Day: November 2, 2000

My Plagiarism Story

Awhile ago I wrote about how my friend Cathy Young had to go through some bizarre, false, plagiarism claims. Meanwhile Mark Morgan is very worried about the implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — Mark uses his site to let people post stories and essays, but if someone should post a plagiarized story, the DMCA potentially exposes him to a rather large degree of liability.

All of which reminded me of a very strange situation I faced in the summer of 1998. One of the things I’m really interested in is libertarianism. At the time I was dissatisfied with the libertarian-oriented web directories — they either weren’t very complete or weren’t updated very often. So I decided to make my own and registered the LibertySearch.Com domain name.

Then out of the blue I started getting some nasty e-mail about the site. I turned out one of the libertarian link sites I had visited and been dissatisfied with was behind the e-mails. The woman who ran the site decided that even though her site was a directory of sites while mine was a directory to specific articles rather than sites, that I “stolen” her idea. She posted a wonderful notice on the front of her site linking to mine saying, “Does this site look familiar? It’s a damn good rip off of the old Freedom Finder. Too bad he doesn’t have a webcam diva fueling his traffic! People who copy things suck.”

She was annoying, but the problem was people believed her and the claim started showing up on other libertarian sites by people who thought I’d literally gone to her site and stolen everything and put it on my site (which would have been pointless because her site was pretty much useless since it listed very few resources).

It took me several months to clear up that mess. It’s a shame she was so petty because she let a pretty good domain name, freedomfinder.com, slip out of her hands and now it’s used by a registrar rather than for a libertarian site.

Should Libertarians Vote for Ralph Nader?

David Kopel, who is normally a pretty level headed libertarian, has written an article for National Review arguing that the best presidential candidate for those who want to reduce the size of government is the Green Party’s Ralph Nader.

Here’s his reasoning: Republican George Bush and Democrat Al Gore are both big government liberals who will expand the size of the federal government, so they’re out. Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne is unlikely to get even one percent of the vote nationwide, and besides some libertarians are upset at Browne’s fund raising tactics and moves he’s made with the national party.

Nader and the Green Party, Kopel argues, while they are certainly wrong about most things at least are willing to a) fight corporate welfare and b) end the drug war. Where Nader and the Green Party have ridiculous statist views, Kopel writes, the difference between them and Bush/Gore is one only of degree. Help the Green Party wean corporations off of corporate welfare and soon corporations will do more to fight the size of government as well.

There are plenty of flaws with this argument. First, even if his claims about Nader were correct, Nader is in most ways far to the right of the Green Party as a whole. It is very unlikely that the Green Party would nominate Nader again as their nominee in 2004, and is much more likely to choose a much more left candidate who is willing to fully embrace their socialist vision.

Second, to the extent that Nader has a few pro-freedom views, a) they are extremely weak, and b) they are more than counter-acted by his anti-freedom views. Can Kopel have one without the other?

Take corporate welfare. It would be great ot have a president willing to denounce corporate welfare at every turn, but along with denouncing corporate welfare Nader would be there denouncing violent and sexual books, magazines, video games, movies, etc. Yes Nader disagrees with Bush/Gore on this point only in degree, but only in that Nader is far more anti-freedom than either Bush or Gore.

A similar problem is Nader’s support for decriminalization of marijuana. First, marijuana and the drug war are largely off of Nader’s radar. If you look at Nader’s web site, his issues page doesn’t even have a listing for drugs, the drug war or crime. The main thing Nader has talked about in speeches is legalizing hemp for industrial use.

A search on marijuana turns up only 9 hits at Nader’s web site, the only one of which deals with legalization issues merely says that Nader would spend more money on education than on the drug war. And don’t forget that the Green Party platform would create a super drug war, since it allows local municipalities to vote to ban any substance for pretty much any reason (and Nader and the Greens have a long list of substances he wants banned).

For Kopel the drug war is perhaps the most important issue and yet he’s willing to support a candidate whose major policy statements on the issue are small concessions to appeal to the hemp activists among the Greens. I think that’s a pretty lousy argument given the other anti-freedom positions of the Green Party and Nader.

Bizarre Jon Katz article

In reviewing Margaret Wertheim’s bizarre new book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Jon Katz provides a classic Katz-ism for the ages,

My own sense is that they are witnessing and participating in the birth of a different sort of nation, seeking not so much spiritual as moral and ethical renewal. We have the sense of being present at the revolution, even if it’s not clear what kind of revolution. People are hungry not only for spirituality, but for a sense of purpose, and they don’t see one advanced in the election.

Nobody makes more profound statements about absolutely nothing than Katz.

Is Domestic Violence Political Persecution?

Last year the national Board of Immigration Appeals reversed a judge’s decision to grant a Guatemalan woman asylum in the United States because it decided she wasn’t fleeing persecution for her political opinions or membership in a social group. Rather the board said that since the woman was fleeing domestic violence by an abusive husband, this was an internal criminal law matter for Guatemala to decide.

Feminists, on the other hand, argue that in fact domestic violence is an act of political oppression that targets women because of their gender. As Karen Musalo, director of UC Hastings’ Center for Gender and Refugee Studies told the San Francisco Weekly,

Everyone agrees that [domestic violence] is persecution. The board is saying that [the circumstances] are a shame but they are bound by the statutes of the law. We, the people that disagree, say that you can interpret the statutes differently. But the effect is that right now, we might not be able to offer protection to women persecuted because of their gender.

Should women who are victims of domestic violence be allowed to seek asylum in the United States?

As a libertarian I favor simply opening up the borders and letting anyone who wants to come to the United States, so I certainly hope this Guatemalan woman is able to stay in this country. On the other hand Musalo and others don’t seem to have thought through their position very well.

While domestic violence is deplorable, all of the evidence indicates that it is far from a gender-specific crime in which men target women. Not only do studies of domestic violence in the United States repeatedly show that women are as likely to engage in acts of domestic violence as men (a recent study even found higher incidence rates by women) but we also know domestic violence incidence among lesbian couples is comparable to that which occurs in heterosexual couples.

Radical feminists like to resist the notion, but violence is a human condition rather than a specifically male characteristic.

In addition, one of the obvious problems the immigration courts are concerned with is that if gender is created as a special category that men might well form the largest class of individuals targeted based on their gender. University of California Berkeley law professor Patty Blum told the San Francisco that, “The paradigm of refugee law is about the concerns for men. THey are about the public sphere activities that men participate in, the political organizations they participate in, the speeches they make. But women are impacted in this society in this more private sphere.”

Huh? If you had visited Guatemala during the height of its civil war you would have found many men forced into military service by one side or another who were targeted by the government or rebels specifically because they were men. Men who would have much preferred to grow old farming their small plots of land were forced to join government or rebel militias, fight and often die simply because they were men.

Immigration courts clearly want to avoid those kinds of claims. Again, I think pretty much anyone should be allowed to cross the border, but if there are going to be laws, feminists shouldn’t pretend that women are the only ones targeted for special repression based on their sex.

Source:

Shelter from the Storm. Bernice Yeung, San Francisco Weekly, October 25, 2000.