Friday Lazy Linking
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
Winter Soldier: Just Another Tuesday. From Ryan Endicott, formerly a United States government Marine stationed in Iraq.
Via Clay Claibourne, L.A. I.M.C. (2009-05-13): Winter Soldier Southwest on YouTube #1
The regulatory State versus freed markets and the human future: A quote from Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, via B.K. Marcus at Mises Economics Blog:
To expect the government to prevent such fraud from ever occurring would be like wanting it to provide cushions for all the children who might fall. To assume it to be possible to prevent successfully, by regulation, all possible malpractices of this kind, is to sacrifice to a chimerical perfection the whole progress of industry; it is to restrict the imagination of artificers to the narrow limits of the familiar; it is to forbid them all new experiments; it is to renounce even the hope of competing with the foreigners in the making of the new products which they invent daily, since, as they do not conform to our regulations, our workmen cannot imitate these articles without first having obtained permission from the government, that is to say, often after the foreign factories, having profited by the first eagerness of the consumer for this novelty, have already replaced it with something else. … Thus, with obvious injustice, commerce, and consequently the nation, are charged with a heavy burden to save a few idle people the trouble of instructing themselves or of making enquiries to avoid being cheated. To suppose all consumers to be dupes, and all merchants and manufacturers to be cheats, has the effect of authorizing them to be so, and of degrading all the working members of the community.
–Turgot, Éloge de Gournay (1759), translated by P.D. Groenewegen
Outrage
All Bizarro News that am unfit to print. In which a argument against an imaginary, Bizarro World version individualism is set to fight with a completely imaginary Bizarro GOP which somehow became
the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice
(?!). For more on an earlier installment in David Brooks’s concerted efforts to liberate the Republican Party from moral principles that it never held, cf. GT 2009-01-28: How to be social while staying civilizedOn intersections, boundaries, and fortifications. bfp, flip flopping joy (2009-05-01): northern territory, sexual activity, teens and police state. In which Ozzie territorial governments set out to create a territorial sex-Stasi to coerce reports of any and all sexual contact by Aboriginal teenagers. Including consensual sex or fooling-around between one teenager and another. Quote:
This sort of nation/state targeted monitoring of the sexuality of teens/young people is something most people of color are vividly aware of. When you through in queerness, disability, and nationality (among others), and community expectations, things for especially teen girls of color get even worse. How do we learn, engage in, and trust ourselves to build a healthy fabulous sexuality when from the time we reach reproductive age, the nation/state literally owns the first and final say as to what happens to our bodies? How do we learn to say
no
oryes
when the nation/state insists on doing it for us?We need democratic governments instead of private protection agencies to ensure that political decision-making remain transparent and decision-makers are held accountable to the people: Molly Ball, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2009-05-10): SECRET GOVERNMENT: Lawmakers keep public out as session winds down with most important decisions looming
On planes as prisons and terrorizing as
security
: Jessica Bautista & Kitty Caparella, Philadelphia Daily News (2009-05-12): Blind interpreter detained at Philly airport says he has nightmares from arrest (On which, cf. also GT 2008-05-07: Airport security.)On legal lynching, part 2. For part 1, see last week, where I said this:
When Anarchists propose that all the functions currently controlled by the authoritarian State, including the judgment of cases involving disputes or violent crimes, we are inevitably told that without a State-controlled, hierarchical system of courts, you’d have nothing more than the justice of the lynch mob. This is actually a classic example of statist inversion: by focusing on the dangers that informal and irregular efforts at seeking justice will lead to a disregard for objectivity or evidence, the statist completely blanks out the ways in which formalization and enforced hierarchy oblige government courts to disregard evidence themselves in the name of formal procedures, and to elevate authority above objectivity, by standing on ceremony or respect for turf at the expense of substantive justice. If the state’s plans to murder Troy Anthony Davis are not an example of a slow-motion lynching, what is?
To which we will add, this week: Radley Balko, The Agitator (2009-05-18): Prosecutors Blocking Access to DNA Testing In which government prosecutors make active efforts to block access to DNA tests that could potentially exonerate the innocent, all in the name ofyou-had-your-chance
jurisdictional turf wars and statist legalfinality.
The police are here to keep us safe. By driving their cruisers at 109 MPH in a 45 zone, on a major commercial thoroughfare, late at night, with no sirens and no flashing lights. Then, when this predictably leads to a fatal crash that kills one of the cops, by lying about it to the media in order to make your dead buddy look like more of a hero, and by arresting the poor innocent man that the cop slammed into at 90 MPH for his allegedly reckless driving.
The police are here to keep us safe, part 2. Radley Balko, Hit & Run (2009-05-18): Cops Gone Wild, in which cops from around the country celebrate National Police Week in D.C. with wine, weapons, and reckless driving.
The police are here to keep us safe, part 3. Commentary from Center for a Stateless Society news analyst Tom Knapp (2009-05-18): To Serve and Protect (Themselves)
Name your own salary. Las Vegas Sun (2009-05-16): City, county may lose say in police pay negotiations. Las Vegas Metro is currently working to get a new state law passed which would allow Vegas cops to get a salary set unilaterally by their own boss cop, and then send the bill, whatever it may be, to folks who had absolutely no say whatsoever in the negotiations.
The Gangsters in Blue come to Philly. Radley Balko, The Agitator (2009-05-01): Update on Bodega Raids by Rogue Philly Narcotics Unit Balko asks, apparently non-rhetorically,
Why did no one in the department ask why an
Come on, really? The reason is that the State as such is essentially irresponsible, and this kind of thing is Standard Operating Procedure forelite
narcotics unit was wasting its time busting immigrant shop owners with no criminal record for selling bags instead of pursuing actual drug distributors?elite
narc squads. There’s a lot here to justify outrage, but very little to justify surprise.On terror-famines for the international narco-crats. Jacob Sullum, Hit & Run (2009-04-30): U.S. Intensifies Campaign to Wipe Out Afghan Economy. Cf. GT 2004-11-20: The tall poppies and GT 2007-01-13: The tall poppies, part 2.
Think.
Austro-Athenian Virtue Ethics versus Moral Fictionalism. Neverfox, Instead of a Blog (2009-05-17): Pulp Non-Fiction
How political control of schools produces terrible textbooks. Tamim Ansary, Edutopia (November 2004): A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education. (Via B.K. Marcus, lowercase liberty (2009-05-18): What’s wrong with textbooks?)
Left-Libertarianism
On dialectical jujitsu: Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-19): How to annoy a conservative
Ownership failures, not market failures Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling (2009-05-01): Markets, the poor & the left. Dillow makes two really important distinctions: one of them the familiar left-libertarian distinction between freed markets, on the one hand, and actually-existing corporate capitalism, on the other; the other a less familiar, but very important, distinction between market processes and patterns of ownership. Quote:
In many ways, what look like ways in which markets fail the poor are in fact merely ways in which a lack of assets fail the poor.
Exactly; and the many cases where there are not reallymarket failures,
but ratherownership failures,
have everything to do with feudal, mercantile, neoliberal, and other politically-driven seizures and reallocations of poor people’s land, livelihoods, and possessions — and nothing to do with genuine market exchange.
Counter-Economics
Against
tax-and-regulate
reformism, and in praise of a thriving black market economy: Crispin Sartwell, eye of the storm 2009-05-18Law among the pirates. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-05-19): To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest
Urban farming. Milagro Allegro Community Garden, L.A. I.M.C. (2009-05-12): Highland Park Adds a Garden
Package-dealing portable double-key encryption for web browsing and web mail: Chris Acheson (2009-05-05): Firefox Portable + GnuPG + FireGPG = CryptoFox. (Via @H+ [2009-05-20], via Human Iterations 2009-05-21.)
Movement
On freeing the MHD3 and all political prisoners. By way of follow-up to the recent report on the bullshit arrest and jailing of the Motorhome Diaries crew, see Motorhome Diaries (2009-05-15): Jones County Sheriff's Department Falsely Arrests MHD Crew, which recounts the full timeline of their arrest, jailing, and release. See also Motorhome Diaries (2009-05-17): Thanks for springing the MHD3 from Jones County (with Allison Gibbs), Motorhome Diaries (2009-05-20): The "Grumbling Old Fart" Addresses Jones County Sheriff Alex Hodge's Statements, Motorhome Diaries (2009-05-20): MHD on Freedom Watch
Don’t vote. Secede and repudiate. Stewart Browne, Strike the Root (2009-05-18): A New Strategy For Liberty – Part 2: Secession in Three Easy Steps
You say
pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair
like it’s supposed to be a bad thing… Kevin Carson @ Mutualist Blog (2009-05-21): An Open Letter to Keith Preston, Mike Gogulski @ nostate.com (2009-05-21): Taking sides on the right to be a complete jackass, Darian Worden (2009-05-21): Perverts Versus Preston, and Brad Spangler (2009-05-22): Bigotry and Revolution
Communications
Boston Anarchist Reading Group. Jake, Anarkismo.net (2009-05-17): Anarchist Reading Group at the Boston Anarchist Picnic! June 6th, 2009
Iconoclasta for Colombian anarquistas: Revista Iconoclasta – Anarcol, Anarkismo.net (2009-05-15): New anarchist periodical in Bogota – Iconoclasta. More information online at http://prensaiconoclasta.entodaspartes.net/.
New subscriptions. Anarchy in the Garden
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
David Brooks annoys the hell out of me. Arthur has written numerous essays pointing out his nonsense.
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/02/writing-from-scaffold-in-defense-of.html
Marja Erwin /#
Re: You say pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair like it’s supposed to be a bad thing…
There is also some discussion in the Fora of the Libertarian Left:
http://libertarianleft.freeforums.org/is-extremism-in-the-defense-of-sodomy-no-vice-t342.html
Hating men is a bit of a problem. However, it is a consequence of the birdcage, and can’t reasonably be used to justify the systems of privilege in this society.
Marja Erwin /#
via Boing Boing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/22/la-cop-union-buys-st.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/05/la-police-union-wants-san-diego-newspaper-writers-fired.html
Rad Geek /#
Marja,
For what it’s worth, I’ve defended man-hating in the past, and I’m willing to stick up for it now. Of course, there’s a sense of the word in which you shouldn’t hate anybody (because you should wish that everyone live well, since, inter alia, that would involve their becoming good people along the way); but if is being used more or less interchangeably with in the sense in which it’s appropriate to hate, say, batterers, or stormtroopers, well, then I’ll stand by the argument that it’s perfectly reasonable for feminists to hate men. In any case, I hate men, too:
(There might be a temptation to reply to a position like this by saying,
But no, that’s not really it. I mean, yes, I do hate masculinity. But I don’t address abstract norms of masculinity in my social interactions; I have to deal with men, men who choose to live according to those abstract norms, and the problem is with them for choosing to do so, not just with some norm external to them.)JOR /#
The video affirms my general position of being for the war, and against the troops. For the war, precisely because it makes the troops someone else’s problem for at least a while, and, god willing, they come home in body bags or with too much physical or emotional damage to do much more than piss in my dumpster or kill themselves.
Aster /#
JOR-
I tried to read your post to my mom, and thrice failed because I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to get a sentence out.
Serious:
I don’t support the war and consider militarism extremely close to the dark hearts of oppression and illberalism. I loathe the common notion that our highest respect ought to go to those who are trained to obey without question, order other people around, and kill on command. In the sense which Republicans mean, I very much do not support the troops. Those who hire themselves out to shoot others to order and all that.
But most of the individual troops are just men and women trying to get ahead in a world in a context of restricted opportunities. They’ve been fed lies about this war in particular and America’s role in the world from all sides for all of their lives. And then they’re placed in positions where they’re being shot at by very nasty people and don’t know how to tell the difference between them and the general populace. And their each given enough firepower to wipe out a village in a few minutes.
I don’t think they should get a free pass for enforcing imperialist warfare, and today a very large subculture within the military (continuing seamlessly through the mercenaries, police forces, prison guards, etc.) is explicitly and violently theocratic and/or racist (patriarchal goes without saying). If the last of American democracy finally breaks, they will be the enforcers of martial law. These guys are the moral equivalent of the SS, and they’ve tortured people I know.
But the typical American soldier is probably just doing the best he can in a world he didn’t create. Even the typical Nazi or Soviet soldier was a broken slave and a victim himself, and it’s unfortunate that to defend one’s life and liberty it is sometimes necessary to defend yourself with retaliatory force. Every war is about high-ups turning other people into murderers in order to kill other people turned into murderes by their high ups- usually for reasons which boil down to ‘you guys look funny’, ‘gimme your sheep’, and ‘look how big my board with a nail in it is!’
~~~~
Of course, as a good Kiwi, I support our troop. Fear him!
Soviet Onion /#
Troop? You literally have an army of one?
Incidentally, the soldier who used to star in those commercials eventually quit because the Army kept pressuring him to do more ads. I guess we’re screwed because he was all we had.
Now’s the chance!! Send the Rohirrim immediately and link up with the 57th Overlanders at San Francisco.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
There are ordinary people involved in fighting U.S. troops who have genuine grievances. The movie Meeting Resistance talks about a group of guys who did an attack after U.S. soldiers came into a cafe and pinned them up against a wall for a search. They responded by buying an RPG and attacking a tank or patrol or something.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
You can actually view parts of the documentary online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhODqC3gs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUbSdCmuVE8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdG1N4IMSZQ&feature=related
Aster /#
Soviet Onion-
(To other readers: this is just lots of meandering gossip about Kiwi society and random stuff having to do with violence. Fluff alert. You have been warned.)
More or less. Freedom Shop carried a pamphlet which had a map of New Zealand world troop deployments. There were around a dozen countries with the numbers for each one in the low single digits, primarily as attaches to other Western military interventions. Um, I know it’s all coercivly funded and all, but I couldn’t quite get outraged. The cats at my flat are more dangerous, and it took them months to catch one mouse.
Here are the actual facts, if you’re interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewZealandDefence_Force
New Zealand occasionally engages in allegedly humanitarian military interventions against Pacific islands which you can’t see with the naked eye on the household globe. The anarchist view, shared by some Pacific Islander organisations, is that this is cover for resource-extractive imperialism. I’ve not read up enough on the subject to have an informed opinion. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find out that the anarchist and Pacific Islander organisations are right.
It is very worth mentioning that Kiwi culture (or at least the urban Kiwi culture of Wellington and Auckland which I know; together these cities and their suburbs comprise about half the population) places pretty little emphasis on the miltary sphere of life. People get far, far, far more excited about the All Blacks than about the military, and despite the rare pathetic attempt at a recruitment poster the general view of a military career is the equivalent of ‘and show how dumb you are’. There’s a fair amount of noise over NZ participation in the World Wars, especially the battle of Gallipoli. There’s a war memorial called the Cenotaph the size of a small single family house next to Parliament. The National Front tried to hold a rally there last year, but their kung fu was less strong than our rude chanting and dumpstered bagels.
There’s a bit more martialism in Maori nationalism, which gets mixed up in the general culture with the pakeha part-admiration-part-appropriation-part-tourist-bait promotion of haka ceremonial war confrontation rituals. This is probably the closest thing New Zealand culture has to a direct celebration of war. Oh, there are national holidays like American memorial days where conservative people get a little sniffy about the nobility of organised killing, but everyone else knows that the reason for the season is just yet another excuse to go picnic and/or get drunk.
The history of the Maori Land Wars is kinda interesting- something like the Lost Cause War Between the States mythology. It was tribalists fighting imperialists, so there aren’t any good guys, but the Maori made the Brits look like total idiots for ten years. As in: quickly setting up wooden fortresses and pretending to man them and then ROTFL while the British wasted three days shelling it before getting a clue. And the Brits fell for it again. And again. And again. Take that, Bembridge ‘race realists’!
There’s a fair amount of pretty low level street violence that the cops don’t seriously try to stop. It’s just taken for granted that blokes beat other blokes up occasionally. The existence of gangs is similarly taken as a fact of life, but the gangs, while nasty enough, aren’t anywhere near as nasty as their American, European, or Asian equivalents, and are partially just pathetic little racist pseudo-self-esteem games. My mom’s shiny red scooter got ripped off for a joyride and damaged because they could. The cops found it, returned the damaged goods, and… sat there.
This ‘what can you do?’ attitude is good insofar as the cops don’t do any part of their jobs competently and are frankly underfunded and understaffed, but bad in that the government would rather come up with sexist advert campaigns to scare women away from public spaces at night than do its supposed job of protecting their individual rights.
Did I mention the cops wear baby-blue and navy uniforms with hot orange highlights? I mean, pigs are pigs, and their agent-of-state-violence nature comes out a bit at a protest, but for the most part it is kinda hard not to laugh at them.
On haka: I’m poised between ‘collectivist masculinist martialism is a always bad thing’ and ‘just about everyone who brings the issue up is an obvious racist wanker like Keith Preston’ and ‘who cares about the political principles; haka are WAY shiny’. That said, having had an Islander pull the real thing right in my face to push me off her street in Auckland takes a lot of the fun out of it for me. Oh, and anyone who thinks that violence is just a male thing should spend a few minutes in the room with an average Kiwi prostitute. Let’s just say that it’s a little difficult to feel much sisterhood with someone whose way of saying ‘hello’ is to hit you with her umbrella.
New Zealand’s gun laws are weaponphobic, which really annoys me on aesthetic grounds. They don’t even allow pepper spray, which is very much not appreciated on very serious grounds. The customs nazis are fanatical about the weapon importation issue, and the average Kiwi instinctually believes that civilised people have no good reason to have access to guns, the only excusable exceptions being hunting rifles. Hell, I know someone with a few IRL levels in rogue whose chaotic alignment is on the shaky edge of neutral, and even he thinks that Americans are barking crazy to own all those guns, and has more than once told me in very expressive tones he’d be terrified to go to a country like that.(!)
There’s a Medieval reenactment group in town I’ve been meaning to join, and they have swords, and a thrift shop I volunteer with got a nunchaku in one day. I rang the anarcha-feminist animal rights activist who runs the place and she didn’t freak or anything. If this doesn’t make logical sense to you given the general legal regime, you’re not the only one.
Personally: I doubt I’d want a rapier if they were still primarily used to kill people. We were at a mall yesterday in Chonburi, and one stall had hunting knives, switchblades, shurikens, Western swords, swordlike objects, fake diasho sets, and handguns all available over the counter for very good prices (good, that is, if you happen to be on the lucky side of neocolonialist privilege). It’s irrational, but I loved all the stuff until it came to the modern pistols. Then I feel a bit uncomfortable touching the thing. Real death is horrible.
Soviet Onion /#
My God, just reading about this country makes me want to beat it up on the playground and take its GDP. My gun buddies and I could just walk in there and run the National Front outta town ourselves. I suppose that would make us big goddamn heroes to most people.
Aster: She used to be cool . . . until the day she got all British on me.
America: We kill Fascists ’cause Kings know better than to mess with us twice.
Illinois doesn’t allow pepper spray either, incidentally. Instead, the police recommend that women being sexually assaulted should stick their fingers down their throat to induce vomiting, which I guess is supposed to make the rapist lose his appetite and wander off (although they take pains to emphasize that it should only be done as a “last resort”).
Seems to me that that kind of advice is really just taking the “don’t dress like a slut” enabler attitude of rape culture to it’s logical conclusion. There’s no conceptual difference between dressing and acting the right way so as not to be “asking for it” and being covered in your own vomit, just one of degree. It’s still about tailoring your life and appearance to accommodate someone else’s demands, so that safety comes at the cost of choosing to live within the grip of an invisible fist.
Of course, most of the Chicago women I’ve mentioned this to still think it’s totally unreasonable that anyone should want to possess a gun. You have no idea how much of a pariah it makes me :(
Just out of curiosity regarding my own predilections, what’s your immediate visceral reaction to 19th century revolvers like these? That’s where I direct most of my martial romanticism. If I had the money and time to make it worthwhile, I wouldn’t mind having a Colt 1851 Navy at some point. It was signature pistol of the West before the Single Action Army came along, and Wild Bill Hickok’s weapon of choice (not that I’m a big of lawmen).
I don’t have so much of a fearful reaction to modern guns. I used to, but now I just see them as neutral tools. What helped me overcome that more than anything else was to disassemble a pistol, clean it and reassemble it for the first time. It really helps clear away the scary mysticism surrounding the idea of guns to see one lying on the table, all totally harmless and with all its parts visible.
Gabriel /#
That might not be a good idea S.O. – in nature fear sometimes serves a useful function, e.g. to prevent an animal from engaging in dangerous (and potentially lethal) activity. A healthy fear of loaded pistols might be a good adaptation in the 21st century.
Now for something completely different: here is the most ironic article I’ve read this week:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090523/aponreus/usiraqrapeslaying_victims
Apparently since his family was killed by military men he wants to mak the world right by becoming a policeman! Impeccable logic, that.
Marja Erwin /#
How about the early-twentieth-century belt-mounted revolver that appears in A Very Long Engagement. Deliciously impractical…
Soviet Onion /#
Ugh. The early twentieth century truly sucked all the charm out of revolvers, not to be regained until libertarian minarchist Clint Eastwood dropped onto the scene and over-killed a bunch of people as a racist cop.
Oh American gun culture, you confound me so!
Both that gun and this one are Smith & Wesson models, and I won’t buy from them for reasons of principle.
Marja Erwin /#
I don’t actually remember the pistol itself. I only remember the way it was used…
Aster /#
On rape culture: I entirely agree, and thank you deeply for the support, but I would prefer not to discuss this issue at present.
anyway,
!!!WARNING. WARNING. TOTAL FLUFF ALERT.!!!
Soviet: Just out of curiosity regarding my own predilections, what’s your immediate visceral reaction to 19th century revolvers like these?
Aster: Oh, that’s totally different. Makes me think of Calamity Jane or maybe Hedda Gabler, both of whom I consider positive role models. Clarisse the Vampire has a six-shot derringer which she holsters in an impractical location. She’s not very good with it, but teeth just don’t help as a ranged weapon. (Thank Marja for Clarisse: she did the hard topping work of GMing over Skype)
I once played a Shadowrun wagemage who was an academic feminist who turned to a life of shadowrunning because the 2050s (2nd Ed.) university system was so neoliberally privateered she couldn’t afford the fragging nuyen to jack in to the Matrix to research her doctoral thesis. She had a streetline special but refused to use anything but rubber bullets (patriarchy! people could get killed!), and her decker boyfriend ended up taking the gun away from her before she hurt herself… or them. Still, she did nail one fleeing morlock (‘whitey’) in the hiney while hiding from the corpcops in the old 20th century NYC subway system.
Soviet: (to Aster): She used to be cool … until the day she got all British on me.
Aster: Not British, Kiwi. I was born in the South(+), and it wouldn’t kill me to actually learn something from my upbringing and concede the Southern politeness point that if you move to another country, life might go along more smoothly if you made a little effort to show that others were their first. Actually, this was the first time in my list that something Southern worked very, very much in my favour. The second time was a summer (platonic) friendship with a wonderful multiple transboi cartoonist from Texas. S/he straightened me out a bit.
New Zealand (meaning the people, not the state) has shown me enormous kindness, so… sure, I’ll keep bugging my neo-stepdad to teach me cricket and (ugh) rugby. It’ll help me with clients anyway. I just wished I had the guts to follow Mike Gogulski’s crowning moment of awesome and burn my American passport. I just can’t afford to lose anything that might help my future travel options- who knows what the world really will look like in 2050 (HGH! cyberware!).
Besides, I’ve been doing the wannabe veddy Briddish thing for years, long before I jumped the other pond. My birthfather (may God have mercy on his soul) was a Cavalier Anglo-Catholic who never saw a historical event where Anglos murdered brown people he didn’t like, and he forced me to sit there and listen to it because his wife wasn’t much good for conversation after what that he did to her. So, I can do it fairly well, well enough at least to get lots of condescending praise from my own personal Rupert Giles.
And yeah, the veddy Briddish thing is an obvious class game. OMG I hated America, both for what it did to me in blatant contradiction to its individualist ideology, and for the way it dragged the ideals of Enlightenment through the mud before the world’s eyes so badly that it’s seriously possible we might lose pieces of the Enlightenment permanently as a result(++). Arthur Silber sees it. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and we wept.
I know that considering what the United States of America has done, a lot of people don’t have much sympathy for ex-Americans crying over chimney smoke and are kinda rightly more focused on the former sla… I mean dead Iraqis. But it’s not just that it was our privileged white ship that went down. It’s also that America for quite awhile truly was the pride of the Enlightenment- as good as it got, at least on some issues, in this bloody Vale of ours. Even Marx and Chomsky admit as much.
Losing her- it’s still too close to call- is an unparalleled civilisational catastrophe, as would or will be the loss of the United Kingdom. Put that together with an economic depression that might be the first warning tremors of a global climate and resource crisis, and we will be very lucky indeed if the 21st century does not turn out to be the 4th. If that happens, and the fallout from the social infrastructure collapse eventually drifts this far down under, then I would rather read Derek Humphry in the sunshine. If civilisation fails all queer people in Christian countries who can’t go completely undercover will die, and all women of intelligence will envy the dead. Contra Preston’s sick queerphobia (and diZerega’s self-hating-Witch personal issues with egoism), just because I can’t bear a child doesn’t mean I don’t care.
I can understand why people have thought it of me. For awhile, I almost didn’t. I thought there wasn’t a corner in the world where most people didn’t secretly think like Keith Preston, and didn’t really feel like I had much rational self-interest in common with the rest of humanity. For the record, Charles and Long are right on Aristotelian moralism. That’s still in my case Randian egoist morality with a side of Nietzsche, which places me in Ysgard/Gladsheim if fortune blesses me and I shape up, but yes: morality is good. Amoralism=Fail.
But when you’re kicked out of your family and left to die and the world belongs to other people(+++), and the only thing you do have is a halfway-decent education, you tend to throw it in people’s face, especially if you have a taste for food and shelter (reading too many dead white books can do strange things to the brain chemistry). It’s a very ugly truth, but sometimes when you’re hit really badly by one kind of oppression, relying on another kind of privilege is the only choice you have short of Calvary. It would be a good reason, for instance, as to why libertarians could lighten up on Black people over African-Americans going into government jobs. Jesus, the government is often the one employer under constant political pressure not to look racist, and if you’re just busy surviving that can look like a pretty shiny deal.
Soviet: I don’t have so much of a fearful reaction to modern guns. I used to, but now I just see them as neutral tools. What helped me overcome that more than anything else was to disassemble a pistol, clean it and reassemble it for the first time. It really helps clear away the scary mysticism surrounding the idea of guns to see one lying on the table, all totally harmless and with all its parts visible.”
Aster: It would be a pleasure if the gun rights movement would to conduct such demonstrations, as appeals to our better nature.
(+) Incidentally, if this Preston things works out, I owe Charles Johnson and Dennis St. George a fairly long essay, with the subject line being ‘The Difference Between Protesting Southern Patterns of Cultural Oppression and Talking Shit About the South and Being Offensive to Hit Back’
(++) Libertarianism stands more to lose here than any other political tradition in the world, and thank goddess that Justin Raimando & Co. have made sure that libertarianism got put down as anti-war for the historical record. This does not change the fact that the guy’s writing style is so hydrologically-Egyptian-except-it-isn’t-WTF? that I can very rarely make it through one of his columns. The cigarette was over the top, but in hindsight that was the one part of his pose that rocked.
(+++) If libertarians ever want to appeal to people rejected by their families, people who take the bullets for Randian individualism by facing the whole world on their own, they have got to solidly and repudiate Hoppe. Hoppe’s ideology (and Preston is only slightly better here) is, literally, a death sentence for people like me. And he consciously intends it to be. That’s the whole point of Hoppeanism. The only thing that makes it possible is a libertarianism overreaction to Objectivist plumbline dogmatism while translates into deliberately ignoring the individualist Enlightenment humanist values which libertarianism presupposes. Hoppe and Preston take advantage of their ability to quote the NAP to suit their purpose in order to damn libertarianism to neo-Nazi Hell.
(+++++++++) Oh, and can we please find a functional replacement for the asterisk that doesn’t resemble one of Preston’s fanboys’ Klan symbols? (#) looks stupid, and asterisks do italics in this secessionist republic’s dialect.
JOR /#
Aster,
Fair enough. I say things like this fairly often for the purpose of shocking Support the Troops! types (I realize that doesn’t include regular commenters here, but one can always hope for the odd passerby linked from god-knows-where), but it’s only half-serious. I feel the same way about the military (including cops) as I do about any other gang. 99% of the members give the other 1% a bad name. But in any case if any of them can come out of that shit and make something decent for themselves, fine.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
What’s sad about the continuing loss of liberty in America is that no one seems to understand it ~ apart from an Arthur Silber or Adam Reed.
Obama has now proposed the legalization and codification of preventive detention. We all know this will only be used on dem “terrorists”.
Soviet Onion /#
It may not be possible to win without the Gadsden flag, but it too will have to be abolished.
Ahem. As a proud American who’s far too patriotic to be nationalistic, and some of who’s ancestors fought in THE War(=), I reserve the right to look down my nose and sneer at the entire rest of the Anglo-sphere(==). No country that still accepts the British Crown as its Head of State in exchange for permission to govern its own affairs has any claim to having left the Empire; a self-governing colony is still a colony(===).
America: We kill Kings, we don’t cut deals with ’em.
If New Zealand, Australia and Canada really want to earn my respect, they should all immediately renounce the Crown and withdraw from the British “Commonwealth” (ROTFLOL), followed by calls for Parliament to cut off the Royal Family’s gravy train and order them to go get real jobs (which will probably involve capitalizing off their fame, but that’s not the point). Hell, if I were New Zealand I would have dropped Britain from my buddy list back when Maggie stepped onto the scene.
Then maybe, just maybe, I’d be willing to recognize these places as independent countries.
Until then: Briddish!!
(=) Ok, it was on the British side. Don’t look at me like that.
Actually a lot of my distant and not-so-distant relatives fought for the Anglos in one capacity or another. I had a great uncle in the navy during WWI who eventually retired and became a fisherman, and my grandfather was an infantryman at that same time, and almost caught one in the head going over the top. Lucky for me he didn’t. We still have the helmet with the dent in it.
I’m also a distant descendant of Francis Drake, who probably did more to kick start the Empire than anyone save Lizzy herself.
(==) Except for you, Ireland. I really dig your style and your fine beverages. You get mad props.
(===) This is not to discount the de facto economic colonialism that continues to this day in different guises. One more reason to oppose the “Commonwealth”.
(==============) What’cha think of the “equal” sign? I don’t think the forces of village fascism will ever manage to appropriate that one.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
Does New Zealand send money to the royal family or is Wikipedia’s listing of it as a constitutional monarchy purely ceremonial? Alongside parliamentary democracy.
Aster /#
JOR-
Kewl, altho’ I’m not as forgiving of cops as the bleeding-heart-liberal part of my brain somehow just became with the tr00pz- simply because the cops can quit, and they have greater ability to know more clearly what injustices they’ll be expected to commit in the line of duty. I have met good American cops (one drove me back to the stroll after a client dumped me… in the back of the police car. Kinda scary and eeriely silent ride), but most of them have been somewhere between ‘authoritarian personality’ and ‘tortured my friends’. Still, individuals are individuals, and people, one may hope, can change.
Nick-
Yeah. Having America show the world that the anti-racist cause is obviously doing something right was awesome. Having America show the world that it still had something good in it fighting to survive, even if coopted and misdirected, was also mighty shiny.
Tis’ a shame that the Black dude who got himself elected is precisely what Jeremy Weiland says- ‘talks pretty, same old boss’. OK, the new boss is better is some important ways (abortion) and at least doesn’t openly preside over torture (lovely standards we have these days). But he’s a bastard, is keeping up with the march of empire and the police state, and I’m beginning to wish him a swift meeting with his patriamonoGod. He just lost his leather pants in my eyes.
Advancing preventative detention in a time of domestic piece just crossed over the line from ‘oligarchical corruption of liberal democracy’ to ‘elected oligarchical dictator’. Congratulations, Mr. President, you’re now on the same level as Bush. Pink, please do another song. Somehow I doubt the Kiwi corporations would play that one every five minutes in the grocery stores over here.
Barack Obama: the audacity to rape hope.
On Arthur Silber-
I deeply wish he could tone down the obsessive self-referentialism and throwaway despair of his writings, because he’s a very good thinker at his best, and he’s nearly impossible to link to or promote in his current form. He really should be welcomed into the left-libertarian community- was there first, and was the third writer after Chris Sciabarra and Roderick Long to show me ways of thinking towards a left-libertarian ideal. He’s gone through something awful for choosing to be himself and speak the truth, and I can’t get him out of it. I don’t in the least blame him. I think a lot of us have felt what has hurt him the most.
I don’t agree with him on his non-prosecution appeal; I think it’s more important that some kind of civilised precedent be restored, even if it will further legitimise the Obama regime. But his attitude is totally right.
Aster /#
“Does New Zealand send money to the royal family or is Wikipedia’s listing of it as a constitutional monarchy purely ceremonial? Alongside parliamentary democracy.”
I dunno on the sending money. Who cares. Monarchs are teh suck, as anyone with a (#tubercular cough# Hoppe) brain knows(=).
The monarchy is mostly ceremonial… more than anything it’s the symbolic lynchpin of the Commonwealth, which might be a decent excuse for not axeing Lizzie the Twooth (trade and cultural exchange across wider areas=good).
But it’s sure not entirely harmless. The ‘symbolic’ power of the monarchy was use to axe a leftish PM the Ozzies had in the 70s. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975Australianconstitutional_crisis
Oh, and while were on about kings…
No… I’ll say that in a few weeks. 3-15 years in a Thia prison isn’t a detail. The King Never Smiles.
I love Thailand, but some of the laws are… well, the reason you fight to the death to protect liberal civilisation.
(=) Actually, I mean a mind interested in perceiving rather than dictating reality. But ‘brain’ is more insulting, and why do we owe the slightest rhetorical charity to people who have openly called for a politics intended to result in segregation and which has always historically led to mass murder? Citing Hoppe is as revolting as citing Ernst Junger or Ludwig Klages. That this bastard happens to twist libertarianism into a call for pogroms should horrify every libertarian. The fact that it doesn’t says that there is something gravely wrong with libertarianism; the fact that it does horrify the left-libertarian community means that we effectively are the remaining organised rump of the pre-Rockwell libertarian movement (someone said this first recently, but I don’t recall who. they’re right.).
Her serenity Angela Keaton tells me that before Rothbard motioned to kick out the ‘modal libertarians’ the Party was a very different place, where tolerance of other people who weren’t hurting others was socially expected. Effectively, Rothbard tried to create an an alliance between libertarianism and the New Left in the 60s and, but he turned right around when the U.S. Empire passed its 1973 peak and eventually came to hate and exorcise precisely those people he had courted earlier in his career. Face-heel. We’re the reincarnation of the original libertarian movement, the one that Rand dismissed as ‘hippies of the right’ because it accepted people less classy and respectable than she had to act like she was and forgot to clean her toes for her.
No. There’s nothing wrong with libertarianism. What’s wrong is that we’ve had utterly atrocious leadership- or, we might say, the problem is that we’ve had heirarchical leadership that sent pretty excellent individuals with great ideas into places where they turned atrocious. Rand never repudiated an order of rank- she de-statised the idea and set up pretty good (if senselessly cruel=”I got mine”) standards as to what greatness looked like, but there’s still the notion of superiors and inferiors of social authority all over her writings, which is the bit which allows supposedly individualistic Objectivists to be conservatives who don’t go to church(==) and turn a blind eye to the police state. And it’s why Objectivism never turns into anything but nasty little bourgeois dictatorship any time it gets past the level of single individuals.
The answer is the left-anarchist organisational model. Yes, decentralism is good… but only if we mean decentralism as in the equal authoirty of individuals to learn and spek the truth, not decentralism of truth in the kind of relativism or postmodern sense which enables the village fascists.
(==) Actually, first-generation Objectivists didn’t make the mistake badly because of course they didn’t go to church– because they were urban secular Jewish intellectuals (Angela, again, cred) who took getting a lot of basic how-to-read-and-think stuff right for granted (Adam, duh). But when Christian-educated suburbanites read Rand, they feed their order and rank into it, which leads to seriously different and much worse results. Something similar happened to the whole libertarian movement, and for that matter to America as a whole once the NE aristocracy lost its grip.
(=========) Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!!…..~~~ This symbol=must use. Good things come from here. Liberte! Egalite! I don’t know what you’re talking about! ZOMG/ss.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
Hmmm
I wish Adam would join us to talk about Objectivist stuff ~ if only because he’s the most effective defender of it out there.
Well, the ex- Objectivist CEO of BB&T mentioned it being rational to help his son but not his acholol guzzling Uncle who bought a house in the housing bubble ~ a conservative approach
And he joked about the government loosening credit standards to give laxer people access to housing loans being like giving a criminal a house when they commit a crime ~ work ethic? I dunno.
On the other hand, it’s true that they avoided the subprime mess. He mentioned their consideration of the product that sunk other banking corporations and how they decided it wasn’t good for their customers ~ tied it up with the rational self-interest motif. He also acknowledged there were genuine victims and that the bank was trying to help people stay in their homes ~ said what does a bank need a house for?
Apart from some of the economically conservative ethics lessons, the Objectivist/Austrian themed take on what went wrong was very detailed/intelligent. He correctly noted the ogliopolistic effect of the TARP program. The funny thing about it was that the businessmen in Atlas Shrugged drop out ~ not accept bailout funds due to state coercion/a need to stay competitive. Those of us faced with footing the bailout bill can try to go Galt but risk prison time.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
Oh: the idea of not helping his Uncle or family member was that a person needs a loss to realize their behavior is in error ~ drinking too much in this case and presumably not working two jobs to pay his loan.
On left-anarchism: like I’ve said earlier. I agree with Adam’s statement on the former Salon that co-ops take a long time to run. I hate group projects in college ~ specially when they give you one single grade. Adam seemed happy being a scientist without having to manage the business he worked for ~ I agree with him that university meetings where you’re effectively one of the bosses must suck. I just want to teach ~ fuck the politics of it all. On the other hand, I was involved in collective meetings with Food Not Bombs and a few at the anarchist infoshop. It wasn’t bad or anything, but there were clearly people more interested/who took more time/did more work. I had a pretty loose casual boss at my last straight job. There is a real sliding scale here. I didn’t do the management stuff, but I was able to have back/forths with him without having my concerns thrown out the window or anything.
I don’t mention this as an appeal to authority. I am just saying there has to be some room for disagreement here ~ normative principles and all still being important. The thing is that the best of Objectivists will acknowledge there is a rational way to organize a business ~ it can’t just be every CEO’s own rancid power trip vision. An instrinic defense of any business organization loses sight of this.
But I don’t want to embrace a new form of communal political correctness either.
Aster /#
Nick-
I’d love to have Adam be part of this debate, but I’m also nearly certain he won’t wish to. His intelligence and depth of knowledge is unapproachable. But he doesn’t hold a high opinion of left-libertarianism. Despite his brilliance, I consider myself competent to respectfully state that I diverge from him here. It the end, reality will decide.
Most of organised Objectivism is a travesty of Rand’s philosophy and in too many cases the brand has been degraded to the level of corrupt apologies of the murderous Empire. But even in the honest cases (Diana Mertz Hsieh and her circle are sometimes interesting; Barbara Branden has a very kind heart, and Jennifer Ianollo just totally rocks.), I think that the Objecivist project contains inextricable errors of judgement which will manifest in any attempt at practical application. In political matters, I believe the primary issue in an acceptance of natural heirarchy which can be pretty much boiled down to ‘classism’. And it isn’t a little problem- Kevin’s “money quote” is an accurate description of characteristic Objectivist attitudes. Charles captured the ideal well when he presented two different pictures of archetypical bosses. Most people I see advancing in heirarchies and who aspire to manage large numbers of people have pointy hair.
None of this, of course, means that we shouldn’t learn from insightful Randian minds, or respect Objectivist individuals. Randroids may be some of the most obnoxious people to share a room with on the planet, but they’re not in the same category of dishonest intellectual error as, per exemplia, racism. That said, there isn’t much of intellectual value or substance coming out of the movement; Adam will always remain a true exception.
I think one can certainly remain true to the spirit and structure of the Randian project and consider what a Randianism with the taint of classism removed would look like. But this is a complex endeavour- because the class issues are inextricable from related and more essential errors in psychology, ethics, philosophical anthropology, and- very much not least in this case- aesthetics; the problem is structural. It sounds like work I might find personally find interesting, and I may give it a whirl, in which case you are certainly welcome to contribute to the discussion. It’s nice to see you calling things ‘rancid’ when they deserve it.
On a personal level, I once asked Objectivists to stand up and apply their Promethean values honestly to my case. They massively refused. I’ve now asked the same question of left-libertarianism, and it massively answered in the affirmative. For me, that is finally decisive. Rand was one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and she taight me how to think, but my own break with the movement she created and inspired is now complete. Aeternum vale, Magistra.
~~~
But Rand died, I believe, in 1986. Surveying the choices today, Carson vs. Reisman isn’t a hard call. The average left-libber’s worth ten Randroids in terms of intellectual daring, insight, and focus on reality. Here are a few realities the vast majority of objectivists fail perception checks on: TORTURE! PREVENTATIVE DETENTION! NO-FLY LISTS! ANTI-SOCIAL-BEHAVIOUR-ORDERS! NATIONAL DATABASES! MILLIONS OF DEAD IRAQIS IN A WAR STARTED ON LIES! MILLIONS OF AMERICANS IN HELLHOLE PRISONS! TORTURE! TORTURE! WHICH PART OF ‘TORTURE’ FAILED TO SNAP YOU OUT OF YOUR INPENETERABLE BOURGEOIS TRANCE? GET A CLUE.
Of course, the Randroids probably have a thousand times as much cash as left-libertarians, since for them it goes without saying that no political philosophy can possibly be valid unless it accords with middle-class expectations and gets them stock-options. But even here, I believe we have an advantage. Our ranks, after all, contain counter-economists, IP pirates, Browncoats, and thieving mutualists. That money doesn’t have to stay theirs.
~~~
What I find very interesting is that left-libertarianism seems to have acquired precisely the self-consciousness which Objectivists claim is lacking in libertarianism- an awareness that reason and individuality precede and are implied by liberty.
The left-lib(=) movement now implicitly covers all the essential philosophical bases which Objectivism did, and does so without Objectivism’s fatal classist taint. Sciabarra failed to reform Objectivism, but he is one of the primary intellectuals responsible for the left-libertarian ‘verse, and I think it can do as much and better. What he wanted happened, but it was done by different people with different pieces and by a different name. Dialectics seems to be second nature to most people here, and the cultural change he wanted from Objectivism just got approced here. Speaking to Chris: if you ever feel like writing again, why not do so here where you’re a founding guest of honour?
I would like to try myself to get buy-in on making the Enlightenment principles more explicit. By this I don’t mean Rand’s ridiculous and slightly pretentious expectations that a politically individualist movement has to take a party line on the epistemology of numbers or the value of nonrepresentational visual art. I merely mean a very broadly inclusive appreciation for the basics of reason, science, the open society, political secularism, humanism, and individualism- y’know, the stuff that thinking people think. All of this, I’ve becoming convinced, one could reverse-engineer by Charles’ approach of ‘thick’ libertarianism.
Karl Popper, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, the early Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky, Kevin Carson, Murray Bookchin, and Charles Johnson all qaulify as examples of what I mean. Anything feeling vaguely like Voltaire, Spinoza, Tom Paine. A golden mean between mean-spirited Objectivist perfectionism and a relativist-pluralist collapse of individualist standards. Basically trying for as open a mind as you can get without the brains falling out in some irrationalist authoritarian mess.
Rand’s totalism led to a wertfrei overreaction among the Libertarians who she brought into the movement but then presented with impossible demands for intellectual conformity. The result was a libertarian movement without princples which ended up being taken over by establishment power-lusters and bigoted reactionaries.
We’re starting over and can pick up the good peices of the old movement. Let’s be reasonable and try to do it right (well, better) this time.
(=) For do we offer not a liberation for leftists as much as we do a left wing for libertarianism? Left-libertarianism has finally given post-leftists somewhere to go.
Roderick T. Long /#
Diana Mertz Hsieh and her circle are sometimes interesting
You mean this jerk?
Roderick T. Long /#
Or the apologist for mass murder?
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
Roderick,
Reasonable people can disagree about mass murder
Duh
On a more serious note: I do find Diana’s steadfastness in pursuit of abortion rights and secularism to be honorable. I link to The Coalition for Secular Government on my website.
Aster,
I don’t have much respect for what passes for Randian circles either. I read Lindsey P cheering on a dude telling Chris Sciabarra fuck you for politely questioning the conventional view of colonialism ~ Chris made the “mistake” of challenging the idea that empire was a smashing success marred only by the natives. Alongside your mention of him wanting to deprive welfare recipents of the vote; I’ve pretty much concluded he’s a jerk ~ hopefully, he thinks corporate welfare recipents shouldn’t be able to vote either. At least, he’d be honest and consistent then.
So sure, I am interested in a movement of people unlike that. If you want to start it then more power to you. It just looks like an uphill battle from where us Yanks are sitting ~ the Porcfest event notwithstanding.
Soviet Onion /#
What we need is a group of people with absolutely no interest in looking polite or respectable (like me) to start crashing LP, Ron Paul and Objectivist events and theatrically shaming them, using their own principles as weapons against them. Things like the old Circle Bastiat used to do to conservatives. Some well-placed stunts could help fracture the alliance between libertarians and conservative, and compel the more principled ones to take a stand against assholes like Peregrino and Boortz themselves.
Nick "NataBsha" Manley /#
Depending on the context, I wouldn’t mind leafleting or something. I am not a fan of physical intimidation though ~ a la some of the radical activist left’s tactics.
Bash Back’s storming of a church comes to mind…
Aster /#
Soviet ;It may not be possible to win without the Gadsden flag, but it too will have to be abolished.
Aster: I kept a Gadsden flag hanging next to the door for three years in my S F. Home Sweet Brothel. Nobody treads on me, except of course by Rothbardian contract. If a culturally American in-your-face individualism dies, something in me will die with it.
I’m in the self-hating-ex-American Pride movement. No borders, no flags, no countries, no nations. I ought to be a metric supremacist and in a different time and place might vote pro-Esperanto.
Sigh. People is complicated. Everyone has an olive tree and it’s crooked. Culture touches us all, and gets inside you. Jeremy admirably gets this, even if I can’t afford not to wish that he would also percieve other things.
Aster /#
Roderick-
I could never speak to Diana Mertz Hsieh personally; she has given every evidence that she would be needlessly and undeservably cruel were I to do so.
Diana’s break with Sciabarra was one of the most revolting personal betrayals of trust I have every witnessed. She backstabbed one of my oldest friends. Her betrayal of friends and benefactors objectively merits an icy reception in Caina. Her slime-writhing political flattery deserves a place in Malebolgia’s second ditch right next to Thais, you whore.
Moreover, just showing her the mirror (take what you want and pay for it) and telling it like it is, she screams rich spoiled brat with Catholic schoolgirl issues.
I still think she’s done some really good work with her Coalition for Secular Government, for which she has my gratitude. I have no interest in her other vulgar libertarian personal causes. She does have one of the most intelligent minds in the Randian ‘verse, let alone the Orthodox Objectivist community, which is not a natural abode for anyone who thinks for themselves and independently percieves reality. She is an also an impressibly formidable woman in their world, and that gets my synthesist-feminist respect. I just hope the Price she paid after doing her three days standing in the snow outside the gates of the ARI was worth it.
Her treatment of you in that letter is unjustly condescending; she’s nearly as out of line talking of you this way as Stephan Kinsella is when he goes out of his way to treat Kevin Carson as a social inferior.
On the contents of that debate, I’m somewhere in the middle. I very greatly agree with you that Rand was loose with cusuistry, or at least was often so outside of her fiction- she could be a true literary artist on the issue when she wanted to be. I will admit that my judgement calls on the Cold War, Israel/Palestine, and We the Living cases in question lean a little towards her positions and to the right of what most left-libertarians would likely find comfortable. I absolutely disagree with Ayn Rand’s endorsement of American exceptionalism. I can deeply forgive her on this one, as a matter of an immigrant’s love for her shore of refuge, but Rand’s contemporary followers have no such excuses and their apologies for the American empire and its atrocities, and for Israel’s atrocities, is indeed not a matter upon which reasonable people can disagree. And I’m not sure I wish to understand the Orthodox Objectivist love affair with nuclear weapons.
I liked Diana Mertz Brickell much better; she said a couple of very good sentences on feminism which helped guide my thinking in direction which I’m very glad to have been find and keep. Diana Mertz Hsieh has unfortunately repudiated that good work, but it was good.
~=~
On a different issue, I wish to entirely concede your position on the ethics debate, even if your and Johnson’s terminology is somewhat more respectable than I can personally feel comfortable with.
There is a moral logos.
If you wish to hear my excuse for not seeing it, it is simply because my life has previous shown scarce evidence of it. My biological father brought me up very strictly on the notion that there was a Right Way and a Wrong Way to do things. I rejected his Cavalier Anglo-Catholic Bourgeois version of it when I was 4. When I found Ayn Rand, I thought that this was the real thing (and like most Objectivists and Americans, didn’t recognise that there are different ways to say it in different languages; Chris Sciabarra helped my through that process in philosophy).
I’ve felt for quite a long time that the world continually demands of me adherence to my part of a social contract which it has no intention of keeping for its part. The gross failure of American individualism and Objectivism to follow through on their deepest principles and promises broke my faith in metaphysics. The gross failure of New Zealand’s sex worker subculture (with the honourable exception of the serene Catherine Healy of NZPC) to keep its version of the same, as well as one unfortunate incident, broke what was left of my view of this world as a place where anything echoes back from ethical perception.
It is only the actions of the left-libertarian community, the love of my uberkwel neo-mom (she’s 56 and rides a motor scooter!!) and the kindness of the Kiwi and Thai people which have shown me that, indeed, there is an objective reality which is open to all who will honestly perceive. I want it added to the record in marble that I’ve seen and recognise this, and am prepared to be judged for any future evasions of this awareness. I merely ask others to forgive me for being obvious troll about it while I’m learning; rehabituation is a process and takes time.
I do think I’m within my rights to mention the fact that Aristotle won the 4th Century B.C.E. laurels for Worst Sexist Wanker, which doesn’t precisely encourage a pro-sex feminist to look to The philosopher for practical wisdom. Especially when Rand’s male-identified only-girl-in-the-room issues were probably encouraged by Aristotle as much as Nietzsche. There is a voice in my head continually telling me that the one Trojan with a brain (who kinda proved to be, um, right) has a point. I certainly oppose the kind of feminism which identifies patriarchy with reason, but no one has yet been able to offer a version of reason completely untainted by patriarchy, or a feminism completely untainted by distrust of rationality. That is a great shame.
Q: (if you’ve the time): You and Charles have convinced me that there’s a moral logos. If I understand you correctly, you believe in a metaphysical logos, and I’ve never read any reason to doubt that you agree with Rand’s position that cosmology needed to be thrown out of philosophy (my own opinions here are complicated). I think there is a political logos, and that left-libertarianism is showing every sign of being a ZOMG advance in humanity’s historical apprehension of the real thing.
Do you believe there is an aesthetic logos?
Stephan Kinsella /#
Aster, I happen to agree with you re Hsieh’s treatment of Sciabarra, and defended him and critizied her at the time (see my Objectivism Schism Form Letter, where I noted the funny “Official Solo Schism Form Letter”, which “lampoon[ed] Objectivist nobody Diana Mertz Hsieh, who felt compelled to Officially, Publicly Break with a former Objectivist friend, the brilliant Chris Sciabarra (who is a decent, sincere, honest person who did not deserve to be treated like this), and to justify it by printing his private correspondence to her and a set of charges to any normal person would appear very bizarre”); she banned me from her blog, for mocking an article critical of my views, when I wrote, “I hereby announce my “official” disagreement with this. Is this sufficient, or do I need to file this in some Registrar of Official Disagreements?”).
As for Carson, I certainly do not regard him as a “social inferior” (I can’t recall ever having given this question much thought, but I suppose I only regard criminals as my “social inferior”) and do not believe I have ever implied this. If Kevin thinks I have, I would be happy to retract and apologize, or clarify. In fact I think his work is worth discussing and I intend to critique an aspect of it in an upcoming article.
Stephan Kinsella /#
Aster, also, note that I have politely and respectfully promoted Kevin’s work, e.g. in this post (and was privately savaged in email by people for doing this–I don’t care).
Aster /#
Stephan-
You’re a better man than I thought, and I’m glad to know it. I appreciate you efforts to give Kevin his due.
We may have to speak sometime on the issue of criminality, but at a latter time of your convenience. It’s a little ironic that my primary engagements at the moment are entirely in accordance with New Zealand law.
And, like I said, I guess you’re on our irrelevant subculturalist team too. It takes all kinds.
Gary Chartier /#
What is by now an aside that connects with a much earlier moment in this conversation (I haven’t been back for a day or two).
Nick writes: “Adam seemed happy being a scientist without having to manage the business he worked for ~ I agree with him that university meetings where you’re effectively one of the bosses must suck.”
I confess I’m puzzled by this. A democratically organized workplace can surely have representative structures. Such structures leave Adam, and you, free to spend very little time–at the extreme end, none–on governance matters, while leaving others free to participate as much as they like.
I think it is an unrelieved glory of university life (even more so at traditional Oxbridge, though that’s been subverted in recent years) that academics get to govern themselves. I can’t imagine wanting to work in any other kind of setting. I can certainly imagine someone not wanting to go to the excess of meetings to which Oscar Wilde objected (and, again, any serious representative structure will leave everyone free to skip the meetings). But why think being able to contribute on an ongoing basis to shaping the policies governing the institutional environment in which one works would suck?
Stephan Kinsella /#
Aster, “We may have to speak sometime on the issue of criminality, but at a latter time of your convenience. It’s a little ironic that my primary engagements at the moment are entirely in accordance with New Zealand law.”
I was speaking of course of criminal in the libertarian sense of committing aggression against people, not in the positivist sense of violating state law. And I do regard (real) criminals, by and large, as social inferiors. That’s why it’s okay to shoot them.
Jeremy /#
Aster, I could never agree with you as much as I agree with you right there. Very well said. What a fucking human tragedy. There’s something subtly but profoundly alienating about what we do on these web pages that we submit HTTP POST requests to.
Maybe this is the wrong place for that conversation, but I would like to know what I’m not getting. What other things? I thought we differed less on values than priorities, less on positions than on constructions. Feel free to email me (first name + 6 + d at gmail).
Alright; so my question is, how do you go about demonstrating this? This is the practical dilemma that moved me in a more subjectivist/relativist strategic direction (although not on morality; to me, this is a social construct without inherent meaning). I got tired of “my truth” serving more as a barrier that led me to anger and outrage than as a light guiding my actions and life.
I believe fervently that there is a logos. My relativism comes about because of two states of the human condition that I cannot reconcile with a universalist politics. First, words are insufficient to communicate about the logos effectively. Communication about the logos is only approachable in my experience through an extensive personal relationship with another, where we can connect using a wider emotional and experiential vocabulary. Why even bother wrapping my words in appeals to the logos when I know that what the other is hearing is not the logos?
Second, if there is a universal absolute, how in the hell do I understand it well enough to promote it to others? Aren’t I better served by keeping my eyes open, by trying through my experience to understand the nuance of this logos, of trying to learn from how others experience and realize it, than to merely preach it as if I had it figured out? If life is just about what I think, then I’ll be checking out now, thank you. But in practice, there is a rich tapestry we can experience and learn from if only we don’t take our own identity as a collection of beliefs too seriously, and open up to the undifferentiated logos.
I think that attitude yields what is an operative relativism: my beliefs are my beliefs, and I either take responsibility for their contingent, uncertain nature or I reify them, identify with them, and block myself off even further from the logos. There’s no point worrying about whether something as arbitrary as a “belief” is right or wrong, because they aren’t composed on moral bases, but on the functional bases of trying to approach this ideal we cannot fully connect with. Beliefs are merely expedient, temporary nodes where competing doubts cancel each other out and yield actionable constructs for living my life and dealing with the other.
Sometimes I say “people are more important than politics”. Maybe people are more important than truth. But I suspect our abstractions lead us to falsely separate people from truth, as if there’s some platonic world in which our politics matter more than this one. Once you’ve taken away the medium for experiencing truth – which is “the otherself”, the reflection of yourself available in 6 billion different versions – you’re articulating a vision that can’t exist on this planet. And it’s only on this planet, in this life, and with these people that freedom, liberty, and life will have any meaning. As much as they hurt and confound us, to escape them is to give up on any kind of accessible logos.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
Gary,
I don’t want to be pushed around in an environment I have no say over. What I was meant was just that I am a pretty introverted person ~ am not one for excess meetings. I wasn’t really sure about what precise institutional structure I wanted. I was mostly fishing in concretes rather than normative principles ~ although, I suppose my concern for the kind of abuse that can flow from authority implies a normative principle.
So yes; I essentially agree! Governing yourself is a good thing indeed. I was also thinking of things I’d heard about nasty university politics…
Something you can no doubt speak with much more authority about. I do celebrate the independence of academics where such independence exists.
Gary Chartier /#
Nick,
No claims to authority here. I agree completely that one shouldn’t have to confront structural or (perhaps more subtle) emotional pressure to participate enthusiastically in meetings.
Yes, academic politics can be nasty. (Cp. the multiply attributed adage–a variant of Sayre’s Law, that academic politics are so nasty because the stakes are so low.) I speak from painful experience. But so can politics in hospitals. And for-profit corporations. So I don’t think this is a distinctively academic liability.
Clearly, a desirable social world would leave lots of room for people who prefer to work independently, outside of institutional environments, and for those in organizations who’d rather leave the actual business of governing to others. I just hope even the introverts won’t be denied opportunities to participate when they want to.
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
I have an emotional pull towards Arthur’s self-referencing and throwaway despair, but that’s because American politics makes me feel the same way.
Few other subjects make me as neurotic. And as all of you know: I am only half “sane” ( :
Nick "Natasha" Manley /#
“So to many of those who voted for Obama, including all those liberals and progressives who now not only fail to oppose his policies of barbarism and death but cheer themselves hoarse with shouts of approval for ongoing murder and destruction (see the Laura Flanders article excerpted here), as well as to all those who attempt to minimize or find excuses for the many crimes of today and tomorrow, I say: Congratulations. Your assimilation has been successful. You are now part of the Hive Mind.
Some of us saw all this, and we therefore declined to vote for Obama. For identical reasons, we refused to vote for McCain. “A Choice of War Criminals” is no choice at all, not if one values innocent life and the honor of being human. But many of those who insisted that all “decent” people must vote for Obama dismissed our concerns, or attempted to marginalize and minimize them. They said we weren’t “realistic.”
To all such people, I say: you yourselves were certainly “realistic.” I would suggest that one other element of what now unfolds is also realistic: the blood that drips from your hands, and the nightmares that ought to sear your souls.
There’s realism for you, you miserable sons of bitches.”
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/05/borg-welcomes-its-new-members.html
That’s “me” when I read apologetic naive stuff about Obama. I am a vindictive guy sometimes. What can I say? ( :
Aster /#
Stephan-
We’re on precisely the same page of the rules. Kewl.
Just please keep in mind that there are sex workers, psychotropic merchants, undocumented immigrants, customs evaders, copyright pirates, tax-free informal economy marketeers, and other people used to being called and often used to thinking themselves as ‘criminals’ among us. So the language of ‘criminals’ as opposed to, say, ‘coercers’, or ‘aggressors’ can with no ill intention accidentally offend people with solid libertarian credentials, and linguistically prop up statist conceptual divisions.
We’re NOT better than you straight folks, but remember: we are the ones most likely to end up in the Empire’s prisons or have other unfortunate incidents happen to us. You don’t have to go out of your way to help us unless it’s in your self-interest to do so; all we’ve really a right to ask for is a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T. You’re showing that, and it’s awesome.
And we’re on your side on important things. Most of the guys here know their Mises and Rockwell pretty well, and Kevin Carson… well, what can I say? He’s not Mises’ enemy. Anything but. He’s just doing what all intellectual innovators have to do- learning from the teachers who have taught them how to think and proving it by going one step beyond his master. We raise our children to leave us.
(The “Official Solo Schism Form Letter” is OMG I can’t stop laughing. Everyone with any kind of humour in them owes it to themselves to read it all the way through:
http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?s=bc1eae004766a3f67baa3b6814dff73a&showtopic=494&view=findpost&p=3908 )
~=~
Jeremy-
I think I owe you that conversation some time over a cup of beverage. Is Skype good for you? I’m aster_francesca, and back in NZ I usually leave a window open.
But, as you were kind enough to allow me to, I’d prefer to wait a few months on this. I’m just too tired at the moment. And I owe Marja a virtual AD&D2E campaign first (she’s escaping a totalitarian state in the middle of a WW2 Eastern front hellbath, and her tiefling 2nd level character has a rat’s tail). I hope we can find a time which suits you.
I’ll just for now suggest Ayn Rand’s piece ‘Philosophy: Who Needs It’, given to a class of West Point graduates. Looking past her enabling sanction of the imperial military-industrial complex, her out-of-line dismissal of Emerson, and her Amero/Eurocenticism, it’s a great essay.
http://gos.sbc.edu/r/rand.html
On the logos:
Jeremy, I believe I have good reasons for my emphasis humanity’s ability to know the truth. I believe that I have very, very good reasons for drawing the Jeffersonian lines I do in the public or political sphere.
But I hear you, meaning It. Word. I mean it 200% with my social demand that the Enlightenment complete its unfinished project and apply to everyone, and everywhere. But I wrestle with the same questions as you every day- some of things which in your language are nouns are verbs in mine, ditto singular vs. plural, ditto feminine vs. masculine, etc. But I see the problem and don’t know how to deal with it. I certainly can’t deal with it with any direct words.
And as a feminist, even the part of me that thinks that I ought to be a free-and-clear perfect Randian rationalist atheist (and she wasn’t quite perfect, if you read some of her posthumously published early letters) is slightly and prudently skeptical of unalloyed rationalism Roderick Long, for instance, is a perfect philosophe, a better feminist than most feminists who happen to be girls, and he incidentally makes very uncharacteristically obscure statements on logos issues. He’s stood up for me with a final whiz-bang spectacular firecracker last major battle of the Left-Libertarian Civil War, and he’s like an actual professor with a title and everything (Left-libertarianism could use a bit of establishment cred).
But, as a feminist, I can never entirely forget the warning of that one Trojan with a brain. I don’t share Rand’s contempt for mysticism. I’ve seen some very, very strange things in my checkered life and had things work out when they shouldn’t have, in a manner suspiciously like a plot, despite the fact that it’s philosophically absurd to suggest a Script. And I did live in a temple in San Francisco for three years, I did keep an altar, and I’m sure the good people at the local Magic Box(=2) were ROTFL at the superstitious new-convert-syndrome Witch busily keeping the local idol economy going.
There are more things in Earth and Heaven than are dreamt of in their philosophy.
~=~
To Objectivism:
(This is Payback Time to a dozen bastards whose names I don’t remember and don’t want to remember. Perigo himself never wronged me, but he’s been enough of a monumentalist to so many people that he’s fit to try on the slipper and see if it fits. Anyone who wants to spam these words to any Objectivist individual or group who has acted the same way to them is free to fwd with my compliments, and with due credit to the author, miss ‘Jeanine Ring’.)
I think it’s overdue that I showed the mirror to a group of people who expensively deserve it.
Objectivists: You didn’t lose me because of your strictly rational philosophy, which really was better than mine, but because your culture takes after Rand (who had excuses) and makes an art out of breaking the ladder after you’ve climbed up. And when you close the doors of social mobility, you end up with an inbred crazy class of absolute monumentacephalids running the place. Which means that after a couple of generations nearly everyone in your family turns out philosophically sterile. The paleolibertarians put out more original work than you do. Hell, the national anarchists(!) are more competent as philosophers these days.
Objectivists: You spent TEN YEARS snubbing a saintly man who dedicated his life to getting every essential of your philosophy a seat at the table in the Ivory Tower, at great potential cost to his own career, while asking nothing from you but that you listen to his clearly presented truth. You watched and for the most part did nothing while the worst among you attacked him with sick homophobic bigotry, even while he was saying nothing about it because he considered what he was doing for YOU more important than the nasty slights he received along the way.
He lived up to all your standards AND knows music better than I could do if I got bitten by a vamp (=3) and unlived to be 200. And then you THREW HIM OUT by means of personal treachery and because of his very mild and respectful criticisms of your dripping bloodlust for democidal warfare (y’know, MASS MURDER, MILLIONS of lives lost) which you have consistently collaborated with so shamelessly someone really ought to drag you out on a dark night and shave your hair down to bleeding stubble.
SHAME. Trader principle= EPIC FAIL.
You are living in the past, and had best learn how to deal with today, and today’s political scene. Getting the clue that most real artistic innovation is done by headbanging caterwaul bands would help. If you don’t get with times, objective reality will see to it that you become reduced to embarassing ceremonial remnantsm, which it mostly already has. We, the left-libertarians, can and will do everything you were supposed to do and do it better, and we’re keeping our spaceship together with duck tape, while YOU have squandered all the advantages of having been born with a silver spoon lodged deeply up your tight ass. If you guys tried to walk your talk you’d end up accidentally hanging yourself with your own bootstraps. Suggestions of group-wank mental masturbation intended.
Enjoy your corporate white-collar-slave jobs. Enjoy your McMansions in Orange County (can San Francisco please secede just so we don’t have to share a room with those terks?). Enjoy your CEO status while you have it, James Taggart; just remember how that turned out for him in Act III. Enjoy your Gail Wynand zillions, if you’ve the sense to get your money out of $US before the American economy goes totally Weimar while you’re not paying attention. The smart guys among you already took their trips to Switzerland.
Enjoy the mistresses you take while denouncing prostitution as absence-of-integrity-incarnate. Enjoy the classist pseudo-self-esteem you prance around with, playing internet tough guy. Just remember that Howard Roark wasn’t too good to work in a quarry, and Dominique Francon knew quality when she saw it, even if the suffering proletarian she really cared about worked with his hands, didn’t speak as their deans, and had a hammer and a nail. I just hope that when you give thanks to the host and he says his after dinner lines to you that you think the Price was worth it. Personally, you twits, I think it’s about time you went off to shoot yourselves. You’re not the One they say you are.
Enjoy the Empire you’ve idolised. Enjoy your Faux News gigs on Pravda with Bill O’Reilly. Enjoy the Land of the They Think They Are Free. You’re more American than the President. Your good American innocence is so very touching (and you wonder why we still don’t trust the farang!? Oi!/…meshuggah)(=4). Oh, and if any of you wake up a little too late to the objective fact that your country’s turning into a totalitarian dictatorship, don’t even try getting a ticket out from me. It’s been tried, thrice. I’ve already turned down what would have probably been a six figure offer, not to mention a couple of tragically impossible requests from people of quality who are actually worth turning the boat around for before the ship goes down.
The Fountainhead= MISSING THE POINT. EPIC FAIL.
You’ve learned Rand’s worst habits well, but you aren’t fit to wash the toenails of the Great Woman you worship in your Anglo-gilded white-picket-fence non-church churches. Which you should have built according to the architectural specifications she carefully suggested for New York City’s Temple of the Human Spirit. You’re a disgrace to reality, to reason, to egoism, to liberty, and let’s even not talk about what you did to romanticism. Speaking of which: Michael Newberry, you’re a real romantic artist, and I deeply respect you for it, but your bigoted attitude towards prostitution has no excuse whatsoever, not if you actually read the books you read, or look at the paintings you paint, or dig the poetry you skillfully deploy as a rape-culture weapon. Ever hire a model for a portrait?
BIG EXCEPTIONS. ROLL CALL OF HONOUR:
Lady Barbara ben Rand, Marsha Enright (deep and humble bow), Jennifer Ianollo (who rocks), Robert Malcolm, Adam Reed (Int 20, Wis 17, Cha 3d6=18), Joshua Zader (deep bow… great website!), and everyone else who isn’t the problem who I apologise for forgetting to mention excepted. There are Objectivists who are among the best human beings in the world, and some of them… well, you know. I respect and regret your errors in judgment, and many people have the truest of reasons for their commitments to the Objectivist movement. Please excuse me, however, if I must finally say goodbye to you all. Left-libertarianism has done what you could not.
But there is a problem, and it’s as obvious as the purplish-black buboes growing on most of your necks. And if you don’t fix it, the person who will be hurt the most is the Great Woman, First-Rank-Philosopher, Hollywood Actress, immortal Ayn Rand, whose current status as Valkerie and demigoddess is beyond question. You’ve done more to discredit her than all the William F. Buckleys and Whittaker Chambers (I didn’t need that thought… ew) of the world ever could. She deserves a Heaven and Hell of a lot better, and I for one would like to see a movement which did a beautiful, magnificent, adequate, job of promoting and exploring the ideas of a dead white girl of world-historical significance. What in Midgard is wrong with you all? And this means YOU, Randroid 7-2521, du din f?@c3;b6;rbannade bortsk?@c3;a4;mda snorunge: you’ve managed to make one of the greatest poet-philosophers of the XX century a headache to even think about.
EPIC FAIL doesn’t quite cover it. You guys burn violas for firewood.
~=~
Thanks, Stephan, I’ve been wanting to say that for years.
~=~
(=1) And thanx to whatever counter-economist took the trouble to transrcibe this piece online! That takes courage. We all know that ARI are (or used to be) as bad as the old They Sue Regularly with their obsessive enforcement of illibertarian copyright laws. Of course they hate left-libertarians. Even the highest and noblest of Objectivist Orthodoxy knows full well that their fortune rests on the state propping up the virtual land titles they inherited from the Adventurer who did her hard work of clearing the stones and building the house for their intellectual estate. But I’m more than prepared to overlook the issue for those Randians who really live up her vision of what man might be and ought to be for. No one who wants to live in the world bites(==3) the hand that feeds them. But no double standards, please.
(=2) http://www.ancientways.com/ Please patronise. They’re very good people and the Bay Area won’t be the same if the current re…pression hurts them too much. And please give my best to the girl there who worships Freya, who I shall exceptionally admire for as long as I live, and who I miss more than everything and everyone else in North America.
(=3, ==3)Consensual vampirism doesn’t count (provided a Rothbardian contract, explicit or engraved invitation implicit).
Unfortunately, I’ve never previously been in a situation (sharing blood=NO) where I’ve trusted anyone enough to go above-and-beyond code for that kind of fantasy. Dru’… Darla… Spike… Lestat… =yes. I think I’m going to faint.
(=4) Oh, and there are plenty of racists in Randistan. Usually of the scientific racist we’ll-let-you-Jews-at-the-top-of-our-racist-pyramid-if-you’ll-help-us-screw-the-brown-and-black-people variety (how dumb do they think their intended shaftees are?). I won’t mention names due to some personal good deeds. But, FYI, it’s revolting. And- ho yay!- racism is still alive out there in Whitopia… a lout of guys have said things to me when they show me who they really are which they wouldn’t say in public when any actual human was involved. And it’s not rare. It’s like about 1 in 3, which is coincidentally the rule of thumb ratio low-class prostitutes give for what percentage of the male populations can be expected to act like jerks. And yes, I just smile and nod.
Araglin /#
WORD.
Incidentally, it’s for quite similar reasons that I think Plato ultimately pwns Aristotle (whose four-cause explanatory schema can only operate within the immanent field of intracosmic relatiy); J.G. Hamann beats Kant; and the Late Wittgenstein beats the Early.
*Altough, even Aristotle’s metaphysics is rent by an aporia: is metaphysics the study of being in general or the study of first being? cf. Booth, Aristotle’s Aporetic Ontology)
Aster /#
Araglin-
With all due respect, I must strongly voice my support for Aristotle in what Leonard Peikoff called the great duel of Western civilisation.
But I’m physically exhausted, and must get to sleep now or my neo-mom will kill me in the morning. So I’ll discuss the real issues some other time. With your leave, I’ll merely relate the words of a favourite(=) philosopher:
Goodnight. I’m not going anywhere. And see you at the season finale.
~ Aster
(=) Before his unfortunate Abelardian accident in season IV.
Roderick T. Long /#
If there’s a great duel of Western civilisation, I suspect Plato and Aristotle are on the same side of it 64.3% of the time.
He was tried for heresy?
Araglin /#
Aster:
With all due respect, I must strongly voice my support for Aristotle in what Leonard Peikoff called the great duel of Western civilisation.
Roderick:
If there’s a great duel of Western civilisation, I suspect Plato and Aristotle are on the same side of it 64.3% of the time.
Well, if my Neo-Platonic Masters (Proclus, Iamblichus, Pseudo-Dyonisius the Areopage, and Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Vico, Pico de Mirandola, and Nicholas of Cusa)* are right, Plato and Aristotle were actually on the same side 99.99% of the time! But, since they’re probably not right — on that point at least — and because I didn’t write a dissertation on Aristotle’s theory of future contingents, I’ll retreat to my fallback position that, when Plato and Aristotle do differ, neither one is systematically more right than the other.
Aster – So as to spare me the hazard of googling ‘pint of blood’ or ‘destroy the world’ (and thus raising any more red flags with the Authorities than I have to), would you mind telling me the source of your interesting vampire quotation? I imagine it’s from Angel, or is it from Buffy?
Araglin /#
Soviet Onion /#
Araglin,
Oh come on. What kind of educated person hasn’t read the works of the esteemed Blondie Bear?
Note: the key to his identity is in the word “pint”.
Rod,
You expect me to believe that? Everyone knows 89.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Soviet Onion /#
Aster, Nick and everybody else,
Why I Fight, for real, or at least the spirit of why I do.
Which is a Hell of a lot more palatable than the fallback attitude of “showing the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are” that I feel on my uglier and more hopeless days.
Soviet Onion /#
I just recently noticed that I’m starting to have fewer of those days.
Roderick T. Long /#
Excessively otherworldly/dualist/idealist/intrinsicist/rationalist viewpoints and excessively reductionist/materialist/psychologistic/subjectivist/empiricist viewpoints are both relatively easy to fall into (especially if one backs into one of them in the course of combating the other), because finding a stable middle ground between and/or dialectical transcendence of these opposed standpoints is philosophically quite tricky, and often slips through a thinker’s fingers just when it seemed they’d almost gotten it nailed down.
Case in point: I think one of Plato’s central insights was that logical principles can’t be grounded in anything more basic than themselves — but the form (pun intended) in which he chose to express this insight, the Realm of Forms, ended up trying to ground logical principles in something more basic after all, namely these metaphysical entities the Forms.
Stephan Kinsella /#
Aster, interesting rant. You may also enjoy The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex. It’s quite funny.
As for Carson, he does build on Mises and it is good that he has important insights on corporatism, IP, etc., but I disagree with many of his foundational views in particular his mutualist views on land and property rights. I think it is not progress but rather retrogression from standard Lockean views on property–but that is a substantive, respectful disagreement. I’ll have more to say on this later in other fora.
Stephan Kinsella /#
Soviet Onion et al.–re why you fight–here’s my post, Why I’m a Libertarian — or, Why Libertarianism is Beautiful.
Stephan Kinsella /#
Aster, for your roll call of honor–aren’t some of the people you praise the Randroid pro-war types?
Aster /#
everyone-
There are too many things on this thread which I would like to and ought to reply to, but regrettably can’t due to reasons of time, ZOMG Bangkok and mom (%#$@@#!! prayers being answered).
360d a few temples (turnwise), lost my shoes like eight times, wild tuk-tuk rides with aforesaid neo-mom (I HEART TUK-TUKS), already been scammed once (very clever, almost worth it), body massage=upper planes. I likes.
Araghlin, I owe you a conversation sometime not now when I’ve time. As for St, Augie (my ex’s name, not mine)…. I shouldn’t have gotten upset at you. Look, I’m just keeping sisterhood. He did someone vaguely related to me a bad turn over a zillion years ago, so like a good Southerner I have to get all upset about it. And he and Aquinas both said some with-firends-like-these lines that have not precisely been appreciated where I come from. But I appreciate the grace you show in not taking offense.
Still daggers over abortion, tho’. But since were under different tsates ann everyone knows the left-libertarian consensus is pro-choice on… anything, I see no reason or profit in bringing it up.
As a Christian, I have one very, very important question to ask of you:
Do monks still play chess?
Aster /#
Araglin.
The author of this quote was William the Bloody, nom de guerre ‘Spike’, played by James Marsters.
There are a couple of videos I’d like to post but… I just recieved two emails that threw my mood, and I don’t have the energy to write and find things at present.