1) You are not capable of listening without my silencing you. This is so obvious that it makes no difference that you are already silent.

2) You are not human beings deserving the courtesy of verbal communication.

3) Mechanical sounds regulate your lives.

4) There is a massive social distance between me and you.

5) Heel.

Any false appearance of respect given after that will be meaningless to the children. They know how they are perceived, and, if the speaker is fortunate, they will silently accept their role as herd creatures. If he is unfortunate, they will challenge him at some point. And he will marvel at how disrespectful urban children are.

Quick review of the relevant thoughts from above: (1) Hoppe explains how the process of civilization, of moving from short brutish back-breaking lifestyles, rests on long (or ‘low’) time preference, the willingness to endure present discomfort or forego enjoyment of resources in order to build a better future in the long term. (2) Beard explains that women in antiquity, for the most part, produced tons of children, suffered the effects of antiquity’s ever-present severe poverty, and died frequently. (3) Amy Chua outlines the parenting style of what she calls ‘Chinese mothers,’ women who may or may not be from China but who practice a parenting style that emphasizes the Hoppian civilizing sacrifice to a degree we may see as incredible.

So the question I get from this is the following: is the strategy outlined in (3) a frequently used and viable strategy women employed during the civilizing process to help ensure that their daughters wouldn’t have to live with the problems of (2)? And if so, shall we judge Chua less harshly or more positively than we do?

(HT: J. K. Gayle)

Immediately a very intelligent girl, a Christian girl who had somewhere picked up some sort of feminist thought patterns, began to comment on how regrettably patriarchal the situation was. She saw this as an example of men oppressing women. Nods all around. Except from me. I was confused.

I sought understanding. How can this be? I asked. I see a bunch of men either unconcerned or opposed to mutilation, and a bunch of wild-eyed women chopping the genitals of young girls. If this is patriarchy, don’t we have to ask some very difficult questions over whether patriarchy is even a meaningful term for this discussion?

To which I was answered that there is no form of patriarchy stronger than one in which women perpetuate the patriarchy. The men, I am told, have get the women so thoroughly under their thumb that the women mutilate their girls to please them without being even so much as told to.

I honestly did not know how to respond to such an assertion. I still don’t. If the immediate and instinctive response to women abusing girls is that somehow these actions are really the work of evil scheming men, I simply cannot understand what is going on in the modern feminist mind. I fear that our ways of thinking are so far apart that we cannot even have a productive discussion. I hope I’m wrong.

Two points to any reader who can help me understand this. Three points to any reader who can convince me that ‘The Personal Is Political‘ is not a hopelessly destructive, two-faced, and anti-female work.

Lest we think to ourselves that this signifies merely the improvement of social conditions for the Muslim world (if we can put the word ‘merely’ in front of a fundamental change in the lives of more than one billion persons), let’s consider what this means for the United States. The US has spent the last ten years growing itself a massive surveillance state and trying to fix the Muslim world by means of continual and ineffective attempts at nation-building.

If I’m right, and authoritarian Muslim rule is a dying thing, we’re basically wasting our time in the Muslim world. No, it’s worse. The actions of the United States are not only ineffective but counter-productive. The last tactic of tyrants is fear, and the US-caused killing of more than 100,000 Muslim civilians in Iraq is exactly what Muslim tyrants need to hold on to power: a massive frightening enemy. Bombing weddings in Yemen and then strong-arming their Muslim government to take the blame doesn’t win us friends.

The widespread anger throughout the Muslim world at the United States is not the paranoid delusions of medieval tribal peoples. Yes, the Islamic world has severe problems. Horrible, horrible human rights issues. But when the US arms corrupt and oppressive regimes on both sides of conflicts throughout the Middle East, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, we shouldn’t pretend terrorism is something that spontaneously hops up from freedom-hating Muslims.

And this is where the US government finds itself in real danger. Its own citizens, right-wingers and left-wingers and everything else, are highly dissatisfied with the direction of their country. Its finances are collapsing, while everyone pretends that we’ve got an endless line of credit from some magic pot of money that will finance us forever.

And despite our efforts, the Muslim world is liberating itself. Liberty is like a tree. It grows on its own. No army of liberation can make one overnight by slapping some wood together. It just won’t work.

It’s time for us to get our military out of the Muslim world as fast as we can.

While we in the US might like to imagine that childhood lasts eighteen years, puberty hits at 12 or 13.  Though the kids shouldn’t be out making babies, they’re behavior really isn’t that surprising.  Really, the surprising thing is that in most high schools the pregnancy rate is so much lower.  The average American girl becomes capable of pregnancy at 12 years, 6 months, and then waits, hormone-crazed, for 12 years, 5 months to have their first child.

That’s incredible! In the entire world, only 13 of about 200 countries have a longer average delay of pregnancy.  We might pretend we have a massive crisis of young motherhood, but we aren’t.

Another factor to consider is child support.  Once a girl gets gives birth, one of two things is likely to happen.  First, as happened to a number of girls in my home town, she may get married.  Plenty of high schoolers think they’re going to get married, and getting pregnant is one way for a girl to seal the deal.  If the marriage doesn’t happen, or if it falls apart, there’s always child support, averaging $4200 per child per year.

It’s not hard to see why to a high school girl it might look like a good deal, even if it isn’t.  If Jimmy might get away, having a kid with him might be one way to stop him.  Both sets of grandparents will be relatively young, and probably able to chip in for the care of the kid.  Everybody loves grandchildren, so making your parents grandparents ties them to you both by your birth and that of the kid.  Plus, there’s always WIC, welfare, and child support should things fall apart.

Teenaged pregnancy, in its own dysfunctional way, makes sense.

Morally, God made all human beings in his image, and we are all flawed in many ways.  (Except you, of course.  You’ve pretty much got it together.)  As my Calvinist and Catholic brethren know especially well but for different reasons, we’re all evil through and through, so evil folks like us shouldn’t let a little something like mental illness — an unfortunate psychological condition — excuse our mistreating others.

Practically, mentally ill folks aren’t nearly as bad as people might make them out to be.  It’s not like they’re foaming at the mouth and running around biting people.  I’m sure there’s a few people that way, but they’re not the mentally ill people you bump into.  Heck, they might not even be mentally ill.

I’ve had a mentally ill guy as a roommate before.  It works just fine.  He always paid rent on time, he made conversation like anybody else, and when he came home drunk he was no more annoying than my “normal” roommates were when they were drunk.  Thank goodness I didn’t know he was mentally ill before moving in.  I still would have moved in, but in the back of my head I would have interpreted just about anything weird he did as “mentally ill,” rather than just genuine human weirdness.

People are people.  Recognize it.

What got me thinking about all this was a commercial that they have been airing hulu.  In it, people are literally labeled in a way that makes people think.  For example, one man wears a shirt that says “schizophrenic” and another a shirt that says “mom.”  The point being, of course, that the mentally ill are real people who are part of real families, in the real world.

But they made a big mistake.  They had two couples where one person wore the word “bipolar,” and the other wore “better half.”  The problem is that when two phrases like that are placed side-to-side, it suggests that the mentally ill one is the “worse half.”

Which is exactly what the commercial is trying to avoid.

I will not try to explain the reasons behind what he did.  I can’t.  Morally, there is no excuse for what he did.  You know this, and I know this. But a few words for those working on processing these events.

Christ’s example in behavior toward government is instructive.  Though his values were opposed to the values of the Empire, and though he ridiculed Herod and refused to cooperate at trial, he did not lift a finger against the government.  Not only that:  he even stopped Peter’s attack on his killers and healed one of them.  And far from fading into obscurity, the message of Jesus Christ succeeded far beyond that of any warrior of his day, so outshining all else that two thousand years later, three billion people practice some form of religion that holds him in high esteem.

The governments of this world are filled through and through with evil, but the scriptures tell us that we are to cooperate with them.  We are to expose their evil and engage in what some smart guy called “Revolutionary Subordination.”  That is what we are here to do as Christians.  The governments of this world are deeply flawed agencies of justice, but even if we may go so far as to call them enemies, we must remember to love our enemies.

Now, I’m a libertarian, and as such, I’ve dealt with a lot of really, really frustrated people, people who want to create a more free world, people so passionate that they do not care about the morality of their actions, who believe that good ends justify any means.  Though I disagree with this outlook, I feel that I need to point something out, in case any angry libertarians are reading this.

Even if you’re so twisted as to think that it’s okay to just go and shoot down a Congresswoman and bystanders, think about how strategically stupid that is.  When you kill someone you make a martyr of them.  You also make it ten times harder for your ideas to be discussed.

Jared Loughner wanted the government to reinstate the gold standard.  Then he killed someone.  Now he is rightfully dismissed as a kook, and whatever coherent ideas may have existed in his dark head are also dismissed.  He worked against the government, against human civility, and against the cause he was working for.

But what about people who aren’t in any danger of going off and killing politicians?  How can they help to mend our nation and create a world where incidents like this are either non-existent or much rarer?

Well, if you live in the city or can get there, I recommend you find a group of people dedicated toward using non-violent means to solve our nation’s problems, like Agora Ministries.  Go spend time with inner-city youth.  If you want to fix the world, go learn the dysfunctions and terror that little kids are going through in your inner cities, and then start seeing what you can do to, one person at a time, to bring some light into the world.

You may help turn the next Jared Loughner around.

I was wrong.  Elementary fact-checking shows that people with large audiences can spout nonsense at length without being seriously called on it.  “Talking heads” is an apt description.  It turns out that argument is not very highly prized on television.  Sure, television loves to have two people contradicting each other, but there’s little reasoning involved.  And it’s not just a lack of reasoning that’s involved.  There’s disrespect for simple facts.

Take, for example, Faiz Shakir.  In the video below, Faiz Shakir and Ron Paul debate the usefulness of the Federal Reserve.  Shakir, who had absolutely no business being on TV discussing the Fed without knowing the fundamental facts of the Fed’s history, scoffed at the idea of not having a Federal Reserve, pointing to the Great Depression as an example of the evils that befell us in our pre-Fed world.  Except for one inconvenient fact that Mr. Shakir didn’t know.  The Fed was established in 1913.  The Great Depression occurred under its watch.

Talking heads assert truth based on little to nothing.  I find naked assertions or even falsehoods whenever I try to find justifications for things like intellectual property, the war on drugs, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Even Nobel Prize winners like Paul Krugman engage absolutely mind-blowingly unreasonable argument constantly.  Politically, the only places where I’ve been able to find sustained and well-developed argument is in the works of libertarians, like David Hume, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Ron Paul, and Bob Murphy.  That’s why I find myself a libertarian on such a wide range of issues:  not because I was raised that way, nor because I like libertarianism instinctively.  It’s because it out-argues anything else.  You don’t find today’s leading libertarian thinkers making glaring errors on issues of material fact.