Rudy as World-Spirit

“Yes, it’s some madness that Hegel dreamed up on his couch one afternoon.”

Hegel? Rousseau got there first, John; “forced to free” and all that. And why is it madness, exactly?

As usual, the liberal elite manages to be too clever by half and, in so doing, take our democracy for granted and even subvert it. Hegel, Rouseau, whatever.

What’s so eeeeevil/conservative about the idea of a “law-abiding citizen”? That’s all Giuliani is saying, people, plain as day. In a democracy there’s the lawful authority and the law-abiding citizen. And he’d better support the lawful authority, cause, there are people out there who bow to authorities we don’t recognize (unlawful!), five times a day even, and who would go the whole hog and not just take “a great deal of discretion” away from you.

Who is the biggest threat to your freedom? “Rudy as Word-Spirit” or Al-Qaeda?

Well I’m with Russell. You get the same thought in Kant (MEJ – Ladd pp 35-6):

bq. if a certain use of freedom is itself a hindrance to freedom according to universal laws … then the use of coercion to counteract it, inasmuch as it is the prevention of a hindrance to freedom, is consistent with freedom according to universal laws; in other words this use of coercion is just.

The Bertrand Russell gloss on Hegel in HoWP is nice though (quoting from memory): “Hegel defines freedom as something like the right to obey the police.”

…or maybe it should read ‘securing justice is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do not do. Oh and pay your taxes as well’

Yglesias is changing what Giuliani said in order to have something he can defend. Giuliani did not say “let’s have more police”, he said “let’s have more submission to the police”.

(incidentally, why not just say “let’s have less stealing”? And a pony? The answer to that is that Giuliani’s aim is to equate civil disobedience to crime, so that wearing a Get Out of Iraq t-shirt excites as much disgust in Joe Public as mugging and rape)

As I have said about Conservative laws in my own country designed to give fewer police more powers in the interests of cutting taxes without ceding control: I would rather pay more tax to support ten cops who can’t kick down my door than pay less tax to support two cops who can.

well, it’s been a long while since I was a Hegel follower, and I was mainly preoccupied with the Phenomenology and the Aesthetics, but I do remember that Hegel’s concept of freedom was a tad more complex and I think this commenter at MY gets it about right, as far as the political aspects go

Is there a problem with calling people Nazis? I guess I didn’t get the memo. (When I think of it, people do have these knee-jerk negative reactions to Nazis, so it’s hard for them to get a fair hearing. Yglesias’s ideas should really be considered on their merits, rather than ad hominem based on Nazi or Zionist affiliations that he may or may not have.)

What Giuliani said might be less objectionable if someone else said it, as part of longer discourse articulating what it meant. But for Giuliani it’s his whole philosophy of government. He plucked that one sentence from somewhere or another to make it his motto. (And it’s imprecise and completely wrong to call Italian-Americans Nazis. Scalia and Alito aren’t Nazis either, regardless of whether they do or do not model themselves on Mussolini.)

I mostly agree with Russell Arben “9%” Fox. There’s a lot of cheap libertarianism and anarchism about — if the rule of law is all you’ve ever known, you take its enabling effects for granted and only see its restrictive effects.

In frontier areas where there’s no overriding governmental authority (the Old West, isolated mountain districts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Atlas Mountains, etc.) everyone has to be armed at all times, and usually they’re impressed into the band of the nearest warlord, so that they can protect themselves from all the other warlords. I recommend Black-Michaud’s “Cohesive Force”, a study of vendetta and feud as organizing principles in stateless societies.

John,

Do you have any good suggestions for a ‘state of the art’ summary of the empirical evidence we have on the collective goods justification of the state?

I have lots of references following Ostrom on why the idea holds for the management of common pool resources in large scale collectives. But I want to have more references for other collective goods commonly used by political theorists to argue that we need the state. I am not thinking of game theory evidence but empirical study/testing.

John and Chris, Before anyone talks about Hegel I always advise them to look at J. Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends (Northwestern, 1996). In this case I’d recommend Part 2: ‘The Myth of Hegel as Totalitarian Theorist or Prussian Apologist’.

Freedom is the appreciation of necessity.

But the necessity in question is not, of course, determined by any “lawful authority”. The guy clearly is a fascist.

I know nothing about this potential leader of the ‘free’ world. Is he a Nazi?

No…I think Yglesias’ “creepy authoritarian” is closer to the mark. This is a pretty good summation.

Similar but opposite to the knee-jerk reaction to the word ‘freedom’.

Well soru, if the word hadn’t been twisted into “something Americans invoke when they’re about to open up a can of whoop-ass on a bunch of brown people,” there would be far fewer of us with a knee-jerk reaction to it.

Oh, wait. Around here I’m not “John”. Forget I said anything.

@Uncle Kvetch

huh? I think you got me backwards. Maybe you missed the word ‘opposite’?

I am all in favour of the de-Freedomization of america, although, like anything, you could take it too far.

Practical matters first:
Readiris is by far the best OCR I’ve found for less than $600 or so:

http://www.irislink.com

It’s controllable, pretty reliable, and handles character sets for many languages (including Cyrillic). Using it plus your mac’s in-built speech capabilities (assuming you’re running OS 10.4) you can turn .pdfs into machine-readable documents that you can listen to while you drive. Not that I advocate that sort of thing on several levels.

Unless you need a big flatbed scanner, the all-in-one scan/print/fax/copy machines are now so cheap that I suspect they may kill standalone scanners in 12 months or less. Canon make one for less than $200 that will take multi-page document feeds. Lexmark makes similar units that are quite a bit cheaper; I can’t remember now why I didn’t buy one. Bestbuy has them, you may eb able to find cheaper elsewhere.

Giuliani, in a friend’s memorable turn of phrase, is a “jack-legged little fascist.” As far as I can tell, he also seems to be fairly smart. I concur that he’s the biggest threat in the political game right now.

No dancing or nude protests…damn, what is he offering on the plus side?

33: OK. Matt is a Jacobin, Nazi, or Communist. It was uncivil and unscholarly of me not to mention all three.

As far as I can tell, radical Islam is a minor threat. Nuclear proliferation is the biggest problem by far, bu it’s still strictly potential, but we were able to deal with Chinese nukes even when Mao was being crazy, and N. Korea is a much more clear and present danger. And contrary to what people say, the mullahs aren’t madmen.

No one I know of has said that the Bush administration has been attentive to the key issue, nuclear proliferation. Quite the opposite, for example in Korea and in the old USSR.

Spreading the fear is a key part of the propaganda campaign for a more aggressive, basically imperialist foreign and military policy. The Bush / AIPAC / PNAC / Fox campaign is so egregious that it almost makes you believe that threat is totally fake. It isn’t, but there’s no real danger that the US will underestimate it.

No, Hobbes uses the image of a social contract to escape the state of nature so as to say to his audience, ‘it is in your rational self-interest to obey the dictates of the exiting state authorities even if you have not consented and some other imaginable political order than the one you have would be better for you.’ The risk of political instability is not worth trying to change the system on a rational self-interested calculation unless the state happens to threaten your survival.

Aaron – if I recall it’s a bit more than that, but as my copy of Leviathan is God knows where I shall have to defer to you (or, perhaps, find it in my rational self-interest to defer to you) until a later date….

Folks need a copy of the Leviathan? Here you go:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3207

America is built on a status quo (called the “Constitution”) which ensures citizesn to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The constitution of America (and the said lines) imply a capitalistic system of private ownership and free trade where individuals are only beholden to themselves, not their neighbors, their state, or a god.

Thus there is a Status quo in America, indeed ths basic status quo is what makes america, america. America is not a hodge podge of diversity or tolerance, but rather a country with ABSOLUTE rules of indvidualism and morality.

The counter cultue of 60s was not a broadening of American culture, but rather a negation. The hippies were a directly off shoot of SOCIALISM, something that is not America as dictated by the founding fathers in the Constitution.

Your also limited in your discretion to commit violence and violate private property. That’s the mission of lawful authority.

And, of course, you’re limited in your discretion to force your wife (daughters, sister) to wear a veil and, basically, dress up like Batman in public.

You can only find what Giuliani says controversial if you want to negate what makes America American.

If s-s-h-s isn’t a parody, I’d like to see them diagram that argument, with bubbles saying things like ‘liberty’, ‘life, ‘constitution’, ‘absolute morality’ and ‘hippy’, and lines connecting them labelled ‘guarantees’, ‘discretion’ and ‘dictates’.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

“Muslim women who veil in Western societies violate all these (our) norms. They are being immodest and invasive. They will succeed only in creating hostility. To every woman who decides to walk out the door looking like Batman and then complains of being ridiculed, I say, you are inviting it. Bear it or shed it.”

I imagine the no dancing law in Westminister is a health and safety issue – people dancing in pubs that don’t have any floor space set aside for it is likely to lead to accidents (and maybe on to fights, given the wrong sort of clientele), and especially in London with space at a premium you can imagine Pubs generally wont set aside enough room, even if they something like a dance floor. You could probably lump it in conceptually with rules governing the maximum number of people allowed in a nightclub at any time, which is usually related to the amount of floor space they have available.

I have to say I’ve spent a reasonable amount of my life in Westminster pubs and I’ve never seen anybody dancing in one.

Nothing to do with the law, just not the sort of place one would choose to dance in.

Stuart thinks his loss of freedom is just a “health and safety issue”. Ejh tries to rationalise it by pretending it was his own free choice. Hegel would be proud of you guys! :)

With respect to a scanner and OCR, I’d suggest using your digital camera — it’s much faster and you already have one. That’s how Google is doing it’s book scanning project. Clamp a tripod to a shelf above your desk, get a couple of desk lamps, to shine at an angle from the side and you’re ready to scan away (you can scan as fast as you can flip pages and press the shutter button).

You do have to be a bit careful about getting the pages straight if you want the OCR to work well. For that, I use ABBYY Fine Reader, which is very good, but pricey. I found an older 6.0 version for cheap. The latest version has a feature to straighten digital camera images, which works well (I tried the demo), but not well enough for me to cough up the extra cash (or, rather, I’m good enough at getting straight shots that I really can live without it).

And then when you scan, you can use the ‘text behind the page image’ form of Acrobat output. The cool thing about that is that you read (and print) the page images rather than the OCR’ed text, so it doesn’t matter if the OCR (or formatting) isn’t perfect. You still get full text searching capabilities.

I find that some text-only docs with no figures or graphics cover to full-text PDFs fine, but for others, use ‘text behind the page’.

Stuart at 57: ‘Do you lose freedom when someone restricts you from doing something you would never do in the first place?’

Yes. Your freedom is the range of things you really could do, if you chose to. The sign saying ‘no swimming’ (if enforced), my inability to swim, both unfreedom. Similarly, not being able to afford to go to the one nearby gym with a swimming pool is unfreedom. The difficult bit is deciding which freedoms and unfreedoms are worth protecting, paying for, or fighting for (not being allowed to dance is a limit on your freedom, even if you were never going to dance anyway, but is it an important limit?).

The possibly-parodic Star-Spangled Hair Shirt thinks that the only freedoms worth the effort are freedoms to buy, sell, and not be robbed. I doubt this. But this dispute is not going to be settled either by a definition of the word ‘freedom’ or by an appeal to the US Constitution. It might be solved by thinking about what kinds of freedom are valuable to east-African plains apes like us.

Aside to John Emerson: Gellner’s work on e.g. systems of trial by collective oath could be productively balanced by Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer’s anarchic management of conflict. The anthropological facts are one of the many reasons why Hobbes is dead wrong.

Novakant – I know it’s a caricature: the “:)” sign was supposed to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious. And there’s no disrespect intended. I like Hegel.

Sam C: I don’t think that Evans-P’s work is very generalizable. It worked sort of OK in a very particular circumstance.

The sign saying ‘no swimming’ (if enforced)

It’s unfreedom even if never enforced. Authoritarian regimes rarely have to enforce their laws against “undermining national unity” etc.; the point is the chilling effect.

abb1 in 67: ‘This is assuming that you do have a range of options, that the ‘free-will’ thing really does exist.’

No, it isn’t: that’s why the ‘if you chose to’ clause is in there. The account of freedom I’ve given is wholly compatible with determinism; indeed it’s pretty much straight out of Hume. Your range of options is the set of actions which are not closed to you by constraint, lack of resource, etc., not those which are available to you through mysterious causality-violating free will.

mattsteinglass at 66: ‘It’s unfreedom even if never enforced.’

Fair point, but I meant ‘enforced’ to cover chains in the head as well as the police.

With respect to a scanner and OCR, I’d suggest using your digital camera—it’s much faster and you already have one.

This is quite true, IF: you’re very disciplined about getting the pages straight and flat, and you have a good, even, bright lamp setup (and you put a bit of black paper underneath the page you’re currently photographing. Ideally you want some good, small, heavy weights to hold the pages in place and a special booth for doing the shooting.

I’ve wasted a few hours on this, and wound up spending a couple of hundred dollars on a scanner.

When you’re scanning for ocr purposes (or taking digital photos per slocum’s good advice), if the pages are thin, you’ll do well to slip a sheet of black paper behind the page you’re scanning to reduce noise from the back of the page.

Getting in such a tizz about one line of Giuliani’s is rather silly, but thankfully some people here (Belle at 17: Bravissima!) are pointing out the big picture. Yes, he’s said one thing that could be interpreted in a somewhat interesting light. BFD. Little Al Capone liked his milk and cookies, too.

Getting in such a tizz about one line of Giuliani’s is rather silly, but thankfully some people here (Belle at 17: Bravissima!) are pointing out the big picture. Yes, he’s said one thing that could be interpreted in a somewhat interesting light. BFD. Little Al Capone liked his milk and cookies, too.

Dang, Richard beat me to posting my advice about OCRing.

I read what wikipedia has to say about compatibilism. Best I can understand, you differentiate between ‘external’ constraints and the ‘internal’ (psychological) ones. Combined they only leave one single possibility, but you would prefer to minimize the external kind. Correct?

I don’t find it convincing. The distinction seems arbitrary, the approach is idealistic. In fact, all the constraints are of the same nature. You can’t fly because of gravity and you can’t watch Channel 5 because of the way electrical currents flow inside your brain. Both constraints are due to the physical laws of nature, they are not different in any significant respect. It seems that it’s only useful to differentiate this way if you want to maintain the illusion.

I understand that this is OT and has little to do with politics, except, perhaps, that a good dose of determinism could help balance the messianic complex most American politicians and many ordinary Americans suffer from.

Now, maybe ‘idealism’ is not the right word, it’s probably ‘dualism’ or something. This approach contrasts material phenomena against this “will” you mentioned. Sorta like ‘the ghost in the machine’ idea, even if the ghost here is a deterministic fella.

It seems that if you want to accept determinism and remain materialistic, it should be logical to assume that all there’s there is just a machine without any ghost inside whatsoever. But hey, what do I know?

It seems that if you want to accept determinism and remain materialistic, it should be logical to assume that all there’s there is just a machine without any ghost inside whatsoever.

But that’s exactly what compatibilists like Sam do assume. Everything may be pre-determined; there is no “ghostly” causality-violating free will. Such a position is not “dualistic” and it does not “contrast” human will with “material phenomena”. Willed action, on this view, is a special kind of physical phenomenon. These are worthwhile issues but they are off-topic here. If you do want to learn something about them, you might start here:

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014

What do you care, there’s not been a single on-topic comment here for 2 days. Are you a law&order kinda guy yourself? How does it feel to be one, I’m curious?

Ok, abb1, you’re just trolling. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have bothered responding.

Hey, engels, I was just trying to make a joke.

Still, I don’t understand, again, why chemical and electromagnetic processes in my brain should constitute a different category of constraints than, say, handcuffs.

If everything indeed is already predetermined, then the notion of a set of hypothetical options that would’ve been available to me had I been a different person (or rather a set of different persons) seems totally frivolous.