leftlibertarian.org

Back in September of 2002, National Review Online published Frederica Mathewes-Green’s magnificently controversial “Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy“. The author persuasively argues that several social ills are derived from the delayed recognition of adulthood (a relatively recent development in historical terms).

• Most of the negative associations people have with the term “teen pregnancy” are actually in connection with unwed teen pregnancy.
• By typically having a number of romantic involvements and breakups before marriage, young adults actually train for divorce, in psychological terms.
• And so forth, enumerating other points in favor of her position.

The author then answers objections, perhaps the most common being the matter of ability/inability by young people to earn an adequate income:

“The age that a man, or woman, can earn a reasonable income has been steadily increasing as education has been dumbed down. The condition of basic employability that used to be demonstrated by a high school diploma now requires a Bachelor’s degree, and professional careers that used to be accessible with a Bachelor’s now require a Master’s degree or more. Years keep passing while kids keep trying to attain the credentials that adult earning requires.”

I would agree that the dysfunctional state education system shares a great deal of the blame for this. Furthermore, anti-state trends such as homeschooling and unschooling point the way toward a more effective educational system — a system that, depending on your preferred terminology, could be described as either an ecology of wholly voluntary educational systems or a “free market in education”. At the very least, true seperation of school and state are needed rather than corporate monopoly “privatization” schemes or religion subsidizing voucher programs. Of course, any anarchist worth her salt will tell you that the most effective way to seperate anything and state is to abolish the state.

Additionally, there’s the matter of bureaucracy and economic centralization. Large scale authoritarian social arrangements nearly always depend on the hollow credentialism college degrees often exemplify. Abolishing government will transform the provision of educational services for the better because people will only support what they perceive works — and that goes for voluntary communal arrangements just as well as profit-seeking (and therefore tending to be customer service oriented) education enterprises. It takes a coercive state to subsidize large-scale dysfunctional systems, such as the prisons that are called “schools” these days.

Let me add that I find the authors apparent traditionalist bias toward a heteronormative conception of marriage a tad unfortunate. The economic logic of strong and genuinely healthy family groups works just as well for queer couples, and more power to them when it does. Don’t let that shortcoming of the author distract from the logic of her overall argument.

It is times like this when I wish Atlas would just shrug, even if all Atlas does is run a dating service. If eHarmony can afford it, it should tell the entire state of California to go to hell, and refuse service to any and all California clients - straight or gay - until Linda Carlson drops her lawsuit.

It is NOT eHarmony's fault that no gay person apparently has had the talent or initiative to launch a national gay dating service, at least not one as effective in serving gays as eHarmony apparently is in serving heterosexuals. And it's not as if online dating services are the only means by which two people can meet and fall in love. eHarmony is not responsible for Linda Carlson's welfare or happiness. eHarmony is under no moral obligation to provide services to gays, just as no gay dating service can be expected to provide the same service for heteros.

I can't even think of an appropriate analogy. This is as ridiculous as ... as ... a gay person expecting to use a dating service that specializes in male-female relationships. The reductio ad absurdum has become the reality.

What are we fightin' for? Well, it's not a word in a dictionary, and it's not any very specific, single political project. We're not utopians, with blueprints for the perfect society, which we would be happy to show you, if you would just clear off that table over there. . . . None of the usual anarchist slogans are really adequate. We're "against all authority," except, of course, all those sorts of authority that are derived from individual talents and qualities, and are a natural expression of human group dynamics. Rulers are unwelcome, as are states. Maybe anarchy is the absence of government, or maybe it's just a fairly pure form of self-government. Maybe we're primarily after liberty, or maybe it's ownness. Or maybe its justice. A good deal�everything, really�depends on what we mean by those various terms, and it's not always obvious. To the extent that we're all citizens of states, products of a state-system, on the road to something that we have only ever experienced piecemeal, it's not just that it isn't necessarily clear what we mean when we speak to one another. There is undoubtedly a good deal about full-blown anarchy, if such a thing is possible, that we've hardly even begun to anticipate. That's OK. We know the state-system all too well, and we know it rubs us in all the wrong ways. We can see enough of what might be down the road to know there's something else out there, something worth working towards. We have a couple of centuries' worth of work in that general direction to draw on as well, though the traditional heroes of our alliance are a rather varied bunch, drawn from diverse traditions.

Let me invoke one of those heroes�Pierre-Joseph Proudhon�one of the the first folks to use that term anarchy in a positive sense, in an attempt to open up a little space for discussion. Proudhon thought of anarchy as a sort of political ideal type, a limit-case unlikely to be seen in actual societies, but one towards which modern political society seemed to be tending.

Anarchy is, if I can express it in this way, the form of government, or constitution, in which public and private conscience, formed by the development of science and the right, suffices alone for the maintenance of law and order and the guarantee to all freedoms, where consequently the principle of authority, the institutions of police force, the means of prevention or repression, officialism, taxes, etc, are reduced to their simplest expression; in its strongest sense, where the monarchical and highly centralized forms, replaced by the federative institutions and communal mores, disappear.

This explanation, from an 1864 letter, is classic Proudhon, in that it refuses to simply discard or demonize existing institutions, while it calls for, or predicts, their radical transformation. In his 1846 System of Economic Contradictions, he had expressed his faith that collective human intelligence made very few missteps, though he understood progress as a movement through series of antinomies, or productive contradictions. This understanding made him a rather generous, if also relentless, critic of existing institutions, and kept him, when he was most consistent, from at least one class of blueprint utopias.

I'm working my way through the System of Economic Contradictions these days, plugging away at the still untranslated second volume now. There are so many of Proudhon's major works still untranslated that it is hard to discover to what extent he brought these notions of anarchy and antinomy into play with one another. They seem, in some ways, to be nearly synonymous, though derived from slightly different roots. Antinomy as counter-law (really the play of counter-laws) may, in fact, describe the "engine" of Proudhon's anarchy as well as anything. Almost from the beginning, Proudhon understood liberty as resulting from a balance of forces. We might be tempted to attempt a deconstructive hyphenation of an-archy, to roughly signify the antinomic forces at work within. What does that gain us, in terms of our understanding of our goals? Mileage is bound to vary. But maybe, for right now, it gets us a sense that our goal is not something simple, self-evident, easily understood, clearly separate from existing institutions, etc. Maybe it gives us something to talk about. . . .

You knew it wouldn’t take long for Little Miss Malice to start popping out of the envelope, didn’t you? And the winner is …

Oh, but have no fear. The background checks for the massive illegal alien shamnesty will be so much better at detecting fraud and weeding out the bad guys. Really, just trust Bush/McCain/Kennedy/Chertoff/Graham. Because, you know, they know so much more about “reality” than we do.

Well, Michelle, we’ve gone into your dissociative disorders before, haven’t we?

And what, pray tell, does Malkin have her panties in a wad about this time? This (and, for good measure, let’s include this version … you’ll see why in a moment):

A Milwaukee police officer was arrested Wednesday by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant who assumed the identity of his dead cousin a decade ago, officials said.

Thing is, there’s no evidence in either of the articles that Morales is a “bad guy.”

On the contrary — although the Journal Sentinel article refers to the program that Morales entered the police force through as having produced some bad eggs, it doesn’t identify Morales as one of them. Neither does the TV channel’s article.

The Journal Sentinel seems to keep pretty close tabs on the misdeeds of various Milwaukee cops. Presumably if Morales had been accused of taking bribes or drug trafficking, raping the citizens he was sworn to serve and protect, or maybe knocking out a driver’s window with a nightstick, then chasing him down and shooting him to death, the article would probably have mentioned it.

But the article didn’t mention anything like that. Nor, for that matter, had Morales seemingly attracted the Journal Sentinel’s attention before at all (at least Google shows nada).

That’s not absolute proof that Morales is a “good cop,” of course, but Little Shelly has always tended to throw down her mattress in the “give those fine officers the benefit of the doubt” camp … until now, when she learns of one whose papers might not be in order.

A few questions and answers for our beloved little wet firecracker:

Q: How many thousands (tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of taxpayer dollars were spent building this case against one of Milwaukee’s finest?

A: Too friggin’ many.

Q: How many ICE man hours were spent on Jose Morales that could have been spent on someone else — maybe someone with an Arab name, a questionable visa status and a possible al Qaeda connection?

A: See above.

Q: How much does Morales’s apprehension, suspension, and possible deportation (which, btw, lowers the head count of trained Milwaukee police officers, however temporarily, by one) enhance “homeland security?”

A: Not one iota.

—–
Got an Incredibly Stupid Statement of the Day tip? Hit me!

This is my latest at the Partial Observer. Excerpt:

Because laws are based on feelings rather than rational thought, it hardly matters in the end whether the law is actually effective in ending the evil. If someone came forth with pragmatic arguments, complete with statistical charts and graphs, proving that dogfighting's very illegality is what makes it thrive, and that repealing anti-dogfighting laws will actually reduce the number of dogfights and the number of suffering dogs, the argument will fall on deaf ears. That's because the law's seal of disapproval will be removed, and people will wonder what kind of society would actually permit dogfighting.. They would cling to the common-sense but false belief that legalization of a bad thing like dogfighting will result in its increase.

Bans on dogfighting show us that laws are based on feelings, not logic.

Today’s winner (for a statement from yesterday) is Cao’s Blog, with this little ditty:

The military’s purpose is to defend our nation from enemies both foreign and domestic. We should not allow the cultural Marxist forces to further corrupt it in an attempt to carry out their counter-culture revolution.

I agree with Cao that the Clinton administration’s tinkering with the “combat exclusion rule” was poorly done and that it “helped lower the standards on physical tests in order to accommodate women.” But that’s beside the point, because Cao & Co. aren’t advocating higher general standards and objective individual assessments versus those standards. They’re just demanding a return to the less “diverse” form of that old “cultural Marxism” that dominated the US military prior to the Clinton gloss: Complete exclusion of the “class enemy” (those possessed of vaginas) from combat jobs.

[S]tudies show that the average woman is a fraction of the size of a man, and her total body strength is 60% or so of that of a man …

Yeah … so? Using these studies as the basis for assignment of Military Occupational Specialties is pure collectivist bullshit. The woman seeking assignment to, say, Marine Corps MOS 0311 (basic infantry”man”) isn’t “the average woman.” She’s a real person with an actual, measurable size and an actual, measurable physical strength.

So: Set a standard based on the performance requirements of the MOS — or make the most stringent MOS standard the standard for military service, period — and measure the applicant against it already. If she measures up, she’s in — and if he doesn’t, he’s out. Simple, fair and based on individual ability rather than on political correctness of the left- or right-wing variety.

Speaking of which, let’s make the other uniform standards — hair length, work dress, whether or not you can pierce your ears, etc. — um, uniform, too. If there’s a reason for them, everyone should adhere to them. If there’s not a reason for them, then nobody should be required to.

—–
Got an Incredibly Stupid Statement of the Day tip? Getcher fame and fortune here.

“Incredibly Stupid Statement of the Day,” that is. No promises — I’ve been known to run hot and cold on the whole daily blogging bit — but it seems like a reasonably good idea. After all, there’s no dearth of ridiculous material in the general blogosphere, and if I get desperate for stupid statements to feature I can be confident that Little Miss Malice has my back at all times.

So, some guidelines. Yes, tips are wanted and will be credited. But please, read the guidelines before firing’em off.

Guideline the First — This is Incredibly Stupid Statement of the Day, not Incredibly Stupid Statement From Six Weeks Ago. I’m flexible, but only so much. I don’t have a problem going back up to 24 hours or so. Don’t send me stuff from 2003, mkay?

Guideline the Second — Nobody’s safe. I expect this feature to “lean right” in terms of targeting, at least at first — let’s face it, the left has just plain been more sensible (or at least less mind-blowingly irrational) than the right over the last few years — but when lefties (or libertarians!) go all bizarro, they’re fair game too. Blogs I like won’t be spared, either. Or non-blogosphere sources, although blog statements will be the presumptive sources of choice.

Guideline the Third — Don’t just send the statement, send the link. Duh.

Guideline the Fourth — Specify the form of your hat tip — i.e. “Joe Sixpack,” “Joe’s Blog,” “anonymous,” whatever — and whether or not you’d like a link (and if so where to).

Guideline the Fifth — Send it here.

That’s the Half-Moses with a twist on this one, folks. Let’s have fun and see what happens.

From Winter Patriot:

“The recent revelation by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that senators knew the intelligence on the Iraq War was being cooked in the lead-up to the invasion refutes the claim that Congress was misled by the White House.”

Not like it’s a surprise — but this does make it official.

Watch Mike Gravel explain it further:

Robert Helms doesn't need me to build him up; his work speaks for itself. That said, it's nice to get an opportunity once again to point folks towards his excellent Dead Anarchists site. The occasion is the publication, by Helms and Wooden Shoe Books, of Forty Years in the Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jewish Anarchist, by Chaim Leib Weinberg. This is the result of years of labor by Helms and others. Check out the online edition at Dead Anarchists.