Posts from August 2008
Archives:
Proof by ostention
So, Kerry Howley (of Reason) and Megan McArdle (of The Atlantic) have a discussion about libertarianism and feminism, criticizing the reflexive anti-feminism that goes on in many circles, the deeper affinities between radical libertarianism and radical feminism, which, when you just think about it in the most basic terms, ought to be quite obvious. A book like The Second Sex is nothing if not placing itself in opposition to something like a group identity. It’s a book about individualism….
(The two often agree, although Howley seems generally more sympathetic to both the feminist tradition and contemporary feminism, and McArdle more inclined to paint it as broadly statist.) It’s an interesting dialogue, well worth taking the time to listen to; watch the whole thing. McArdle and Howley cover a lot of ground, and get into some really interesting arguments about the intellectual intersections between the two traditions.
Then a link was posted to Hit and Run.
Here are the first four comments that this post received.
Brian Sorgatz | August 4, 2008, 3:13pm
Since you’re sporting enough to call yourselves lipstick libertarians, I’ll have to blog about your discussion in some detail at Reflections on Playboy soon.
It’s politically complicated for a guy to mention, but you two are reinforcing the positive stereotypes about brainy brunettes. I don’t know if it’s good, bad, or neutral for feminism, but it’s fascinating.
Warty | August 4, 2008, 3:16pm
In my imagination, you two are planning a rainbow party. I’m not about to watch the video and spoil that image.
Your Mother | August 4, 2008, 3:24pm
You girls would be so pretty if you just did something about your hair and makeup.
Fratboy libertarian | August 4, 2008, 3:27pm
Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!
Further down the thread:
shrike | August 4, 2008, 4:21pm
Any chick who classifies themself as a libertarian, atheist, or Tom Waits fan automatically gets extra Hotness points – but not quite as many points as “bisexual” garners.
And:
ktc2 | August 4, 2008, 4:42pm
Kerry is hotter. She wins. No need to watch the video unless they get naked and wrestle in some jello.
And:
MikeT | August 4, 2008, 3:41pm
If one is really a libertarian, then how can one subscribe to an ideology that has to be redefined in such a tortured manner to be individualistic as feminism? The very idea of feminism is a collective identity political system. Not that I am surprised, since many libertarians are so enamored of left-wing politics.
Of course, Howley (in particular) gave several arguments for seeing feminism as a mainly individualistic movement, and echt-feminist texts — The Second Sex, for instance — as basically individualistic in spirit. But why bother engaging with those arguments, one way or another, when you can just run off at the mouth about it? Why even act like there’s an argument at all, when two women having an intellectual conversation about feminism obviously serves no function at all other than an opportunity for blowjob jokes and lesbian jokes and hamhanded attempts at flirting with complete strangers?
Take a look at these two threads of conversation — the original dialogue, and the thread in reply
to the link. Of these two, which kind of libertarian movement would you rather be a part of?
8:15am
Donated by Kazuo Nikawa
1,600m from the hypocenter
Kan-on BridgeKengo Nikawa (then, 59) was exposed to the bomb crossing the Kan-on Bridge by bike going from his home to his assigned building demolition site in the center of the city. He suffered major burns on his right shoulder, back, and head and took refuge in Kochi-mura Saiki-gun. He died on August 22. Kengo was never without this precious watch given him by his son, Kazuo.
Sixty three years ago today, on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay
dropped an atomic bomb over the center of the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Hiroshima was the first target ever attacked with nuclear weapons in the history of the world.
The bomb exploded about 200 yards over the city, creating a 13 kiloton explosion, a fireball, a shock-wave, and a burst of radiation. On the day that the bomb was dropped, there were about 255,000 people living in Hiroshima.
The explosion completely incinerated everything within a one mile radius of the city center. The shock-wave and the fires ignited by the explosion damaged or completely destroyed about nine-tenths of the buildings in the city. Somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 people–about one third of the population of the city–immediately died. The heat of the explosion vaporized or burned alive many of those closest to ground zero. Others were killed by the force of the shock-wave or crushed under collapsing buildings. Many more died from acute radiation poisoning
–that is, from the effects of having their internal organs being burned away in the intense radiation from the blast.
By December 1945, thousands more had died from their injuries, from radiation poisoning, or from cancers related to the radioactive burst or the fallout. It is estimated that the atomic bombing killed about 140,000 people, and left thousands more with permanent disabilities.
Almost all of the people maimed and killed were civilians. Although there were some minor military bases near Hiroshima, the bomb was dropped on the city center, several miles away from the military bases on the edge of town. Hiroshima was chosen as a target, even though it had little military importance, because It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focussing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.
1. Hiroshima was also one of the largest Japanese cities not yet damaged by the American firebombing campaign. Military planners believed it strategically important to demonstrate as much destruction as possible from the blast.
Thomas Ferebee, a bombadier for the United States Army, was the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His commanding officer was the pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets. Tibbets and Ferebee were part of the XXI Bomber Command, directed by Curtis LeMay. LeMay planned and executed the atomic bombings at the behest of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry Truman.
Kengo Nikawa died on August 22nd, 1945 because of the bombing. This is his pocket watch.
We will never know the names of many of the 140,000 other residents of Hiroshima who were killed by the bombing. We have only estimates because the Japanese government was in a shambles by this point in the war, and countless records, of those that were successfully kept, were consumed by the flames, along with the people whose lives they recorded.
The late, great Utah Phillips called this one of the first songs he ever wrote that ever made any sense. It’s certainly one of his best.
Enola Gay
Look out, look out
from your school room window
Look up young children from your play
Wave your hand
at the shining airplane
Such a beautiful sight is Enola GayIt's many a mile
from the Utah desert
To Tinian Island far away
A standing guard
by the barbed wire fences
That hide the secret of Enola GayHigh above the clouds
in the sunlit silence
So peaceful here I'd like to stay
There's many a pilot
who'd swap his pension
For a chance to fly Enola GayWhat is that sound
high above my city
I rush outside and search the sky
Now we are running
to find our shelter
The air raid sirens start to cryWhat will I say
when my children ask me
Where was I flying upon that day?
With trembling voice
I gave the order
To the bombardier of Enola GayLook out, look out
from your school room window
Look up young children from your play
Your bright young eyes
will turn to ashes
In the blinding light of Enola Gay I turn to see
the fireball rising
My god, my godall I can say
I hear a voice
within me crying
My mother's name was Enola GayLook out, look out
from your school room window
Look up young children from your play
Oh when you see
the war planes flying
Each one is named Enola Gay.–U. Utah Phillips (1994), on I’ve Got To Know
As far as I am aware, the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center, in which forces acting on behalf of the United States government deliberately targeted a civilian center and killed over half of all the people living in the city at the time, remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.
See also:
Iatrogenesis
John Perceval, a member of a prominent English family and the son of a former Prime Minister, resigned a military commission in 1830, underwent a conversion to an unconventional Christian sect, and had a break-down while traveling in Scotland and Ireland. His older brother, then a Member of Parliament, took him back to England and had him locked away, against his will, in two private asylums, first in Bristol and then in Sussex. Here are a couple things that he had to say about what he observed during his confinement, as noted by Thomas Szasz in The Manufacture of Madness.
I will be bound to say that the greatest part of the violence that occurs in lunatic asylums is to be attributed to the conduct of those who are dealing with the disease, not to the disease itself; and that the behavior which is usually pointed out by the doctor to the visitors as the symptoms of the complaint for which the patient is confined, is generally more or less reasonable, and certainly a natural result, of that confinement, and its particular refinements in cruelty; for all have their select and exquisite moral and mental, if not bodily tortures.
–John Perceval, Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832. Edited by G. Bateson. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961. 114. Quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 129.
And:
But when the lunatic doctors say that the presence of friends is hurtful to lunatic patients, they are not aware of the fact–at any rate do not acknowledge it–that the violent emotions and disturbance of spirit, which takes place on their sudden meeting with them MAY arise from their being overcome by a sense of their relations’ conduct toward them, in neglecting and abandoning them to the care and control of strangers, and from the treatment of the doctors themselves. The doctors naturally do not acknowledge this, for if they are acting from stupidity, their pride refuses correction, and will not admit the suspicion of being wrong; if they are acting with duplicity and hypocrisy, they necessarily preserve their character, and cannot in consistency confess that there is any error on their part–who can expect it of them? You cannot gather grapes from thorns. Nevertheless, it is true.
–John Perceval, Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832. Edited by G. Bateson. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961. 218. Quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 129–130.
After he gained his freedom in 1834, Perceval wrote two narrative accounts of his treatment in the asylums. After being released, he spent the remaining four decades of his life campaigning for the liberty of people labeled as mentally ill, notably founding an Alleged Lunatics Friends Society and leading a petition campaign against the Lunacy Act, which allowed for involuntary commitment and denied involuntary patients
the right to challenge their imprisonment in court.
Please note that, today, the shrinks and their flunkies, who continue to inflict on unwilling patients every sort of isolation, restraint, confinement, physical torture, and emotional trauma that the mad doctors of Perceval’s day inflicted — the shrinks and their flunkies who continue to march forward with the same invincible ignorance, using the same involuntary commitments and the same hellhole prison-camp asylums,
— the shrinks and their flunkies who, in spite of the lessons clearly taught by men like Perceval, still continue to display exactly no self-awareness or critical insight whatsoever into either the history of their own discipline or the possibility that the phenomena they supposedly study and correct may be at least partially the results of their own coercive treatments
— those shrinks and their flunkies, I say, now have the supreme gall to turn around and claim John Perceval, the man who their forebearers imprisoned and tortured, and who spent the rest of his life opposing their forebearers’ exercise of arbitrary and absolute power to imprison and torture innocent people who have been labeled as diseased
by doctors or family, as a pioneer … for the mental health advocacy movement.
See also:
Shameless Self-promotion Sunday #12
Sorry that posting has been so thin for the past couple of weeks; I’ve been wrapping up a summer job teaching logic to gifted teenagers in Pennsylvania, which has been eating up the bulk of my personal time. But that comes to a close at the close of this week, so things should be picking up again around here soon.
In the meantime, what do you all have for me this week? You know the schtick: leave a link in the comments with a short description of a post you’ve written.