Monthly Archives: July 2021

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Song of the Day #1876

Song of the Day: 1982 Disconet Top Tune Medley [YouTube link], mixed by Casey Jones, is another one of my all-time favorite Disconet dance medleys. This is just a superb knitting together of dancefloor staples such as “Love Come Down“, “I Specialize in Love“, “Keep On“, “Planet Rock“, “Play at Your Own Risk“, “Megatron Man“, “Love is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)“, “Let it Whip“, “Do Ya Wanna Funk“, “Come and Get Your Love“, “Babe, We’re Gonna Love Tonight“, “Gloria“, “It’s Raining Men“, and “Mickey“. The medley incorporates R&B, hip hop, Hi-NRG, electro-pop, and the alternative sounds of the era. I digitized this lively medley from the original vinyl, uploaded for the sole purpose of entertainment with no copyright infringement intended. (And another H/T to Ryan Neugebauer for his YouTube Tech Tips!)

Harm Reduction vs. the “War on Drugs”

Like most libertarians, I’ve long argued that the government’s “war on drugs” is not only morally bankrupt and practically counterproductive, but also a leading contributing factor to the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world.

This weekend, in an Op-Ed in the “NY Times”, Maia Szalavitz explored how alternative practices of “harm reduction” can inspire self-care, rather than spurring a cycle of self-destruction, for those suffering from substance abuse problems. Harm reduction promotes “policies that are both humane and effective by putting risks in context and centering the perspectives of those who are most affected. By making it the cornerstone of drug policy — and all policies aimed at changing risky human behaviors — we can build a healthier, happier and more equitable world.”

Check out the full article here.

Fight the Draft!

In the news: The Senate Armed Services Committee has approved, 23-2, the National Defense Authorization Act “that would, if enacted, require young women to register for Selective Service alongside men, and in the rare event of a war or other national emergency, be drafted for the first time in the nation’s history.”

Not everyone is on board with this. While most Republicans voted with Democrats to authorize this change to Selective Service, two Conservative Republicans voted against it: Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. They didn’t object to Selective Service registration or the draft for men. Oh no. They just want to protect “America’s daughters”. As Cotton put it: “Our military has welcomed women for decades and are stronger for it. But America’s daughters shouldn’t be drafted against their will. I opposed this amendment in committee, and I’ll work to remove it before the defense bill passes.”

But it’s still okay for America’s “sons” to be drafted against their will. To force any human being into military conscription “against their will” is involuntary servitude. So I have a really good idea: How about we end Selective Service registration and any thoughts of drafting any human beings whatsoever to fight and die on battlefields created by the power elites to further their own interests?

I can’t believe that I’ve come full circle with this. Back on April 19, 1979, when I was nineteen years old, I was one of the cofounders of the New York University chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society, and on May 1st, we joined with a coalition of antidraft and antiwar activists to protest in Washington Square Park the Carter administration’s reimposition of Selective Service registration for men, between the ages of 18 and 26.

David Dellinger, one of the Chicago Seven, fired up the crowd of around 350 people. As chairperson of the NYU chapter, I was among those chanting in unison, “Fuck the Draft”. It was a lot of fun handing out antidraft pamphlets to well-dressed men wearing sunglasses standing on the sidelines—could the FBI make it any more obvious that they were observing us? We considered ourselves part of the “New Resistance.”


An Antidraft Button from My College Days (1979)


It’s time for a Brand New Resistance to close down the entire Selective Service System, to ending even the threat of the draft against any person! Equal rights against involuntary servitude of any kind!

RIP, Jackie Mason

A hilarious comic—who offended everybody with his irreverent politically incorrect humor—has died at the age of 93.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

C4SS: Homonograph Reviewed

Eric Fleischmann—who is not just a student of my work and a very dear friend, but a very fine young scholar in his own right—offers a critical and provocative review of my monograph Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation on the site of Center for a Stateless Society, which, not coincidentally, is offering the “Homonograph” for sale at its C4SS Store here.

Eric interviewed me for the piece, which places the monograph in its proper context—a nearly two-decade old discussion of the relationship between Objectivism and those in the LGBTQ+ community who were drawn, “like moths to a flame,” to Rand’s uplifting celebration of individual freedom and authenticity “only to be burned in the process.”

Despite some many on-point criticisms of the work, of Rand and her acolytes, and of reactionary elements within the libertarian movement, Eric argues that the “monograph serves as one of the centerpieces in the establishment of thick libertarian ideas. It especially forwards the point that it is not enough that people refrain from trying to use the state against the LGBTQIA+ community. We must go further and combat a culture that breeds both physical and nonphysical violence.”

Check out the review here and other reviews of the work here. And thanks, Eric, for your challenging and wide-ranging examination of the monograph!

The “Homonograph” (Leap Publishing, 2003)

Song of the Day #1875

Song of the Day: 1981 Disconet Top Tune Medley [YouTube link], mixed by Mike Arato (who DJ’d at Uncle Sam’s in Long Island!) and John Matarazzo, is a swirling compendium of some of the best hits of that year, including: “Pull Up to the Bumper“, “Nights“, “Try it Out“, “Give it to Me Baby“, “Hit ‘n Run Lover“, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“, “Walk Right Now“, “Your Love“, and “Lay All Your Love on Me” (yep, from that great ABBA Disconet Remix [YouTube link]). While the rest of the world was walking on disco’s grave, the rest of us were dancing the night away in the clubs of the day!

Ravitch, Rand, and CRT: The Ominous Parallels?

I introduced this blog post on Facebook with the following preface:

Okay, here’s something that should piss off people on both sides of the Critical Race Theory debate. The merits of CRT matter less to me than the central point of this blog entry: That somebody as far away from CRT as Ayn Rand had something profoundly important to say about the nature of systemic racism.


I have not written extensively on “Critical Race Theory” and have no time to do so, given personal and professional constraints. But Diane Ravitch published a worthwhile article in the New York Daily News on this topic in the 29 June 2021 issue. Check it out here.

Ravitch writes:

In the Houston of my youth, every public and private facility was racially segregated: schools, mass transit, restaurants, hotels, public swimming pools and everything else. Grocery stores had two water fountains, one marked “white,” the other marked “colored.” Public buses had a movable marker with the word “colored,” which consigned Black people to the back of the bus. If whites needed more seats, the marker was pushed back, and Blacks stood. By custom, a Black person entered the house of a white person only through the back door. When a white and a Black approached each other on the sidewalk, the Black person was expected to step into the road to let the white person pass. The customs of white supremacy were well understood and seldom, if ever, violated.

In school, our history textbooks taught us about great American patriots, all of whom were white. The only person of color mentioned was George Washington Carver, who discovered many uses of peanuts. When we studied the Civil War, there were heroes on both sides (my junior high school was named for a Confederate hero, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston), but minimal mention of slavery or its cruelty.

Reconstruction following the Civil War was taught as a time when Southern whites were oppressed by federal troops, opportunistic carpetbaggers, and ignorant Black politicians who ran their states into the ground.

It was many years later that I learned that this was the Confederate view of events, and that Reconstruction was a time when able Black men served honorably in Congress, and racially integrated state legislatures wrote new and progressive constitutions. And that, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, white Southerners quickly restored the status quo, replacing slavery with Jim Crow legislation that maintained racism, segregation and unequal opportunity for Blacks.


Many whites, myself included, believed that the 1954 Brown vs. Board decision, which overturned the fiction of “separate but equal,” marked the beginning of the end for racial segregation. The Civil Rights laws passed during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration in the mid-1960s strengthened the belief that racial inequality was defeated. The federal government and the federal courts would reverse any racial discrimination, we believed. No longer would places of public accommodation or public transit or public schools be allowed to bar Blacks, nor would Blacks be denied the right to vote.


This too was misleading. In the 1980s, I became friends with Prof. Derrick Bell, the first Black person ever to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. … He is called the founder of critical race theory, which holds that racism is systemic and that Blacks will never achieve equality until we reckon with the past and confront the systems and beliefs that allow racism and segregation to persist, blighting our society. An example is housing patterns, which did not evolve by accident or choice, but because — as Richard Rothstein showed in his book “The Color of Law” — racially discriminatory rules were imposed by the federal, state and local governments. Segregated neighborhoods produce segregated schools. … A nation can’t escape the sins of its past without confronting them directly.

For those who dismiss all of this as a by-product of “leftist” thinking, check out Chapter 12 (“The Predatory State“) in my book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. While Rand would have had many differences with many CRT advocates, I examine, in that chapter, Rand’s profoundly dialectical analysis of the reciprocal relationship between advancing statism and deepening racism in our society, such that each is both a systemic precondition and effect of the other.

I present Rand’s approach as a Tri-Level analysis of social relations of power:

The Tri-Level Model of Social Relations

As summarized in my September 2005 Freeman essay, “Dialectics and Liberty“:

Rand maintained that government intervention in the economy creates a civil war of all against all; advancing statism makes masters and slaves of every social group, with each vying for some special privilege at the expense of others. Paradoxically, even as statists try to create and rule society as a collective whole, their policies simultaneously create vast social fragmentation. The rule of force has the effect of engendering the formation of pressure groups, each with a design on the levers of power. Every group threatens every other group while acting in self-defense against the aggrandizement of its political competitors. Over time, Rand argued, the group becomes the central political unit of a statist society, and every differentiating characteristic among human beings—be it age, sex, sexual orientation, social status, religion, nationality, or race—becomes a pretext for the formation of yet another interest group.

Racism, in Rand’s view, was the most vicious form of social fragmentation perpetuated by modern statism. It was not a mere byproduct of state intervention; it was a constituent element of statism. From the perspective of Level I, Rand argued that racism was an immoral and primitive form of collectivism that negated individual uniqueness, choice, and values. Psychologically, the racist substitutes ancestral lineage for self-value and thereby undermines the earned achievement of any genuine self-esteem. Holding people responsible for the real or imagined sins of their ancestors, wielding the weapon of collective guilt, the racist adopts the associational, concrete-bound method of awareness common to all tribalists. This “anti-conceptual” tribalism is manifested in the irrational fear of foreigners (xenophobia), the group loyalty of the guild, the worship of the family, the blood ties of the criminal gang, and the chauvinism of the nationalist. Tribalism was “a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result” of the various caste systems throughout history.

Such “psycho-epistemological” tribalism could only gain currency in a culture dominated by irrationalist and collectivist ideas (Level II). When the Nazis ascribed notions of good and evil to whole groups of people based on legitimating ideological doctrines of racial purity, they depended on the obliteration of individualism as a cultural ideal.

In terms of structural realities (Level III), Rand explored the various political and economic institutions and policies that both reflected and perpetuated racism—through outright slavery, genocide, or apartheid, or through the use of quotas, prohibitions, zoning laws, rent control, public housing, public education, compulsory codes of segregation and integration, and a self-perpetuating welfare bureaucracy that kept poor people poor, while inculcating a psychology of victimization among them.

What most interested Rand was the broad historical process by which racism predominates in modern societies. In Rand’s view, statism was born in “prehistorical tribal warfare.” Political elites often perpetuated racial hatred and scapegoated racial and ethnic groups in order to secure power. But “the relationship is reciprocal,” said Rand: Just as tribalism was a precondition of statism, so too was statism a reciprocally related cause of tribalism. “The political cause of tribalism’s rebirth is the mixed economy,” marked by “permanent tribal warfare.” In Rand’s view, advancing statism and tribalism went hand-in-hand, leading to a condition of “global balkanization.”

For those who think there is no comparability between Rand’s view of how statism and racism are systemically related and what Ravitch and others have said about systemic racism, I’d say this: If anything, Rand lays bare the statist order that makes such systemic racism possible. It is not just a part of the past, but a necessary part of our present social system. Rand called this system “the New Fascism”, and her analysis of it—of the racism and social fragmentation it depends upon and perpetuates—is as radical as any proposed by Critical Race Theorists.

Taking a cue from Rand, I’d tell folks on both sides of this debate to “Check your premises.”

Pearls Before Swine: Remote Learning

Today’s “Pearls Before Swine” installment, courtesy of The New York Daily News and Stephan Pastis. I may not have all these remotes, but since I often misplace the ones I do have, I sure would like that last one!

Remote Learning

Song of the Day #1874

Song of the Day: 1980 Disconet Top Tune Medley [YouTube link], produced by John Matarazzo and Mike Arato, features such dance gems as “Fame“, “Funkytown“, “Twilight Zone“, “Vertigo/Relight My Fire“, “Celebration“, “Love Sensation“, “Rapture“, “Upside Down“, and “Another One Bites the Dust“, drawing from the pop, alternative, and rock sounds of the day.

Ski and Me: Update #3

Back in December 2020, I first posted on my sister’s medical adventures. Elizabeth Sciabarra (aka “Ms. Ski” to the thousands of students whose lives she touched as an educator for nearly fifty years) was taken seriously ill in mid-November. This was followed in mid-March by back surgery, which necessitated her entrance, on April 7, 2021, into a subacute rehabilitation facility. She has toughed it out, as only she can, and today—after 4+ months of physical therapy—I am happy to report that my sister is home again.

The first thing on our agenda was ordering some Brooklyn Pizza to celebrate her return!

Here’s to many more days of celebrating, as she continues to progress toward full recovery. Thanks to all those who have expressed their love and support.

Here’s to My Sister! My Friend! My Partner in Crime! With all my love, always …

Welcome Home!