I have little to add to Amanda's and Will's discussion, except to explain my categorization of my initial post. While I have spent most of my life outside urban areas,

1) Like most Texans, I drive rather than walk on the streets, which impedes harassment somewhat;

2) My hometown was sufficiently small that I was known as one of "Dr. G's girls" and thus not much of a target because instead of being a random unclaimed female (as I am in New York), I was assigned to a respected member of the community.

So street harassment is something that I've experienced mainly in northern cities, which combine atomization and pedestrianism.

Howard Bashman passes along this McSweeney's piece, Your Street-Harassment Questions Answered. Author Wendy Molyneux appears to share Amy Holmes's informal regulatory mechanism for deterring such behavior: shame the harasser. A sample Q&A below the fold--

Hey, baby! Do fries come with that shake?

Actually, with this shake, you get a choice of sides. You can have regular or curly fries, jalapeño poppers, or a side salad.

What kinds of dressing do you have?

You can get ranch, honey-mustard, or lite Italian.

What about onion rings?

They're a dollar extra.

Can I get this to go?

Yes! And you can also shove it up your ass, you fucking idiot.

I received the following notice yesterday:

In conjunction with Juilliard's 100 Year celebration.

Bruce Kovner (Chairman) and Joseph W. Polisi (President) have invited
members of the Columbia Law School community to attend...

"American Society and the Arts: leading American thinkers speak on the
arts' impact on our society"

Featuring: David McCullough
Justice Antonin Scalia
Renee Fleming
Stephen Sondheim

Thursday, September 22, 2005.
1:30pm
The Julliard Theater
155 West 65th St.

There are multiple answers to the question posed in this post's title. Three of the participants are male; one is not. Three are or have been married, and are parents; one has never married and is childless. However, the one that stuck out for me is Justice Antonin Scalia, as I wouldn't have thought Scalia to be in "the arts." The only connection I know between the two is his majority-contemptuous concurrence in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, in which he declares, inter alia, that

Avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it. It is preposterous to equate the denial of taxpayer subsidy with measures 'aimed at the suppression of dangerous ideas.'

[T]he agency itself discriminates -- and is required by law to discriminate -- in favor of artistic (as opposed to scientific, or political, or theological) expression. Not all the common folk, or even all great minds, for that matter, think that is a good idea. In 1800, when John Marshall told John Adams that a recent immigration of Frenchmen would include talented artists, "Adams denounced all Frenchmen, but most especially 'schoolmasters, painters, poets, &C.' He warned Marshall that the fine arts were like germs that infected healthy constitutions."

Let me offer a few more words about "muddling through", which I discussed interstitially in my last 50-book-challenge post. While those who prefer to "muddle through" are usually placed in opposition to those who prefer comprehensive plans, there is nothing particularly libertarian about muddling through, and nothing necessarily statist about planning.

Government-centralized planning, which is a subspecies of planning, obviously presupposes a government interested in and somewhat capable of meddling in the lives of its subjects. But invasive governments can also decide to muddle through rather than plan (as many local governments do, especially in the context of land use exactions) and private people and organizations can and do engage in entirely non-coercive sorts of planning. Indeed, the right to run parts of your life without having to answer to anybody else almost directly implies the right to plan those parts of your life, rather than live hand-to-mouth. University campuses, the NAACP, and the Institute for Justice are but three examples of entirely non-governmental organizations that nonetheless engage(d) in quite successful forms of comprehensive planning, in the land-use context and otherwise.

So the question of whether one believes in coercive action against self-regarding others is entirely separate from the question of whether people and institutions-- coercively or not-- ought to have a coherently planned vision of the future.

Zing!

Touche.