The secret to building a successful political alliance is to direct loony insults at your potential allies.
Or at least so a good many people seem to think, from Keith Preston on the right to, now, Bruce Bartlett on the left (well, using “left” generously to apply to this mainstream Republican apparatchik turned mainstream Democratic pundit). Bartlett opines:
[M]ost self-described libertarians are primarily motivated by economics. In particular, they don’t like paying taxes. They also tend to have an obsession with gold and a distrust of paper money. As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn’t extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep all the guns they want. Many are survivalists at heart and would be perfectly content to live in complete isolation on a mountain somewhere, neither taking anything from society nor giving anything. …
[T]here is a theoretical case to be made for liberals and libertarians at least continuing a dialogue. But for it to go anywhere, libertarians must scale back their almost single-minded focus on economic freedom as the sole determinant of liberty. They must work harder to defend civil liberties and resist expansion of the police state whether it involves suspected terrorists, illegal aliens or those who enjoy smoking marijuana.
Libertarians should also be more outspoken about America’s disastrous foreign policy, which Obama seems to be doing very little to fix. … The main problem seems that neither liberals nor libertarians are up to challenging the loudmouthed bullies on talk radio and Fox News who equate anything less than a 100% commitment to the “war on terror” as treasonous.
(CHT Peter Klein.)
Y’know, I’m all for arguing that libertarians need to place more emphasis on the left-wing aspects of the ideology; and it’s certainly true that some elements (cough, the Libertarian Party, cough) of the movement have been stressing economic freedom at the expense of personal freedom. (Hence my agreement with Point 2 of the Grassroots Libertarian program.) But this Bartlett dude must be living in some sort of impervious energy bubble if he thinks libertarians haven’t been saying much about – haven’t, indeed, been at the forefront of discussing – civil liberties, abusive cops, the drug war, or the war on terror. I mean, who does he think runs Antiwar.com?
This seem to basically be fall-out from libertarian-conservative fusionism. The libertarian-conservative paradigm has given the rest of us a bad name, to the point at which most people’s image of libertarians is indeed reduced to a sort of paleo-conservative caricature. But such a caricature is incredibly unfair to the libertarian movement (as opposed to the mainstream hi-jackings), which is by the very least a rather pluralistic panacea of tendencies tied together by little more than a few principles. It isn’t fair to the libertarian movement that people such as Ronald Reagen, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck and Dennis Miller have claimed to be “libertarians”. Libertarians should stop letting the conservatives hi-jack their terminology.
Yeah, his last points are really weird. Unless, he equates libertarianism with the positions of the Libertarian Party and mainstream libertarianism. Then it would make sense. But that’s an unfortunate conflation.
To his first point: I think he’s right. Ron Paul–for instance–focuses way too much on precious metals. As if diamonds for gold were the most basic form of economic exchange. In Rothbard’s sense, the most basic economic exchange is one state of affairs for another. So, the most basic economic exchange (on the interactive level), really, is work for another kind of work. All “leftists” could agree on that.
To the survivalist charge: I think he’s wrong. He looks at withdrawal from society as if it were necessarily anti-social. That’s not true at all. If society itself “resolves” conflict in a confrontational way–in Hasnas’ sense–then withdrawal from the structure of society constitutes the most social–properly understood–end imaginable.
To the broadest point–that we should build political alliances b/t liberals and libertarians: well, as long as we know what we’re talking about, Mr. Bartlett. But still, a tension does exist between agorism and engagement within the system. As of last night, I think that Hasnas’ conception of the compositional legal paradigm (as opposed to the confrontational one) can bridge the gap. Left libertarians and liberals, I think, could easily reach consensus that the compositional mode of conflict resolution is preferable to the confrontational mode (Keith Olbermann not included).
It sounds to me like Bartlett is describing Austrian Economics, which isn’t a political philosophy, and is therefore rightly focused on monetary issues. Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty and the Manifesto have plenty to say about the issues Bartlett says we’re neglecting.
A better criticism was from Mike Kinsley, who said we’re too focused on property rights, like liberals are too focused on “discrimination” or whatever it was. But that’s because Kinsley was unconvinced a libertarian society would be safe, in the Hobbesian sense.
I don’t know what libertarian-conservative fusionism is.
[...] The rest is here: Bartlett
Bartlett is just being silly, so I’m going to comment on something else that’s still on-topic.
Almost everyone here is probably aware that part of the LRC crowd is Catholic, and some LRCers have made an effort to reconcile their Catholicism with their libertarianism. Most of you probably react to this the same way I did – with something like, “OK, maybe it’s possible, but why? Who cares? Why is it relevant?”
But now I want to point out that something similar can happen among left-libertarians as well. Sure, reconciling certain leftist beliefs with libertarianism can be very worthwhile. I’ve done quite a bit of that. However, in some cases, I think it has more in common with what the LRCers sometimes do.
In other words, some of the beliefs held by the statist Left deserve to be treated as nothing more than religious doctrine.
I’m not particularly familiar with him, but I do recall seeing some lecture from him a number of years ago and he seemed like a minarchist. So basically you’re saying that he’s being dishonest or an oppurtunist, since his former aquiantance with the libertarian movement makes it clear that he should know better?
He seems to equate “economic freedom” to the interests of big business, and in so doing ignores the extent to which economic freedom is really freedom to build alternatives to state-subsidized and state-protected big business: all the localist, cooperativist, communitarian, alt econ stuff that the decentralist Left finds so appealing. In effect, Bartlett accepts the implicit assumption of the libertarian Right that “economic liberty” is a franchise of corporate interests.
I agree that the narrow focus on the gold standard (as opposed to a broader focus on freed-market monetary systems as such) is a mistake. But the Paulistas are right to emphasise the importance of getting away from a form of money that government can manipulate at will, and toward one whose value is determined by actual consumer preferences. Come the (r)evolution, maybe we’ll all use gold and 100% reserve banks, maybe we’ll all use fractional-reserve notes, maybe we’ll all use mutual banks, maybe it’ll be a combination, but whatever we use we’ll be free to stop using and switch to a competitor if the issuers start fiddling too much with the value — and that’s they key point.
Ha. Yes, like Preston – and Aster. Funny that – she gets a free pass for the same actions.
That makes sense. And it seems like such as system could still satisfy the Keynesian focus on employment. I mean, whatever form of currency we choose to use, it’s most likely going to be the one that best represents the capacity to create over time. And the capacity to create over time, most likely indicates something like full employment.
Is that how you see it, or do you see something else?
I agree with the Austrians over the Keynesians regarding the cause of downturns–that they are the natural consequence of economic booms/bubbles. I also agree that the proper strategy to prevent a severe downturn is to moderate credit during those times.
What I’m confused about is the Austrian tactic in situations where the mistakes were already made. In these instances I tend to think that steering mechanisms ought to encourage demand, not to re-inflate bubbles, but to soften falls. I don’t understand what the Austrian response is here outside of do nothing.
I’m not criticizing the Austrian business cycle. I think it’s correct. I just want to understand, in situations where mistakes have already been made, whether the temporary generation of demand–to soften the fall–is out of the question for Austrians.
Kevin, agreed. All the more reason for left libertarians to say more about how decentralization would not serve corporate interests or make red markets more powerful.
Not necessarily; he might just be clueless. Or he let a few early encounters form his interpretive matrix, and ever since then nothing inconsistent with it gets in.
I’ve frequently had arguments with people who are obviously intelligent and sincere, but who’ve gotten a certain interpretive framework lodged in their minds at some point and nothing seems able to dislodge it; any data that contradict the framework no longer do so once they’ve been processed by the framework.
Bartlett is really one to talk about foreign policy. Here he is in 2003 touting the economic benefits of the war on Iraq: http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett040203.asp
And in 2007, praising candidate Hillary Clinton: “Given the views of the Democratic base and the enormous unpopularity of the Iraq War, it is a real act of courage for her to steadfastly refuse to say her vote for the war was wrong.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzgxMjNlMWMzNzQ1NjlhMWI5YzNiYTM5YzdmZDdiNTQ=
Wasn’t that also Karl Hess’ position back in his Goldwater Republican days?
I tend to use the term in a broader sense than Meyer vs. Rothbard, however, as a reference to the general fusion between paleo-conservatism and libertarianism in America, the neo-liberal way in which minarchism is often concieved of and certain tendencies towards knee-jerk anti-leftism.
As far as I can tell, Rothbard himself fell into a libertarian-conservative trap in his later years, when the paleo-libertarian thing got formalized, despite the fact that his earlier position was almost explicitly the result of a break with the traditional American right on numerous matters.
Brandon: Yes, numerous matters, and not just the single issue you are talking about. Have you read Rothbard’s message to students of YAF, telling them to flee YAF because it supports police statism and prohibitions on voluntary economic activities? Or his many pieces totally bashing Ronald Reagen? Rothbard was not exactly a friend of these movements. It was not until much later on that he explicitly endorsed a right-libertarian strategy and viewpoint.
I’d like to see someone demonstrate a difference between economic freedom and personal freedom. I have never been able to find a difference. Only today I found the most useful street-language all-encompassing definition of libertarian: LIBERTARIAN: One who does not wish to force an agenda on others; neither by fraud, gunpoint, legislation, judicial decision, or majority rule.
This definition comes from the blog:
http://spirituallibertarian.blogspot.com/
Quasibill-
You did not listen to a word I said. I offered to sit down and reason both privately and before the public, and you have refused. In which case there is no point in continuing this conversation. It is a tedious waste of time.
The real ideas- the lethal ideas- that are more important than personalities here can be seen in Preston’s recent promotion of hard-right Weimar intellectuals or in the writings of the national anarchists. Otherwise, those who wish may read Keith Preston, read you here, and read my own words, and judge for themselves. The fact that the left-libertarian community came out so unanimously not only against bigotry but repeatedly in favour of the values of individualism and authenticity greatly encourages me.
So long as you do not stoop to something equivalent to the Prestonite bigotry and prejudice which performatively excludes me from social citizenship, I see no reason why I should concern myself with your opinion of me. I would much rather focus on the promising task of building and promoting the left-libertarian movement.
[...] Geek and Roderick Long both argue that Bartlett unfairly ignores those libertarians who do, in fact, argue quote a lot [...]
I certainly agree with that. But Bartlett — who’s worked for both Ron Paul (1976) and Cato (1993) — should know better.
I don’t know what libertarian-conservative fusionism is.
I think the term was coined by National Review co-editor Frank Meyer back when he was trying to … well, he would have said trying to hold the anti-socialist coalition together, but I would say trying to prevent libertarianism from re-emerging from conservatism’s squidlike embrace. Meyer was a lot more libertarian than most of the NR crowd (Rothbard thought he was more libertarian than not), but he was also a big Cold Warrior who urged a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union (which was the issue on which he and Rothbard broke).
It seems to me that there is a “Tale of two Rothbards”, I.E. Rothbard as post-rightist turned anarchist flirting with leftism (Rothbard ala late 60′s and early 70′s and Rothbard as leader of the will to re-create a mythologized/romantisized “old right” (Rothbard ala late 80′s/early 90′s).
I agree, though maybe there are three, or at least two and a half. Because there’s also Rothbard after his disillusionment with the New Left but before his paleo turn (basically, the LP/Cato years); not sure what to call that.
“Numerous Matters”. He broke with them because they were agitating for war with the damned Bolsheviks, and openly advocated mega-fascism at home to achieve it.
I’ve never read anything to suggest that Rothbard wavered from his belief in bourgeois morality, nor from his belief that social issues had nothing to do with Libertarianism.
I’ve never read anything to suggest that Rothbard wavered from his belief in bourgeois morality, nor from his belief that social issues had nothing to do with Libertarianism.
I tend to agree with you on the first point, but not on the second.
In Liberty and the New Left he endorses “participatory democracy” as a way that all organisations should be run, as well as Mario Savio’s critique of Kerr-style educational philosophy (both the directly political and the more broadly cultural aspects). Plus in Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty he described conservatism as embodying the “death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America.” So he pretty clearly seems to have seen the New Left’s political aims as connected with social/cultural ones, and to some extent he endorsed that linkage.
In For a New Liberty he rejects utilitarianism on the grounds that it makes one’s commitment to liberty unstable — a paradigmatically “thick-libertarian” argument, though one that is not exactly left or right.
On the less happy side, in Contempt for the Usual (which I discuss here) he argued that libertarians qua libertarians should be against feminism (the cultural aspects, not just the political ones). And of course after his paleo turn, in “Why Paleo?” (which has never been placed online, but Sciabarra discusses it here), Rothbard held that “a certain [bourgeois/Christian] cultural matrix is essential to liberty.”
So it seems pretty clear that Rothbard always held that an engagement with social and cultural issues was “thickly” bound up with libertarianism, though the issues in question tended to be left-wing in his earlier writings and right-wing in his later ones. (His reasons for changing his mind on immigration seem to have been in part driven by cultural issues as well.)
As for how much of either the left-thickness or the right-thickness was genuinely values-driven and how much was strategic alliance-promoting, I’m not sure (though “some of each” is usually the safest guess).
One key difference is that while Keith was at least interested in presenting a basis for very limited cooperation with social progressives, Aster wasn’t at all interested in working with village fascists on any terms. There was no compliment to her backhandedness, so to speak.
Of course, he’s now returned the favor in the general direction of her, assorted brown people and the Queer Stereotypes of America, so that’s a forgone possibility.
War’s long done, all just folk now.
One of Keith’s funniest (?) arguments was “Aster’s insulted me, so out of self-defense it’s okay for me to insult LGBT people generally.” Talk about collateral damage!
Plus it’s not the “same actions.” Attacking people for being cozy with fascists and attacking people for being transgender are different, because, well, being cozy with fascists is bad and being transgender isn’t.
Quasibill-
I stand by my interpretation of Keith’s positions. He’s recently been promoting Ernst Junger and Carl Schimdt on his website. Peikoff’s _the Ominous Parallels_ or (for the source code) Popper’s _The Open Socuiety and its Enemies_ discuss these authors as the immediate intellectual precursors of German National Socailism. My Deutsch-speaking mom recognised this as soon as I mentioned these names to her- I believe her precise words were ‘blut und boden’, a phrase which Preston has pronounced in itself harmless(!). Keith is doing the equivalent of citing two of the nazgul as references, or blaring Wagner at top volume.
On cyberstalking- I swear by my goddess that my anonymous self-presentation had nothing to do with Keith whatsoever. I was writing as ‘anonymous’ but with a distinctive writing style which made my identity deliberately obvious to anyone who knows me, as a (dumb, failed) way to avoid transgender insults. since ‘anonymous’ is neuter. My salon had just crashed, and my hopes in the libertarian world were so low I didn’t know why I was even writing, and this was a way to keep my emotional distance. I stopped when I realised that this approach was counterproductive. I can easily see how bad this looks, but it really was just a stupid mistake. I’ve stated in several places, including on this site while debating Keith, that I am not interested in concealing my identity.
I did make a conscious and systematic effort to expose Preston as a fascist fellow-traveler. I consider myself fully vindicated on this issue by recent events. I would have far preferred to have others call out Preston, but as none did so I did what I had to, as I simply cannot function in a society where the refusal to recognise my gender is socially acceptable. In this context, I want to point out that one acquaintance of mine wrote to say he was just too scared to stand up against Preston’s bigotry, while another transgender friend told me she would have walked away from the left-libertarian community permanently had fortune not favoured the genuine left-libertarians.
As for being ‘psychic’, that’s not it at all. I’m just a post-Randian and look for philosophical premises, and Keith’s are out of the anti-Enlightenment reactionary current which led to (among other things) national socialism. I saw it from the moment he posted a quite long essay by de Benoist on my former salon several year ago; specifically this one:
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html
I found it personally very surprising that the libertarian movement, which owes so much to Ayn Rand, did not recognise these philosophical premises as inimical to individualism.
Now, all that said, I was definitely wrongly rude and nasty to Keith, in ways that were neither moral fair to him, nor in my rational self-interest. I do apologise for that, and have in several forums. At the time, I’d recently had a great number of things go wrong with my life, and had been badly hurt. I was filled with anger and vented it on Keith, a person doing very real civilisational harm who had presented himself falsely to me in the past. Yes, I was wrong, but I believe that all of those who ignored his entryist attempts to bring national anarchism and third positionism into the left-libertarian community, as he had previously tried to do with left-anarchism, were ignoring a far greater wrong and refusing to do what was necessary to prevent an intellectual catastrophe.
And if we wish to negatively sanction everyone in the libertarian universe who has used unduly harsh rhetoric against another, then we will have to begin by tossing out Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand. We will certainly have to exclude Hans Hermann Hoppe. We will have to remove Lindsay Perigo, Kevin Carson, and Charles Johnson. We will have to lose Justin Raimondo and Tom Palmer. In short, we will have to say goodbye to many, many people.
I apologise for my misbehaviour, but what is genuine in your accusations against me is common to most of us. I do, however, believe that the intellectual promotion of fascism is an uncommon evil, and one less excusable than by own failings by an order of magnitude. And now it is not among us at all. And I am proud to have been partially responsible for that.
If this does not satisfy you, I would be glad to respectfully talk over the issue with you privately over Skype. I don’t have anything of argumentative substance to add, but I think you might find my actions moe understandable if you understood the emotional and personal context influencing me at the time, which I do not wish to discuss in public at present. As I said, I had been recently been badly hurt, and venting my anger at someone who merited opposition for the best of reasons is not the worst way I could have handled it. I know this isn’t a moral justification or excuse, but I didn’t have enough in me to do better.
In any case, I wish to put this war behind me. If you seriously object to my presence here, you are within your rights to raise the issue publically- I would suggest in the Forums of the Libertarian Left as the most proper place to do so. I believe that what I did was on balance more right than wrong, has had good results, and that what was wrong in it is common to most of us by any fairly and consistently applied standard.
Re “real act of courage” — I guess he never read the Laches on “foolish endurance.”
“Attacking people for being cozy with fascists”
Except, of course, that’s not actually what she did. She attacked him *personally*, *repeatedly*, and across multiple forums in threads where it was irrelevant to the topic at hand, as *being* a fascist.
Sooooo….what’s the next excuse?
And yes, I agree Keith overstepped the bounds with his counter. But again, I’ll ask you whether you think you’d be piling onto (and making offhanded jokes and jibes about) a woman who over-reacted to being ‘pantsed’ in public by permanently crippling her attacker. Is it wrong? certainly. Should it be the focus of what was wrong in the situation, when all the context is considered? Apparently for you and others, the answer is “yes”.
Since, as you brought the situation into relevance with your joke, the actual “just like” is talking about “direct loony insults at your potential allies. ” Not about anything else the clique feels the need to talk about to prove why they have rightfully ex-communicated Keith from the Object – er – Left Libertarian! movement.
Aster “directed[ed] loony insults at [her] potential all[y]“. Which led to Preston doing the same foolish thing. A consistent person would call out both of them.
Which of Aster’s specific accusations was false?
I’ll avoid a “back at ya” about Keith’s comments, and just note that falsity doesn’t describe the sum and substance of “wrong”. I personally don’t remember anything of Keith’s vile missive that I thought was necessarily wrong factually – though certainly that could be the case, given how vile it was, and how little attention I paid it once I realized what he was doing – but it was still vile in its characterizations and pejoratives. He may be entirely right factually about revolutionary potential. But that doesn’t change anything about my reaction to what he wrote.
Here are some Aster quotes from when she was “anonymously” stalking Preston on this very site:
“He loudly opposes liberalism, humanism, and human rights, in so many words. He glories in violence and paramilitarism.”
First sentence, utterly false. Second sentence, misleading – I agree that Preston is too quick to sing the praises of violent revolution. But there are plenty of others in this movement who I would say the same thing about. I’m not sure he “glories” in it any more than your average believer in revolutionary tactics (which, from my POV, is entirely too much).
“[Keith,] If you wish to well play the
Just to re-iterate – an “insult” is not by definition necessarily false.
If I call someone “stupid,” it is an insult, whether or not they actually are stupid. And Preston’s characterizations of those he claimed to wish to purge were insults, whether or not in any given case they were actually truthful. Describing a homosexual as cock-ring wearing, for example (I believe that was one of his slurs) is insulting because it paints a human as one-dimensional *whether or not that human actually uses such a device*. It’s not a way I would ever describe another human, whether I liked them or not.
Similarly, calling someone a Nazi who isn’t actually, you know, a National Socialist, is just wrong, no matter how close they come (which I don’t believe Preston does at all) to congruence with Nazism on any given issue.
So I’m not sure why you suddenly fixated on this as an excuse for Aster, and the assent by relative silence her cyber-stalking received. But it doesn’t impress me in the slightest.
I’ll avoid a “back at ya” about Keith’s comments, and just note that falsity doesn’t describe the sum and substance of “wrong”. I personally don’t remember anything of Keith’s vile missive that I thought was necessarily wrong factually
Actually there were a couple of false things, but that’s beside the point: the two cases aren’t parallel. Since fascism is bad and being gay isn’t, we need to know whether someone is a fascist in order to know whether attacking them for being a fascist is right or wrong, but we don’t need to know whether someone is gay in order to know whether attacking them for being gay is right or wrong. So it matters whether Aster’s charges are false and doesn’t matter whether Keith’s are.
“He loudly opposes liberalism, humanism, and human rights, in so many words. He glories in violence and paramilitarism.”
First sentence, utterly false.
Seems true to me. Click on the following links to see Keith loudly opposing liberalism, humanism, and human rights “in so many words.”
I guess Preston = Nazi is truth?
No, I don’t think Keith is a Nazi; and Aster does tend to express essentially valid points in overstated rhetoric. But still, in contemporary political discourse it’s generally understood that calling someone a Nazi hardly ever means you think the person is literally a Nazi.
But I’ll concede that, if you believe Aster was psychic, you can arguably believe she was being truthful in those assertions.
Whether what she said was true and whether she had adequate evidence at the time for saying it are two different things. You seem to be granting the first claim; to fully assess the second I’d have to look back through all of his and her past contributions and compare the dates, a prospect which does not excite me. But clearly her main point was that a) Keith made common cause with bigoted people, and b) made some bigoted comments himself, and there’s plenty of evidence for both running back a far way.
Keith himself denied any great knowledge of this author
What Keith said was “I do not fully share Alan De Benoist’s entire outlook, either. For instance, I would value individualism more and communitarianism less, am less hostile to the market, and am less anti-American in the cultural sense than the French New Right. I do find some of De Benoist’s ideas on ethno-pluralism, federal populism and paganism to be refreshing critiques of the PC Left, Marxism and social democracy, and of the ‘throne and altar,’ traditional conservative,’ Neo-Nazi, bourgeoisie or Christian Right.” So I’d say he has a fair bit of knowledge of De Benoist — certainly more than mine.
So I’m not sure why you suddenly fixated on this
I’m not sure what “this” refers to here.
the assent by relative silence her cyber-stalking received
It’s true that I’ve said very little critical of Aster. But until recently I’ve said very little critical of Keith either. Does that mean I was “assenting by relative silence” to both of them?
quasibill,
While we’re playing the analogy game, I wonder what you would say about a woman who overreacted to being “pantsed” in public by grabbing a crowbar and beating the shit out of not only her attacker, but also everyone else in the room, regardless of whether or not they had ever done anything to her?
I ask because that’s actually more like the situation that’s going on when Keith replies to Aster calling him names by going on a tirade about “cock-ringed queers,” “pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair,” “homosexualists” (?), and “persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity,’” inter alia, and generally a bunch of other people who aren’t Aster.
This is not, actually, a two-person feud in which a bunch of bystanders have just inexplicably (or all-too-explicably, or whatever) picked on one side — the side you consider to have been the instigator — to pile on against. What happened was that Aster repeatedly insulted Keith and has in the past attributed positions to him that he claims not to hold, based on insufficient evidence; Keith in response has not only returned the insults; he has also, in the process, launched the most vicious sorts of broadsides against all sorts of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the purely personal aspects of the feud.
Perhaps this might just help explain why a number of folks who have mostly opted out of trying to intervene in the interpersonal sniping, have had something to say about Keith’s recent sorties of rhetorical saturation-bombing.
I don’t need to investigate or comment on the history of the fight in order to justify getting pissed off at Keith for punching me in the face, even if somebody other than Keith started the fight that got him swinging. If he doesn’t want to get piled on, he should start by fighting in a way that doesn’t involve bashing a lot of people other than his putative target.
RG,
As long as we’re playing “add to the hypo”, I’ll grant your addition, and add this: Those that the woman struck were standing by silently, watching the “pantsing” and doing nothing to assist. In some cases, they actively cheered on the instigator.
Is it now a tougher call as to piling on the woman? Again, I’m more than willing to call Preston far in the wrong here. I found his language, tone, etc. absolutely deplorable. I can’t condemn his “eye for an eye” attitude enough. I’m just trying to make sure all the context of the situation is not dropped from the history books as the Cultural Revolution marches onward and upward.
So yes, I can understand you had a more visceral reaction to Preston’s stuff than to Aster’s stalking. Just like I once had a visceral reaction to being approached by a group of young black men in a bad neighborhood I was staying at in the middle of the night. After the fact, I recognize my subconscious bias, admit it freely, and admit that it is wrong and work to improve on it. Your bias towards Aster is a blind spot that you happen to share with quite a few people. Doesn’t make it somehow right. You should admit, confront it, and move on.
Prof. Long,
“Actually there were a couple of false things, but that’s beside the point”
Then why ask about Aster’s truthfulness? Yes, the falsity is *beside the point*. Insults are insults, either way. And since you began this debate with the offhanded jibe about Preston insulting putative allies, I thought it was important to note that your jibe also described Aster’s actions, which, in fact, precipitated this whole sordid affair.
And, no, I don’t think calling someone a Nazi is somehow acceptable under these circumstances just because lots of idiots do similar things. That’s setting the standard for civility awfully low. And when I read your links, I keep Keith’s other writings in context, so I can’t agree that Keith is against human rights in substance, he argues that as a conceptual framework, they are useless. I think he has a bit of a point there that many are too afraid to address head on, but that’s irrelevant.
I have no desire to troll through the history of the incident either, but you were the one who asked for specific falsities, even though you now concede that it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
“But clearly her main point was”
Here’s a little tip from a persuasive writing class I once took – when someone starts a sentence with “Clearly,” you can bet that it is anything but. “Clearly” is not an argument – it’s an assumption.
Perhaps that’s your subjective, post-hoc take on it. It certainly read differently to me at the time, especially considering the repeated, cross-forum nature of the stalking. Looking back, I see no reason to change the assessment I made in real time.
Aster,
I have no personal animus towards you. I’ve certainly stepped over the bounds of civility from time to time. I do find some of your philosophy vile and repulsive, and containing the seeds of a very nasty future totalitarian state. I don’t however, hold it against you in any personal way – your philosophy (as far as I have been acquainted with it) is still better than probably 99% of the world’s.
And I despise the Objectivist nature of such personal “purges” and such. Kinsella is having a great laugh that he got Prof. Long to publish his perceptive insight into this spat without so much as a blush of self-recognition. I have no desire to cleave myself from you, even though I do believe you stepped over a major line that should not be lightly forgotten and should definitely not be left uncriticized for it.
Again, my main point here is that the cultural purge not dump all the context of this sordid affair down the memory hole. Preston’s current actions did not arise in a vacuum. They were most definitely influenced by your cyber-stalking, and the failure of any of your clique to criticize your actions *until* they first got a good kick in on Preston while he was down. Whether you were correct that he is deep down a racist and homophobe or whether your stalking and the general assent by those around you kicked in his hyper-developed sense of “fight or flight” can’t be known now. I know Jeremy, who knows Keith personally better than anyone else here, has an opinion on the subject, and I’ll tend to trust the person who has the most relevant knowledge on the subject over some internet pop-psychologist.
Quasibill –
“Actually there were a couple of false things, but that’s beside the point”
Then why ask about Aster’s truthfulness?
Well, I just explained why the question of falsity matters in Aster’s case and not in Keith’s. If you think there’s something wrong with my explanation, please tell me what it is; but just re-asking the original question as if I hadn’t offered an answer isn’t going to advance us very far.
And since you began this debate with the offhanded jibe about Preston insulting putative allies, I thought it was important to note that your jibe also described Aster’s actions
Aster regarded Keith as a putative ally? That seems less than obvious.
you were the one who asked for specific falsities, even though you now concede that it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
No, I haven’t conceded that. I said that I thought the question of falsity was relevant in Aster’s case but not in Keith’s. And I said why I thought so.
Here’s a little tip from a persuasive writing class I once took – when someone starts a sentence with “Clearly,” you can bet that it is anything but. “Clearly” is not an argument – it’s an assumption.
This persuasive writing tip likewise seems — dare I say clearly seems? — to be an assumption rather than an argument.
Perhaps that’s your subjective, post-hoc take on it.
I don’t know what’s post-hoc about it. I’ve been seeing these Aster/Keith exchanges for quite a while now.
And I despise the Objectivist nature of such personal “purges” and such. Kinsella is having a great laugh that he got Prof. Long to publish his perceptive insight into this spat without so much as a blush of self-recognition.
Since Keith is the one who’s calling for purging the left-libertarians, and most of us never called for purging him — all we did is finally say “okay, goodbye already” as he stalked away with his toys — I’m not sure what you’re referring to.
*until* they first got a good kick in on Preston while he was down.
So who in our “clique,” other than Aster, “kicked” Keith before he “kicked” us? The harshest thing I can recall ever saying about Keith before he decided to purge us all was when I said “There are plenty of aspects of Keith Preston’s work I vehemently reject” — which hardly seems like a soul-destroying insult. (So if I didn’t criticise Aster for overreacting to Keith, I also didn’t criticise Keith for overreacting to Aster; I’m not sure why you’re complaining about the first but not the second.) Then Keith suddenly proclaims that everyone who’s interested in fighting racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and border controls (in other words, a whole bunch of people, including myself, who’ve never been anything but civil to him) should be purged from the anarchist movement. And you’re spinning this as defense on his part against kickings by us? LOL.
Whether you were correct that he is deep down a racist and homophobe or whether your stalking and the general assent by those around you kicked in his hyper-developed sense of “fight or flight” can’t be known now.
If someone who is, among other things, a violinist insults you, and you react by spewing vitriol against violinists in general, that suggests you already have some odd attitudes toward violinists.
P.S. – In Anti-semite and Jew Sartre tells a story about a woman who explained to him why she hates Jews: “I was once cheated by a furrier. Well, he was a Jew.” To which Sartre reasonably responded: “Why not hate all furriers?”
quasibill:
You might think it’s a tougher call, insofar as bystanders have some kind of ethical obligation to intervene when they see someone being physically assaulted in front of them (and when the potential danger involved in intervening is such that not intervening would be cowardice or complicity).
But the problem, then, is that I think you’ve now extended the thought experiment to the point where it has lost contact with the situation it’s supposed to be analogous to. If you believe that everybody reading a comment thread, or writing on it, or whatever level of involvement is supposed to be, has the same sort of ethical obligation to come in to rescue Keith from uncalled-for insults or strawman presentations of his views, then you might find it odd that many people didn’t get involved into Keith started slinging insults based on gender identity or started pulling out the most colorful sorts of schoolyard taunts in order to bash whole groups of people based on their sexuality and suggest, at length, in a stand-alone essay that has nothing directly to do with any kind of personal back-and-forth with Aster, that those groups of people (identified with the crudest sorts of schoolyard taunts) be run out of the anarchist movement.
But what makes you think that there is such an obligation to intervene in such a case?
We are not, after all, talking about a physical assault; we’re talking about people calling each other names over the Internet. Is there some reason why I should feel compelled to put myself in the middle as long as the two parties are only engaged in bagging on each other in an open comment thread?
If you’re going to charge a double-standard, you need a case in which the things being evaluated differently are actually the same. But they’re not the same, and there are obvious reasons why people who do not care to intervene in the purely personal part of the sniping that both Aster and Keith engaged in, and who have no real reason to, might nevertheless have good reasons to get involved once Keith starts slinging the fag-bashing, not to mention the standalone essay-length extended arguments for running large groups of people out of the movement based on their sexuality, gender identity, or racial or sexual politics. (Which was studded with vile insults against all kinds of people, sure, but which was primarily objectionable because of the substantive position taken in it, not because of the tone or diction.)
Distinguishing between economic freedom and personal freedom is useful (if at all) mainly as a pedagogical guide, explaining a cartoon version of libertarianism to someone unfamiliar with it. It’s also useful as a way of explaining how the political-spectrum scam works. But I agree with you that they can’t ultimately be distinguished; those who try to promote one but jettison the other always end up jettisoning both.
As for being ‘psychic’, that’s not it at all. I’m just a post-Randian and look for philosophical premises, and Keith’s are out of the anti-Enlightenment reactionary current which led to (among other things) national socialism. I saw it from the moment he posted a quite long essay by de Benoist on my former salon several year ago
I’m reminded of the line from Roark’s speech: “I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built.”
Aster, I agree with you on the whole about the Enlightenment, and certainly about the anti-Enlightenment premises you’re worried about; but I do favour some qualifications.
Roderick-
I’m very familiar with your essay. It played a substantial role in my intellectual development when I first read it around five years ago, and as literature it’s the single best piece of yours I’ve read. It was one of the first articles discussed on my old salon.
Ellen Stuttle didn’t like it as much as I’d expected.
Just as a summation -
I deplore the way this has been handled because it has become about personalities, and not ideas. If, from the beginning, you had addressed Preston’s ideas instead of attacking him personally, I would have had no problem. And Preston would have been clearly in the wrong if he had initiated a personal attack on you or any of your clique.
So long as the discussions focus on personalities as opposed to actual ideas, you and your group will be traveling down a path I will not follow.
I deplore the way this has been handled because it has become about personalities, and not ideas. …
So long as the discussions focus on personalities as opposed to actual ideas, you and your group will be traveling down a path I will not follow.
The Aster/Keith feud was frustrating to the rest of us because it seemed to be, on both sides, so heavily about personalities and not just ideas — which is why we’ve tended not to get involved in it. It was Keith who suddenly decided to broaden his personal attacks from Aster to the entire left-libertarian movement, while at the same time trying his hardest to vindicate everything Aster had ever said about him.
He attacked us out of the blue and then split, and all we did is yell “holy shit! what was that about? — okay, if that’s how things are then goodbye already” as he stalked away. As far as I’m concerned there’s not much more to say about it, and I have no interest in endless discussions of Keith. But if you want to reinterpret all this into some sort of personal persecution of Keith by our “clique,” feel free.
It always seemed silly to me to describe liberty as fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, as it is sometimes described. Conservatives are against plenty of “economic” freedoms (buying and selling certain drugs, trading with/employing certain undocumented folks, buying sexual favors, etc.); liberals are against plenty of “social” or “personal” freedoms (having guns, smoking, getting fat, being an asshole to certain minorities on your own property, etc.)
However, I think that there is a real problem when some libertarians act as if property rights are axoimatic first principles, to the point of overriding the right to life and liberty while treating personhood as if it were identical to a property right over an object (and mistakenly regaurding basic rights as *alienable*). In this sense, yes, there is an error of favoring “economic freedom” over “personal freedom”.
According to Hess himself, it was. He once said in a Plowboy magazine interview that at the time of the ’64 campaign he was hoping that President Goldwater would appoint him Asst. Sec’y of Defense so that he could lobby for a “pre-emptive” nuclear first strike on both Russia and China:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Homes/1976-01-01/The-Plowboy-Interview-Karl-Hess.aspx
Fortunately, Goldwater lost and Hess became disillusioned with the GOP and the ruling establishment in general and started spending a lot more time with Murray Rothbard and the SDS, which radically changed his views. If only every party apparatchik would follow such a path…
Some conservatives and some liberals.
Conservatives and liberals as conventionally understood.
And I think I understand the Austrian reasoning now: “steering mechanisms” means nothing more than people doing stuff. So the Keynesian and the Austrian can agree that it’s better if demand does not crash all at once, but they frame the prevention in different ways. The Keynesian thinks in terms of institutions taking actions while the Austrian keeps in perspective that institutions are always and only run by people.
Is it possible that Austrians and Keynesians are just talking past one another?
I think that there is a real problem when some libertarians act as if property rights are axoimatic first principles, to the point of overriding the right to life and liberty while treating personhood as if it were identical to a property right over an object
I don’t see how they could do both of those things at the same time. If they include self-ownership among the property rights they favour, as per the second half of your sentence, how could property rights then conflict with rights to life and liberty, as per the first half of your sentence? (Unless you’re just talking about alienability; but my impression was that you meant more than that.)
For some reason it won’t let me reply to your post, but it will let me reply to my own post. I’m talking about alienability as a consequence of acting like all rights are property rights in the sense of a commodity (I.E. as if rights are to be bought and sold). I don’t think that all rights are property rights in this sense. Basically, I think that the alienability and “voluntary slavery” issue is a natural consequence of an axoimatic conception of libertarianism.
The other issue I’m talking about is the mistake of always defaulting to a simple “who’s property is it?” question (for example, to justify killing people on one’s property). I would assert that a property right in one’s home, for example, does not grant one absolute decision-making power in the sense of a sanction to kill or enslave people just because it’s your property. So this is really the question of the degree to which violence in the name of defending property (or via appeal to property or ownership in general) can be seen as legitimate.
I think that a dogmatic approach to property rights ends up reducing to a mere appeal to the authority of whoever is the owner in order to justify whatever they do to other people, and it is in this sense in which I’m saying that property rights has to be balanced against or conditioned by or intertwined with the right to life and liberty. I’m not asserting that they inherently conflict or that there is a strict “heirarchy of rights” so much as that there should be a “unity” between them conceptually – or there are certain internal contradictions that might occur.
Basically, I’m saying that if one’s conception of rights reduces to nothing more than “whatever the owner decides is legitimate”, then in effect all rights have been relativized to the whim of whoever is the owner of property in a given scenario (I.E. your right to life and liberty essentially ends as soon as you enter so and so’s property), and absolutist propertarian arguments of this sort risk turning into a more “private” version of the “love it or leave it” argument.
What I’m really argueing against here is not property rights as such but an arbitrary sort of territorialism (derived from too rigid of a theory of property rights) that does override liberty on the basis of defaulting to the decision-making power of whoever is a territorial owner in any given scenario, or by defaulting to communitarianism on the local level.
I’ve encountered some libertarians making this mistake sometimes (particularly the Hoppe-influenced ones). For example, when people talk about a single individual or organization having absolute decision-making power over an entire city (and consequentially all of the occupants within it) by virtue of “property rights”, it is hard for me to see why this isn’t a defacto monarchal or aristocratic city-state. That isn’t my conception of a “voluntary city” at all (my own conception is, in a sense, much more decentralized – people don’t own “cities”, “cities” are close collections of a bunch of different owners in one area).