Rad Geek People's Daily

1. Malcolm X is a really, really fine film. I always remember that it is fantastic, but I never remember just how good it is until I watch it again.

2. I am flying to Dallas to do some almost-Christmas visiting with my family; while I will have Internet access a fair amount of the time, all the non-family-visiting time I take will be turned over to finishing the essay that I’m co-authoring with Roderick, which we will be presenting a mere week from today at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division conference in Boston. I should be back around Christmas or so, but I don’t know if there will be any substantial blogging prior to the New Year. We’ll see.

   The essay we’ll be presenting, in case you’re interested, is on libertarianism and feminism; I’ve mentioned the topic, in considerably less detail, here before: see Why Libertarians Need Feminism and Government and the pink-collar ghetto, and touched on related themes in Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I, Because of assholes like this guy…, April March, and EC OTC in OZ, among other places. The overarching project is an effort to show that radical feminism and libertarianism can and should be reconciled–they can because the points where there seems most obviously to be contradiction are actually mostly the result of misunderstandings, either of each other or of one’s own position (misunderstandings that can be dispelled, in part, by the illuminating example of the nineteenth century individualist anarchists, as Roderick has argued before); and they should because they have a lot to offer one another both in terms of theoretical insight and strategy. Unfortunately, some past attempts by libertarians to incorporate feminism into their analysis (take Wendy McElroy’s iFeminism—please!) have fallen straight into a couple of notorious traps: (1) dancing to the divide-and-conquer tune of definition-by-opposition–that is, isolating some ill-defined bogey-woman of Evil Radical Feminism, attacking it mercilessly, and then forgetting to say anything in particular about male supremacy; and (2) attempting a hyphenated feminism synthesis in which the feminism is entirely swallowed by the libertarianism. Our hope is to help suggest a more productive way forward.

3. Happy Festivus! (Thanks, Max.)

Cheers, everyone.