Thursday, July 23, 2009

It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for LOLA

LOLA activist Allison Gibbs
Ladies of Liberty Alliance, that is. "Conspiring to attract libertarian women into the movement One activist at a time."

Many libertarians react negatively to anything that smacks of "identity politics." These complaints usually evaporate among heterosexual male libertarians when the specified identity is "female" and there are calendars involved. Dunno why, it just seems to be that way for some reason. I guess heterosexual male libertarians are just really obsessed with what day it is or something.

As for me, I think that "identity politics," rightly done, can be a great starting point. If it's an end in itself then that end is a dead end, but it's just a fact that a bazillion years of evolution have made us into creatures who do tend to viscerally identify at a group level, and we're better off taking advantage of that fact than fighting it.

To put it a different way, it's probably easier for a libertarian to talk libertarianism to a non-libertarian if the two already have something in common -- be it race, gender, sexual orientation, profession or a love of beer or music or model trains or whatever.

Anyway, good luck to LOLA, and let's get with that calendar action already.

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