[editors: the asterisks denote italicized headers, like Cherish got last
week.  Actually an underscore also denotes italics.]

                  MIND STALK
                D. R. Sullivan

*On Political Labels*

I apparently have been dubbed a neoliberal and a conservative.
Actually, that might not be so contradictory; I suspect neoliberal means
conservative, although I haven't been paying too much attention to the
most recent mutation of labels.  Still, when I said that the lowering of
trade barriers is always called liberalization, I should have said that
it could always have been called that.  Adam Smith was firmly part of
that liberal tradition known as the European Enlightenment, and he was
not the first opponent of mercantilist and protectionist policies. 

For my own positions, I aesthetically prefer the term 'liberal'.  But
since to obtain any accurate meaning I must attach the prefix
"eighteenth-century" to it, I am forced to use 'libertarian', itself
stolen from the anarchist opponents of property who followed Proudhon,
Kropotkin, and Bakunin.  And the libertarian position is hardly close to
most conservative positions, as may be noted by our calls for the
legalization of drugs (although conservative William F. Buckley agrees
here) and prostitution; absolute freedom of speech, trade, and movement;
zero tolerance of pollution; and a smaller military, given that the
United States is surrounded by Canada, Mexico, and two very large
natural moats.  Doubt as to the legitimacy of corporations is also not
inconsistent with libertarianism, although not widespread.

On the other hand, I freely admit no more attachment to the labels
'progressive' or 'populist' than to 'conservative'.  I do not think that
'progressive' need be synonymous with 'liberal' -- in fact, given the
way I use the latter term, it often will not be.

*On Free Labor Markets*

Byran Philbour quotes me: "Opening our markets ... makes us all wealthy
global citizens" and takes me to task.  My interpretation is that he
assumed my "us all" referred to everyone in the world; for the purposes
of the article it referred to Americans.  Opening our markets allows us
to be directly compared to the rest of the world and shows how well off
most of us are.  Given that most of us live through labor for others,
and not by directly manipulating owned physical wealth, obviously we
will find ourselves competing with equivalently skilled foreigners with
lower standards of living, and thus be worse off.  I fail to see how
this is, in itself, exploiting the foreigners, as Cherish Brown claims.
If someone is working for dirt cheap wages, presumably they feel the
alternatives are worse: either being shot, or starving.  If the company
is holding a gun to their head, this is slavery.  If their government is
holding a gun to their head, this is still slavery, but the problem lies
more with their government than with the company, whose dubiousness is
more in the area of ethics than morality.  If they are working as an
alternative to starving, the problem does not lie with the company; the
problem lies with their not having any wealth or natively available
jobs.  Barring the company from operating internationally will simply
deprive those workers of a job.

If someone takes a cheap job because they are starving, the problem lies
not in that someone is offering them a cheap job, but in that they are
starving.  I recognize that sometimes one can link a multinational to
both the job and the poverty, but often the latter has quite
independent causes, such as in the entire Second World.

*On Drugs*

Robert Rossi grants that marijuana is no worse than alcohol or tobacco,
but says it is no better, and that we should wean ourselves of those
that are legal now.  But given that people _do_ use them, what should be
their legal status?  If marijuana should be kept illegal, then alcohol
and tobacco should be made so.  Yet alcohol prohibition has not worked,
is not working in India right now (some poor state is trying it), and
probably would not work again -- just as prohibition of the other drugs
is not working.  And the damage caused by the effort is worse than that
caused by the drugs.  Better that the drugs be legal, and that the
advocates of temperance try to educate and convince people themselves
that drugs should be left alone.  And to improve conditions so that
fewer people feel the need to abuse drugs -- but I think that ending the
attempts at prohibition would be a simpler way of cutting the violent
crime rate.

Not that I can see any authority for the Federal government to ban any
drug, anyway, especially as a constitutional amendment was needed for
alcohol.  One might have thought that would have established a precedent.

One might also think that the availability of drugs in federal prisons
might tell us something about the feasibility of keeping them out of
a very large country.

*On Bandaids*

I fear Cherish Brown took my shameless attention grabbing too
seriously.  The second part of my previous article did not deal with
domestic abuse because it was not meant to.  I constructed a caricature,
hoping to force people to see a superiority of marijuana use to alcohol
use in that situation, and then tried to present and destroy various
public and private health arguments for marijuana being illegal, the
entire exercise having been inspired by various politicians shrieking
over Proposition 215.  The title -- "How to Stop Domestic Abuse" -- was
tongue in cheek; stoning all abusive people is not close to being an
ideal solution -- although I do think it would be an improvement. 

As for the reference in my caricature to an "unfortunate moral
education", the list of societal factors Cherish listed is a large part
of what I thought such an education generally consists of.  Her family
and mass media culture -- and yes, economic handicaps, especially with
children -- have not conditioned the woman in my scene to do something
like have a gun handy to shoot him down with, or to slit his throat
while he's sleeping, which responses are my first thoughts when I think
of being regularly physically attacked by a spouse.  Or when I think of
physically attacked.  If I can call such a reflex a thought.

For example, I don't entirely care if OJ Simpson killed Nicole Brown.
If he beat her eight times in their marriage, he should have been dead a
long time ago.

It is a shame that IMPACT is gone.  I liked that class a lot.

*On Feminism*

I've read that Betty Friedan's simple formulation of feminism was that
"women are people too, and should be treated as such."  I think this is
the second best such formulation I've heard.  The one I prefer the most
is my own: "women are people first."  The difference is that the first
statement conjures for me an image of a table, at which People sit, at
first surrounded by Men, with Women coming as a group and demanding a
place.  Which may well be what was needed at first, and is needed in
most of the rest of the world.  But our mothers and grandmothers have
gone through that stage for us; I would hope that we can move on, to
simply see people sitting at the table, some male, some female, some
(later) inhuman.  Differences between sentient beings exist, but should
not be barriers, or necessarily permanent.  

*On Education*

People keep saying that parents need to take an interest in the
education of their children, and to encourage them to take an interest
in science in learning.  But it seems to me that this will continue to
be an intrinsically difficult task for as long as the parents do not
take a strong interest in their own education.  The best way to teach is
by example.  One will not reliably raise a polymath by telling your
child she can watch TV after she has done her homework or finished her
summer reading list.  One might do so by reading and visiting a library
often on one's own, and thus conditioning the child to regard learning
and thinking as inherently pleasurable.