The Humble Libertarian original

Oh boy A story that defies understanding until you realize... how old the parents are. It's a boy! And he's five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," Laxton said. I'm confused. Is being stereotyped as a boy worse than being stereotyped as a court jester with an extra chromosome? "Wha--! That is so offensive!" Agreed. So why did she do it? "Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?" On a hunch I checked out her blog to see how opposed she was to slotting people into boxes: I may be wrong, but this appears to be a woman whose whole life is boxes. The premise for this unstory is that the parents wanted to prevent any gender stereotyping, so hid the child's gender from everyone to let him [sic] grow unstereotyped. The problem is that the parents already know...

I. Aziz Ansari didn't rape or sexually assault "Grace." But he was definitely being rapey . The critics in the backlash against Babe.net and #MeToo over this have failed to see that. Which is seriously unsettling. And many of them are spreading vile stereotypes about men that I take serious issue with as a man. II. To be fair to Aziz, maybe she's exaggerating or not telling the truth, and we don't know for sure. She could just be a really evil bitch. It's definitely possible. But taking Grace's account at face value, as many columnists have in criticizing her and #MeToo... And assuming it is an accurate representation of what happened that night... He treated her extremely badly. And deserves to be pilloried for it. A popular NYTs opinion column by some smart ass named Bari Weiss was entitled: " Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader " And what a ridiculous article it was! He was guilty of a lot wors...

Everyone's talking about some actress named Connie Britton because she wore a shirt to the Golden Globes that said "poverty is sexist." Well I agree with her.

Have we all been asleep??? This was publicly available information during the 2016 presidential campaign. The recorded interview in which Hillary tells all about this incredibly sordid thing she did, was uncovered and published in 2014. But it was never widely addressed by the media and voters two years later. Most people are probably still unaware of this strange and unseemly fact today. Here's what happened : "In 1975, the same year she married Bill, Hillary Clinton agreed to serve as the court-appointed attorney for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old accused of raping the child after luring her into a car. The recordings, which date from 1983-1987 and have never before been reported, include Clinton's suggestion that she knew Taylor was guilty at the time. She says she used a legal technicality to plead her client, who faced 30 years to life in prison, down to a lesser charge." On the tape Hillary Clinton actually laughs with veteran Arkansas jo...

Another example of how violence against men in this country is trivialized. A lot of people pretty much laughed about Rand Paul getting assaulted and left with 6 broken ribs. Three of them were displaced fractures (where the halves of the broken bone are knocked completely out of alignment) and he also had pulmonary contusions, which are a life threatening injury that can fill a person's lungs up with blood and fluid until they drown. The reaction from most of America was pretty much a big yawn. But you know we would have mobilized to DefCon 1 if a female political leader had been assaulted in her own front yard and severely injured. There would have been such a massive and effusive outpouring of good will and concern for her. She would have gotten her own trending hashtag with its own special Twitter flair icon. There would have been a lot of fierce rage for her attacker. There may have even been a #MeToo campaign for other women ( women only, not men ) who have ...

On The Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal, Amy Swearer writes : "There is a time and place to address genuine concerns about the left’s war on manhood, the horrible lack of due process for college students accused of sexual misconduct, and the unfortunate but very true fact that sometimes lives are ruined over false allegations. Whatever that time is, and wherever that place may be, it is not when a person is telling you she was a victim of assault. That will never be the right time or place to raise those concerns. When someone confides in you about an event so life-altering and full of heart-rending pain, you do one thing. Only one thing. You listen." "she" "Whatever that time is, and wherever that place may be, it is not when a person is telling you *she* was a victim of assault." I know men who have been sexually assaulted. Yet Amy continues to gender the victims of sexual assault as female- just like the meme she discusses. But mo...

Someone I knew from knocking on doors for libertarian-leaning political candidates years ago challenged me on some of my recent thoughts about the #MeToo meme that was re-posted by millions this week. She wrote: "What is the actual problem of conflating the two, or just including the two as options, in a Facebook post though? As a practical matter, many women who are rape victims may not want to publicly say it but the fact that the meme had harassment as an option maybe allowed them to be freer with their experience. It's not like this is a Congressional law we're talking about where language needs to be precise and not vague... this is a meme." I wrote back: Sorry I wrote you a book. There's a lot to unpack here. So you're saying someone who might be too embarrassed, as sad as that is, to say they were raped, might feel emboldened to speak up about their experience to their group of friends under the cover of the meme's ambiguity? Wow. That ...

If you're wondering why there aren't more women in positions of power in big corporations today, you're asking the wrong question. The right question is: Why are there any men at all that want those positions of power? Video: Psychology Professor Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (University of Toronto) talks about women in high pressure jobs and the balance between career and having a family life. Jordan B. Peterson interviews James Damore August 8th, 2017: Interestingly enough, this noted psychology and philosophy lecturer (who is also a practicing clinical psychiatrist) had his popular YouTube channel (with over 350,000 subscribers) shut down earlier this month for unnamed TOS violations, and then reactivated after an outcry went up. I'm scared I don't have a big enough audience for anyone at Google to care if the Blogger account that I host this blog on is deactivated because I posted these videos to share this very reasonable viewpoint. And that's t...

I just published a book: " Sexism (D) - The Democrats' War on Women " Does any of this sound sexist to you? “The broader question if Sarah Palin becomes vice president, will she be shortchanging her kids or will she be shortchanging the country?” -NBC correspondent Amy Robach "Like this right-wing slut, what’s her name, Laura Ingraham? Yeah, she’s a talk slut. You see, she was, back in the day, praising President Reagan when he was drinking a beer overseas. But now that Obama’s doing it, they’re working him over." -MSNBC’s Ed Schultz ”It's pretty clear that Nikki Haley is being chosen because the Republican Party has a diversity problem.” -DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz "She's a dumb bitch!” - celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton about Miss USA contestant, Carrie Prejean "I want her laying next to me in bed. That's the way people vote." -CNBC’s Donny Deutsch about Sarah Palin "On so many levels S.E. Cupp is a perfe...

Credit: Kitty Hell The existence and availability of gun technology is a great equalizer for the physically weaker and more vulnerable among us. Take for instance, this 15-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sister , who were home alone one Tuesday afternoon in 2010 when two strangers tried to break into their house. Without gun technology, these two children would have certainly been in worse danger. Gun technology confers physical parity upon those who are physically disempowered against stronger bullies or intra-species predators, because they have smaller or weaker bodies. Two thundering, violent, adult, male brutes breaking into a house don't need gun technology to overpower and abuse or even kill two children. But without gun technology, the children would likely never be able to overpower and neutralize these predatory adults' physical advantage. The quality of the technology is relevant to its effectiveness and the best interests and best practices of million...

No, not the victims, the rapists. Let's back up a second: "We're going to get familiar with your womanly parts." That's what Brandy Hamilton says Nathaniel Turner, a male police officer told her last year during a traffic stop when she and her friend were driving home from the beach. The officer found a small amount of marijuana in their car after stopping them for speeding and made them wait on the side of the road in their bikinis, without allowing them to put on their clothes, so Jennie Bui, a female officer could show up and perform a roadside cavity search. The traffic stop and the vaginal search were caught on the police cruiser's cameras. "She pretty much forced my legs open because I wouldn't even open my legs," Hamilton said. Her friend, Alexandria Ramble told her local news station, KXAN, "We were just assaulted in the worst way possible. We weren't asked could we be touched. It was just done to us. I'm just emba...

In response to some recent comments on my popular libertarian essay about abortion , it's time for me to mention that my views have shifted. I would argue that for the purpose of discussing law and public policy, the critically relevant issue is not the nature of the fetus as I have argued before, but the nature of the state. Let's come up with a libertarian consensus on abortion that even if a human fetus is a living human being entitled to self-ownership and non-aggression, and even if to abort a human fetus is to murder a human being, that we still don't want to pass a law against it in a monopoly legislature, appoint a standing army of career policethugs, and try to enforce that law with money we take from people against their will and under threat of violence-- because if all that isn't bad enough to begin with, even if protecting human fetuses was the only thing this government did, before long it would end up doing a hundred other unrelated things that make us ...

"She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm." --Camille Paglia, Penthouse 1992 Camille Paglia has been for me over the past few years, one of those voices that I stop and listen to, whatever she may happen to say and whatever I may happen to think about it. When she speaks out on matters of art, culture, and society, I can always feel the weight of her robust worldview at the very least. Often I agree with her and am delighted by both her perspectives and her means of expressing them, especially in her assessment of what is genuinely erotic and what is merely a manufactured, very nearly "android" contrivance of our mass media i...

This is a contribution that I wrote for a new 4th wave Feminist group, F.I.N.D. Feminism Is Not Dead , in the March 2011 issue of their zine. Feminism is rooted in classical liberalism. The liberal notions that inform feminism are some of the same ones that informed the abolitionists of American slavery. Among those is the idea of self-ownership, which is the truth that each person and each woman owns her body and is the highest authority over that body. Neither the state nor any man (or woman) has a higher claim on your body than you do. This is encapsulated in the popular pro-choice maxim, “My body, my choice.” Secondly there is the liberal notion that all people are created equal- everyone is born with the same rights and powers. In addition to repudiating the divine right of kings, the idea that we all have the same rights and powers also defies the institution of patriarchy. No woman is beholden to her husband or any other man simply by virtue of being a woman. The highest purpose...