Utopophobophilia

I have to echo the short and very accurate comment by “JeffC.”

“But there is a straightforward logic to its application in this context: like Marx, Williamson evidently dreams of an ideal community in which we live ‘to discover better ways to serve one another.’ ”

‘Evidently’? How strange to so smugly use a word while wallowing in pride at the fact that one has no evidence. Even your quoted piece leads nowhere near this assumption. It is no wonder then that the remainder of your article spins a convoluted web of what, in the end, comes to nothingness as you state, “If it turns out that Williamson has really pulled it off – boy will I look like an idiot. No question. That said, I’m not going to read his book. ”

My grandmother used to say, ‘The empty box makes the loudest noise’ to let us know we were acting like fools. What do you think she would make of someone who took that phrase as a compliment?

Having read the book (I pre-ordered on Amazon, received it last week, and finished it the day it arrived), all I can say is…um…read the book.

Really.

I’m not saying you should read the book because it will provoke some sort of “Road to Damascus” moment in you. I’m saying you should read the book because talking about it without having read it makes you look like an idiot.

“In my post on Wright I remarked that, in a sense, he’s pushing against an open door: he wants Americans, who think ‘socialism’ is a dirty word, to be more open to utopian thinking.”

In a few more decades, “socialism” won’t be a dirty word any more. This Pew Research study shows that views of “socialism” are strongly associated with cohort. Currently, a total of 60% of Americans have a negative view of it, compared to 31% with a positive view. But the breakdown by age indicates that these numbers are being skewed by the elderly; of those aged over 65, a whopping 72% view it negatively compared to only 13% positive. In contrast, 49% of the 18-29 group (“millennials”) hold a positive opinion of socialism, with only 43% viewing it negatively. The groups in between lean more towards the elderly view, but not nearly as sharply.

It appears to me that the stigma of “socialism” in the US was based on two things: the long Cold War with the USSR, and the ability of the capitalist system to deliver a decent experience for working-class and middle-class Americans. But the Cold War has been over for 24 years, and American capitalism has far less ability and desire to sustain a middle class than it did in the 1960s and 1970s. So it’s not surprising that younger Americans dislike capitalism and are starting to warm up to socialism. (And it’s possible that the Republican use of “socialism” as a reflex insult is starting to backfire: if even the mildest steps towards a safety net are “socalism”, then the ultimate result will not be to demonize the safety net but to rehabilitate socialism).

I read the reviews on Amazon, (all 5 stars) and it seems that it is just as bad as you prognosticated. Here is a quote from one of them (amazingly 5 star – this was good?).

“There will be something of a collapse, and somehow institutions will persist after the collapse. The title suggests that the author will lead the reader from A to B. That does not happen. There is no discussion of the nature of the impending collapse, or a suggestion of the mechanics by which healthier institutions will reemerge.”

and later

“He provocatively claims that government is violence. Government likes to pretend it has a monopoly on violence. It is by nature coercive. The author draws comparisons between mafias and legitimately constituted governments, historical parallels between the rise of market groups, the Taliban, and English kings. The use of force is always the same. The consent of the government is a matter of choosing the lesser of evils.”

Market groups?

“Making his case for voluntary associations, the author makes the point that reputation is important. Many fracking operations operate with environmentally protective measures for an excess of what the law requires. They do this as a matter of professional solidarity with one another and the result is that when a company does accidentally despoil the environment, if they have been conscientious they will get lighter treatment.”

Oh yeah! Sure that’ll work. (And doesn’t relying on reputation destroy the concept of free entry in markets? Not to mention the possibility that someone could take over a company and decide to cash out the goodwill.)

Interesting. And I would say that the analysis stands for conspiracy thinking as well. Lots of people who espouse conspiracies do so precisely because they think they are being smart and cynical – as in, ‘You can’t pull the wool over my eyes.’

“It appears to me that the stigma of “socialism” in the US was based on two things: the long Cold War with the USSR, and the ability of the capitalist system to deliver a decent experience for working-class and middle-class Americans.”

There are also small matters like the inability of socialism to manifest itself on a large scale except in the form of terror.

You’re also inferring too much from the reaction of young people to the word “socialism.” The 18-29 cohort apparently has a 49% positive and 43% negative reaction to “socialism,” but it also has a 50% positive and only 28% negative reaction to the “libertarian” label. You’re likely to go terribly wrong if you place too much weight on what you can deduce from such numbers.

Obeying the law should be voluntary because the law enforcement apparatus can be abused?

John Holbo @13
I’m not sure if JeffC will return and speak for himself – but I think he is suggesting you are a fool for not asking for a free copy.

I sort of wonder whether this sentence from Williamson:
“we will discover new and better ways to serve one another,”
doesn’t become more realistic, and less utopian, if you replace one 5 letter verb starting with “s” with another. Why does he think one outcome is more likely than the other?

reason writes: I think he is suggesting you are a fool for not asking for a free copy.

But perhaps John doesn’t need another doorstop.

The author suffers from Conservativephobophilia.

“There are plenty of mainstream socialist political parties in Western Europe, and none of them rule by “terror”.”

Yes, in fact here is what the “socialist” rhetoric of today looks like (quoting from a WSJ article on a Hollande speach, which is the one I found on Google):

———————
“Our first duty is to stimulate the spirit of business and initiative in our country,” Mr. Hollande said in a speech at the Élysée Palace. “It is business that creates wealth, activity and jobs.”
———————

Some socialism indeed.

From the comments – “He’s a Berkeley educated nihilistic philosophy professor teaching in Singapore. “

Why are our smart phones so smart – getting better and cheaper every year

Moore’s law tells you how many transistors you can expect on a given silicon wafer. It does not tell you what you might use them for.

“Will someone PLEASE make me look like an idiot? ”

I did not read the Kevin Williamson book (or its title) either, but I’ll try to comply with your request in more general terms.

This is not the first time I’ve noticed John Holbo making arguments that fall into this pattern:

“There is no clear dividing line between night and day (there is some light in the night and less that full brightness in the day) therefore the night is the same as the day”

John Holbo’s thoughts about utopian theorizing seem to be an attempt to subvert Burkean arguments about the power of tradition, and he tries to do that by pointing out that most conservative thought contains elements of utopianism. Since no conservative argues for the eternal repetition of the same historical social arrangements, and since idealism often creeps in conservative thought (just like there is some light in the night), we are told that conservatives must suffer from cognitive dissonance and are mired in at least some form of performative contradiction. They should therefore drop the pretense and admit that they are just as utopian as the communitarians that they are criticizing (i.e. they should admit that the night is the day).

Obviously though, this kind of argument only works if you assume that the basis of conservative thought is exact repetition of historical social institutions. The argument falls flat if conservative thought uses tradition only by giving it an important voice in shaping what we believe to be the social institutions that are robust to the challenges of systematic ignorance and human moral frailty.

Since conservative thought does not (or at least should not) believe in the exact reproduction social institutions, it follows obviously that there will be a process of abstraction from history and also a process of insisting on reproducing only those aspects of tradition that are judged to be essential for the kind of robustness mentioned supra.

This process of abstraction might look superficially like the same thing as utopian theorizing. Indeed, they are opposites only as ends of a continuous spectrum (hence the Holbo fallacy that the night is the same as the day), but they are still distinct opposites.

The pure utopian says “to hell with history, we’ll build our society using our principle of equality from reason alone,” while the conservative says “to hell with the inessential aspects of history, we’ll build social institutions using the historically tested institutions of private property and religious morality.”

Only the same type of superficially that equates night and day on the basis that there is no bright line between them will equate the utopian and conservative approaches described supra.

Another comment is that “Liberals love to burn books”.

“I guess I think the problem with that is that it seems to me empirically false. […] It’s normal for conservatives to employ a ‘wipe-the-slate-clean’ rhetoric.”

What is a conservative supposed to do if by some miracle the North Korean leader decides that he’ll abdicate and use that conservative’s advice in reshaping the country’s institutions? (Please no insinuations that by using this example I’m equating the welfare state with North Korea. It’s an extreme example only to make the point obvious.)

From a superficial perspective, the conservative advice will be extremely radical relative to the NK social institutions — virtually all economic and political life will be drastically changed. Yet from the perspective of a conservative who has identified the principles of private property and religious morality as historically tested over the long term and robust to human folly, the recommended actions are not really radical when viewed in the long term. North Korea for him is just another illustration of the folly of departing too much from conservative principles.

You may want to disagree with the conservative’s claim that he identified correctly what makes social institutions robust, but that’s an entirely different line of argument than the one that you are making here.

Of course, if it turns out that some utopian project works well for a few centuries then this type of conservative argument will be in trouble — but we’re not there yet.

Social institutions which have persisted for millennia — like the family and religion — are likely to persist in the future, no matter what “utopian” political changes are made — I haven’t noticed they are absent in, say, France, or even Russia. The inertia of cultural continuity is virtually built in to most existing cultural systems.

new and better ways to serve one another

Holbo’s critics are right to call him a fool. Anyone familiar with the relevant literature would know that Williamson has written a cookbook.

What is “watering the tree of liberty from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” if not a utopian desire to reboot things and start fresh.

But I suppose that conservatives don’t see a problem here. Given that they believe that the second amendment gives them the right to destroy the government and start over. . . or put differently, that the Constitution gives them the right to overthrow the Constitution. . . they seem to believe that violent utopianism is a normal part of the process of running a government.

The crazy bastards. . .

@politicalfootball: I can’t believe it took 44 comments to get to a Twilight Zone reference. Honestly, it was the first thing that came to mind. ‘To Serve Man‘ indeed!

On North Korea, didn’t this happen in Iraq after the US invasion? Didn’t a crew of young utopian flat-tax think-tankers head over there to establish a Perfect State?

I do not doubt that there are more sympathizers of socialism in the 18-29 range than in the older set, but I very much doubt that it means there will be a much more sympathetic environment for socialism a few decades hence. It was ever thus–as Churchill, I’ve been told, put it: “If you aren’t a socialist before you’re 40, you have no heart. If you are after 40, you have no brain.”

Churchill didn’t say it. See Corey Robin’s post earlier: https://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/06/the-wrongly-attributed-statement-was-our-democratic-poetry/#comments.

It’s not true. For example, Boomers haven’t come to love segregation over time. Millenials are unlikely to become gay bashing anti-feminists who ruefully acknowledge that their crushing education debt is their own damn fault. There’s ample evidence that the effects of aging on political affiliation are real, complex, and not easily summed up in a pithy quote.

DBake: “And you don’t see any problem with this? Post Russian privatization, you see absolutely no worries with this?”

Niall: “On North Korea, didn’t this happen in Iraq after the US invasion? Didn’t a crew of young utopian flat-tax think-tankers head over there to establish a Perfect State?”

Phil: “Sorry, Alex, but you really couldn’t imagine a better exposition of the utopian mindset. ‘My principles are historically tested over the long term and robust to human folly, therefore we shall implement them in this country.'”

Note that the right wing in the U.S. does have something called paleoconservatism that has been making these exact criticisms from essentially since the time of Reagan.

The next step: Find some country to liberate us and replace our terrible tax code with a 15 percent flat tax.

The North Korea example illustrated perfectly fine the idea that conservative thought is about preserving or modifying social institutions using principles that actually passed the test of time – it’s not about preserving institutions as they are simply because they happen to exist.

But you don’t like the North Korea example so let’s talk about the US health care system instead. Here the problem with actually existing conservative discourse is precisely the opposite from the one you diagnosed: we have the fake conservative impulse of preserving a system simply because it exists, instead of using conservative principles (consumer choice) to modify a system that clearly failed and is failing on the financial side (the cost of health care increased more than the GDP over a significant period of time) .

Sure, today’s conservatives make some noises about relying on consumer choice, but that choice is usually restricted to choosing between different types of insurance instead of being extended to choosing actual health care (This is not to say that you should be stupid about implementing this idea and ignore the peculiarities of the health care market – but those peculiarities do not determine what a working health care system looks like to the extent that some on the left like to claim.)

The point relevant to our discussion is that conservative thought is not about preserving failed institutions simply because they exist and it is perfectly consistent with wanting to change such existing failed social institutions as long as they are modified using principles that passed the test of time.

You either didn’t digest or you didn’t buy this argument, but if you didn’t buy it you didn’t offer any argument for your rejection and you’re simply circling back to the claim that conservatives are supposed to support something merely because it exists.

(I don’t know why you insist on discussing someone neither of us read, someone you labeled yourself as the occasion and not the subject of conversation.)

Alex K. @ 67: “Actually, I was born in one of those Eastern European Communist countries…”

Such a claim is very easy to make on the Internet to grab a little extra street cred, and hard to prove or disprove. I’m skeptical.

Once again: just because Alex K is confused about this doesn’t mean that all conservatives are. There are some of them who are perfectly able to articulate the problems involved in suddenly replacing North Korea’s regime with “time-tested” “universal” solutions that the North Koreans have never heard of. But their conclusion is that the U.S. should not be going out and conquering other countries and imposing solutions on them, and conservatism as a whole is much more controlled currently in the U.S. by the people who want to do that.

But saying that conservatives really are utopians is an exercise in making bad categories, I think. Perhaps it would be better to say that they really are authoritarians. So naturally some of them look like left authoritarians. “Society should really conform to my particular beliefs, which I know are the best beliefs for everyone because (rationalization). So I really how everything should be, and what came before doesn’t matter.” Yes, conservatives do this quite often. Is that utopianism?

Or look back at the paleocons. Are they really less authoritarian because they aren’t utopian in the sense above? They think that America really is a tradition based on being white, English, Christian, heterosexual, and so on, and if you’re not part of that, you shouldn’t be here. They don’t have a utopian plan for you, they just want to drive you out.

Or back to Occupy. “Let’s create an alternate society in the public square. Who knows what it will be, but we’ll give everyone an interminable amount of time to help create it!” Is that less utopian because there’s no plan involved as such? Or are these utopians who, as most of the left would have it, just critically failed to theorize?

Michael Wharton (Peter Simple), pining for a return to feudalism, was the last true conservative. Even Buchanan and the paleocons just romanticise the highly contingent 50s

Josh G.:
“Such a claim is very easy to make on the Internet to grab a little extra street cred, and hard to prove or disprove. I’m skeptical.”

That’s a claim perfectly in line with the quality of your other arguments.

Rich Puchalsky :
“Once again: just because Alex K is confused about this doesn’t mean that all conservatives are. There are some of them who are perfectly able to articulate the problems involved in suddenly replacing North Korea’s regime with “time-tested” “universal” solutions that the North Koreans have never heard of. But their conclusion is that the U.S. should not be going out and conquering other countries and imposing solutions on them”

Believing that something works in organizing society and going around imposing it on other countries are entirely orthogonal issues — it’s not clear to what you’re objecting in what I wrote.

MPAVictoria:
“Ah yes. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed.”

The issue of the transition from one political system to another is a complex issue and I’m not sure that serious thinkers have good solutions to them, let alone politicians. That is what I meant, and not that conservatism is irrefutable.

Although, I do think that John Holbo’s argument here does not lead to a refutation of conservatism.

@42 “Social institutions which have persisted for millennia — like the family and religion”

The content of those institutions can change pretty drastically.

The understatement of the century.

“I’m more than convinced by his arguments that conservative “thought” isn’t about any specific type of program; it’s about domination. ”

Yes. But a good bit of left thought is all about domination too. Why one particularly totalitarian element in both got labeled “utopianism” is a bit of a question.

” I’m reading the OP as a kind of ironic exercise intended to demonstrate the intellectual confusion that passes for “conservative thought.””

I really do think that my description up at #51 is a better description of what the post is doing. It’s true that whenever John is challenged he’ll fall back on “I was only being ironic as always”. But something like this:

Cynicism about human nature feels like a shield against naive utopianism. But the truth is that thinking everyone around you is basically an angel who can be counted on to do exactly what you want them to do is not a typical, psychological temptation that needs to be warned against. The actually psychologically hazardous root of utopianism is utopophobophilia: you, unlike those utopian idiots, see the score. You can pull off the cunning bankshot – using human weakness against itself in some ingenious, generally beneficial way. You are the cunning social engineer because you are cynical. Cynicism breeds utopianism.

is not actually ironical. It’s an insight. But it’s an insight based on a conservative that John has created inside his head in order to have one whose thoughts make sense, rather than a conservative that actually exists.

Believing that something works in organizing society and going around imposing it on other countries are entirely orthogonal issues — it’s not clear to what you’re objecting in what I wrote.

Um, no. All state action is predicated on violence and the distinction between applying violence inside a particular set of borders is purely arbitrary. The difference between forcing white employers to hire black employees and invading North Korea is a difference in quantity, not in quality, both employ the application of force by Leviathan. Now, I don’t object to the first, whereas I would to the second but they are both, at bottom, applications of force.

@ Peter T

Nice job at avoiding the salient qualifier I gave which was social diversity. Yeah, when I interact with my close friends and family then there are different aspects from interacting with complete strangers.

I enjoy that most drivers with whom I share the roads are generally well-behaved and follow the same rules as I. That said, this orderly behavior is predicated on that they will be punished by the state for violating the rules. I am grateful that the state uses the threat of force to provide me with an orderly transportation system, but anyone who claims that such order is not predicated on violence is lying.

Yes, barring one’s personal relationships all interaction is either driven by the power of government, markets or some combination of the two. That you are blind to that reality does not change that reality.

Peter T 05.15.13 at 1:27 am:

Asher’s days are very peculiar: s/he only either buys things or gets ordered around. Funny – doesn’t happen to me.

You, apparently, find that you have something – maybe just more-than-nothing – in common with the people with whom you interact each day. Asher has apparently been forced (because what social being would freely chose such a daily existence?) by government (I fear, because a market would allow him to freely choose without fear of violence) to spend his days interacting with people who do not understand him.

My first guess is he’s in prison.

But he might work for WalMart.

hey, that name sounds as if you could have been born in a former Eastern Bloc country

The Easternest Blocest of them all.

@ Ogden Wernstrom

Consider the following thought experiment:

Imagine that the federal government passed legislation making the income tax truly voluntary, so there would be no punishment for anyone declining to pay. Well, the first year most would still probably pay, let’s say 80 percent. However, the next year a good number of that 80 percent would see the people not paying an decide to get in on the free ride. Within a few short years no one would be paying and the government of that particular nation-state would no longer exist and some entity, or entities, willing to exercise the force required to have a functioning government would take its place.

See, we share a body politic with 300 million other people and, for the most of us, most of our interactions are with other individuals with whom we have no sustained interaction. Just this past few months I have shared the roads with tens of thousands of other drivers, virtually none of whom I have a personal relationship. And, yet, the transportation system functions well enough that it meets my transportations needs.

Why? Because of rules. And what backs up those rules? Violence, or the threat thereof. Not only are the rules predicated on violence but the taxes collected to fund the transportation system are also predicated on violence.

See, everyone participating in this thread advocates violence, whether they admit to it or not. We may disagree about the particulars but large-scale human societies are as predicated on violence as are the conflicts between small tribal units. The difference between myself and those to deny their support of violence is that I am intellectually honest about it and they are not.

That you walk around and do not see all the things in your life that are predicated on force just means that you are intellectually blind.

@ Ogden Wernstrom

The reasoning goes something like the following:

A) Anything good cannot be predicated on violence
B) X is good
C) Therefore, X is not predicated on violence

Of course, no good reason is given for proposition A besides mere assertion. In fact, the proposition is obviously false.

@ b9n10nt

But Asher, it seems by your own reckoning that without violence-backed rules, antisocial driving would increase

Violence is as inherent in human life as is breathing. Without those rules there would be violence and with those rules there is also violence. We don’t have any choice besides which arrangements of violence with which we’d rather deal.

If the alternative to coercive government is seen to be increased suffering, then it hardly makes sense to condemn the act of governing as merely predicated on violence.

Of course it makes sense. We are simply choosing between different arrangements of violence and selecting which best suits our tastes. The difference between you and I is that I am intellectually honest about it and you are not.

The reason I won’t call taxation “theft” or call “state action” “violent”

This is not some libertarian attempt to backdoor the notion of “theft” into the violence on which taxation is predicated. Taxation is not theft. Taxation *is* violence. They are not the same thing. When a lion catches a gazelle it is not murder but it is violence. The entire system of rules that supports complex societies is predicated on violence and anyone claiming differently is a liar.

I reserve the term “violence” for acts that do immediate harm

If I shoot someone who I confront in my house and is holding a gun that is violence. If I surprise them at gunpoint, not knowing whether or not they are armed, and hold them at gunpoint until the police arrive that is also violence. The immediacy of what occurs is categorically irrelevant. The fact that they remain at gunpoint is predicated on the prospects of getting shot. Same for taxation.

The issue is not one of immediacy but of primary predicate. Just as the burglar with held at gunpoint by threat of violence so do we pay our taxes by threat of violence. Again, the immediacy of any particular event is irrelevant, the relevant issue is the primary predicate of a category of actions.

Again, everyone advocates violence, everyone. We simply disagree on the particulars.

Asher,
having read your comments, I tend to think you are on the right track. But I think it is important to distinguish between “violence” and “the (ultimate) threat of violence” – and I think you use them interchangeably. As has often been pointed out, the threat of violence for non-compliance with rules need rarely actually be carried out, and we label people requiring such coersion criminals. There is an important difference between a society ruled by widespread and random violence (otherwise called anarchy), and one rules by common rules backed by a (mostly latent) threat of violence.

“Yes, barring one’s personal relationships all interaction is either driven by the power of government, markets or some combination of the two. ”

I don’t think the distinction between the power of government and markets is real either. Markets depend on clear on enforcable property rights – which are in the modern world – a function of government.

@ reason

the distinction between the power of government and markets is real either. Markets depend on clear on enforcable property rights

Yep, markets, as we experience them today, are clearly a function of enforceable property rights created by government. That said, the function of the profit-seeking motive is clearly an evolutionary adaptation and governments just make it function more efficiently.

Barring close, interpersonal relationships people are going to do things for you because you pay them or because you have a gun to their head, and I think that’s what most people mean when they distinguish between the government and the market.

Rick Pucholsky
“I used to feel a lot more indignant at the latter before left-liberal protests at all the things that Bush did mysteriously went away once Obama was doing them.”

That is just not true. Don’t you ever read Glen Greenwald? The difference is that most left-liberal commentators don’t like them, most Bush supporters did. But we only get a binary vote in an election, and we care about lots of things.

@ reason

The idea that any government can be of, by and for the people with this chaotic agglomeration of the multitude of societies we call “the US” is absurd. What we have is an empire and to get to representative government would require breaking the US up into at least 15 different countries and probably closer to 30.

Asher:

I’m not yet sure if i understand what point you’re making. Let me try again:

I define violence as coercive action that, if taken, would result in equal or greater suffering than if the action had not been taken.

Thus: taxation = not violence because the absence of taxation would create harms ranging from criminal violence to diminished public health. Assaulting a neighbor over an argument about loud music = violence because the suffering posed by th attack is greater than that imposed by the loud music.

This is, I believe, how the term violence is conventionally used. What point are you making by removing the qualifier would result in greater or equal suffering than if the action had not been taken ?

And yes, I am juvenile. I contain multitudes. And why is effeminate an insult? The use of TEH VIOLENZ insinuates that you are fixated on the concept that you are uniquely honest about an important social reality (everyone promotes violence!) .

Look, can’t I play this game? Everyone supports a society based on empathy. Bush wanted war with Iraq in order to bring glory to his political associates. He empathized with their need to be accepted by others, which is why they sought fame and glory. Due to the preponderance of empathy in our culture, Bush even had to appeal to TEH EMPATHY of the public: free Iraqis from an oppressive dictator. Yes, all state and market behavior is an expression caring for others, the best we know how. And this caring, this empathy, pervades all consideration of public policy. I am special, i acknowledge this, you all are LIARZ [sorry, can’t help myself]. So delicate and profound are your feelings for your fellow man, you dare not risk emotional damage by exposing these feelings and so put on a mask of crude uncaring.

That said, the function of the profit-seeking motive is clearly an evolutionary adaptation and governments just make it function more efficiently.

I’m not sure it’s “clearly” any such thing.

Talk of democracy promotion in North Korea reminds me of that scene in one of the books (cant remember which one) that came out on the Iraq war, of a US official delivering a power point presentation to a room full of elites somewhere in Iraq, and opening with the line ‘welcome to your new democracy.. I’ve met you all before. Ive met you in Russia, and Nigeria. Ive met you in Cambodia..”

b9n10nt:

I see where you’e coming from re: “violence”, and you might even get the etymology to do some work for you, but that said, I think it’s far more standard to take violence to be more or less equivalent to the use of physical force. On the other hand, all of this is unnecessary to defeat Asher’s (bizarro) point—all you need is a distinction between a coercive measure and an act of violence. It’s actually pretty strange to think that these are one and the same.

(This is of course leaving entirely aside Asher’s implicit contention that the solution to basically any coordination problem requires coercive measures, a contention for which I’d like to see a bit more support. Then again, I might be a liar!)

principles of private property and religious morality as historically tested over the long term

It’s interesting that both of these “principles” are very much reflections of a given society at some point in history, rather than things that can be meaningfully specified.

Showing “religious morality” to be a reflection of society rather than a pillar of it is trivial; the LDS doesn’t keep coloureds out of the temple anymore, and the Protestant Revolution did in fact happen.

And it’s interesting that it was an occasion for feudal princes to seize church lands. You can no longer own a human being, and unlike the feudal lord, the modern owner of real estate can’t cede land to a foreign power. The questions of what constitutes “property” and what “rights” one has to it are in constant flux; the contemporary conservative does not hew to any platonic ideal of “property rights” (however fond he may be of the phrase as a rhetorical device) but rather seeks to push that flux in a particular direction.

@ b9n10nt

My question remains: what follows from using the term “violence” to include the I.R.S. if we are not condemning the existence of the I.R.S. or suggesting that such an institution is unethical? What is the point that Asher is making?

The point is that violence is not inherently unethical. Taking the reins of power and implementing policy involves forcing others to do what you think they should do. Sometimes violence may even be an ethical obligation.

I think the hang-up comes from a misunderstanding of the term “ethical”, which comes from the Greek “ethos” meaning “shared understanding”. The problem is that most people in the world do not have shared understanding and that is why ethics is particular and local, not universal. What is ethical in one time and place and to a particular community is not to another, and there is no higher mediating set of ideals by which to compare the competing, even warring, ethical notions.

specific, detail [sic] argument

I don’t think you know what this means. Anyway, what’s the going rate for telling a stranger the time in your part of the world?

Asher #114: To live in mass society means that throughout our lives we interact with tens, even hundreds, of thousands of individuals, most of whom we have zero personal relationship. To get such people to do what we want we either pay them or hold a gun to their head, i.e markets or government.

Those are two methods; they aren’t the only two methods.

Government is unique in being able to make offers you can’t refuse and retain its legitimacy, if it does so according to accepted procedure (i.e. law). But government is also capable of making people offers they *can* refuse, and often does — e.g. all of its employees. Furthermore, as has already been pointed out upthread, markets can only exist under the sheltering hand of government, coercing people to buy rather than shoplift. (This is done by threats of violence, as you correctly point out.)

When government both makes the existence of markets possible, and also sometimes enters them to do business, “markets or government” doesn’t look like much of a classification system. Those categories aren’t even disjoint, let alone exhaustive.

Asher #112: Anyone who claims to have a general faculty of caring for all “fellow man” is a snake oil salesman who is trying to sell a rotten bill of goods.

Seems awfully sweeping to me. While I do think that public institutions shouldn’t be designed so that they can only function when everyone has such a sense of caring, I wouldn’t go so far as to deny that *anyone* has it. Heck, I wouldn’t even deny that I have it (although I could be fooling myself).

I suppose you could try to analyze, say, js’s example of telling a stranger the time in terms of some kind of enlightened self-interest — you never know but that you’ll meet that stranger again in some situation where their goodwill will be valuable to you, so you might as well invest in it if you can do so cheaply. That may even be correct for some or most people. But if people are willing to do that sort of thing even when the prospect of such a return is remote, how different is that really from an actual concern for fellow humans? Only that you can’t rely on it when the cost is higher?

@MPAVictoria

People who claim to have such a universalist, general feeling of “caring” for humanity are simply preening, seeking to elevate themselves above the unwashed masses. It’s no different from have to have the latest fashions or discovering the hot new indie band before anyone else does.

In fact, in my experience, the people who claim to have that higher “caring” tend to be rather crappy at it on the personal level, which is where caring really functions.

Strangers who claim to care for you probably just want to rule you.

Asher is doing a standard, stupid U.S.-libertarian routine, which he’s modified the end of to try to act tuff-n-stuff instead of shocked. The classic U.S.-libertarian thing is about MEN WITH GUNS. If you don’t pay your taxes, MEN WITH GUNS come make you pay them. In fact, any law or regulation, no matter how trifling, ends up getting enforced by MEN WITH GUNS if floated enough, therefore, all government is based on violence.

This goes along with Asher’s other bit: “To get such people to do what we want we either pay them or hold a gun to their head, i.e markets or government.” But, of course, markets are just as much based on MEN WITH GUNS as government is. Break a contract — and yes, if you keep refusing to pay, MEN WITH GUNS will make you. Nor are contracts voluntary in some way that governments aren’t. Do you need food and water to live? Well, you’re gonna be making implicit contracts with somebody. Do you need land to walk on and people to interact with? Then you’re gonna be signing up with some government. It’s not their problem that the only voluntary part is which one you choose.

So Asher think he’s tuff-n’-stuff because unlike U.S.-libertarians he’s willing to admit that it’s all based on violence, and he’s good with that. But he’s emptied it out into a completely meaningless category. If everything outside of family and friends is “violence”, then the concept of violence becomes more or less useless.

And of course this tired bit retains another part of its U.S.-libertarian heritage, which is that these people don’t believe in society. To most people it seems pretty obvious that most people are socialized into implicit societal rules, and only rarely need the threat of violence or actual violence in order to reinforce those rules. But under the U.S.-libertarian account, primitive humans don’t exist in tribes, and humans are not basically social, and the whole concept of society basically doesn’t scan.

Oops, I posted while Jerry V. above was writing.

“So I’m advocating violence. And? By this standard literally everyone is always advocating some kind of violence anyway.”

Yes, exactly.

@ everyone

Yes, exactly.

Yes, exactly. Everyone *does* advocate violence, and anyone claiming that they have a handle on *true* justice and that all existing justice is illusory is just after power and prestige. There is no one true justice – there are simply different systems of justice appropriate for facilitating different types of life and anyone claiming differently is merely engaging in metaphysical handwaving. Life creates morality and it necessarily follows that differences in morality implies differences in life-types, thus, the notion of a universal human brotherhood is simply a particular moral claim no fundamentally superior to any other set of moral claims.

Violence is no more an analytical tool than is an arm or a chair. We evaluate different arrangements of violence based on the ends they aim. A *good* result does not make violence into non-violence, it merely justifies that violence.

@ Rich Pulchasky

Asher is doing a standard, stupid U.S.-libertarian routine, which he’s modified the end of to try to act tuff-n-stuff instead of shocked. The classic U.S.-libertarian thing is about MEN WITH GUNS. If you don’t pay your taxes, MEN WITH GUNS come make you pay them.

Libertarians get this correct. That said, I am not a libertarian and libertarians draw the illogical conclusions because they aren’t usually aware of some of the premises under which they are operating. Libertarianism, like any flawed ideology, has bases in reality and libertarians get this correct. We pay taxes because if we don’t men with guns come and put us in prison, shooting us if we resist. This does not mean that taxation is some fundamental wrong, since the vast majority of people readily agree that some sort of taxation is required for the sorts of societies in which we wish to live.

Taxation is violence, it’s just that the results of taxation justify that violence.

markets are just as much based on MEN WITH GUNS as government is

This is simply incorrect. Trading is a natural human activity and has been around since before the dawn of time. Yes, current markets as we experience their function are a product of government but that is built on innate human functions. As one who is not a libertarian I don’t have any bias between paying someone to do something or holding a gun to their head to get them to do it; they are appropriate in different situations.

Do you need land to walk on and people to interact with? Then you’re gonna be signing up with some government. It’s not their problem that the only voluntary part is which one you choose.

I figured out a very long time ago that nothing we do is strictly voluntary; in other words, I grew up. In the strict sense, voluntary is illusory. “Free”, in the strict sense, resides in the realm of spirit and is, thus, immune to rational inquiry.

concept of violence becomes more or less useless.

That’s because violence is only a means. We are interested in the ends at which violence is aimed.

which is that these people don’t believe in society

I very much do believe in society. Unfortunately, the Cathedral has decided that Western societies don’t deserve to exist and, as witnessed by the revelations about the British Labour Party in the past few years, have undergone a sustained effort to destroy society. If maximizing personal autonomy is the primary source for all human goods then anything, including society, which is not voluntary must be destroyed.

@ js

the limit is generally pretty remote

Doesn’t matter. If it exists, at all, then it is not strictly voluntary. Libertarians get this correct, they understand this, but they draw incorrect inferences from it.

@ MPAVictoria

Really?

Yep, really.

Look, the alternative to liberal autonomy theory is political self-determination, allowing groups with similar notions of life and the good to form political units. Society is real. But America isn’t a society but an empire comprised of many different societies, ruled by a ruling class motivated by one of the prime human instincts: the need for prestige.

I would point out that the criticism of libertarians on their notion that there is no such thing as a society does not make the case for broad-based socialism, to put it loosely. In fact, society is more intact and *real* the smaller and more unitary/homogeneous the group.

@ chris

When government both makes the existence of markets possible, and also sometimes enters them to do business, “markets or government” doesn’t look like much of a classification system.

Except the money required by the government to enter into those contracts is collected by coercive taxation.

Several philosophers have said there there is also a Social Contract, implied or explicit, under which citizens agree to pay taxes in order to have the contracts they enter into enforced by the government.

@ Harold

I am, generally, favorably disposed to social contract notions. That said, every social contract that exists only does so by dancing on the graves of previous social contracts that no longer had any use. The bodies of those contracts being broken by violence. Amusingly, I have encountered a few Brits that claim the American states are still legal possessions of the British Crown.

Leftists have this irritating habit of dancing around screaming “social contract, social contract” where, clearly, none exists or where the same political space is cluttered with multiple social contracts, which is the situation in the US, today.

The bodies of those contracts being broken by violence.

Mercy. All of them?

clearly

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Well, there are societies based on love and societies based on law. Most people would prefer to live in a society based on law.

I’m not arguing because I haven’t actually figured out what your point is supposed to be. Ok, violence. Now what? You’ve used the word “clearly” a few different times throughout your posts, but none of the things you are using it to are “clear” at all. In fact, they’re highly tendentious and I don’t really get why you think it’s just so obvious.

@ Harold

Well, there are societies based on love and societies based on law. Most people would prefer to live in a society based on law.

Um, the guy who wrote The Social Contract based his notion on an emotion related to love, namely, pity.

See, here, we got this nice little thingy call The Social Contract. And, now that we’re in the social contract, we are gonna tell what’s what based on our particular conception of good, freedom, etc., and if you reject our particular notions that makes you a breaker of the social contract, see.

What you’re going to see over time is people simply dropping out and doing as little as possible to survive while contributing as little as possible to the existing social contract. At some point, that social contract will simply be untenable, and what can’t go on, won’t. Either the existing social control will be imposed by nothing more than brute force or it will dissolved and be replaced by a successor(s) that wil squabble over its carcass.

Asher, a question.

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

Rousseau would have probably agreed with Asher, since he thought that the social contract could only work in a small city-state.

Our social contract, though, is based on Locke (and St. Thomas Aquinas).

Oh Asher, you really have no idea just how funny and unwittingly apposite your answer is.

Now describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.

Hmm, probably a Nexus 5 at best.

And why do you think “effeminate” is an insult?

Way to ruin the fun user.

@Asher: Here’s the thing. You think you’re a credible voice, because everything you’re saying makes sense to you.

Well, it would, wouldn’t it? You’re running error-checking on the same hardware that made the original mistakes, if any: you won’t see your own errors.

[It’s a pretty common problem, it’s why people disappear up their own arseholes if they spend too much time hashing stuff out in their own heads and not enough time checking what other people think. You need the external input or your [inescapable, but fixable] mistakes will not be fixed and will thus compound.]

Nabakov, you’re almost making me feel bad for the guy. (Not that it wasn’t brilliant.)

The Cathedral can only titter and shake its head for so long. Your time is coming.

Dude, what the fuck are you talking about?

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html

The Cathedral is the vast monolith of post-modern left-liberal thought. It pretends to be *the* true and final Logos of man in his ascension to collective Godhood. It’s sort of a snide reference to the Matrix. You are all just cogs in the Cathedral; remember it, you’ll start hearing it a lot in the coming years.

I hereby apologize for attempting to introduce a modicum of sense where clearly none existed!

@ John Holbo
Call like things alike – Nietzsche

You can only go around so long calling anyone with whom you disagree slurs like “fascist” or “racist” before they lose any currency. Don’t care. At all. And before you know it enough people will also regard those terms as worthless that it will be a big problem for you.

It was the One’s purpose for our hologramatic universe to serve as a teaching instrument by which a variety of new lives advanced until ultimately they would be isomorphic with the One. However, the decaying condition of hyperuniverse II introduced malfactors which damaged our hologramatic universe. This is the origin of entropy, undeserved suffering, chaos and death, as well as the Empire, the Black Iron Prison; in essence, the aborting of the proper health and growth of the life forms within the hologramatic universe, Also, the teaching function was grossly impaired, since only the signal from the hyperuniverse I was information-rich; that from II had become noise.

What exactly is the point here? Imperialism and national self government are the same because violence; morality is a function of life form is a function of power/force/violence (all very Nietzsche, I guess); therefore find your ethnos/ethos and figure out whose brains you’re going to blow out. Is that about right? Can’t say it’s very coherent but, well there you go.

I can’t tell whether this has gotten more amusing or less.

I’d say more. The linked piece in 164 is priceless—though perhaps in the sense that it’s worth shit.

“I’d say more. The linked piece in 164 is priceless—though perhaps in the sense that it’s worth shit.”

Yup.

And the comments are, if possible, even crazier than the post.

Particularly “interesting” is the guy at the end who seems to think that the whole modern world is the result of a nefarious Jewish conspiracy, and explicitly argues against the very concepts of tolerance and equality. Indeed, he seems to take it for granted that others are inferior to him.

A lot of them also seem to hate Christianity, interestingly enough.

js:

Oh, the view is obvious enough I think, once you take away the weird rhetorical tics and unnecessary digressions…

Thank you, js, for summarizing the bulk of Ashole’s posts, which I did not bother to read. I thought I saw where this was going in her first couple of posts, and the bits I read beyond that appeared to be distraction/redirection tactics and misuse/overuse of the word “clearly”.

I started to feel sorry for her, since she has to put up with a world that accomodates us in ways that do not put her clearly correct ideals above all else, but then I realized that any sympathy for her would also be contrary to her beliefs. If we start to agree with her, I’m afraid that may shatter her world view.

It seems that Asher won’t have much more time for this discussion because his 2-week grounding by his mom from EVE online for that Jell-o incident is going to be over soon.

Oops
“in some form of another as a contribute to group security and survival”

… in some form OR another as a CONTRIBUTION to group security and survival …

But of course you can’t have any trading without the threat of violence against people who would rather just steal than trade.

To be fair, you could argue that originally this threat wasn’t institutional — each person carried out their own threats of violence against anyone who stole from them, and people who lacked the power to make those threats credible were in fact routinely robbed of anything valuable they didn’t manage to hide. (Sometimes enslaved and raped, too. Ah, the glorious state of nature.) And this kind of society could still support a limited kind of market, as long as everyone came well enough armed to make others think that the risk of robbing them was likely to exceed the gain.

I believe most people would describe that situation as a dystopia, but as someone may have already observed on this thread, the idea that one man’s utopia is another’s dystopia and vice versa is almost as old as those two concepts themselves.

When the state threatens to punish robbers *even when it is not the one being robbed* you could argue that is a legitimate change from the prior state of affairs. And expands access to the market to people who can’t defend themselves.

Or maybe alpha gorillas do the same thing, I dunno.

Why is it that when men get married and have their own biological children living with them that they skew so heavily right?

How do you propose to establish the direction of causation? People with more convention-oriented personalities are more likely to live conventional lifestyles.

Why is it that when women have children and require the state for large amounts of support that they skew so heavily left?

My first guess is that they’re hostile to people whose political agendas are likely to result in the starvation of their children. I don’t think that requires a hell of a lot of explanation, really.

“Why is it that when women have children and require the state for large amounts of support that they skew so heavily left?

“My first guess is that they’re hostile to people whose political agendas are likely to result in the starvation of their children. I don’t think that requires a hell of a lot of explanation, really.”

Yes, caring unselfishly about others is a peg (round or square) for which the head or Asher contains no holes.

Beats me why Asher and his ilk think they’d actually move up the food chain if their preferred ideology was ever actually enacted.

On a lighter note, what do you get if you cross a libertarian with a Mormon?
Someone who knocks on your door just to tell you they can.

Patriarchy was enforced through violence. The Roman patriarch could exercise the death penalty on his wives, concubines, infants, children, and slaves. The vendetta was also used in outside the family.
I have heard there is a theory that universalizing religions (such as Buddhism) are associated with the rise of trade, though I don’t know what evidence if any there is for this theory.

Nabakov @186
Just for info, Asher is not a libertarian, but I’m not entirely sure whether he is something worse or better. My guess is that he maybe does care unselfishly about some others, but is very choosy about who they are. He certainly is not in favour of abstractly caring about others.

“Patriarchy was enforced through violence. The Roman patriarch […]”

Yes, but that runs the risk of making familial violence exotic or distant in time. In the contemporary U.S. there are still plenty of families in which children get beaten in various ways for doing something wrong. And that’s socially accepted violence, and not what society thinks of as child abuse.

You can only have this idealized view of the family as free from impersonally dictated social violence if the state takes it over for you. There are some societies in which, if children do something wrong, parents have to punish them because no one else will, unless they want to start an inter-family conflict which is generally much more dangerous. In contemporary industrialized societies, the state has been taking on more of its so-called monopoly of violence away from the family, and conservatives complain about this, but it also allows them to idealize the family sphere.

Mao Cheng Ji @193
I should intervene a bit here to escuse my own careless thought patterns from earlier. We need to be VERY careful about using the word “government”. A “government” doesn’t perform violence – it (through agents) authorises individuals, in special circumstances, to use violence. Government is not a single actor, it is something quite complex, and all the different parts of it don’t act with a single purpose or even a single controlling unit.

One of the great disservices of the libertarian noise machine, is how they allow us to forget this. They like to treat an amorphous process as though it was an invading alien being. We shouldn’t fall into this trap.

Libertarianism combines anti-statism with property fetishism. Property fetish is the main part, anti-statism follows. One can easily be an anti-statist without being a libertarian.

It’s like Terkel said, at the peak of the cold war: “Suppose communists come out against cancer. Must we come out for cancer?” I’m not comparing the government with cancer, but it’s the same idea.

Ronan(rf) @108, please try to remember the name of that book!

Lee A Arnold – I actually remembered it from Timothy Mitchells Carbon Democracy, he quotes it from p280 of Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards(which I havent actually read)

There’s one more amusing thing about this later part of the thread —

“Leftists have this irritating habit of dancing around screaming “social contract, social contract” where, clearly, none exists or where the same political space is cluttered with multiple social contracts, which is the situation in the US, today.”

All of this stuff about violence, violence everywhere, and how the state’s use of violence is necessary to regulate it, and the thought experiment of the social contract, is straight from Calvin and Hobbes. I mean, straight from Thomas Hobbes. In a sense U.S.-libertarians are still being shocked at Hobbes, and Asher has become a Hobbesian. But Hobbes does not map easily to current left-right distinctions, because his thought has been adopted to all sorts of foundational positions across the spectrum.

So the “leftists love the social contract” talk… well. I think that someone who actually understood Hobbes would be very surprised to hear that the current U.S. is littered with multiple social contracts, presumably because we don’t have an absolute dictator. But mostly this is just like what happened with Machiavelli. After _The Prince_ was published, everyone had a good time accusing everyone else of being a Machiavellian.

It may, for example, also be “agreement”. We figured this out in our regular group bullshit sessions during recess, out on the 3rd grade elementary school playground.

Agreements commonly include a term to the effect that whoever breaks the agreement shall be punished by violence from the other parties. Including agreements made on elementary school playgrounds.

Indeed, you could view society as agreeing not to murder each other, and also agreeing to punish anyone who does. (Modern societies take it even further, e.g. punishing people who interfere with official attempts to find and punish murderers.) Is this more usefully understood as an agreement or as a threat? Well, it’s both, isn’t it?

@ reason

Since you appear the only one, here, actually capable (interested?) in intellectual discussion I will address some of the things you’ve said.

First, several months ago I had a very interesting discussion with a standard, and very smart, Misean/Rothbardian libertarian on the nature of money. My position is that money, of the type we experience, is a function of power, and his was … still not quite sure. Anyway, we were discussing the issue of inflation and my position was that inflation is primarily a political phenomenon, rather than a monetary one, and arises from a loss in confidence in government in multiple areas.

You need to carefully distinguish between the concept of “money” and the concept of “control of resources”, which are related, but are not the same thing (most clearly the difference is apparent in a liquidity trap where creating new money mostly doesn’t reduce the resources available to others with old money.)

Which is why what is considered money changes over time. See, money is simply a tool for engaging in various economic and productive activities and arises as a response to those activities. One aspect of what’s probably going on in a liquidity trap is that of social psychology and what is going on in a liquidity trap is that people are simply not sure of the relation of what is called money to future economic activity, which relates to the legitimacy of what we call government.

Anyway, the point is that coercive function of government is extant in money even in things like the liquidity trap, because government money is foundationally a function of government power, it’s very existence is a function of political power. If you disagree then lobby politicians to pass laws removing any punishment for not paying taxes and see what happens.

You must remember the arguments about gift culture – that suggest that this is in general just not true. And government and taxes are also natural human activities that have been around since before the dawn of time

Agreed, and I have argued this issue with many libertarians. Both socialists and libertarians have their latent, but different, noble savages hidden in almost everything they say. The fact is that something resembling both markets and government, in various forms, are natural to human beings.

And trading is also backed ultimately by violence because of the danger of cheating.

Yeah, sure, I don’t disagree with this. The problem with the socialists is that they don’t understand that in every generation there is going to be a significant minority of people who simply aren’t of any value to other people and to society, as a whole, and that lack of value is due to their nature, *not* a function of oppression. In the past, such individuals were culled, killed, enslaved, drank themselves to death, whatever.

The endevour of human life is *both* naturally cooperative and competitive and the socialists seem to think that they can cooperate their way out of competition. Not. Ever. Gonna. Happen. And when there is competition there are going to be relative winners and relative losers.

Traders, in more anarchic times, tended to carry weapons with them.

There is a functional difference between using weapons to facilitate economic activity and using it to hinder economic activity. That said, both are natural parts of human life and the notion that we can use ideas to transcend either is ludicrous. One thing that’s interesting is that in ancient times many ruling governmental elites were raiders that settled down and instead of pillaging an area and moving on began to regularize pillaging, what we call taxation, in return for protection and even, sometimes, the production of public goods.

in some form OR another as a CONTRIBUTION to group security and survival

Don’t have a problem with this, as long as you keep in mind that “group” implies insiders and outsiders and that there is going to be inevitable competition between groups. One primary aspects of in-group cooperation is to better foster competition with outside groups.

My main beef with those who call themselves “socialists” is that they studiously ignore the natural trade-off between diversity and unity. The more you have of one the less you have of the other. Both are important and maintaining a balance between the two is one of the most important tasks of any group. Any time you expand one you reduce the other.

@ Rich

it’s the start of the path that makes the whole bit about MEN WITH GUNS so silly. OK, if violence is everywhere, then violence is everywhere, but what are the particular institutions through which a society’s final sanction of violence is expressed?

You’re confused. I am not a voluntarist. And there is no truly “final” sanctioning entity. No social contract is truly final. Every social contract rises and every single one of them fall and their particular “justice” is but a moment in time.

Chris #204 — The question is not the existence of punishment for infractions by members of an institution, it is whether the institution is predicated on violence. “Predicated” means “based upon.” If you can exit the institution or you can legislate to change the institution, then it is not predicated on violence.

@ Lee Arnold

By that standard home invasion burglary is also not predicated on violence, as long as the inhabitants leave the house.

Further, lots of people escaped Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, so they must not have been predicated on violence, either.

Violence or “time out” or a fine.

This bears repeating. And repeating. If you start with some mundane violation of contract—non-repayment of loan, parking without a permit*, etc.—there’s no really easy or obvious way to trigger a violent response (within the bounds of the law, obv.). You’d have to keep refusing to accept or comply with the penalty—over and over and over and over again…, and again. And _even_ after all that, we don’t for example debtor’s prisons anymore. So, either you’re going to have use “violence” in so loose a fashion that it’s basically meaningless, or else it’s simply not true of the vast majority of contracts that they are “backed by violence” in any obvios sense.

“You’re confused. I am not a voluntarist. And there is no truly “final” sanctioning entity.”

No, I’m not really confused. I don’t have any interest in what you particularly are, so long as you’re adopting this easily identifiable U.S.-libertarian script. It’s the script that people are going to encounter in other contexts, and thus it’s the script that has any potential broader interest.

And by final I didn’t mean that there’s a final sanctioning entity, I meant that violence is society’s final sanction. The whole “everything is backed by violence!” thing falls down, as js writes above, if you observe that most punitive interactions are not in fact backed by violence. If you don’t pay your traffic tickets, or even your taxes, then in most countries you have to go through a whole lots of cycles of escalating punishment before violence will be used on you, and even then you have to make yourself pretty determinedly obnoxious in order for that to happen.

“At some point, one segment of a population is going to be so useless to such another large segment of a population that the latter is going to have enough political power to simply ignore the existing social contract, form a new one and exclude the former group.”

So ‘find your ethos/ethnos and figure out whose brains you’re going to blow out’ was about right.

@ GiT

So ‘find your ethos/ethnos and figure out whose brains you’re going to blow out’ was about right.

My personal preference is peaceful separation. I think the current US is too unwieldy to be governed effectively and it would be best broken up into somewhere around thirty different countries with a period of time for everyone to sort themselves out by the sort of government and citizenry they prefer.

I mean if “oppressed” peoples are so “oppressed” isn’t the obvious solution to allow them to form their own body-politic?

Asher #220: “I think the current US is too unwieldy to be governed effectively and it would be best broken up into somewhere around thirty different countries”

Your other complicating confusion is this question of the size of aggregates, See also:

Asher #79: “it makes no sense to speak of “community” where you lack a large array of commonalities.” #102: “to get to representative government would require breaking the US up into at least 15 different countries and probably closer to 30.” #114: “most people in the world do not have shared understanding and that is why ethics is particular and local, not universal… there is no higher mediating set of ideals by which to compare the competing, even warring, ethical notions.” #126: “There is no one true justice – there are simply different systems of justice appropriate for facilitating different types of life…differences in morality implies differences in life-types, thus, the notion of a universal human brotherhood is simply a particular moral claim no fundamentally superior to any other set of moral claims” #130: “society is more intact and *real* the smaller and more unitary/homogeneous the group.” #135: “every arrangement of any sort of social institutions will be derived from one particular set of life-types that work together and will be biased against other ones, none inherently superior or inferior to one another.” #136: “the same political space is cluttered with multiple social contracts” #141: “the proper object of the social contract is the real, lived lives of a shared community with a common body of traditions, heritage, language, etc., in other words, an ethos.” #146: “What you’re going to see over time is people simply dropping out and doing as little as possible to survive while contributing as little as possible to the existing social contract. At some point, that social contract will simply be untenable, and what can’t go on, won’t.”

Actually, I think that what you are going to see over time will be quite the reverse, on that last one…

Let’s put aside the assertions which are not really in evidence. It is interesting to me that there is no acknowledgement of the possibility of a society of multiple polycentric institutions, covering different kinds of transactions and transformations, and over different scales of time and space. Choosing your friends in life and choosing your vegetables at the market (I do not mean to imply that these objects are similar) are most efficient under small scale, personal standards, while the welfare state safety-net is most efficient at a huge scale with the largest possible riskpool to make everybody’s pay-in as small as possible. It seems to me that Montesquieu’s notion of the separation of powers is a similar polycentric idea — perhaps one of the first conceptual expressions of it, in a social institutional sense.

I don’t quite see Asher’s reasoning why it cannot work. It appears to be mixed-in with the notion that your aggregation, your group, needs a simplified ethos, or else you cannot act as an individual within it. This strikes me as not well thought-out.

And I do not see why there cannot be a set of global morals, when the basic definition of “moral” is “the realm where people interact”, and the realm where people interact is subject to change by Agreement. “Agreement” is the necessary ingredient, and it can be developed in the future. I’ll just bet we can get almost everybody to agree on the most basic moral, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Most people are probably already there.

If you don’t, if you are violent to the Golden Rule, again we will respond in kind. That is not a predication of violence, unless it’s because the perp started it. I do not see why this must be false.

“There is no foundational standpoint from which to judge between different systems of rules and leftists act like there is some such standpoint.”

This is clearly wrong.

“There is no foundational standpoint from which to judge between different systems of rules and leftists act like there is some such standpoint.”

Nonsense. I’m pretty sure “leftists” wherever they lurk are on board for:

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.
Golden Rule, prehistoric.

197. Did black people agree to have thier lives ruined by racism, isn’t this violence against them. (Yes)

And certainly plenty of ‘leftists’ are non-foundationalists, and the role of foundationalism in left-liberal justificatory projects, like discursive democracy, is a matter of debate

I’d thought of saying something like this, but The Asher is utterly impervious to argument. Dude’ll probably go back to spouting some extraordinarily mangled version of Sandel.

Put more succinctly, sentiment is the sole long term criterion for the legitimacy of a particular social contract and when that sentiment turns in significant numbers in the population that social contract is null and void and will be replace by another/others.

JH #87: About Plato (did all THAT happen in between?): why is philosophy – where reason is in driving seat – the only real pearl producer? I mean, Plato wants the “bronze” to have real pearls, not pearls of wisdom. Wisdom means poverty, publicity, and surviving 50 years of intensive intellectual and moral education (and the latter isn’t indoctrination – all there is to that, is the – in my view, pretty harmless – metals story – but practical moral tests which weed out the selfish from those with broader concerns). So might we not have sorted – fairly, meritocratically – between different kinds of pearls and pearl fanciers?

“Legitimation” and “sentiment” are predications of agreement, not violence.

Everyone understands this. It’s just that no one expected this thread to turn into baby’s first theory of government.

I’ve been reading CT for years, and while I won’t presume to speak for its bloggers and commenters, I feel confident asserting that they do in fact understand this point. It’s just that no one is particularly impressed by it, or by your insistence that this is some kind of revelation.

No, Jerry, they don’t. There’s an old saying that the government that can give you anything you want can take everything you have, and not understanding the implications of a premise mean you don’t understand your own damn premise.

Here’s the deal, Jerry, most people who call themselves socialists want a significant increase in the intrusion of politics into life. The effect of this is to make politics into a much more important feature of people’s lives and will make politics into a much more winner-take-all affair. I say fine, let’s make the political much more important and see how the lefties like it. At the end of the day the people who count, the men who actually use the guns on which government is predicated, are going to be significantly different from the type of people who comment on blogs like this.

You’re going to get more politics … and you’re really, REALLY not gonna like it. You lot deserve to get what you want, good and hard.

With apologies to John Dewey, politics is not preparation for life; politics is life itself.

You’ve got some rage issues against lefties, I guess. Is there any reason beyond taunting that you feel compelled to take them out on this comment thread?

@ Jerry

to put it another way, a theory that “proves” everything proves nothing

What I find amusing is that when I note that even Nazism and Communism had some basis in reality very smart, educated people sniff that this observation is trivial. It doesn’t seem to occur to them to ask me *what* is true about Nazism and Communism. The hoi-polloi are much more likely to ask it, though.

My… code is compiling. Yes, that’s it.

“I’ve never seen a troll indulged by so many for so long. I feel like a weird kind of congratulations are due to Asher for that, if nothing else.”

It is almost like performance art.

What a wonderful diagnosis.

Actually, I quite like CT being described as a clubhouse inside the cathedral. Sounds a bit Dan Brown-ish. Is it time yet to initiate Asher into the First Circle?

In fact, if you look up the dictionary definition of violence, taxation is not violence, either.

The idea that Seattle is full of socialists is pretty intensely amusing. I like living in Seattle, and I’m glad for the liberal influence it ha, but it’s a thoroughly corporatist culture where people’s culture has much effect on governance. It’s just a kind of corporatism that’s less overtly cackling about making sure some people live in misery and that everything is ugly.

But then I think about Mom’s pleasure at going to the local park and seeing all the kids at play, and realize that to Asher, the existence of the park and of H1B visa holders’ kids playing alongside the grandkids of loggers can only mean impending race war, Stalinist purges, and general unpleasantness.

I’m surprised, b9n10nt, that you have found Asher to be ‘really smart’

Yeah, in the larger context of contemporary society: smart.

I would also say out of his/her league here (as I suspect myself to be, often enough), but not for lack of intelligence. What Asher’s posts allowed me to contemplate once more is the discipline and humility it requires to think productively in a way that has meaning and use to others.

@ b9n10nt

There are two main ways to use the word smarts:

a) What he did was not smart
b) He is smart

My brother’s best childhood friend aced this way through school without much effort … and then got hooked on heroine. We say that he *is* smart but that getting hooked on heroine is *not* smart. We say the latter because of real consequences to quality of life, on his terms.

But if we are talking about discussing ideas either “smart” is quantifiable or it is meaningless.

America is not one society, but many. The society to which I happen to cohere considers what I have been saying, here, to be very smart and that cohort is in the tens of millions. America is not a society but unitary body-politic comprised of many different societies.

http://www.heartiste.wordpress.com

That’s a website mostly about getting chicks into bed. It’s US alexa ranking is around 17,000. I am guessing almost all of the guys there do not vote … and that they have roughly similar worldviews to mine and regard the current political structures as illegitimate. Note that I am not saying they regard it as “unjust” or “unfair” but as illegitimate to govern them. Now, as the legitimacy of the current social contract erodes whose side to you think they’ll choose? Mine or yours?

btw, you may not understand this but that site is actually *more* political than thins one, as crooked timber is a website about moving beyond politics.

Asher, no one will ever side with you on anything, because you are a big weirdo. Sorry to break it to you.

@ Walt

Lulz. “Weirdo” meaning you dont’ like what I say. Look, most people who comment on the internet invest a significant amount of emotional energy and make themselves emotionally vulnerable – this happens on websites of all varieties of politics. What you regard as “weird” is ultimate personal frame control and a complete emotional distancing from my theories. In a sense, that is “weird” but it is an excellent tool for developing impregnable positions.

I have spent dozens of hours of arguing topics that a thousand random university professors haven’t even considered once. I know the logic of the various positions and arguments and where they lead, and that is what comes across to you as “weird”.

I assure you that roughly 25 percent of the internet does not even remotely consider me weird, and no one in real life does.

@ Lee Arnold

Not sure you live but even most left-of-center people I encounter agree that violence is inherent in all taxation – we just disagree about the structure of application.

Also, dictionaries are to word usage what training wheels are to bicycles. Dictionaries do not establish meaning. It always blows my mind how many people actually think that a dictionary establishes meaning, sort of like how the Bible establishes itself as the Word of God.

Also, you guys are just blowing by so much interesting stuff. Don’t you find it odd that I claimed a website dedicated to getting men laid is *more* political than this one, which is ostensibly about philosophy and politics? A long time ago I came up with a hilarious quip about political legitimacy: The legitimacy of any political entity lies in getting young men laid. But it makes total sense if you think about it. I mean just about the most salient aspect of a guy before the age of, say, 35 is in getting laid. Well, that is the same demographic that governments call upon to repel a foreign invader or suppress a secession and if the system isn’t involved in getting them laid then there is little reason for them to regard it as legitimate.

The fact is that taxation is predicated on the very existence of the state, itself, which is predicated on violence. The War between the States is an excellent example of that (btw, I’m not someone who bothers to lament that war).

@268

why do you assume those lonely hearts would agree with your politics?

@ Ronan

There is more practical value in that observation than in the vast majority of what passes for political philosophy today. 99.9 percent of people encountering Rawl’s veil of ignorance wouldn’t understand its implications, even if they claimed otherwise.

Anyways, the site’s main value to me is its anti-feminist postings – feminists make young earth creationists look like paragons of reason and sanity. Also, I’m married and the guy who turned me onto the site does quite well with the ladies, mean really eff’ing well. One of the themes on that site is that the only thing more disillusioning about women than lack of success with them is success with them. My friend is totally callous and dismissive of women and he regularly scores ungodly hot tail.

Political philosophy is usually unrelated to the practical concerns of people in daily life.

Asher @274 — So what “most” people (even “left-of-center”) agree on, establishes fact? Except when “many” people “actually think that a dictionary establishes meaning”? In other words, this conversation is about your own definitions, whether other people agree with you or not? So “The fact is that taxation is predicated on the very existence of the state, itself, which is predicated on violence,” is true, because in this case, you agree with the other people who say so?

@278

I have to disagree. A political philosophy built on ones inability to get laid is extremely tedious

Check out that 278! I.Q. is not at issue here, folks. Granted, this guy might score a solid 115-120, thereabouts. But in terms of E.Q., the relevant measure, he is dipping dangerously into the socio-pathic region of the spectrum.

Asher is so typical of what passes for libertarianism these days (and protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, that is exactly what he is). Emotional development of a twelve-year-old Heinlein junkie. A little Nietzsche, some Ayn Rand, heard someone mention Mises, Hayek, and he’s got it all figured out.

“I’ll take cesspool . . . ”

There you go. sums it up neatly. Case closed.

A political philosophy built on ones inability to get laid is extremely tedious

In a pure state of nature, pussy is scarce. Thankfully, we do not live in a pure state of nature.

From Asher’s website:
“A feminist utopia is a million beta males under the heel of an alpha male state, toiling for the pleasure of fat women.”

Classy man. I actually feel sorry for you if you consider these guys to be “your people”. Seek counselling.

Umm…don’t you people realize that “Asher” is “Mencius Moldbug”? Why have you wasted so much time arguing with him? What part of sleeping under bridges and eating live children don’t you understand?

If ten people call you a horse ….

“at some point, there would have been significant conflict between the North and South in the westward expansion.” ”

At some point? As in, at that point?

@ Ronan

You have serious problems both with the ability to decipher language and to infer obvious points. It’s amusing because I can vigorously and in great detail argue on one site that Lincoln’s action were entirely reasonable and, even justified, and only another site I get accused of being a “the south shall rise again” sort of guy. Yeah, that’s freakin’ hilarious.

To simultaneously be identified as “x” and “non x” probably means that both parties levelling the accusations are raving partisans with little intellectual seriousness.

@293:

I didn’t bother with this thread. I just observed that you were ceaselessly all over it and that you’d linked to “Mencius”, who I hadn’t seen around for quite a while. But whether it’s “guilt by association” or “birds of a feather”, there’s nothing wrong with my inferential capacities.

@ Lee Arnold

There isn’t any such thing as either “socialism” or “capitalism”. I neither support nor oppose either as they are both meaningless abstractions.

Asher, no, you just can’t lose an argument.

@ Lee Arnold

Yes, the successor to libertarianism calls itself the “alt right”, some even still call themselves libertarians. But libertarianism was already dying as a cohesive movement by the time Jeffrey Friedman penned the rather famous, on the right, essay “What’s Wrong with Libertarianism”. That essay is merely its tombstone.

What’s interesting is that mainstream Right sites like RedState have been experiencing declines over the past few years, while the hodge-podge that is the Alt Right have experienced very significant increases. Such sites are rarely interested in abstractions like “socialism”, “capitalism” or “libertarianism” and are mainly focused on research and hard knowledge. For example:

http://monogamygame.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/unattractive-women-cause-erectile-dysfunction-the-elephant-in-the-room/

Men with a happy sex life make for a better society. When women get fat men are less happy, therefore, when women get fat it makes for a worse society. Now, under what abstraction would you label that knowledge? It is a “capitalist” observation? A “socialist” one? A “libertarian” one? It certainly is anti-feminist but that isn’t really a label except to identify those who oppose the inane ravings of feminism.

“read quite a bit of Hayek about fifteen years ago” –An emblem worthy of a wall of Banksy!

You might have a point were it not a direct response to speculations of what I had read. For all intents and purposes, I have never read Mises, Rand or Heinlein and probably haven’t touched Hayek in around 15 years. I have a habit of making lists so I made a list of some of my intellectual influences. I have read far more schopenhauer and Kant than all libertarian writing combined, barring Hayek.

“There isn’t any such thing as either ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ “?

This is not just me. I mean, this is pretty much standard stuff in what calls itself the Alt Right, and that you are not familiar with it just demonstrates how intellectually inbred you are. Trust me, standard conservative sites are well aware of the alt right and vigorously ban Alt Right views.

Lee this guy is obviously some pathetic loner who is still bitter about being turned down for the prom. It is sad really.

..we have to work within the system while purging it off non whites and women?

Ah okay, I googled it..I know what the alt right are now..: )

Well GiT did you read his comment about “pussy”as he so charmingly put it? They guy is obviously a little sad.

No doubt, but pushing the PC police buttons on these sorts isn’t going to produce much of interest.

OT, but I just noticed the time stamp on that last comment was 12:46pm. It was 7:46am here (CDST). Reykjavik, Iceland? WTF?

s/they’re/their/ ;

*typo facepalm*

But you get the point.

It is not scientific knowledge … If all girls were fat and the ones on the billboards were fat, you’d still be a slobbering maniac

Yeah, see this is why the term “utopian” is a much more apt description of those who call themselves socialists than those who call themselves libertarians. Socialists much more thoroughly deny reality than do libertarians. No, male sexual preferences is the product of evolution.

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=5uVUwCE3Vm4C&lpg=PA113&ots=4GAZixbBsr&dq=gynoid%20fat%20gynoid%20fat%20gynoid%20fat&pg=PA116#v=onepage&q&f=false

Socialists deny blatant reality, in fact, that denial is so part and parcel of being a socialist that they don’t usually have to say it, it’s implied in everything they say. It’s amusing that so man socialists int he West are atheists and, yet, they deny that every human behavior is rooted in evolution, explaining everything away as “social causes”, whatever the hell that gibberish means.

There’s a label you’lll start hearing a lot more of: Liberal Creationists.

Racism, envy, and misogyny

Save your break and say SIXHIRB – sexismislamophobiahomophobiaintoleranceracismbigotry. Before the end of my life all of those terms will be completely bereft of what propaganda value they now have. Those words no long *mean* anything besides “non leftist”. One very useful thing I’ve found on the internet is the ability to test out various lines of argument and develop a template for dealing with various positions and objections. One project I’m working on is developing an argument template so that anytime someone is confronted with the charge of “racism”, “sexism”, well, SIXHIRB they have a ready-made template to demonstrate that each of those charges is nothing more than pure leftist propaganda and that the words, themselves, are meaningless.

Cathedral, cathedral, you’re time is coming …

But yeah, Mandos is pretty much spot on. This isn’t anything new, except in how it gets delievered.

We’re talking Dark Heart of the Internet type folks here. The kind of dude who believes all that bullshit about “betas” and “alphas” and thinks that only about 10% of the male population get laid with any regularity because all the women go for them due to “hypergamy”. They’re the hard-headed serious types who tell you the deep truths about society with science, and by “science” they mean “a 10,000 word blog post about what bitches those bitches are. Bitches.” There’ll be at least one reference to the Matrix or the Red Pill, because that sounds kind of cool. “Racism” is spelt with about 20 a’s and in all caps, because racism doesn’t actually exist, or if it does it’s nowhere near as important as the hurt feelings of young, affluent white guys.

So it goes.

Also, Michael Moore is gynoid.

“they deny that every human behavior is rooted in evolution”

Sigh.

No, no-one does that. The argument is whether human behaviour can be traced back fundamentally to some evolutionary benefit (“rooted in evolution”), or whether there is a potentially broad spectrum of potential human behaviour, the expression of which is determined to a great extent by culture and environment, and not all of which has developed purely for the evolutionary benefit of the species or the individual.

From what I’ve read about epigenetics (genes can be effected by the environment) and neuroplasticity (the brain is a remarkably fluid and subtle instrument that can change its’ structure and functioning quite considerably), the latter sounds much, much more plausible; the former often degenerating into evo-psych just-so stories justifying a stereotype (“back on the veldt, this must have happened (although there’s no real evidence for it), and that is whywomen like pink“)

Sorry, pal. Genetics moved on.

@ Freshly squeezed cynic

No, no-one does that.

Look, very closely at what I said, which is “human behavior. The distinction is between homo sapiens as humans and homo sapiens as animals. Behavior that is a reflection of evolution is human, not animal, behavior and leftism is a project of rejecting all behavior that is not rooted in evolution.

Of course, we know that much behavior in our species *is* caused by evolution but leftists posit that as undesirable and the goal is to eliminate any influence of evolution on homo sapien, so rising above our animal natures is the only thing that makes us human. Over the last several years I have noticed a very odd phrase that keeps popping up from leftists: a truly human future. I mean, huh? Aren’t all futures truly human futures simply as a function of us being human? No, because human is something that is solely the product of that which is other than our animal nature and is a project in the making.

But if it is the future is that which is potentially “truly human” what does that say about that the past? Ready for it? The past is not *truly* human but merely a mirage of human-ness and, really, in human.

Sorry, pal. Genetics moved on.

You don’t need to establish a confirmed set of genes to establish that a behavior is genetically influenced. Human culture is real but it is always a reaction to genetic heritage. Men and women are different, and all sorts of things get associated in distinctions between the sexes. That one color was going to be associated with men and another with women was an inevitable result of sex differences – that one happened to be blue and another pink is just an accident of history.

The world would be *wrong* if it were not so, you see. I mean, if it were the case that gender-based inequalities were the result of oppressive activities by a ruling class, and that these behaviours are mutable over socially-relevant time scales, then, then…

…all Asher’s psychic sufferings, his alienation and resentment, was for nothing.

Therefore, by deduction, evolution.

@ Mandos

There are two possible sources of human behavior:

A) Radical autonomy, aka free will
B) Evolution

In a mosaic of causality every single cause is, in turn an effect of other causes, so any time someone says “x caused y” the appropriate response is “what caused x”. What the “social causes” crowd wants to do is have it both ways; they want to say “x caused y” without having to ask “what caused x”. BTW, libertarians tend to do this, too, so it’s not just leftists.

So, yes, the entire mosaic of human behavior is entirely caused by evolution, as a whole. The only out from that is “free will” which lies outside the realm of rational analysis. If you say “x is an example” you are placing “x” outside of the realm of rational analysis by rhetorical fiat. Now, by the very definition of placing something outside the realm of rational analysis you are offering me a take-it-or-leave-it decision, but I cannot rationally argue something that you have placed beyond rational analysis.

When two different parties have opposing views on a question that has been placed beyond rational analysis there are two options:

A) Peaceful political separation
B) War – one party imposes their views on the other

@ Mandos

Therefore, by deduction, evolution.

The other option being autonomy, aka free will. Fine, but if even one specific action is the product of free will then what will end up happening is that we’re simply going to pick and choose which is which based on our particular preferences.

A) Radical autonomy, aka free will
B) Evolution

This is one of those things for which the expression “not even wrong” was invented. Also see “fallacy of the excluded middle”, “false dichotomy”, and “failure of imagination”.

@ Mandos

Consider the two propositions:

A) Jamal turned to crime because of poverty
B) Jonny turned to racism because of ….

Well, the leftist is like to finish with “… because of racism”. In other words, “racism” is simply a tautology meaning ” that with which I disagree”. See, the problem with “social causes” is that you’re going to variously assign autonomy and heteronomy based on your desired outcome, and that is definitely not dispassionate rational analysis.

@ Mandos

see “fallacy of the excluded middle”

And this is where you’re supposed to identify the content of that excluded middle.

B) Jonny turned to racism because of ….

Poverty? Anger at lost privileges? Insecurity in a changing world? A sense of wanting to belong to a particular group? All four and more besides?

@ Freshly squeeezed cynic

Poverty? Anger at lost privileges? Insecurity in a changing world? A sense of wanting to belong to a particular group? All four and more besides?

And what caused those? You do see where this is going, right? Any time you posit a particular “social cause” I’m just simply going to respond with “what caused that?”.

Self-employed contractor

“I could come up with a thousand different factoids like that, which, on their own, demonstrate little..”

at last we agree!

Look, if leftists just responded to everything with “we have no idea why” then that would be honest, but the whole “social causes” thingy, as it exists today, is blatant intellectual dishonesty.

I’d like to go back to Mandos observation of my using deductive reasoning to infer that all human behavior and any variations have soem basis in evolution. Here’s the premise for my reasoning:

Every *thing* that exists is caused by some *thing* else

Any time a “social cause” is posited I’m simply going to ask “what caused that?” until we get back ten million years (or whatever time frame) and, at that point, the notion of a “social cause” is patently silly. My main objection to almost all “social causes” talk isn’t that there isn’t the potential for very real social causes but that they are used for political advantage and not for rational analysis.

I look away for one day and someone solves the is-ought problem in the comments section of CT.

What is good for the poor is bad for the middle-class and what is good for the middle-class is bad for the poor. Objecting to the cathedral claiming that the poor and the middle have identical interests is not ressentiment.

I don’t even know what you are getting at here. When I said ressentiment, I meant the clear right-wing dislike/loathing/fear of modern cultural and financial elites, who are all, apparently, Cultural Marxists (cough Jews cough) who hate the average white guy.

“we” don’t have a collective human future. What there is are a vast kaleidoscope of future for lots of different “we’s”.

Doubt it. Unless global neo-liberalism collapses, we are all in the same boat.

You and some other young males may be unhappy and silly; that is a different thing.

That is the other thing that constantly bothers me about the whole Alt-Right/PUA scene. It seems made up of pissy, entitled white kids who I wouldn’t want to spend 5 minutes with, yet they seem to feel that they can make pronouncements that identify what is best for the white male, which, you know, I happen to be.

@ David

I meant the clear right-wing dislike/loathing/fear of modern cultural and financial elites

So, the Occupy movement was right wing? I did not know that.

apparently, Cultural Marxists (cough Jews cough)

Jews have been disproportionately represented in all sorts of destructive and dissoluting movements in the past couple of centuries, and the issue of whether that’s incidental to contingent facts of history or something inherently Jewish is sometimes debated on the Alt Right. My side, that it is not something inherently Jewish, is definitely well into the ascendency. FWIW, Episcopalians are more disproportionately in the financial elite than are Jews.

Since the financial elites have behaved so abominably over the past few years, if not decades, I’m not sure how objecting to their behavior constitutes ressentiment.

Unless global neo-liberalism collapses

See, the problem with being in the same boat is that sometimes some parties in the boat want to throw others out. I don’t claim to have the solution for that, hell, I don’t think there is a solution for that, and if there is no solution then it isn’t a problem, as it makes no sense to say that something is a problem where there is no solution.

@David 358 — Imagine them using the pickup line: “Anyone who claims to have a general faculty of caring for all ‘fellow man’ is a snake oil salesman who is trying to sell a rotten bill of goods.” (from #113). I’ll bet that really turns the girls on.

@ Asher # 363 — As I pointed out in #357, the general question is about your misunderstanding of the relative importance of evolutionary theory to political questions, not about unnecessary reminders of the obvious existence of other constraints in the universe.

But then of course we get back to the notion that people follow traffic laws due to coercion. That is evidently false. Most people follow traffic laws because they want to. Some go lower than the speed limit, they don’t even know what the speed limit is. The signers of the Declaration signed it of their own free will, the Constitution was ratified by statehouses by their own free will, so the U.S. Democracy is by definition predicated on Agreement. In a democracy, coercion is secondary, even tertiary.

The initial act of sovereignty was wrenched from the British Crown by force of arms. Therefore, all subsequent acts of sovereignty (just a fancy way of saying “what governments do”) is predicated on that initial act of force.

If a re-constitution of the social contract was legitimate once then it is potentially legitimate at any and all times.

privilege-knapsack-unpacking

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! The privilege knapsack. Hilarious.

Look, “privilege” simply means differences in opportunities. However, there is no unitary scale that measures difference in opportunities. Men have different privileges from women, and vice versa. Blacks have different privileges from white and vice versa. What the left does is take the notion of privilege, a very real thing and elevates it to something metaphysical, to a distinction between privileged and nonprivileged.

No, EVERYONE has their own distinctive set of privileges that pertains to their particular circumstances. I’m quite aware that I as a white male have a certain set of privileges, just as a black female has her own particular set of privileges.

See, being leftist has its own set of privileges to which others are not privvy.

Everybody has their own set of privileges, EVERYBODY. The only way to eliminate privilege is to raze all human connections and start from scratch. All human history confers privilege, all of it.

“Jews have been disproportionately represented in all sorts of destructive and dissoluting movements in the past couple of centuries”

Wow…. Okay so we have spent the last 3 days arguing with an anti-Semite. Good to know.

Privilege exists. Privilege always has existed. Privilege will always exist. Get over it already.

A classic:

http://barb.velvet.com/humor/lurkers.html

Also, a good musical accompaniment to this whole discussion is “Zombie” by the Cranberries.

Ah, yes, SIXHIRB. At some point, enough people will not care about it that its propaganda value will be zero.

Moldbuggers are weaponized carcinogens for comments thread everywhere. You sustain this node at the peril of the whole body. Just saying.

I have to admit, for a supposedly self-made man with a wife and a high IQ, our pal Asher sure has a chip on his shoulder about something.

@ MPAVictoria

Wow…. Okay so we have spent the last 3 days arguing with an anti-Semite. Good to know.

They have. Deal with it. What else will you object to? My observation that that the KKK was disproportionately white gentiles?

That shouldn’t surprise. It’s the logical conclusion of the whole Steve Sailerish line of thinking.

Asher #367: “Categorically speaking, there is no difference between establishing a government or social contract and maintaining its existence”

There is no functional difference in the day to day sense, but there is huge categorical difference. However, let’s forget that and suppose that “maintaining its existence” is all that there is in the world, and then ask: does it prove coercion?

Well no. Theoretically, all “absolute foundations” were already denied by the interlocutor, so coercion cannot be an absolute foundation of the state. If you cannot “elevate some initial act of “free” willing to God-like status”, well then, coercion in daily enforcement cannot be elevated either.

But much more importantly than theory, it fails the experiential test. For example, lots of people follow lots of laws because they want to. Not everyone is an infractor. So the government “maintains its existence” partly because people WANT it to.

Of course nobody likes paying taxes — the subtraction of money from the pocket can be a coercive ordeal. It is one of several rules like this. But so what, really?

the tax were under an unredressable state of rule, with an intentionally punitive rate of tax, then THAT would meet the definition of “violent”.

So far, so inapplicable. We have a free speech democracy instead, and taxes are clearly not at punitive rates. So where does this torment come from?

Well in this discourse, it looks like 2 things: 1. Because the economy is slow it “must” be due to taxes; the equation of taxes to slow economic growth.

–But this is just bad standard economics, taxation is the LEAST of out problems. (For another econ 101 mistake see #206, “my position was that inflation is primarily a political phenomenon, rather than a monetary one, and arises from a loss in confidence in government in multiple areas”. –No, no “initial act of God-like status”. The last big inflation came out of oil price hikes increasing the price of most products, causing in turn a hike in wage demands, see here:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZBqv14CGcQ&list=PLT-vY3f9uw3ADgyYqUVo2R8kxM4Agc3aw&index=11

So what remains, to produce the whole “torment of violence” thing? Well, there is 2) the animosity to socialism (though a current interlocutor denies it).

But if we look around, centralized socialism is no where on the horizon.

The only socialist programs are: a)–taxation; b)–the welfare state which is U.S. Social Security and Medicare; c)–now adding: universal medicine; d)–dole-outs to private capitalism, which has been able to socialize some of its losses to increase private profits; e)–and of course finance capitalism, whose losses have been entirely socialized; they didn’t even really pay back the TARP. (There ought to be ressentiment.)

But what else is there? Nothing else is happening; there’s no where else for socialists to stick their greedy little paws. Oh, environmental laws. And (really in a separate category) “climate change tipping points”, new disasters which will occasion MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION, even fascism. Watch it happen, zombie!

But otherwise, you are already living with these programs. Nobody likes taxation, so therefore, paying it + throwing crooks in jail = coercion? Well duh. If this is the premise of the whole theory, it fails. Many other laws are followed, not by coercion. The idea that “people follow traffic laws due to coercion” is inobservant.

Ah, yes, SIXHIRB. At some point, enough people will not care about it that its propaganda value will be zero.

Wishful thinking from the Right. No matter how hard they try, and how manifestly they want it, they are not going to ironically undercut racism and whatnot.

That desire being to win rhetorical wars against Liberals (both conservative liberals and otherwise). That racist ideas are taboo annoys them because it makes their entire program a non-starter, and if they don’t get what they want it must mean that they (and only they, mind you, not silly blacks or gays) are oppressed.

When did the Nazis get a hold of postmodernism?

@ Jacob McM

s there any doubt where this is heading?

Pray tell, where is this heading Jacob? I have long advocated peacefully breaking up the US into around 30 countries with a time period for people to sort themselves out. See the very notion of politics inherently contains a large element of competition and the idea that it’s all about agreement is just silly. What that ends up being is claiming the situation is all about agreeing while you’re forcing your views on someone else. That can’t last.

I am upfront, fascism is the proper antidote to socialism. This does not mean that I advocate some ossified ideology that is “fascism”, but that there’s a tension between unity and diversity, competition and cooperation. At the end of the day, all abstractions (socialism, fascism, racism, sexism, libertarianism, social darwinism, capitalism,, etc) are only relevant to specific times, places and peoples. To an ever-increasing array of people terms like fascism, sexism, racism and social darwinism will simply mean “disagrees with a leftist”.

And an ever-increasing array of people aren’t gonna care. At all.

I have to admit, for a supposedly self-made man with a wife and a high IQ, our pal Asher sure has a chip on his shoulder about something.

Intellectual dishonesty. I absolutely loathe intellectual dishonesty. Being able to throw around terms with impunity is leftist privilege, and I don’t resent, at all. What I do object to is denying that a privilege is a privilege.

I have long advocated peacefully breaking up the US into around 30 countries with a time period for people to sort themselves out.

In my travels through the Alt-Right I have seen this before. There is a large section of angry far righters who want to essentially “take their ball and go home” so that they aren’t forced to pay for welfare for black people. They want to form something like the Confederacy, I guess, but webbed throughout the country.

@ David

No matter how hard they try, and how manifestly they want it, they are not going to ironically undercut racism and whatnot.

That’s correct because you’re going to do it for us by the fact that you’re going to have to cast an ever-increasing net in order to maintain hegemony.

When did the Nazis get a hold of postmodernism?

Not a leftist? OMFG! Nazi, Nazi, Nazi!

One project I’m working on is developing an argument

A noble goal, my dear Asher, a noble goal indeed. The road ahead of you is long and hard, but keep on workin’ on!

@ David

I live in Seattle and quite like it. I would be fine with a country consisting of Washington and Oregon with its current population. Wouldnt have been any Iraq War had the US been broken up into more governable sovereign entities.

Also, I’m not quite sure where you get the idea that I am “angry”. I certainly don’t *feel* angry.

racism will actually be lessened

Sort of begging the question of what you mean by “racism”. Of the variety in Nazi Germany? Certainly. Of the “not a leftist” variety? No, that’s going to increase. Look, the vast, vast majority of the globe is not “anti-racist”, nor is it “racist”. Most people are concerned with how well their lives and communities are functioning and metaphysical, ideological “anti-racism” does nothing to facilitate this, probably hinders it.

You don’t seriously think that the society that is china is ever going to adopt anti-racist ideology do you?

I live in Seattle and quite like it. I would be fine with a country consisting of Washington and Oregon with its current population. Wouldnt have been any Iraq War had the US been broken up into more governable sovereign entities.

It will never happen in a million years, and I would rather it didn’t anyway. I live in the Midwest and I am NOT in favor of letting regional oligarchs have their way with my culture. Liberal elitism forever.

Also, I’m not quite sure where you get the idea that I am “angry”. I certainly don’t *feel* angry.

Your ideas are outside of the Overton Window, which usually suggests a radical mental break with society as it is currently constituted. The most successful, attractive, what have you, people almost always buy into some ideology that falls within the political mainstream.

You don’t seriously think that the society that is china is ever going to adopt anti-racist ideology do you?

Probably not, but it will never become a huge issue for them, unless they really embrace neoliberalism with gusto. They will become exactly as non-racist as they need to in order to make money.

@ David

Do you consider Singapore neo-liberal? Unlike the US, their immigration policy exists solely to advance the common interest of their citizenry. Do you think that makes it more or less neo-liberal than the US? Would you like to see Singapore’s immigration policy become more like the US or vice versa? Why?

Do you think the goal of immigration policy is best when it is crafted to meet the interests of current citizens or are there other considerations?

Does anyone else remember Floyd Alvis Cooper, from the Age of Warblogging in the mid-2000s? Now there was a real troll; we shall not see his like again. Still, you have to give Asher credit for effort.

The doctrine of the soul. It’s the idea that we can hypothesize about the *soul* of Asher, or whomever, and what it would do in the context of some other era or place. There is no “other” Asher, as my consciousness is tied to my specific time and space within the mosaic of causality, and to speak of some “other” is metaphysical gibberish. It’s the notion that there is some realm of mind or consciousness that is not tied to particular existence.

It’s the same sort of thing as when some leftists says about some prominent, mainstream conservative that if they’d been around in 1861 that the conservative would have fought to continue slavery. There is no “they” there, so, no, “they” wouldn’t.

Also, Mr. F. A. Cooper was before my time, but googling his name reveals some truly choice gems scattered about the internet. I wonder if Asher’s skeletal structure is composed of a shiny ceramic material (not F.A.C.’s work, so far as I know, but something I found looking for it).

Unlike the US, their immigration policy exists solely to advance the common interest of their citizenry.

So does ours. Cheap labor.

Do you think that makes it more or less neo-liberal than the US?

Not sure. I assume that Singapore lets in people with technical skills needed for the economy? The answer would be “exactly as” then.

Would you like to see Singapore’s immigration policy become more like the US or vice versa?

I don’t really care, but I am not exactly moved by racialist “Dey took er jerbs!” right-wing populism.

Do you think the goal of immigration policy is best when it is crafted to meet the interests of current citizens or are there other considerations?

I think it is useless to even ask that question, because I don’t think an immigration policy would survive that would not meet the needs and desires of the elite.

Asher.

From what you’ve posted here, I agree with JacobMcM that your beliefs can be summarized as follows:

“Social Darwinism. Jews acting as a pernicious influence on culture and politics. Talk about intractable differences between races/ethnicities rooted in genetics. Struggle as the primary fact of life bundled with indifference/contempt for the weak. Lurid fascination with violence. Hatred for both feminism and the “feminization” of society and the assertion of “masculine” (i.e. ruthless and competitive) values in their place.”

All of these beliefs are ones traditionally held by Fascists, and others on the “far right”. If you aren’t a Nazi or Fascist, than can you please show me where their beliefs differ from yours, rather than acting as if calling you one is illegitimate?

I agree that there are instances where people on the left have overused the terms “Nazi” or “Fascist” and applied them where they don’t belong. This does not seem to be one of them.

One thing that I do is craft every comment I make with the assumption that all assertions require justification.

Can you go back to #79 and rewrite?

@ David

I don’t really care, but I am not exactly moved by racialist “Dey took er jerbs!” right-wing populism.

First of all, “they took our jobs” isn’t necessarily racialist, and the primary argument isn’t that “they took our jobs” but how well an immigrant and their descendents fit in with society, as a whole. Presumably, an immigrant from South Korea is going to be a better fit than an immigrant from sub-Saharan Africa. Are you making a moral claim about the basis for immigration, or a factual claim about how it is just going to be based on political power structures? So, basically, you dodged the question, but, hey, you got to throw in the term “racialist” along with a South Park reference.

I think it is useless to even ask that question, because I don’t think an immigration policy would survive that would not meet the needs and desires of the elite.

Mmmm, if immigration policy is such a slam-dunk for elites then why is it necessary for them to resort to slurs involving “racialism”, “nativism”, etc? You’re going back and forth between “is” and “ought” (yeah, anytime someone uses “racialist” in an argument it is an “ought” argument). I mean, if elite-oriented immigration policy is so inevitable and necessary then throwing out “racialist” shouldn’t be necessary.

It’s going to become more difficult to disguise the blatant intellectual dishonesty of that two-pronged approach, either make factually-based arguments or morally-based ones but to weave back and forth between the two is disingenuous.

Asher @398: “Wow, you’re confused. If the initially act of willing is categorically different from subsequent acts of will that IS elevating the initial act to God-like status.”

Take it from the top. You asserted that government is predicated on coercion. I asserted that the initial act of free will was Agreement, the opposite of Coercion: agreement to the Constitution. You then ruled that argument out, saying that it “elevates some initial act of ‘free’ willing to God-like status”. I rather doubt this, but anyway it does not matter — the important result is that, if so, then you have ruled yourself out. Because by your own objection, the subsequent existence of some coercive laws (like taxation) are not a god-like proof that democracy is continued by coercion, instead of by agreement. So then you need scientific evidence, and proof that all or most occurrences of “following the law” are primarily from coercion, coercion appearing at the top of the list of intentions. So you write, “they do so because it is enforced for those who do not follow it”. But that is NOT always the top intention, and there are many counterexamples. There are cases of following laws primarily from intentions of safety and self-protection, not from coercion. People follow traffic laws because they hope this is the way to be in the least amount of traffic accidents. Gov’t coercion in this case is sort of tertiary: 1) they agreed 2) to make laws to help drivers understand each other, and avoid mishaps 3) with punishments for infractions. You are holding onto this silly insistence about the sequence of intentionality involved in following traffic laws, because otherwise your argument is demolished.

Furthermore your argument is weirdly linked to a theory that uniformity/diversity issues are at the basis of discord. And even further, this is combined with a systems-theoretic mistake that these issues can be lessened by breaking-up into smaller aggregates. You are of course free to petition your state legislature to leave the Union. Be advised that it is a knuckleheaded idea however. The move towards smaller groups is ignorant of A) the savings in transaction-costs that can allow quicker comparative advantages to trade, and ignorant of B) the easier treatment of systems-wide problems due to bigger risk pools of the bigger group. These things free-up space and time, thus bigger systems may also REDUCE coercion.

@ jb

Social Darwinism.

Social darwinism is largely an old-wives tale. The original social darwinists were socialists who understood that agreeableness and sociability were traits that were at least partially heritable and that the new socialist man would have to be created by conscious collective action for the creation of the new socialist order. Social darwinism isn’t rightwing but leftwing.

No, what I am talking about is just darwinism, purely and simply, and to claim otherwise is tantamount to claiming that all human evolution of behavioral traits ended around 100k years ago.

Jews acting as a pernicious influence on culture and politics.

If your positions were so impregnable then it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to intellectual dishonesty to argue for them. Your use of “Jews”, here, implies the entire Jewish people as an indivisible whole. Jews, as a whole, have been beneficial to the US. However, that individual Jews are disproportionately represented in dissoluting movements is undeniable and this accounts for the minority in the Alt Right who claim that there’s a Jewish Problem.

All lies have a basis in reality, including communism and nazism, and you have to account for the reality behind every wayward ideology that attracts a large number of adherents – I do.

Talk about intractable differences between races/ethnicities rooted in genetics.

More intellectual dishonesty. First off, there are no rigidly distinct races – humanity is made up of partially in-bred overlapping evolutionary clusters and the idea that there is some “essence” to distinct races is idiotic. Secondly, differences are not intractable, they could disappear within several dozen generations, however, that is of little consequence for social policy.

Lurid fascination with violence

Lurid
Adjective
Very vivid in color, esp. so as to create an unpleasantly harsh or unnatural effect: “lurid food colorings”.
(of a description) Presented in vividly shocking or sensational terms, esp. giving explicit details of crimes or sexual matters.

The references I’ve made to violence are coldly clinical (although next comment I sort of expect you to find fault with me on that, too). Um, while I reject the notion of using a dictionary to establish meaning in language, if you are still in the “training wheels” stage of reading then, by all means, use a dictionary.

Hatred for both feminism and the “feminization” of society and the assertion of “masculine” (i.e. ruthless and competitive) values in their place.

A desirable society understands that the masculine and the feminine is highly functionally different, as a product of evolution, and seeks a balance between the two. I am looking for a balance between the two, not the replacement of the feminine with the masculine. The feminine brings warmth and togetherness and the masculine brings order and stability; both are invaluable.

All of these beliefs are ones traditionally held by Fascists, and others on the “far right”

Every belief system, no matter how wayward, incorporates very real human concerns into its ideology, fascism no less than socialism. Fascists probably usually brushed their teeth but brushing one’s teeth does not make one a fascist.

Yeah, some of the ideas I advocate are shared with fascists because, guess what, some of the ideas and concerns of the fascists were grounded in reality, same for every other ideology.

than can you please show me where their beliefs differ from yours,

No conception of “racial essence” or “purity of blood”. No interest in ethnic cleansing. No interest in anti-miscegination laws, as no government is competent to establish some absolute standard for ethnicity or race Never been to stormfront, but what I hear they get in frequent fights over nonsense involving who is and is not “properly” white. It’s as silly as the leftist notion that average outcome differences between identifiable evolutionary clusters isn’t the product of evolutionary divergence and that all human evolution ended 100k years ago except a few minor things involving the digestive and immune systems.

I am against moronic ideas of which much of what passes for thought on “mainstream” leftist sites, like this, is the mirror image of stormfront. I have the same disregard for the Cathedral as I do for neo-Nazi skinhead types.

@ jb

Jews are disproportionately represented in prominent positions of society, both positive and negative. That’s because the average Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is between 110 and 115, and I suspect they are more conscientious and open to new ideas than average. Gregory Chocrane, professor genetics at U of Utah (i think), has written about selective pressure on Jewish European populations that have probably occurred over the past few centuries and his writing has been endorsed by Steven Pinker (a jew).

My observation about Jews is solely about explaining why a minority in the Alt Right think that there’s a “jewish question”.

The initial act of settling America required coercion..the initial act of solidifying the Spanish Crown required coercion..how far back are you willing to go here and what’s your point?

@ David

That is just factually wrong. Some things, peoples, and ideas can be described as “racialist”, objectively

I understand that from a strict technical point this is correct. However, what percentage of the population comprehends the difference between “racist” and “racialist”, not to mention the outmoded notion that there are distinct “races”? Probably one or two percent, three, tops. In terms of practical politics, the term “racialist” is going to be used in a normative context. Always.

What makes most far righters uncomfortable is that they know that 99 percent of people view the idea of “racism” as inherently bad.

If only one-percent of people hold an objectionable view then that view is not a meaningful problem. Clearly, that would include huge majorities of most rightwingers, making “racism” a complete non-issue. Yet, we hear shrieks of “racism” from hysterical leftists who see a Klan member in any social situation without sufficient “diversity”.

contempt for usual right-wing complaining about lack of economic opportunity due to immigration.

The issue isn’t one of lack of economic prospects but of how additional immigrants affect overall society.

Don’t understand what you are getting at.

Whether or not you intend it, outside a very select group of people, charges of “racialism” and “racism” are indistinguishable. An argument or position that has to swing back and forth between normative and consequentialist claims is a suspect argument. I know the strategy very well, as it has been frequently employed in the past by libertarians. The intellectual flaws in that approach are very complicated but if you’re interested there’s an essay on the subject by Jeffrey Friedman titled “What’s Wrong with Libertarianism”. It’s aimed at what he calls the “libertarian straddle” where libertarians swing back and forth between consequentialist and normative claims (is and ought), arguing one where the other is weak and vice versa.

I am familiar with how Randists and their ilk switch to normative claims to protect their crypto-moralist viewpoints regarding property and theft, et al. That is not what I was or am doing.

You are simply misreading me through the lense of your own personal hobbyhorse.

All right, then. Wow. I’m out.

A democracy is be founded by an agreeing to a Constitution, and that might come after many other historical avenues besides warring with a colonial sovereign. As I pointed out in #197, it is a trivial fact that all the organization in the universe involves constraints. It does not put coercion at the top of the reasons for all governments, and it certainly does not mean that increased size will increase coercion. Increased size may also increase freedom. These cannot be an absolute measuring-stick on that.

@ Lee Arnold

Let’s say that some contiguous land mass is ruled by a monarch and that monarch is overthrown by 51 percent of the extant population. Further, let’s say that the other 49 percent prefers monarchy and does not participate in the creation of the originating documents and is vehemently opposed to them. However, they don’t want a civil war, because war is the hell of it, and simply let that 51 percent go about creating the original documents. Would you consider that scenario “agreement”?

@ David

All right, then. Wow. I’m out.

I’m guessing you’re pissy about my observation that culture involves conformity. Why? That is what it is. Ever heard the phrase “cultural norms”, meaning “what is considered normal and acceptable at any given time and place”? Hell, you clearly want conformity on the issue of divergent human evolution so that conforming cultural norm is, apparently, fine with you.