Hollywood’s latest hardened fem empowerment flick, ENOUGH, features an abused woman who discovers that the dream man she married isn’t all she thought he was.

It’s a classic rehash (Julia Roberts did it in 1991 with SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY), but much like the ever-popular “makeover” days on Oprah and Maury, this formula is a tried and true crowd pleaser and a sure box office pay off as a date movie. Women enjoy seeing a guy who’s got it coming get kung fu-ed by the poseable Barbie Doll du jour (Jennifer Lopez in this case). And in the “Yes, my sweet, I would adore nothing better than to go to the chick empowerment movie with you on Friday evening to hone my sensitivities in those regards” department, it is a prime opportunity for men to catch an ample glimpse at plenty of tense and writhing Latina anatomia.

Jennifer Lopez asserts her “divine animal right” in the movie ENOUGH

What’s my problem with this, you ask? Not a thing so far. When it’s all said and done there’s really nothing wrong with a movie reiterating what most of us already ought to know: the state may be getting very good at looting your ex’s paycheck so you can still afford to contribute next to zero by way of value to anyone, but if your former prince charming is a determined psycho, the cops can’t always save your mooching hide from him. So sometimes the only thing for it is to lay off the bon-bons for a couple weeks, get buff, and kill him.

Even so, where would we women be without our friends to validate us? How could we sisters soldier on if not by exploring the deeper fundamentals of natural rights via our girlfriends’ flawless epistemologically derived orts of wisdom like the one Lopez’s movie pal served up in ENOUGH when she advised, “You have a divine animal right to protect your own life and the life of your offspring.”

Well sure. It’s all so clear now. Here I was thinking the whole bunny-hugging lot of dizzy female celebs prancing about in bare-assed protest of fur coats and red meat was explained away by the fact that their lightweight intellects won’t go the distance that it takes to distinguish the difference between human and animal nature.

I figured somewhere in the heads of these puff-brained, over-privileged bints, they still carry imagery of themselves as six-year-olds, twirling about in their color coordinated bedrooms, protected from the realities of life that lead to the understanding that human beings evolved, survive, and exist by virtue of our unique nature and that no animal, no matter how cuddly and seemingly intelligent, begins to rival the importance of what even one real human being is.

I’m truly captivated and, though I’m not one to eagerly wade into voluminous treatises on rights derivations, I do feel compelled to give the above nimble-witted assertion regarding self-defense a further look.

“A divine animal right…”

I had presumed that was divine as in “sacred” or “proceeding directly from God”.

Or should I be turning my attention toward a more volant definition of the word divine, as in the Divine Miss M sense? If that’s the case, the postulate does begin to attain optimum coherance. I read somewhere that Bette Middler is an animal lover. She would, no doubt, approve of the logic behind ascribing rights to human beings based upon the purer, more fundamental animal rights model. Indeed she might well assert that animal rights are the foundation or, so to speak, “the wind beneath the wings” of human rights.

Now onto: “to protect herself and her offspring”

That much would seem to fall from its own obvious weight. However, employing the right to self-defense with the already discussed modifying clause - one’s divine animal right - widens the foundation for… about anything that animals do, right?

Shit howdy. There�s your free pass for every pilfering collectivist that could ever shake a copy of an Audubon Society Field Guide in the air.

�I hereby derive my rights from those of The Graceful Seagull in flight, who, by his Divine Right, pillages the nests of other cliff dwelling sea birds. I, in turn, may also excercise my Right to pillage your belongings in order to ensure a more perfect survival of my needs and the needs of my offspring. If that means I vote money out of your pocket to buy my prescription drugs, or to school my own little “nest-nuggets”, you�d better cough up or else I�ll send someone over to fuck up your nest in a hurry.�

If we human beings are to derive our rights from our observations of animal behavior, well, just about anything goes. I mean, it may be arguable to some whether or not we have the right to load the atmosphere with fossil fuels emissions, but we certainly would have a “divine animal right” to piss on our neighbor’s landscaping. We can agree on that much, can’t we? And why stop there?

What about your divine animal right to gang bang the neighbor’s wife if you catch her alone in the front yard some enchanting moonlit night? It all falls into the realm of clearly precedented animal rights.

It was only a movie. Just the fancy of some boiler plate screenwriting team, but all this mind gook that it’s based upon is a clear and present product of popular thought. It’s not only being disseminated in the cool comfort of the summer cinematic mind massage, it’s, as the Visa ad says, everywhere you want to be. The streets, universities, stores, backyards, and barbeques. The stuff that passes for thought or profound wisdom is often rank and penetrating. You can ignore it with limited success, but you won’t escape the odor of it. Eventually it will reach you where you live.

The folksy, light-hearted tone of the “Gone Fishin” sign doesn’t sit well with Debra Hudson, Oseguera’s aunt.

“I wanted to see that the place was actually closed, and I saw the ‘Gone Fishin’ sign. I took that as a slap. I took it personally. I know that’s not how they meant it, but they should have just said, ‘Closed.’ That just seemed a little big.”

In January 2000 Christopher Oseguera,18, and Casey Dugdale, 19, perished in a fiery crash when their Jeep Wrangler was rear-ended by a pick-up truck driven at 70 mph by Paul Upwall, a piss drunk patron of Liquid Joe’s bar in Salt Lake County, Utah.

Upwall left Oseguera and Dugdale to die, trapped in the burning Jeep, while he fled on foot from the scene. He was apprehended the following day at his home. Another passenger in the jeep, Aaron Sharples, was critically injured, but survived because he had been thrown clear of the wreckage.

The only thing Upwall’s victims had done to deserve their fate was to stop at a traffic light while driving home from watching a hockey game. Paul Upwall was 100% responsible for slamming three young men into an instant inferno, but the state of Utah is getting serious about holding bar owners responsible for the carnage their customers cause on the state’s highways.

A few years ago I had a scrape with a drunk driver, an obnoxious, raging boar who damaged my sister’s parked vehicle. My experience was trivial compared to what the families of Upwall’s victims had to face, but I can surely understand why Utahns seek to end the nightmare of DUI damage across their majestic plateau.

Any debate over the state’s authority to license at all is undeniably part of the more pertinent and overarching problem here, but I’ll leave that part out for now and concede that Utah is acting within the bounds of the licensing agreement that Liquid Joe’s signed onto with the state. However, holding a business culpable for the crimes of its customers is a perverse way of addressing any problem.

“We need to have rigorous enforcement and also rigorous prosecution so that the licenses of bars are revoked when their actions result in a death,” said Art Brown, president of the Utah chapter of Mothers Against Drunken Driving.

And it is just this kind of enforcement advancement that some national research shows to be beneficial. A study published in the most recent issue of Advances by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation suggests that cities “consider greater restrictions on alcohol accessibility and disciplinary measures for alcohol outlets that violate beverage laws.”

It’s too easy to fall into the trap of blaming the management of a hard partying imbibery for their customers’ behavior and to forget that the true core of the issue goes right back to that of individual responsibility. Are alcoholic beverage distributors also to be held liable since they know, or must know, that the businesses to which they sell have reputations for getting people drunk? Shouldn’t Seagrams know that Liquid Joe’s is using their product to mix up a concoction called a “Mind Eraser”?

Just how far and wide can the state seek to spread the distribution of culpability?

“But tackling enforcement of serving over-intoxicated patrons is much more than a DUI issue,” [Lt. Ed Michaud] said. “When bars and restaurants break the rules and serve too much to a drinker, they also contribute to domestic violence, alcohol poisoning, fights and other alcohol-related problems.”

The possibilities are endless.

Some may have noticed that there has recently been an organizational bloodbath at No Treason. With one exception, I demoted the entire editorial staff. Gone from the journal staff are the Senior Editors; the position doesn’t even exist anymore. Robertson? Gone. Condor? Gone!! Schneider, Beck, Starr, and Freely? All gone. Gone likewise are the weblog editors. There are now simply two editors of No Treason, Lynette Warren and John Kennedy. The rest were demoted because they were not performing any editorial function. They occasionally produced good articles and items, but aside from that Lynette is the only one who ever did a lick of work around here.

Most people, even those participating in No Treason, are not aware that since even before the public launch on June 9th 2001 Lynette has been more influential than anyone in determining he course of this project.

I met many of these people on the newsgroup alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater. I didn’t have all that much interest in the Clinton scandals, I thought they were largely irrelevant to the fundamental problems of government. But I was very interested in many of the writers I found on that newsgroup, and the Clinton scandals weren’t the only thing they were writing about. The people in the newsgroup who interested me most comprised the largest collection of individualist anarchists I had ever encountered, in fact Mike Schneider and Billy Beck were the very first such anarchists I became aware of. I don’t mean to delimit any of these people with labels, many of them strongly resist labels of any sort, but it was clear to me that there was a core of writers on the newsgroup who rejected government while recognizing property rights. And from my perspective these people were core of the newsgroup itself, though they certainly were not representative of the whole spectrum of views there. Kipawa Condor called the newsgroup alt.anarcho-capitalism and I think that’s appropriate, the individualist anarchists were the driving force of the newsgroup, they set the agenda.

As the end of Clinton’s term approached many realized that the newsgroup was unlikely to be sustained indefinitely in it’s current form. Sometime in 2000 Mike Schneider and I began a private discussion about ways to sustain what we valued most from the newsgroup. I also had in mind that I wanted to see the writing of some of these people become available to a broader audience than the newsgroup reached. It turned out that Mike and I had different visions. He wanted to create a forum that would continue the anarcho-capitalist discussions taking place in the newsgroup. He also wanted to weed out the weezils. In October of 2000 Mike did just that by launching American Liberty. I always thought American Liberty to be of great value and I offered my assistance from the beginning. I’m pretty sure I was the second moderator of the forum, after Mike. (My performance as a moderator has been entirely undistinguished, about all I can say in my defense is that I did considerably more scut work at AL then Mike ever did at NT.) But while I think I was welcome to join Mike as an equal or near-equal partner in AL, I did not do so. I knew that I wanted to take things in a different direction.

In November of 2000 I saw Union Square Journal and I said “That’s it.”

Martin McPhillips had skimmed the cream off of the Whitewater newsgroup, he had recruited three of the very best writers on the newsgroup and he started publishing articles by them and permanently archiving them on the web. The writers he recruited were Billy Beck, John Sabotta and Lynette Warren. On the I had followed the writing of all three for years, with great interest. Though Beck and Sabotta were writers I identified as individualist anarchists, USJ was by no means an anarchist journal. I decided I wanted to start my own anarchist journal, following the example of USJ.

Lysander Spooner’s No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority had for me forever demolished any pretense of legitimacy for government, so I chose the name No Treason for my project. Ultimately I wanted to recruit as many anarcho-capitalist writers of high quality as I could find, but I decided I needed at least three writers to get the ball rolling and launch the project. One of them would be me. I’ve never considered myself much of a writer, but I do have things I want to say and I judge I developed a voice of my own on usenet, for what it’s worth. It’s worth something to me anyway. I certainly have never considered my writing skills to have approached that of Beck, Sabotta or Warren.

I knew I could count on Mike for some support, but it seemed unwise to depend on him considering his commitment of effort to American Liberty. The first actual recruit to No Treason was Rob Robertson. Rob was also among the cream of the crop in the newsgroup, his writing could stand up against that of the USJ writers and not suffer by comparison. Rob was not an anarcho-capitalist at the time, but he was a very principled libertarian and he was finding it more difficult to defend any government as time went by. Rob was also impressed with USJ and decided he would write some articles for NT. I needed one more writer to get going, but instead I recruited Kipawa Condor. Kip was never one of the most prolific writers on the newsgroup, but he was a much better writer than I was, and his judgment was sound. Kip agreed to take a whack it.

It’s true that Kip has yet to produce an actual article, but it is also true that he was very influential in the planning stages of No Treason and I have always been grateful for his contribution at a crucial point of the project. And he had some great articles planned, perhaps I’ll share them sometime. No Treason could easily have just died then if I didn’t have Rob and Kip on board confirming that the project had a chance to succeed.

Rob and I started to write articles and I started to lay the foundation for he web site. (It’s unclear what Kip was doing.) I settled on the domain name no-treason.com. I was seriously considering the simpler notreason.com, but Rob threatened to bolt because that could be parsed as “not reason”. I think that was very good advice, but not the best advice Rob ever gave me. That came next.

As it became clear that we were going to be able to launch a respectable web site I decided to invite Beck and Sabotta to contribute articles if they had time. Rob insisted that I should invite Lynette too. I objected that while I respected Lynette, and liked her writing very much, she wasn’t close to being an anarchist and her USJ articles would not be appropriate on NT. Rob insisted I’d be stupid not to get Lynette if I could. That was the best advice he ever gave me.

I invited all three of them to contribute. I assured them that I hoped they would continue to be successful at USJ and that I did not see the two sites being in any sort of competition. Beck begged off initially as I recall, he had too much on his plate already. Sabotta seemed inclined to throw something my way, but urged me not to hold my breath. And Lynette said sure, she’d be pleased to contribute to No Treason.

Great, I thought, I bagged the statist.

I was staring out the window and thinking about the conceptual strain of setting complex issues in their most basic terms. There happened to be a clutch of children handy, and I nearly absent-mindedly asked aloud: “Have you ever liked something that you know is bad?”

Eleven year-old Emily sharply stabbed the air with the pencil at work on her sketch-pad, and said, “Heights”.

“What?”

Nodding solemnly, she explained, “I know high places are dangerous, and they scare me, but I like high places.”

I had been at the point of seizing on cigarettes as an example, with resort to paraphrase of Brick Pollit’s immutable ethical stand taken in the screen adaptation of “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”: “I like to smoke.” When it comes to Christopher Hitchens, however, I have to admit that Emily made a much finer point, if only instinctively. I have every confidence that she will grow into serious analysis of the “heights: bad, but good” paradox, but, for the moment, it’s enough to let her be a kid, something at which she is most delightfully adept. In the meantime, many years of familiarity with the demands of heights brought the facility of her example to superb clarity in an adult. The essential thing about dealing with high places is surety of foot and grasp. They really can be enjoyed, but only in the safety of practiced knowledge.

Never once in a quarter-century did I entertain the hope that Hunter S. Thompson would arrive at a sensible politics. To my mind, the closest he ever got was in the fact of his relative quiet through the term of The Ozark Long March. It was a time when, arguably, he could have been of good use at articulating the manifest implications of his left-handed endorsement of Maximum Bill in 1992. However, I could not blame the guy for lying low, and I did idly wonder now and then whether he dawdled in his own Second Thoughts over his youthful infatuation with the likes of Rick Stearns, or perhaps the example of Pat Caddell’s rational skepticism. It was an idle wonder, though, without excitement. Justice is a fugitive, a recurring travesty evident in the exemplary fact that some of the most incisive political scripture in the back half of the twentieth century (”Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72″) found no reprise when it was needed most. Don’t hand me “Better Than Sex”, because that was a hand-job, and we are all given widely-cited authority to understand that the Senate would never subscribe the definition.

When I do not blame Thompson, it’s because I do not hold him principally responsible for the confusements into which he was born as an incident of history. Call me a bleeding-heart: the thing simply makes me sad. And when I say he was the H. L. Mencken of his era, I refer to matters of attitude, a bit less to style, and not at all to integrity of judgment. With Vince Foster’s body a-mouldering in the grave, just barely, Thompson came up for air in 1994 and gave us — his obituary of Richard Nixon. I say the work was better done pre-mortem, and there were fatter swine to slice, on the living hoof. It’s a crying shame that his blade had gone dull, but I remember the heights of yore, from which the “coke bottle” dropped on that smashing August afternoon when the jig was up, and Thompson tracked the flying shards.

It is a necessary attribute of heights that they go where the lows are not. This is why it’s possible to admire them in the work of people who could have been genuine contenders in the conceptual fight for freedom, but who, when not all is said and done, settled for spelling the word. I was never deluded by Thompson’s spelling any more than by The Lying Bastard’s lips moving for eight rotten years. This is because the concept of “freedom” always rested flat on the floor of his brain like a plugged nickel with one side showing. If he did not originally strike the word “greedhead,” then he certainly made the most of it at securing his own fortified compound. Whether confused or deliberate, it is a low thing to indict the idea of private property behind private fortifications, and I’m here to say that plumbing depths can require all the surety of foot and grasp necessary to scaling heights.

And that brings me to another significant conceptual failure: Christopher Hitchens. To begin at the top, a prominent peak of selection would include his “Letters To A Young Contrarian”, in which he points out the probity of that corner of Dante’s Inferno where the morally neutral are consigned. Hitchens specifies a “moral crisis”, and I won’t quibble — in this paragraph — between “The Cold Battle”, to which myopic apprehensions point as ended, and “The Cold War”, which has never stopped since twelve hundred horses were drawn up as the Estates-General at Versailles in May of 1789. I will place my bet here that Bastiat would understand me, and agree, which is not to dispute the qualification of a half-century of potential global annihilation as a “moral crisis”. It certainly was that. However, there was, and is, much more to the matter, namely, the reasons behind it all.

The questions here are these: how could it be such a short step from a peak of ethical concept to those pits outlined in the statement that “Lenin was a great man“? And, most important: what is the act of identifying two individual men as mass-murderers if not “moral equivalency”? The two men at hand are Hitler and Stalin, with Lenin thrown in where, if the exchange between Martin Amis and Hitchens is fact as reported, the dog did not bark with real cause for alarm. Unless, that is, there was real cause for alarm.

In a passage of crucial lucidity in these times of stark nonsense, Hitchens, in his “Letters”, extols the ability to discriminate as “a precious faculty”. Every two-bit senator of the day is, and whole gangs of those gone by were, eager to follow the fashion of disclaiming this universal human practice of judgment in the name of “compassion” or its latest meme. It is a most painfully tedious chore to point out the rare value of a statement of the fact of things — the actual reality — in opposition, because joy in the truth of it is aborted at the sight of this hollow revolt before the obvious similarity of two monstrous killers.

“Discrimination” is, first and foremost, an epistemic process. It begins with abstraction of essentials by comparison of all an entity’s attributes and selection of that (or those) attributes that serve a distinctive concept. One might discriminate human beings among all living things for political purposes (e.g.; the recognition of rights), but attribute selection is different when judging the very same basic entity (”human”) for other purposes, such as speed for the purpose of a track meet, honesty and mental acuity for the purpose of accounting, or specialized dexterity and soulful expression for the purpose of recording blues guitar solos. Note that these purposeful discriminations generally rely on demonstrated record: this is the basis of the old admonition that “What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” That thing is a warning to be, in order to be known.

Is there a sensible person alive who would have trusted their life to either Hitler or Stalin? That question is absurd among people who know anything more than either name and whose faculties are intact with factory equipment. That’s because we know them by their works. So; what “moral equivalency” have I “fall[en] for” in asking it? Here is the discrimination that I draw: innocent human lives are sacrosanct from destruction at the hands of dictators of every stripe. Dictators who violate that sanctity are morally equivalent monsters. When they do it on the scale of millions, they have descended into something very special: the domain where quantity takes on a discernable quality, which is the reason why Jeffery Dahmer will completely disappear before history is even half finished with Hitler and Stalin.

This is all elementary, important as it is to say it, yet again, and again, if necessary.

What’s slightly more interesting is the matter of cause for alarm, and the stand for Lenin behind Stalin. This is the part where I might laugh, except that my sense of humor has had the decency to leave the room. Call it “reaction”.

At a crucial moment of The Cold Battle, Dean Rusk met Charles De Gaulle’s native impudence with the question whether to rid France of Americans including the dead ones in the military cemeteries. It was a point of clarity given to The Hero of Madagascar for reflection, and, for once, he had nothing to say. It would not do to dismiss the moment’s lapse of impudence to an ally on account of his once watching Stalin toast the shooting of Kaganovich and the hanging of Air Marshal Novikov as jokes during a diplomatic reception at Moscow. Doubtless Kaganovich and Novikov were compelled to laugh by something beyond professional courtesy. They knew who they were dealing with, and so did De Gaulle. (”And these are the people we shall be facing for the next hundred years!”) If De Gaulle prevailed to the point where NATO moved its various commands out of France, it was only because he could afford it as long as NATO existed to begin with. And here is the point:

Those who split “Stalinism” as a loose communist hair in their coif of history, also implicitly ignore Hungary and Czechoslovakia (to say nothing of Afghanistan) when they do it. And that necessarily means that they ignore Lenin and Trotsky, too. Hitchens, himself, has “refus[ed] to indict the course of events”, preferring “historical as well as moral reasons for the fate of revolution”. This is sophistry failing to redeem itself. If Lenin calls for blood, it could be arguable that he is not responsible if Stalin delivers on a scale that Lenin did not live to attain, except for the fact that Lenin is credited with principal impetus for the coup of October 1917. If Stalin ground “kulaks” through the machine in wholesale lots, it is impossible to rationally disconnect the fact that it was Lenin who, when asked what a “kulak” was, said, “They will know them when they see them.” Why don’t we take a moment to discuss “moral reasons” for “fate”? While we’re at it, we might spare a word for untold numbers of individual people — with names and dreams and families and work — who were deliberately squeezed out of existence like so many watermelon seeds. There was something a bit more than “fate” involved, and if my pointing this out is “moral equivalence” of Soviets with Nazis, then I have no problem at meeting the indictment with a plea of reality and accepting conviction. I don’t care a whit for any so-called reasons for any of it: none of them are valid. This, I judge, and “self-appointed suits me just fine.” I take the conviction as it is recommended.

Hitchens has written of words “with which to puncture an argument”. (”Vyshinsky” is a good one, although it’s not as good at puncturing a human head as the bullets that also perforated his dialectics.) It will likely be an enduring curiosity whether Viktor Serge “punctur[ed]” the coif of “Stalinism” with the word “Kronstadt”. Trotsky briefly entertained the curiosity — with lies — as late as 1938. Tukhachevsky was assigned military command of the siege, but it was Trotsky who ordered the execution of every fifth Red Army soldier who disobeyed orders to charge across the ice. It was Trotsky who told the rebels that they would be “shot like partridges” if they continued to resist. It is understandable that he did not care to dwell on Kronstadt — or even mention it — in his memoirs, but that also does not address the very serious, probative, argument by Serge that the tap-root of “Stalinism” reaches to “the beauty and pride of the Revolution” in the Gulf of Finland. When Zborowski delivered Trotsky’s dismissal, “The Fuss About Kronstadt”, to Stalin, it’s unknown how it was received, but there is no question but that the two were in perfect Bolshevik accord on the matter.

Is that “moral equivalence”? Yes. With prejudice and no apology.

The central question here is this: by what possible standard available in human history can these men — any of them — be called “great”? Hitchens was entirely correct when he wrote, “On some grave questions, there is no difference to be split; one does not look for a synthesis between verity and falsehood; the sun does not rise in the east one day and in the west the next.” This is language (”always look to the language”) from the sure-footed heights: the sort of thing that first drove human beings to the endurance of the written word. I take no vengeance here in quoting it back to him in the wake of the passage by Amis.

The largest matter of this is in reminding those with eyes to see that “The Cold War” is not over, and that’s because it was never about ICBM’s and submarines so much as ideas.