A small critique of “A critique of wisdom by Roderick Long” by Bryan Caplan

(Okay, he didn’t have the attribution in his blog post title, but nested parallelism ftmfw.)

Bryan Caplan writes a piece which you should drop everything and read right now:

• A critique of wisdom (EconLog)

He’s addressing, in his usual gently-iconoclastic manner, a piece by Roderick Long which casts aspersion on the comfortable iconoclasm of the vaguely-libertarian econo-rightish movement which loves — and I do say lurves — to bitch, whine, moan, and otherwise complain about teh political correctness.

You should read the whole thing.

I have one quibble.  I was going to claim that this ‘un’s a mild quibble, because it’s not a dagger in the heart of his whole post unless I’m even more oblivious a misogynist than I think I am, but it’s still pretty effin’ big.  Caplan writes, in a context which I’m perhaps perniciously eliding:

I don’t see that women in modern First World countries receive worse overall treatment than men.  In fact, people take male suffering less seriously than female suffering.  Consider the endless jokes about male prison rape.

Dear fellow swinging dicks: Quit the fuck talking about rape.  It just doesn’t work: No matter how right your limited and circumspect argument might be inside your head, broader context will always intrude.

I submit that men make endless jokes about “prison” rape because most men aren’t “imprisoned”, and therefore aren’t at any particularly great risk of “prison” rape.  Note that there is no particular location qualifier on “female rape”.  Popular culture has it that men are at notable risk of getting perniciously penetrated by penises when they shower in penitentiaries (or perhaps at Penn State), which most of us don’t do ever.  Women, on the other hand, don’t get to go take a piss at a bar without having a plan to make sure that they have a Rohypnol-free drink when they come back to their table.  Many of us call that situation “Friday and Saturday night”.

Look; I know Bryan’s one of those “fearlessly speaking truth to the Modern Orthodoxy” folks, but he’s also smarter than the vast majority of “those fearlessly speaking truth to the Modern Orthodoxy folks”.  Don’t pull a Todd Akin here, man.