No Girls Allowed!

Aaaaaaah! Yes.

I don’t know why you say this. I can only assume that you have no idea how social science research is done. In spite of some libertarians’ petty prejudices, the social sciences, while far from perfect (and what science is perfect?), are far more rigorous (especially psychology) than many laypeople (or economists) imagine. As for common sense, well, as the adage goes, common sense isn’t very common. “Common sense” leads to imagining that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, while research shows that the real differences are small and greatly swamped by intra-group differences.

Don’t hold your breath waiting, Sean. She evaded this issue even before I was born during early 70s debates on the Goldberg book on patriarchy. I think these debates were in the Libertarian Review but it’s been a while since I’ve read them. There was a goofy strain of libertarians back then who supported the ERA while ignoring its broader implications in a statist society like ours. My boyfriend even recalls an ALF member, Janice Allen, telling him in 1973 that ERA only consisted of a very words, so what was the problem ! Nationalize the means of production is even fewer words. The most knowledgeable and consistent libertarian Senator, Sam Ervin, lead the battle against the ERA.
Some of these libertarian feminists came over from the left culture and like some other converts from the liberal ranks like John Hospers and Edith Efron, we could have done better without.

You don’t address the question I raised. I address it below.

I don’t dispute the point you make here. Popular media accounts of political contests are generally superficial, and this superficiality takes the form you describe regarding women in politics. I don’t know how shabby it is, but it’s not what I imagined when Sean suggested that Palin was treated “shabbily”.

Despite the obsession with women’s sex appeal, I doubt that Palin lost many votes because she was too hot. The media’s focus on her airy head was more decisive, and I see nothing sexist about it. Critical media also focused on Bush’s airy head and rightly so.

I was no fan of Janet Reno, but I was firmly on the side of Elian’s father, and so was she.

Family relationships are more important to me than political relationships.

Taking children from their families to protect them from the family’s, or the family’s nation’s, politics is not my idea of a libertarian program.

Elian’s father and all of his Cuban classmates from the school he attended, before the ill-fated and nearly fatal voyage to the U.S., also attended the “boarding school” in Havana for a few weeks, and Elian’s father consented to it. It was a political stunt, and Elian has been politically privileged ever since, but if you want to know who made him one, don’t look in his father’s direction.

Juan Gonzalez takes every advantage of the situation, created by his son’s mother and the Cuban exile community, to advance his son’s interests where he and his son were born and raised.

You don’t understand. I don’t care about Fidel Castro. If Fidel Castro were standing in front of me right now, I could happily shoot him.

Elian’s father, Juan Gonzalez, was not and is not a high ranking Communist Party bureaucrat. He’s a waiter in a restaurant. He called relatives in Miami the day after Elian’s mother left Cuba to tell them that the mother had taken Elian on the voyage that nearly killed him without his father’s consent. These relatives then found Elian at the INS where the Coast Guard had left him, and the relatives refused to return him to the father, and they did so for political reasons with encouragement from the Cuban exile community in Miami.

Again, Juan Gonzalez allowed Elian to stay in the “boarding school” in Havana along with many of Elian’s classmates from the school he attended before the voyage, and Juan Gonzalez stayed there with him. It was a political stunt, no doubt, and I don’t need to defend it to defend a father’s right to the return of his kidnapped son.

Everyone stayed at this “boarding school” for a few weeks. Elian then returned to his father’s home and attended neighborhood schools until he reached high school, when he entered a different boarding school. Being a political icon undoubtedly helped him get into this school and will help him getting into a prestigious Cuban university as well. He might even end up as a high ranking Communist Party bureaucrat.

I couldn’t care less how Fidel Castro or Al Gore or anyone else capitalized politically on the tragedy, and I don’t blame Juan Gonzalez or Elian for capitalizing on it for Elian’s benefit.

You already know me. Guess it sucks to be you.

Children don’t have choice in general, so they don’t have compulsion either. Elian is an adult now. We can ask him who abused him. Why should I believe you instead of Elian? Why should I believe you instead of his father?

Cuba is not Nazi Germany or a war zone. I don’t see parents taking their children into war zones, and I never anywhere suggest such a “right”. Paying attention to me is obviously your choice, along with the diversionary red herrings and ad hominems.

So much for your inattention span.

Elian’s Dad was described in the mainstream media as a long time Communist Party member with a middle high ranking. He was not just a waiter. Elian was not kidnapped but was taken by the woman who brought him into the world to get out of the Castro gulag to a freer country. Reno kidnapped him to return him to the tyranny.
He was in a Communist boarding school for much longer than a few weeks and why do you put quotes around boarding school ?

Oakland’s then Mayor Jerry Brown visited him there.
What kind of a family life can anyone have in a Communist society where everyone belongs to the state ?

This is the first time I ever heard of the Left invoking family values !

Frankly the first I have ever of heard ditzy left libertarians invoking them either !
Of course the relatives and the Miami Cubans had political reasons to fight for Elian. Any person opposing tyranny would understand them. And it wouldn’t be the physical danger for Elian they were most concerned about. Can you think of others ?

As for Elian’s becoming a high Communist Party official why would any sane, decent person consider that a good thing ?
Well, I do know all that I want to know about you.
Your last sentence reads like pure projection.

But the media don’t talk about those issues. They talk about their personal lives.

I’ve seen the CATO thing, I just happen to think they’re kidding themselves. They wanted a certain set of answers, and as one always can with a study, they found a way to get them. But the preference for libertarian ideas they measured is paper thin, and it falls apart on contact with specific proposals. Here a link to a very good talk, that says it all better than I can:

Also, I should have made this part clear earlier: Obviously no one really comes home for the holidays and outs himself as a libertarian, just like that.

What actually happens is much worse and much more personal. You come home for the holidays in November 2002 and tell your Dad you don’t think the invasion of Iraq is a good idea. Or you tell your aunt, who happens to be a tenured public school teacher, that you oppose public funding and control of education. That’s when the sparks fly.

And yes, of course its true that everything has a cost, but the point is that the cost of being a libertarian is higher, and the benefits lower (read: nonexistent), than with either of the two dominant ideological camps.

We are the Anabaptists of modern politics. However much the main armies of Catholic (R) and Protestant (D) might hate each other, when they came across a village full of us, they are only too happy to set aside their differences, lock arms, and unite to destroy us.

BTW – I just want to make clear that I am not the down-thumber of your comments.

I got my job as editor of Reason fair and square, by underpricing the more experienced male competition by $15K a year.

Though in the olden days, Libertarian Review, the competing libertarian magazine (now on the Mises Institute archives) was edited by two women, the late Joan Kennedy Taylor and Victoria Vargas, and a gay man, the late Roy Childs.

Women are not men, but a) seems incredible to me. I don’t at all believe that women are treated more harshly when it comes to politics, conflict or public intellectual life.

In public life (politics, seeking dominance of the state), libertarians (of the sort I support) are treated more harshly by others seeking dominance of the state, because libertarians (ideally) seek to dominate the state only to cripple it, while others seek to strengthen the state, because they want to dominate a strong state.

It’s hard, in this sense, for all libertarians, but every libertarian lady has a legion of libertarian lords rushing to her defense at every opportunity, precisely because most libertarians are lords and not ladies.

People often accuse me of playing a contrarian. I only play myself. If I happen to be contrary to you, that’s just a coincidence.

Sean, “You make an ass of yourself” is not a description of the person addressed. It’s a description of a speaker calling this person an ass while projecting responsibility for the statement onto the alleged ass.

Positing a false choice like “ass” or “haiku” does not strengthen an argument for the alternative advocated.

“Women are treated differently from men” is so prosaic and indisputably, even inevitably, true that it hardly requires a response, and I concede that I wasted words on a response. The rest of the post is still up there if you’d like to reply.

Okay, this statement just seems crazy to me: “In mainstream journalism, for instance, it is much easier to be a libertarian than it would be to be a social conservative.”

First of all, without even steeping past your front door, you know that the outlook called “social conservatism” has millions upon millions more adherents than the outlook called “libertarianism”. In so far as the business of journalism largely consists of telling people what they already know and want to hear again, that cannot fail to be a huge advantage in favor of the social conservatives.

Empirically speaking, your statement seems even crazier, as I defy you to name any libertarian woman (or indeed any libertarian) who reaches a wider audience than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin.

For proof, I give you the following Google hit scores:

Bill O’Reilly = 121,000,000
Ann Coulter = 18,600,000
Michelle Malkin = 6,700,000
Nick Gillespie =1,700,000
Katherine Mangu-Ward = 78,000

Again, I really cannot believe I’m having this argument. Still less can I believe I’m having it with Virginia Postrel. It all just seems painfully obvious to me.

And by the way yes,…I believe that as things go for public figures and blog commenters, so also do they go also for private citizens.

Libertarianism is a form of rebellion, is it not? So try this: ask any sister who has a brother if female rebels are treated the same way as male ones. I believe most will tell you that their brother’s deviations from the established order were written off as boyish and charming, while theirs were considered disgusting and unseemly.

I’d really love to know where you’re meeting your leftists, because they sound like a finer breed than I typically encounter The ones I know come in two main types:

1) Those who simply aren’t aware a distinction exists between libertarians and conservatives. They know only that there’s a category of people who don’t support Obama or a $12 minimum wage or whatever, and who must accordingly be the most evil, stupid, and crazy people in the history of the planet.

2) Those who know what libertarians are, but find them inconvenient, and so make every effort to reclassify them.

Example: I say “Have you ever stopped to think that taxes are taken by force?” They answer: “Oh, I see where this is going. Right here, right now, you tell me where you stand on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Do you believe people should be allowed not to hire people solely because of their race?”

You might recall Rachel Maddow used this trick on Rand Paul a few years back. If you poke a minarchist long enough, you’ll find an area where his non-aggression stands in the way of a leftist social policy, and then voila, you’ve got yourself a social conservative or close enough

Now, about the line you draw between mainstream journalism and opinion journalism…I’m sorry, I don’t see it. It all looks like point-of-view stuff to me. And in any case, I was only ever using journalism as an example. I never intended to limit the discussion to that alone.

The question is: do libertarian women have it rough out there? That’s bigger than any one profession.

I read The Future and its Enemies back in the day, and I didn’t think it shallow then. My thinking has evolved a lot since, so I don’t know how I’d perceive it now.

No one short of Murray Rothbard is ideologically pure enough for LRC, and I wasn’t tuned into Rothbardians at all when I read Postrel; however, emphasizing the distinction between stasis and dynamism, rather than a political distinction between statism and libertarianism (which often comes down to a statist proprietarianism), made a lot of sense to me then and still does.

On LRC generally there is a Roman Catholic bias that is reflected in the inane rants against abortion by Lew Rockwell, Laurence M. Vance, Becky Ayers and a whole host of Fundie nuts who write there.
Rothbard himself gave the best defense of abortion rights ever in The Ethics of Liberty, far better than the feminists and Rand but these intellectually dishonest creeps at LRC never refer to it.
One thing Presley did right was coin the term ‘fetus fetishist’ to correctly describe these folks. I went back to LRC recently after a long boycott just to read their dozens of pieces against gun control.
I was referred to this site by Thomas Woods piece two days ago in LRC.
But now that they are starting up their old mackerel snapper anti-abortion nonsense again I may resume my boycott.
I am an Irish-American secular Jew who had 16 years of classical Roman Catholic education so I know all the arguments.

It sounds like that young woman is pretty dumb if she aspires to be a journalist or academic with minimal talent and ambition. I suggest trying a line of work where there are jobs. But it’s actually EASIER to get a job as a professional libertarian than as a professional liberal (for instance) because there is much less competition. (Remember: I’ve been on the hiring end, though I suspect there are more good candidates today.) Anyway, I thought we were talking about people who don’t get paid for their ideas but, rather, who simply hold their political views as part of their private life. I’m reminded, for instance, of two female college friends whose libertarian political views I learned only after I became editor of Reason and encountered them in that context. (One met her husband when she saw him reading Reason in the company cafeteria and said, “I know Virginia Postrel.”) Someone can be a libertarian, or libertarian-leaning, without spending a lot of time arguing about political issues.