Tim: Isn’t this an example
of an *ism that you would not use as the basis of
organizing a libertarian society, but cannot be
dismissed merely on the basis of that?

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think libertarianism is antithetical to any idea that a society(as opposed to its government) should be organized at all. Organization of any system of objects(humans, in the case of society) cannot be done without force or coercion to some degree.

Now I’ll admit that I’ve never consciously read feminist ideas, but assuming he could get into more detail about their coercive nature it seems to me that Todd has a pretty sound argument here.

And that is the root of the ridiculousness of your analogy (and offensiveness). The problem with Nazism is the death camps. Not the fact that Hitler and feminists both wear pants.

One could imagine a more statism-inclined philosophy like that — it may actually exist — and it should perhaps be called instead “militant secularism” or something, the belief that no legal rule (generally speaking) is higher/prior/more sacrosanct than promoting non-belief and punishing belief, but I do not think that atheism itself generally has this legalistic tendency and that feminism generally does.

If I favored using the law to repress religion, I would strongly encourage everyone to call me fascistic — and on that even-handed note, I will move on…

Or to really challenge you, maybe put atheism as the
*ism. I think you have already called yourself
an atheist; however, you hope to convert others your
way through opinion and not law. Isn’t this an example
of an *ism that you would not use as the basis of
organizing a libertarian society, but cannot be
dismissed merely on the basis of that?

(I’ll move on to a new entry in a moment, though.)

I believe that it is an undesirable cultural state of affairs that married women take their husband’s last names while none do the reverse; and that if the woman keeps her last name the children almost inevitably take the father’s. I think that this custom is explicable and understandable as a social-evolutionary or ev-psych outcome, but that it is not compatible with my best sense of fairness or equality. I think that it symbolically subordinates one person to another in a way that is undesirable, and that offends a similar part of my brain to the part that’s offended by coercive political subordination, though it is not an example of such subordination.

I do not favor, indeed actively oppose, the Quebec solution of effectively prohibiting women from taking their names. But I favor, and argue in favor of, cultural change in this regard. It is not my place “qua libertarian” to argue for this view, any more than it is your place “qua libertarian” to argue for gender-complementarity, but that doesn’t make either feminism or complementarity views that are analogous to Naziism, or *incompatible* with libertarianism.

What is the name for the intellectual category into which this belief on my part falls?

And if the name is “feminist,” then I can’t help but think that feminism, while orthogonal to ‘political libertarianism’ in Rawls-speak, is a central part of some of the comprehensive worldviews that will make up the libertarian overlapping consensus– and that that’s an attractive fact, and that it’s a part of my own. And, from within my comprehensive worldview though not “qua libertarian,” I’ll venture that gender-complementarity looks mighty tribalistic and collectivist the second it becomes a normative doctrine and not a purely explanatory one.

As noted when all this began, we can shoehorn monarchism into looking like a subset of anarchism, but that’s not the obvious thing to do, nor is treating feminism as if it’s something other than a collectivist ideology.

ToddSeavey.com at its finest.

There’s almost no response to make here that doesn’t dignify this post more than it deserves, but:

Naziism is in the *first instance* a doctrine about the use of state power and the organization of politics. The idea of a rights-respecting, peaceful Naziism is the idea of a square circle, plain and simple.

There’s nothing incoherent in the idea of a feminist outcome reached peacefully, or indeed in the idea of a feminism that is a method of evaluating and critiquing choices that should nonetheless be made freely. As with, say, religion or aesthetic views or cultural conservatism, feminism *could* function as a peaceful standard of evaluation, a description of morally desired states of affairs that one wishes to argue for and see pursued voluntarily.

The month of feminism is… not toddseavey.com at its strongest.