(Crossposted as a comment on Chris Sciabarra’s Hussein, bin Laden, and Gramsci at Liberty & Power. I’ve made some minor edits for clarity and typesetting.)

Chris writes, concerning hostilities between Hussein’s secular Ba’athism and bin Laden’s Islamism: All of this brings to mind, once again, that the Arab-Islamic world is not a monolith.

This is, incidentally, one reason out of many to depise the phrase Islamo-fascism–an anti-concept cooked up in the fevered brain of Christopher Hitchens, and spread like a virus throughout the war-hawks’ sphere of intellectual influence. The phrase is anti-conceptual because it has absolutely no coherent reference; it does not pick out any category by essentials, but rather gestures at motley grab bag of (admittedly nasty) ideologies that have nothing in particular in common other than the fact that they are all held by either Arabs or Muslims. Ba’athism is arguably a form of fascism (it is definitionally pan-Arabist national socialism). But it is Arab fascism, not Muslim fascism; its politics are secular, nationalist, and particularist. Islamism is certainly Islamo, and it is certainly nasty, but it is not a form of fascism; its politics are theocratic, internationalist, and universalist. (Membership in the Ba’athist polity is conceived in terms of being born into a particular ethnic group, viz. the Arab nation; membership in the Islamist polity is conceived in terms of choosing to submit to a universalistic faith, viz. Islam, in the eyes of which all nations are equal.)

Islamism, in fact, was invented in direct opposition to the secular nationalism of pan-Arabists such as Nasser and the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’ath Party; the programme as it was originally theorized by Sayyid Qutb et al. was always mainly concerned with winning the soul of the Muslim world away from secular nationalism, whether pro-Western or anti-Western). The only things that the two have in common are:

1. People who believe in them are either Arabs, or Muslims, or both.
2. They endorse totalitarian politics
3. They oppose the policies of the Euro-American powers
4. Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like them.

But of course, neither (1) nor (2) picks out any coherent ideological kind. Arabs or Muslims does not pick out any coherent class of people except in the racialist ignorance of an unfortunate proportion of the American public (and professional political experts). (2) is certainly an important thing to know about any political ideology; but it doesn’t mean that there is a coherent tradition or body of ideology between two politics that share it (nobody tries to make a serious point of intellectual analysis by talking about fasco-Stalinism or Keynsio-Islamism). (3) is, of course, even further from categorizing by essentials; libertarians and anarchists, after all, mostly oppose the policies of the Euro-American powers; but that does not (pace Bill O’Reilly!) make for any real affiliation (whether objective or subjective) with Islamists or Ba’athists. (4) is the thing that most closely binds together everything that is called Islamo-fascism—but (4) is not a cognitive category at all; it is a shared Boo! Hiss!

Of course, boos and hisses can be legitimate uses of language; they need not be anti-concepts. But Islamo-fascism is anti-conceptual because it purports to be a serious term of analysis and criticism; in fact it cannot stand up to even the most superficial of either.

As Chris himself quite rightly points out in (among other places) Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, Rand’s work on anti-concepts and their use in the discourse of statism is illuminated when thought of in connection with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony; the anti-concept is one of the chief weapons of the intellectual bodyguard of the Leviathan. A radical libertarianism should realize that if the Leviathan looks vast and undefeatable, it’s only because it is bloated up with a lot of rhetorical gas. As Gramsci and Rand both stressed, the study of philosophy and the practice of philosophical criticism is essential to building a free society–in part because it is necessary to deflate the anti-conceptual supports that hold Leviathan up; the political upshot of philosophy should be, as it were, to put the truth in Speaking truth to power.

Onward!

Roderick has a new argument for anarchism. Here’s how it goes:

1. If anybody should rule, philosophers should.
2. But philosophers should not rule.
3. Therefore, nobody should rule.

Any philosopher who denies (1) is excessively timid; any philosopher who denies (2) is excessively bold. Hence moderation demands assent to the conclusion.

It’s worth noting that Roderick’s argument also succeeds in combining the thesis embodied in uncritical democracy (2) with the antithesis embodied in Platonic totalitarianism (1). Thus anarchism is the dialectical synthesis of two genuine insights which are disastrous when taken out of context. Maybe this will convince Chris Sciabarra to be an anarchist again…

Minor updates have been made to the original post for clarity and removal of typographical errors.

You may or may not have noticed it already, but there’s been a bit of a change around here at Geekery Today. I’m proud to announce that recently I freed the content on these pages through a copyleft. What that means is that you can, except where I note otherwise, copy and distribute any of the works on this website, and you can also make and distribute derivative works based on them. What’s the catch? Only that the copies or derivative works you produce have to be honest, and they have to stay free. The copyleft license is the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license, which requires that the original author must be given credit, and that any derivative works or reuse of the original work must also be distributed under the terms of the copyleft. (For more exact details, see the copyleft notice.)

Image from Roderick Long’s Unblog

Of course, I’m not anywhere near conceited enough to think that there’s any great demand for reproductions or derivative works based on my pedantic ramblings. My motives are much more ideological than that: I’ve done this because I don’t believe that there are any such things as intellectual property rights; I don’t think it’s possible to enforce copyright law without violating the rights of ordinary people to make peaceful use of good old-fashioned tangible property, such as pens and computers and your own brain. (If you want a good argument about why this is the case, I don’t have one on hand. Fortunately enough, Roderick Long does, in brief in Thoughtcrime, and at more length in The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights. Thank goodness for the free exchange of information!) In short, intellectual property restrictions are nothing more than State aggression on a massive scale. Worse still, they’re a form of State aggression that is getting worse every day, and, increasingly, violently stifling innovation and the progress of civilization.

In light of all this, you might think that I’ve chosen a rather odd means to my ends–trying to fight back against intellectual monopolists by placing my works under a restrictive licensing scheme that depends upon international copyright law. In fact, it’s not nearly as odd as it might initially seem. Saying that copyright laws are illegitimate is not the same as saying that nothing it’s currently used for is legitimate. It just means that none of its legitimate uses are legitimate because of a right to control your intellectual property.

For example, say that you write a brilliant philosophical essay, and send me a copy for feedback. I put white-out over your name, write my name in, and send it off to Mind. Have I done something wrong? Well, certainly—what I did was dishonest and mean. More to the point, have I done something criminal? Well, yes. But it’s not because I’ve violated some right to control "intellectual property." Rather, it’s because I’ve committed fraud—I’ve passed something off as my work when it is in fact yours. There’s no need to talk about "intellectual property rights" to deal with this, any more than there is to deal with someone who sells Tofurkey^TM as Thanksgiving turkey (or vice versa).

So what about a copyleft? Well, the terms of the license allow for free copying, distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works, without having to ask the permission of the author. So putting up a copyleft is not a restrictive use of intellectual property law; it’s a statement of the author’s intent not to use intellectual property law in aggression against peaceful reuse or creation of derivative works.

Of course, the license does add two restrictions: first, copies and derivative works have to accurately credit the original author for her work, and second, copies and derivative works also have to be distributed as free content under the terms of the copyleft.

The first restriction, however, is just a restatement of the requirement that we considered above–that the users of the information cannot commit fraud. They can’t pass off your work as somebody else’s, and they can’t pass off somebody else’s work as your own.

The second restriction is where the real genius of copylefting lies. If anyone wants to reuse the copylefted content, they also have to free whatever they copy or produce from the restrictions of traditional copyright law. But the restrictions of traditional copyright law are unjust; since enforcing them constitutes a violation of rights, enforcing a copyleft to prevent them from being enforced is like using a gun to keep innocent people from being shot–a defensive, rather than an aggressive use of force. Copylefting reverses copyrighting from within, using the illegitimate power of the State against itself to undermine the arrogated power of intellectual monopolists.

It is worth noting, though, that copylefting didn’t originate for use with the written content on webpages. It originated from the world of Free / Libre / Open Source Software. What I’m talking about here is a bit different from what they are talking about. Copylefting as I am deploying it deals with how information can be used once it is published; copylefting as it is deployed in the FLOSS world has to do with that, but it also makes specific requirements about what information should be published. GPL-style licenses allow for free reuse and modification of source code, but they require that any source code for these derived works be distributed under a copyleft. That’s copylefting in the sense that I’m using it. But they go a step further: they don’t just impose a restriction on how the source code is to be distributed if it is distributed; they also require that it actually be distributed. That’s copylefting in a different sense. While enforcement of copyright law is a violation of rights, it’s perfectly legitimate to choose to do whatever you please with your own copies of information. In world without copyright, Microsoft would still have every right to withhold their proprietary source code; a closed-source business model is not criminal.

Nevertheless, not being criminal isn’t the same thing as not being wrong. Closed-source software doesn’t violate anyone’s natural rights, but it does suck. The reasons for using FLOSS are reasons of cultural politics: FLOSS is better than closed-source because it fosters innovative use of technology and high-quality, co-operative, participatory projects. It also provides affordable access to high-quality software for underprivileged users. None of these are matters of justice (except in the extended sense of fairness or equity); but justice is not the only virtue.

In short, copylefting, or freeing content can mean one of two things. It can mean freeing information users to make whatever peaceful use they like of the copies they already have. Or it can mean making copies more freely available for information users to make innovative, peaceful uses. I think that only the first goal is enforceable; but both goals are desirable. This connects with a point that I have often made about the relationship between anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-socialism. The first sort of free content has to do with the virtues of a free market: it is a matter of the form of a free society, i.e., that the organization of society must be free rather than coerced. The second sort of free content has to do with the virtues of open, participatory institutions within the free market: it is a matter of the content of a free society, i.e., the specific organizations that people ought to choose to freely form.

Tomorrow–or, if you reckon it by the time of night when I’m posting this, today–I’m hopping on a Greyhound bound southward to Alabama for a weekend at the beach with L. You might find it a bit odd that I am bussing all the way down to Alabama for a weekend at the cold end of October; it might not seem so odd when I mention that our vacation is going to consist in going to the annual Alabama Philosophical Society conference in Orange Beach, Alabama.

For what it’s worth, I’ll be presenting a paper at the APS conference. It’s an essay on the Liar Paradox and other related paradoxes of self-reference. I argue against traditional attempts to rule out the formulation of paradoxical sentences through the employment of syntactical rules; using Tarski’s semantic conception of truth as a case study, I argue that the dream of a logical syntax leads either to overt ad hockery, or else systematic theories that go systematically wrong. In place of the syntactic method, I argue for a dialectical method of elucidations–rather than looking for prior syntactic rules, the right method is to explore the putative sentences and show how, even if they follow all the syntactic rules, they never succeed in doing propositional work. (To get a rough idea of the distinction, think of two different ways of talking about what goes wrong in a chess game. On the one hand, think of how you would react if someone tried to win by moving her bishop sideways: you would get out the rule book and point out the rule that specifies only diagonal moves as well-formed bishop moves. The syntactic method takes something like this picture as the model for deflating self-referential paradoxes: if you adhere rigorously to the syntactic rules of the formalism, there is no way for the paradoxical sentences to ever be formulated. The dialectical method, on the other hand, takes the matter to be more like moving your pieces into stalemate than like making an illegal move: all of the moves leading up to it are legal, and there’s no single non-trival rule to tell you why you can’t win from a stalemate. Rather, you realize that you are stalemated by trying out moves until you see that there’s just no more chess to play.)

In any case, I’m really looking forward to the upcoming weekend: what could be better than a restful weekend at the beach, a vacation alone with L., and a quality philosophy conference all in one? (Disneyworld, eat your heart out.) Also, I’ll get to head back to the South and spend a little time in Auburn again.

In related news, I won’t be taking much time out of my vacation to post updates to the weblog. (You might protest that I don’t take much time out of my work week or weekends to post updates, either. I haven’t gotten back into the groove of regular posting yet, no. But mostly because I’ve been busy with a lot of updates to various parts of the website that aren’t immediately visible in the form of weblog posts. I have a couple of posts in the queue that I’ll polish up and post on my return, and hopefully I’ll carry on from there.)

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Ciao!

One of the favorite satirical devices of Karl Kraus, an acerbic critic writing in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was to simply print verbatim quotes from prominent Viennese figures, without any additional commentary. Sadly, the tactic has only become more necessary since the end of the Great War–particularly within the discursive world of televised debate.

(link thanks to Tom Tomorrow)

Hannity & Colmes: Debate on Impeaching Bush

SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: While inspectors in Iraq continue searching for weapons of mass destruction, some Americans are outraged at the president that so far no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Our next guest thinks that’s grounds for impeachment.

We’re joined by the publisher of Harper’s magazine, John MacArthur, who’s with us. And the author of the best selling book, Treason, Ann Coulter is with us.

It’s not even really intellectually worth discussing. After reading your article, my first reaction is to bubble and fizz and get mad. My second reaction is this is beyond silly, you know, but you really believe this?

JOHN MACARTHUR, HARPER’S MAGAZINE: Why do you invite me to go on the show if you think it’s beyond discussion?

HANNITY: Because Alan wanted you on. That’s why.

MACARTHUR: OK. But clearly…

HANNITY: It wasn’t my first choice.

MACARTHUR: Clearly, if the president of the United States has lied on a grand scale to Congress…

HANNITY: Name me one lie. Name me one lie.

MACARTHUR: Let me finish.

HANNITY: If you’re going to call him a liar, back it up.

MACARTHUR: I will, yes. I’ll talk about what he said to Bush…Blair at the press conference on September 7 at Camp David. He said…he cited a non-existent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying that Saddam was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon and infamously said, What more evidence do we need? And from there…

HANNITY: We don’t have time for a speech.

MACARTHUR: … we moved on to aluminum tubes. We moved on to connections with Al Qaeda.

HANNITY: Did you call…

MACARTHUR: We talked about an atomic bomb threat that did not exist. Sean, this didn’t exist. This didn’t exist.

HANNITY: This isn’t a speech time.

MACARTHUR: You need me to give you the facts.

HANNITY: I’ve got to ask you, did you call for the impeachment of Bill Clinton?

MACARTHUR: I wasn’t interested in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

HANNITY: You weren’t interested? So you’re only interested in the impeachment of Republicans?

MACARTHUR: No, no, no, no. I mean, it’s…Listen, I can’t stand Bill Clinton.

HANNITY: Did Bill Clinton lie to the American people?

MACARTHUR: Yes.

HANNITY: Why do you have one standard for him and another standard for a Republican?

MACARTHUR: I have the same standard for both of them.

HANNITY: No, you don’t. Because you didn’t write an article asking for his impeachment.

MACARTHUR: Actually, what I’m trying to tell you is that if you, as Senator Graham put it a few months ago very intelligently, if you apply the same standard to Bush that was applied to Clinton, then it’s impeachable. He should be impeached. Absolutely.

HANNITY: Ann…

MACARTHUR: Because as Alexander Hamilton said in The Federalist Papers, this has to do with the immediate consequences and harm done to society. What could be greater harm than the deaths of American soldiers…

HANNITY: Excuse me. The immediate consequences…Sir, you have yet to…

MACARTHUR: … in Iraq, who have been sent to Iraq on a fraudulent pretext, utterly…

HANNITY: My patience is really running thin.

MACARTHUR: … and they’re dying.

HANNITY: Could you please be quiet, because there are other people on the panel?

MACARTHUR: OK. Sure.

HANNITY: The idea here, he cannot give a specific example.

MACARTHUR: I did give a specific example.

HANNITY: He’s full of crap.

MACARTHUR: I did give an example.

HANNITY: And this is just, hatred of George W. Bush now has become a sport for these guys.

Ann Coulter?

ANN COULTER, TREASON AUTHOR: First of all, I agree with you. I hate to treat this seriously by responding, but the particular lie that he cited as his leading, case in chief of the president lying, yes, Bush cited something like the Atomic Energy Commission. He misspoke.

HANNITY: Right.

COULTER: It was the International Institute for Strategic Studies or something. He misspoke about the name of the institute.

MACARTHUR: No, he didn’t. He didn’t.

COULTER: It’s my turn now. You stop that.

MACARTHUR: OK.

COULTER: Point two, as you know, I’m something of an authority on the grounds for impeachment. And this is precisely the sort of thing that impeachment is not for. I mean, it’s not for policy disagreements. It’s certainly not for something that is in the president’s prerogative, such as waging war, for example.

To take a decision that I think is appalling, but is not grounds for impeachment. Bill Clinton sending a small Cuban boy back to a Bolshevik monster in Cuba. That is not grounds for impeachment, because that is part of the president’s authority.

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Ann…

COULTER: You don’t impeach for disagreements over policy. It is for misbehavior; that is what misdemeanor means. It’s for bad decorum.

COLMES: Ann, we didn’t let Rick make a speech. You can’t make a speech, either.

COULTER: Well, actually, you did.

COLMES: I know it’s hard, but if you look to your left, I know that’s difficult.

Look, I don’t think he should be impeached. I disagree with Rick about that.

COULTER: That’s very big of you.

COLMES: Thank you. I think I’d rather put our time and effort toward 2004, and just like I don’t think Bill Clinton should have been impeached, I don’t.

But I understand Rick’s point. There are many Americans who increasingly seem to feel that we were not leveled with, for whatever reason, whether it was Bush who did it or people in his administration who gave him false information.

He did say the IAEA reported that Iraq was six months away from a nuclear capability, which turned out not to be true. It’s a scare tactic.

COULTER: He got the name of the institute wrong.

COLMES: Saying I misspoke, and they said they misspoke about a number of things. Misspoke about uranium. They misspoke about tubes, misspoke about how many things.

MACARTHUR: Right.

COLMES: Misspoke lets him off the hook?

COULTER: No. Liberals don’t want to fight terrorism. You want there to be lots of 9/11’s.