Just caught a clip of Joy Behar talking about Joslyn James, the porn star who claims to have been pregnant by Tiger Woods.
Behar said, inter alia, that a) of course Joslyn James wouldn’t have wanted to raise a child, because she’s a porn star and so has no “maternal instinct”; and b) it’s not plausible that Joslyn James would have objected to Woods’ being unfaithful to her, because she’s, you know, a porn star.
I wonder whether Behar’s aware that according to recent cutting-edge scientific tests, the DNA of porn stars is very similar to that of human beings?
I’d say it’s not plausible that Joslyn James would have objected to Woods’ unfaithfulness because … he was already married to someone else.
How does that make it implausible?
I just figured she knew that she was the side project, he having a very high-profile marriage and all. It’s not impossible, it’s just unlikely.
It was a sham wedding, part of Woods’s carefully constructed public image.
Roderick, you’ve said before that the ideal system would allow people to select the currency with which they would like to trade. Will you say more about that or point to something you’ve written?
Michael, I wonder if the basic arguments are there in Hayek’s The Denationalization of Money (free download available at http://www.iea.org.uk/record.jsp?type=book&ID=431).
Once there’s no money monopoly, there’s no reason multiple currencies wouldn’t or couldn’t be in circulation. No doubt some would be more popular than others, but it seems as if local currencies could be exchanged in much the same way as national currencies are now. Technology would make it easy to use different currencies in the same region.
Yummy! 🙂
What’s funny about the Hayek paper is that the financial crisis of 2008 demonstrates an even more compelling case for concurrent currencies.
Hayek focuses mostly on the amount of money as the problem. He says that the money monopoly invariably invites government to print more. But that’s not the most pressing reason for concurrent currency.
What AIG, Countrywide, Wachovia, etc. did had nothing to do with creating more money. What they did do was to create instruments through which they could get rid of risks of default on loans. They circulated that risk so deeply through the system, that virtually every dollar was tied to the risk those companies cleared off their books.
Had they been operating with AIG dollars, Countrywide dollars, etc., then there would have been no choice but to let them fail.
I’m not saying that Hayek was wrong about inflation. I’m just saying that his case for concurrent currency is much easier to make by showing how credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations necessitates non-monopolized money. Otherwise, the risk taken by a few people becomes risk taken by all people, while the rewards can only be harvested by the few.
Inflation does not cause that. We see events that Hayek did not see. And what we see is — I think — much worse than inflation.
I’d love to know what you think Gary…
Michael, I’d have to think about this more. I’d be glad to support any arrangement that would require the AIGs of the world to internalize costs associated with the risks they take. But I wonder whether AIG would, in fact, use AIG money. Large financial institutions would presumably hold multiple currencies.
That’s a fair point. In fact, they’d probably use as many different kinds of money as possible to build up another too-big-to-fail scenario.
But even with the incentive to mix monies, it would be much less likely that a few companies could infect every system of currency.
Isn’t it funny that porn “stars” are one of the few groups of people that neither the right nor left treat with any semblance of political correctness? Most anything can be said about them without much objection from either side.
It’s true of all of the right, including right-libertarianism. It’s true of much of the American political left and large sections of the intellectual left, but there are exceptions, particularly within feminism and anarchism. In New Zealand a former prostitute can become a member of Parliament with the Labour Party.
It’s true of all of the right, including right-libertarianism
I’ve certainly found many exceptions among right-libertarians.
I’ve found many individual exceptions as well, but not enough to make contemporary libertarian society safe for sex workers. My understanding is that the situation was better in the 1970s.
Those on the right are afraid of alienating the religious fundamentalists, many of whom consider porn to be the worst thing in the world.
Those on the left are afraid of alienating the radical feminists, many of whom consider porn to be the worst thing in the world.
Pro-sex or sex-positive feminism has had significant success in challenging these attitudes within the radical feminist community both inside and outside academia, certainly more success than left-libertarianism has had within libertarianism.
Actually, most of the libertarians that I know don’t really have an opinion about porn, aside from the general libertarian opposition to censorship. Other than that, they don’t really consider it to be a political issue.
Of course, libertarians, like anyone else, have personal opinions, but they don’t usually consider these opinions to be an extension of their libertarianism. Rather, these opinions are generally considered to be outside the scope of politics, just as one’s taste in music (or movies) would usually be considered to be largely independent of one’s political philosophy.
And that’s the problem. The separation between the personal and the political is a uniquely liberal phenomenon, one which libertarians have radicalised into a demand that one look the other way towards any sort of structural oppression which is not the state. In the XIX century this sort of thinking encouraged a Tory attitude towards class injustice which allowed socialism to legitimately overtake liberalism as the only ideology which would take class justice and hence the interests of the majority seriously. Today libertarianism has become a refuge for every neoconfederate and anti-feminist in search of an ideology which demands silence in the face of racism and patriarchy. The libertarian commitment to operational relativism and sole focus on statism has created a bacterial breeding ground for reactionary attitudes. ‘Better’ libertarians signal that they don’t care and don’t consider prejudice an actional issue, which allows a large minority of bigots to maintain conservative social conditions.
Libertarians may keep making and excuses and shrugging, but most independent-minded people facing non-state oppression- people who in a better world should have been libertarians- are going to follow their interests and self-respect and hook up with someone else, namely the Left.
The revived sex workers rights movement has massively made precisely this choice. And come on guys, sex workers really ought to be natural libertarians- it’s a rare prostitute or porn star who doesn’t believe in free speech and sex and drug liberalisation (basically the whole ‘social’ axis of the Nolan Chart)… and I read somewhere that we’re not immovably opposed to commerce and the free markets. But sex workers put up with an imperfect Left because it does create a social sphere within within which sex workers can reliably expect the institutional respect and fairness which are prerequisites for any functional public activity.
One cannot judge a movement solely by its official political positions or its formal rules and structures. Real social movements don’t succeed primarily by rewriting the formal rules (that’s a later step) but instead by expanding the kernel of their internal cultures until this changes the nature of daily human relations. Libertarianism tells us what society it would truly create by the operation of its internal polity- and I don’t want that society. The exclusive focus of formal political positions merely stacks the deck in favour of conservatives who defend traditional social relations of power and who present anyone who won’t stand quietly in the face of second class citizenship as a PC troublemaker. The Left by contrast usually responds when one demands they live up to their promises of equal opportunity.
langa: Those on the left are afraid of alienating the radical feminists, many of whom consider porn to be the worst thing in the world.
Huh?
1. Antipornography radical feminists generally oppose, and have repeatedly come out against, the kind of nasty remarks and polemical abuse that’s directed against women in pornography from people (mainly men) on the political Left and Right. Whether you think we are right about pornography or not, I don’t think this is an accurate understanding of the position towards women in the pornography industry.
2. I can find no evidence at all that much of anybody in the mainstream Left is particularly afraid of alienating antipornography radical feminists, or really cares what radical feminists in general think (whether they are antipornography or not). Do you really think that someone like Catharine MacKinnon or Susan Brownmiller has very much influence over what people in common liberal or Leftist discourse, outside of specifically feminist political spaces, think it is or is not acceptable to say?
The idea that people on the male Left really want to object to nasty remarks about the women in pornography, but fear of radical feminist backlash is somehow holding them back, strikes me as bizarre.
I’m not arguing that it’s an “accurate understanding”, but rather that it’s the common perception among members of the mainstream left. Furthermore, while people like MacKinnon and Brownmiller may not have much influence on mainstream discourse, more mainstream feminist groups (e.g. NOW) have quite a bit of influence, and many on the mainstream left are very afraid of offending such groups.
Now, you may counter that NOW (or whoever) is not an example of “radical feminism” or that their views on porn are different from those of true radicals like MacKinnon or Brownmiller. While that may be true, it’s not really relevant, because it presumes a level of sophistication with regards to different strands of feminism that most of the mainstream left simply does not possess, at least in my experience.
For example, a guy like Keith Olbermann probably has no more appreciation for the differences between the different strands and sub-strands of feminism than he does for the differences between Randian Objectivism and Rothbardian anarchocapitalism. He just knows that feminists are generally opposed to porn and is very reluctant to pick a fight with them over what he probably considers a minor issue to begin with. Again, I’m not saying he’s right to feel this way, but most members of the mainstream media (both left and right) are motivated much more often by concerns of political expediency than by some lofty ideological principles.
Ianga-
How many feminists do you know?
Briggs,
I think that’s true, but I don’t think it’s funny. (Neither ha-ha, nor particularly strange.)
It’s entirely ordinary for women to be treated like crap by both the official Right and the official Left simultaneously, and especially women who are perceived as being defined by their roles in the system of sex-class (e.g. sex workers and other publicly sexualized women).
There are very few rules when it comes to the girls, and especially not girls who aren’t seen as “nice” according to prevailing male standards. Or I should say that there are a lot of rules: just not rules of courtesy or common decency, but rather rules of Patriarchal Correctness, which are themselves quite rigid in their expectations of who has the right to act like a dickhead, or even has a positive obligation to act like a dickhead, and who ought to be kept in their place.
I sincerely hope that you did not have to sit through watching The View in order to catch that clip. If so, I pity you.
No, it was her evening show, and I only watched a few minutes of it.
In related news, Tiger Woods apologised to everyone on earth today — except any of the women he had affairs with.