexual behavior if he chooses to do so, a black person cannot choose to be white short of radical plastic surgery.

What they really seek is a culture of easy approval of their choices. There is nothing more withering to most people, especially women, than finding that someone not only doesn't approve of how they're living, but doesn't think that they're a good person. Countless forests have been butchered by feminist writers, perhaps even with Howley contributing to the arborcide, in writings that can best be summarized "why won't you accept my promiscuous behavior" or "why won't you date me, can't you accept the fact that I'm a career woman?" Ever since sodomy laws were rendered unenforceable, the practical barriers to homosexuals building lives together in peace have been remove, yet they still campaign ferociously for social acceptance. Unfortunately for them, part of living in a free society is having to freely accept the fact that people will often not accept them or their choices.

If cultural libertarians are successful in forcing a left-wing value set on libertarianism, that will only serve to alienate other minarchists like political libertarians, to say nothing of making it more difficult (and pointlessly so) to find common ground with social conservatives. That is increasingly dangerous since the political left, in the United States, has abandoned most of its individualist elements in favor of a comprehensively statist view. Where concepts like subsidiarity still have a lot of traction on the right, the left has steadily marched toward a centralized, statist view even going so far as to generally jettison views like freedom of speech in order to "suppress hate." Libertarians cannot afford to alienate the right because it is the right, not the left, where there is still a popular base of support for any form of limited government.

A widget for showing your last 10 replies

2009-10-19T13:15:28Z

I created this widget in response to this request on the Movable Type forums. It's complicated, but readable. If added to a blog, it will need to be cached using template module caching because it contains several block tags which will do database lookups.

Thoughts on libertarian moral neutrality

2009-10-19T00:54:13Z

Ed Feser took some of Reason's contributors to task quite competently on the so-called "moral neutrality of cultural libertarianism." This excerpt in particular was spot on:

Howley's position is that libertarians should aim, not only to reduce governmental power, but also to change social attitudes. For Howley, "not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun." There is also the "paternalism of the mob" enshrined in "tradition," "convention," "culture, conformism, and social structure," which, even in the absence of the threat of imprisonment, can shore up "patriarchy" and endanger the "acceptance of gays and lesbians" and "the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three." In short, for Howley any libertarianism worthy of the name must promote the cultural agenda of the left no less than the economic position of the anti-tax, anti-big government right.

The culture of radical personal autonomy which these people seek will only lead to tyranny. The needs of a robust civil society which has precious little need for an active, large government are simply not compatible with radical personal autonomy. Such a society can only exist when there is a healthy balance between individual autonomy and individual subordination to non-government social institutions and roles. The push for radical sexual autonomy alone has been utterly disastrous for civil society, and has created ample room for the explosion of big government which must necessarily step in so as to maintain order. Nature abhors vacuums, and the state is always quick to volunteer to plug the holes in the dike.

Howley's view that libertarianism is essentially at war with any institution or value that restricts choice between consenting adults is hardly new. One of the funniest episodes in recent times involving a prominent libertarian getting taken out behind the shed for a beat down came when Ramesh Ponnuru took Tim Lee to task for essentially saying that if you redefine libertarianism as permissive social views, it's been a great success. What is telling about this are the priorities that they have. At a time in which the march of the state into private life has never been greater, they maintain an upbeat attitude because of a few "positives" like attitudes toward homosexuals have become more permissive. It's an impressive case of missing the forest because of a few trees, and the only good explanation is decidedly non-neutral bias.

The practical effect of being at war with any institution or value that causes an individual to feel the need to subordinate their liberty to a rule or duty is that it undermines the institutions which libertarians most need to hold back the state. Strong family life cannot coexist with the view that a family and marriage exist primarily as a vehicle for one's personal happiness; well-funded religious institutions which perform the lion's share of support services for the needy cannot easily survive in a society that actively undermines their moral authority which is necessary for continued investment into their work. An economic culture in which workers are regarded as fungible units of productivity cannot temper the natural class tensions that exist between social classes.

A well-ordered free society is very much like a concert where all of the instruments work together for a common effort. Unfortunately, the view that cultural libertarians promote is one in which part of the orchestra is playing classical, part is playing blue grass, and part is trying its damndest to badly imitate Apocalyptica. The maintenance of a free society requires each piece to do its part to build and nurture an environment in which freedom and the good can coexist peacefully in a sustainable fashion.

The fetishizing of liberty by libertarians gets in the way of understanding how liberty would work in a well-ordered free society. Liberty itself is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Few people are happy or could be happy by virtue of some abstraction called "liberty." In a well-ordered society, personal autonomy is tempered by natural duties like the duty of one spouse to another, or a parent to a child. The voluntary social acceptance of these duties makes the case for a large, activist government much harder to make. The absence of them makes it necessary to have an activist, intrusive government if for no other reason than society cannot remain relatively stable without certain social bonds being maintained (though it is hardly conceivable that if such dereliction became rampant that the state could coerce stability). It is taken for granted by libertarians that the reason why there are so many laws on the books is that the state must manufacture criminals to justify its own existence. To some extent, that is certainly true, but it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that a number of laws exist to address new issues that have come about due to some segment failing to behave as it should. "Cyber-bullying laws" are a good example.

A window into the minds behind government economics

2009-10-15T20:37:55Z

Just a few years ago, after all, everyone assumed that U.S. home values were bound to keep rising. In fact, on average, they have dropped by a third since the peak of the market. If prices can drop by a third, they could certainly drop some more.
That's why many private lenders wouldn't touch a 96.5 percent loan with a 96-foot pole. One dip in the economy, and the house is worth less than the mortgage. That's an invitation for the owner to stop paying, drop the keys in the mailbox, and find a place to rent--an invitation hordes of people have already accepted.
What most foreclosures have in common is that the mortgage holder owes more than the property could sell for. "Not everybody who has negative equity goes into foreclosure, but nearly everybody who goes into foreclosure has negative equity," says Paul Willen, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
But Stevens sees no reason the agency should raise its down payment requirement to 5 percent. "All that's going to do is retard recovery," he says, by making it harder for people to buy homes. [Source]

The reason we need a recovery in the first place is because so many people lost so much wealth on these loans that there was a massive series of foreclosures which set the stage for the loss of untold billions of dollars in bank deposits that were invested into these mortgages. So, the solution is to encourage short-term spending, and by short-term I mean really short-term since in early December the $8,000 home buyer credit is going away and anyone who has been paying attention has noticed that that has been the one thing which got demand up high enough that values stopped plummeting. When the credit goes away, it's pretty much a given that demand will drop, and it doesn't help things either a lot of adjustable rate mortgages are going to get recalculated early next year.

The federal government has two choices to keep from going broke: institute a debtors' prison for people who voluntarily bail on these mortgages or tell people that 20% down is the "you must be this rich to play" marker for who will get a loan. It won't be either because no one in D.C. has the spine to tell the American people that they are not entitled to the American Dream.

Now that's what I call a recovery!

2009-10-15T20:10:41Z

We haven't seen employment that low since the fall of the Soviet Union!

North Carolina thinks it can tell the Christian Church who can join the body of Christ

2009-10-13T23:19:09Z

I am conflicted. Part of me advocates firm, but passive disobedience like the early church. Another part of me would like to see the church elders call on the men in the congregation to grab any police officer who tries to enforce this law on their church and throw the officer out on his ass:

"I'm not denying him the right to go to church. He denied himself that," said state Sen. David Hoyle, the Democrat who sponsored the North Carolina bill. "If they are a convicted pedophile, they have given up a lot of their rights."

Church leaders feel caught between leading houses of worship where broken people can seek help and preventing criminals from exploiting a place of trust.

Joseph Green, pastor of a church that Nichols attended after his arrest, reached out to him while at the same time assuaging the concerns of his parishioners.

"I told him as long as he's honest with me, then we're willing to embrace him and help him focus and get his life back on track," Green said. But, he added, "The Bible talks about wolves coming in in sheep's clothing, so I've got to be watchful over everyone coming into my church."

Most church members were welcoming. "I think everybody deserves a chance," said Shawn Cox, 28, a married father of two who says his faith helped steer him away from drug dealing and crime.

"God turned my life around," said Cox. "I'm not saying that you bring the guy in and put him over the youth program or the youth ministry as soon as he walks in the door. But there's no way he can overcome these things without help and support."

I think the church is handling it admirably by recognizing the dangers both in letting potential wolves into the congregation and in potentially turning away lost souls. It's not every day that you see a pastor who takes so seriously the admonishment to be open to seekers, but wary of wolves coming in sheep's clothing into the flock.

As a matter of first principles, the Church cannot accept Hoyle's implied argument that he, a secular authority, has the ecclesiastical authority to determine who can join a congregation and under what terms. Hoyle has effectively declared himself to be in a position to arbitrate and direct the Great Commission itself, and that is an affront that the Church cannot tolerate. Church leaders who give in will have to answer to Jesus for that in the next life because Jesus did not exclude any class of sinner from being preached the gospel.

Even on the secular side, this law makes little sense as a "security law." Churches do not allow convicted sex offenders to have ministerial authority over the church functions which correlate to their sin(s). Nichols (the guy featured in the article) would not have been given a chance to be put into a position of authority where he could abuse children or teenagers. People like him would not typically have any chance to repeat their crime at church short of a brazen attack that would most likely quickly get them caught very quickly. Furthermore, from a security perspective, creating the perspective that society is even "restricting their reconciliation with God" is invariably going to create resentment and bitterness that will enable recidivist tendencies.

Given the reach of sex offender lists and how many things they cover, the Church cannot afford to let the secular authorities make the decisions for it. Shall the Church be forced to turn away people who got caught having sex as teens or even just peeing in the bushes after a night of drinking in college or on the side of the road on a long trip? The former are very well represented on sex offender registries. Even if the Church were content to write them all off as dangerous rapists, the legislators have been so derelict in properly defining the parameters of the classification that it couldn't be useful to the Church anyway.

As always, one thing remains constant here: a legislator missed a golden opportunity to change the law to make the sentencing guidelines for the dangerous sex offenders actually remove them from society. At some point, the American people need to demand that this security charade end, and the sentences and punishments match the actual severity of what the criminal did.

It must be nice to be so above the law...

2009-10-12T16:29:26Z

That you can get away with spraying half a magazine into someone from behind and the government is ok with it:

A Phoenix police officer who mistakenly shot an armed homeowner during a search for an intruder was cleared of wrongdoing this week by a committee that reviews such shootings.
The ruling by the Phoenix Use of Force Board determined Officer Brian Lilly acted within police policy in the incident, in which he fired six shots at the homeowner amid the confusion of a home invasion last September.

For a little background, the wife informed one of the officers that her husband was upstairs, armed and holding the perp that they were looking for at gun point. He didn't pass that little tip onto his buddies, one of whom went upstairs and emptied six rounds into the homeowner from behind. The rest, well, if even half of it is true from what they did to him afterward, to the attempted cover up is almost surreal.

"If Brian would have known there was a homeowner in there, he probably would have hesitated," Gannon [from the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association] said, "but if he had hesitated, and it was the (suspect), the outcome could have been tragic."

As opposed to the actual events where a law-abiding homeowner was gunned down by a trigger-happy police officer who made no attempt to ascertain that the man in front of him was actually their target. One would also like to think that he would have hesitated instead of "probably hesitated."

There is a pattern here...

2009-10-11T00:58:48Z

Newsweek delivers a smackdown to Murdoch...

Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true.
Murdoch and Curley know this. How do we know they know? Because if they really thought Google was stealing from them, and if they really wanted Google to stop driving all those readers to their Web sites at no charge, they would simply stop Google from linking to their news stories.
Google doesn't force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google's results with a few keystrokes. All they have to do is go to the Web site's robot.txt file and type this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Poof, the site becomes invisible to Google. Their stories will no longer show up in Google searches. It will be as if they don't exist.

The content cartels get cold sweats at night at the thought that somewhere, someone, is doing something with their creations that has not been explicitly authorized, or that they are somehow personally profiting from them. That is why the record labels hate Apple, despite the fact that the iTunes Music Store has been a real life line thrown to them to give would-be pirates a chance to buy a high quality single, conveniently. It is also why they hate Google for hosting Google News, despite the fact that they don't even show any advertising on that service (example)!

The complaint that Google shows advertising on its search results on the main search application is a red herring. Google has to make money somehow, and it's patently moronic to suggest that ads on the search results page will turn off users from clicking on ads on the article itself. The cold hard facts are that the newspapers will ultimately have to go to a paid content model at some point if they want direct compensation; local ads are of limited value on a website that doesn't get most of its traffic (and a lot of traffic) from locals.

It's just the same old content cartel welfare baby temper tantrum.

They mean "tech neutral" the same way that the perpetually aggrieved classes mean "equal rights"

2009-10-08T14:23:25Z

Composers, music publishers, and songwriters have told federal lawmakers that regardless of whether music is distributed to consumers via TV, DVDs or digital download, they need legislative help to ensure they get their fair share.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a story about how some of these groups want iTunes and other Web music retailers to pay performance fees for downloads of TV shows and films. They also want online music stores to cough up fees for 30-second song previews. Those revelations didn't go over well with many techies. [-source]

You know that you have reached the point of parasitic no return when you are so greedy that you demand compensation from your own advertisers and salesmen for hawking your wares to the public. The fact that they regard companies like Apple as "the enemy" rather than their chance to profitably cut out the labels is proof enough that the mental rot in the music industry is so great that nothing short of flushing the entire thing down the toilet and starting over will be sufficient to "fix it."

All of this started with the shift in the way the public consumes media. Songwriters and publishers have for a long time collected performance fees from broadcast TV networks and film studios, but now more and more consumers are watching films and TV shows downloaded to their iPods or laptops, which at this point aren't considered public performances.

The private performance versus public performance dichotomy is precisely a great example of what is so very, very wrong with modern intellectual property rights. It would be intolerable for car companies to sell cars for "personal use" versus "corporate use" in that one is effectively licensing the right to drive a car for a specific class of use only from the manufacturer. It's not as if contract law provides them insufficient means to create semi-exclusive "public performance contracts" for the initial showing of a movie. It is also absurd to suggest that if a store owner buys a CD that they cannot play that CD on rotation in their store without paying an additional fee.

That is parasitism and an entitlement mentality, nothing more. The only solution is to govern copyrighted goods according to the majority of the norms and expectations of real property, provided that copyright holders wish to actually be called property owners.

The 8th circuit court of appeals affirms cops' right to sexually assault women

2009-10-07T23:53:21Z

In a swath of territory covering a good chunk of the midwest, the police are now free to taser a man for having the audacity to aggressively confront them when he sees them sexually assaulting a woman. The full ruling from the 8th circuit court of appeals is here.

God help the police if the SCOTUS "takes their side" on this. As if the few good cops didn't already have enough eggshells to walk on, dealing will female suspects who are with their boyfriends, brothers or fathers will be like doing hopscotch through a minefield.

Once again, I'm reminded of why Shakespeare held lawyers in negoticidal contempt.

A three way libertarian fight on corporate social responsibility

2009-10-07T21:29:14Z

I found this debate between John Mackey, Milton Friedman and TJ Rodgers to be very interesting. Of the three, Mackey is the only one who seemed to truly appreciate the way that libertarian economic theory and propaganda is disconnected from human nature and society. Probably the most ironic aspect of the debate was the way that Rodgers excoriated a strawman made from Mackey's arguments, and then Mackey ended up slapping him right back down by observing that Rodgers' business, despite being built on "profits for investors uber alles" (ie: the investors are the alpha and omega of the business; it's sole raison d'etre) it has lost its investors far more money than it's made. That's just downright sad when considering the fact that Whole Foods has found a way to not only generously donate funds to its communities, but to integrate charity spending into its promotions so that it gets a solid return on investment (and has been far more profitable than Rodgers' Cypress Semiconductors).

Mackey made several very good points, one of which is that a company cannot serve its investors by putting profit maximization above all other values. Profit maximization as the highest value is simply institutionalizing greed as a virtue, and greed is never virtuous. The wise man knows the difference between greed and ambition, and the way that greed often reduces people from reasonably rational individuals to single-minded, self-destructive creatures like Gollum. The current banking debacle is a great example of what happens when a business is run by an intense, obsessive need for higher and higher profits; the large, greedy megacorps are in ruins while the small, more conservative, community-focused banks like some of the ones near me in Virginia are either quite healthy or recovering quickly.

What Friedman and Rodgers both missed is that in a free, well-ordered society, businesses do have a role in protecting their communities. Human nature abhors a vacuum, especially the sort of vacuum created a quasi-Nietzschean form of capitalism where only isolated individuals help one another. Mackey was correct in pointing out that the majority of the world rebels against capitalism because it has been advocated by men who only acknowledge a minimal responsibility that businesses have to their communities. It is extremely difficult for foreign workers, especially ones in traditional societies, to believe that capitalism is for their own good when the same men say that businesses have no duty to their workers, that they're just fungible units of productivity to be disposed of the moment that a cheaper labor source is found.

The attractiveness for me of Mackey's view of libertarianism is that it could form a popular basis for a Christian libertarianism, since unlike typical secular libertarianism, it has a quasi-Christian understanding of the moral order of the world. As Mackey said, social responsibility should not be coerced, but in a well-ordered, free society, it is healthy for a business to be active and involved in its community as a good provider of services and products, employer and investor in the common good.

The arrogance of officialdom...

2009-10-06T00:08:30Z

This article reminded me of a quote from Cicero I saw today:

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That's right. Orchids.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn't have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal - but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty's new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

Unless the rule of law is taken to mean the arbitrary will of tyrants, cases like this prove that the rule of law is on its death bed in the United States. The fact that heavily armed men could so arrogantly, so violently attack an elderly couple's house and then deprive them of years of peace and thousands of dollars of wealth over such a pathetic, regulatory matter that could have been handled at least by a slap on the wrist just shows how far we've declined.

I think Radley Balko is somewhat correct when he says that police and prosecutors respond to incentives, but that is insufficient. It's really a cop out (pun intended). Only moral retards would look at this case and judge it morally neutral to inflict so much damage on an elderly couple over such a harmless thing when other means were present to get them to shape up where they weren't compliant. If there is going to be reform, it cannot stop with just the legislative reforms and changed incentives. It must include a top-down house cleaning.

Attacking the underlying meme

2009-10-05T22:32:08Z

Found this memetic nugget from the Hawaiian Libertarian who was excoriating "conservative women" who nevertheless subscribe to a feminist worldview:

Feminists threw away the moral superiority of women, a beautiful counteraction to the physical superiority of men.

What is uniquely risible about conservative feminism is that it is a heresy, not a separate, distinct entity. It bends the truth, distorts definitions, short-circuit's logic and looks like the truth, while leading them astray ever so slightly that they don't notice until it is too late. Many studies have shown, and many have observed independently for generations, that fathers are as critical, if not more so, to the "civilizing" of young women as women are to the "civilizing" of young men. The conservative instinct that fathers are so necessary to the development of children is at odds with this belief which is still well-entrenched, if more subtly, in conservative circles.

It is not that feminists threw away the idea of natural female moral superiority so much as it is that they demonized most aspects of femininity, motherhood in particular. Conservative women who spout this nonsense are pathetically ignorant of all of the rousseauian, feminist narratives of the peaceful, matriarchal past. Mainstream feminist thought is a Marxist class conflict translated to gender relationships with women assuming the role of the oppressed, but noble proletariat; to say that they don't believe in the "natural moral superiority of women" is just ludicrous.

Rape, statutory rape and "rape rape"

2009-10-02T00:49:10Z

Well, there you have it. According to the legal giants at the View, a guy can give a ~14 year old girl a champagne and quaaludes (or roofies) cocktail, screw the heck out of her while she repeatedly tells him "no" and it's not "rape rape." It may be statutory rape, but it's not "rape rape..."