We have nothing like the First Amendment; our Supreme Court is a Leftist institution par excellence and has even decreed in effect that truth is no defense in cases where “protected groups” are insulted or offended. Paragraph 140 of a 2013 Judgment finds “that not all truthful statements must be free from restriction. Truthful statements can be interlaced with harmful ones or otherwise presented in a manner that would meet the definition of hate speech.” Section 15 (2) of the Constitution Act of 1982 abridges the rights that section 15(1) guarantees Canadian citizens.
Further, our Human Rights Tribunals are Soviet-style shadow courts that discard due process in adjudicating cases of supposed discrimination or “hate speech.” As Canadian Human Rights Commissioner Dean Steacy said: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” Openness to everything except freedom of speech, chartered principle and practical reason is the hallmark of our justice system, as it is of the nation. As Carl Sagan quipped in The Demon-Haunted World: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.
April 21, 2021
QotD: Freedom of speech in Canada
April 8, 2021
Andrew Doyle defends freedom of speech in his new book
In The Critic, Simon Evans reviews Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle (who is perhaps best known on this side of the pond for his ultrawoke Twitter persona “Titania McGrath”):
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom, because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
Frank Herbert, Children of DuneIt is most peculiar. If the counter-culture had a dominant theme, it was the right to criticise the establishment and to question orthodoxy of all kinds. Back in the Sixties, it was central to its mission to Expand your Consciousness, man. And it worked. Walls came tumbling down. Yet now, everywhere you look, it seems the elements of society — students, academics, comedians — that one would most naturally associate with that freedom of expression, are introducing caveats and qualifiers to that principle faster than you can cry “Stop Little Pol-Pot, Stop!” They are turning, before our very eyes, into actual scolds.
It must be supposed that what was once the siege army, camped outside the moat like Occupy Wall Street, has captured the castle, for they are demanding that the walls be re-erected. That “hate” speech be distinguished from free speech and dealt with accordingly. That freedom of speech need not mean freedom from consequences. And a general suspicion is at large, among the young, that free speech is some sort of artefact of complacent boomer self-indulgence, like Steely Dan and second homes. No longer counter-culture, but decidedly counter-revolutionary.
I’m a comedian, and these have been strange times for our trade. Brexit saw comedians side with the mirthless neo-liberal consensus, against the humorous, sceptical grumble of the common rabble. The same thing happened in America, with bar-room stand-ups horrified by the vulgarity of Trump. And now the latest revision sees many of my fellow jesters and fools unsure whether people can really be trusted with free speech.One might have thought this issue had been settled long ago, in this country, and in liberty’s favour. But no, it seems we need to sharpen our tools once again, and Andrew Doyle’s new book is an excellent place to start.
Making the case for the defence, Doyle’s book is terse, restrained and as carefully argued as a QC’s summing-up in a top-drawer courtroom drama. Whether his command of the material comes from his doctorate in Renaissance literature or his experience of defending the comedy character Titania McGrath from infuriated wokerati, who knows? It is a beautifully balanced and comprehensive overview that will of course be read by no one who needs to hear it.
It is admirably historically literate. Doyle takes a quote from Milton’s Areopagitica as his epigram, with the old poet, declaiming over the din of the Civil War, as defiant as Satan himself, “Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
This sets the tone for the whole book, but Doyle also presents arguments intended to appeal to those who insist that we live in a society. With the compromises that entails. This was most famously recognised by notorious cis-hetero white man and free speech absolutist John Stuart Mill, who was surveying the world from the heights of Victorian Exceptionalism when he published the still unsurpassed On Liberty.
QotD: Thomas Hobbes and his “state of nature”
One reason I had such a hard time teaching this stuff to undergraduates back in my ivory tower days was that, ironically, we can imagine a much more “realistic” State of Nature than Hobbes could. We even had a TV show about it: Lost (in which, I’m told, one of the characters was actually named “John Locke”). A large group of strangers, unrelated by blood or affinity, would never be shipwrecked on a deserted island in Hobbes’s day, but we Postmoderns have no problem imagining a large international flight going down. Assume everyone survives the crash, and there’s your State of Nature – a much better one than Hobbes’s.
Under those very specific conditions, something like what Hobbes says might come to pass. In reality, of course, we seem to be much likelier to pull together in a disaster than to immediately go full retard, but let’s envision the most apocalyptic scenario, in which every guy who can bench press his body weight (assuming such still exist on international flights) immediately tries to lord it over everyone else on the island. There, and only there, the stuff Hobbes says about equality is true – the strong guy can beat up the weak guy, and enslave him, but the strong guy has to sleep sometime …
… so pretty soon there are no more strong guys, only various flavors of weak, clever guys, and now they have to band together, because you need three or four of them to accomplish the physical labor that one strong guy could’ve before they murdered him in his bed. And so on, you get the point, eventually everyone grudgingly lays down his arms and starts working together for mutual survival.
At this point, I need to point out something fundamental about Thomas Hobbes, that y’all probably don’t know. Hobbes always considered himself first and foremost a mathematician. But he wasn’t a very good mathematician. He’d thought he’d discovered a way to “square the circle,” for instance, and that’s not a metaphor – that was really a thing back then, and Hobbes’s attempt got ripped to shreds by real mathematicians, who thought they were thereby discrediting his metaphysics and, by implication, his political philosophy …
… fun stuff, but irrelevant, the point is, Hobbes was a bad mathematician. So bad, in fact, that even I, a former History professor who needs to pull off a sock every time I have to count past ten, can see the glaring flaw in his “geometrical” political theory: IF it’s based on “the State of Nature,” and we legitimize the Leviathan because that’s what gets us out of the State of Nature, then once we are free of the State of Nature, what’s the point of the Leviathan?
Hobbes didn’t see it that way, of course. He thought that we really did revert to “the war of all against all” the minute the social contract was broken, and in his context – the English Civil Wars, recall – that’s not unreasonable. But what about all the periods of “normal” government? You know, those periods of peace we created the Leviathan specifically to secure? If we get those – and there’s no point to the exercise otherwise – then we seem to have created an all-powerful government that, while it CAN do everything, really shouldn’t do anything.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
March 31, 2021
QotD: The first and only “inalienable” right
It would’ve been far better to have kept the trio in Locke’s original words – life, liberty, and property – but even that wouldn’t have saved us, because the proposition is flawed from the beginning. The full quote is:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …
… and pretty much all of that is wrong.
As we’ve seen, it was a major part of Hobbes’s project to prove that men do in fact have such rights, because it’s not at all “self-evident.” That was the whole point of the Wars of Religion – heretics have NO rights, because they have put themselves beyond the pale of the human community. For the Wars of Religion to end, political legitimacy had to be secularized.
That was Hobbes’s goal. That’s what the “State of Nature” thought experiment was about. Does man has any rights in himself, that flow only from his existence as a human being? In other words, does he have rights NOT endowed by his Creator?
Hobbes argued that we DO have such rights, of course … but, crucially, we only have the full exercise of them in the State of Nature. For Hobbes, all rights are, at bottom, the right to self-defense. Getting out of the State of Nature involves laying at least part of that right down – “alienating” it, in the Latinate English of the 17th century – creating in the process a “corporate person” who “represents” us all. Far from being “inalienable,” then, Life and Liberty, at least, have to be alienated, at least to some degree, if civilization is to exist at all …
… at least according to Hobbes, and do you see what I mean about people trying to adopt his terms while dumping his conclusions?
Hobbes had plenty of examples to hand, writing as he was in the last, nastiest phase of the Wars of Religion. According to Hobbes, the Leviathan – who, let’s recall, can be a Senate or something just as easily as a monarch – absolutely has the right to your life and liberty, since your voluntary surrender of them is what creates the Leviathan in the first place. How else could wars be fought in the gunpowder age? A medieval king leading his personal affinity into battle didn’t have to worry about political theory. An Early Modern king, fielding armies of tens of thousands, did. Without an animating ideology, they’re just mercenaries – ask Machiavelli how that works out.We’ll skip over that “pursuit of happiness” crap, since that’s probably just Jefferson’s noodle-headed way of alluding to Classical political theory, and circle back to the start: “all men are created equal.” As we’ve seen, this was central to Hobbes’s “State of Nature” thought experiment … but, as is obvious to anyone with real-world experience, it only applies there.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
March 29, 2021
Requiring only men to register for the draft isn’t the real problem — the problem is the draft itself
Kerry McDonald fears that the current challenges to the gender inequality of the US draft may end up making the underlying problem worse:
US Selective Service draft notice for J.D. Schmidt, dated 24 September, 1970.
Wikimedia Commons.
Currently, all American men are required to register for the draft through the Selective Service System when they turn 18, and could be forced into military service if the draft was activated. As a mom with young sons, I shudder at this prospect.
Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to rule the current military draft registration unconstitutional because it requires only men to register, not women. As a mom with young daughters, I shudder at this prospect.
While draft registration does involve unequal treatment of men and women, and women have been ably serving in the military for years, including in full combat, the larger issue is Selective Service registration itself. Current draft registration may be unconstitutional, but it shouldn’t exist at all.
Forcing citizens into any kind of non-voluntary work or action is antithetical to the principles of a free society.
Some contend that conscription is necessary to defend those principles if there were not enough volunteers to serve in a wartime effort, but is slavery ever justifiable? Who decides? If there are not enough soldiers to willingly fight a war, should the war be fought?
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was one of the key figures who succeeded in persuading the US to move to an all-volunteer army in 1973, arguing against military conscription. Friedman wrote that “any system involving compulsion is basically inconsistent with a free society.” He went on to argue: “The continued use of compulsion is undesirable and unnecessary. We can and should man our armed forces with volunteers.”
In place of conscription, Friedman advocated for a voluntary military guided by free-market ideas. “The appropriate free market arrangement is volunteer military forces; which is to say, hiring men to serve,” Friedman wrote in his book, Capitalism and Freedom. “There is no justification for not paying whatever price is necessary to attract the required number of men. Present arrangements are inequitable and arbitrary, seriously interfere with the freedom of young men to shape their lives, and probably are even more costly than the market alternative.”
Friedman’s advocacy against conscription came to a climax in testimony with Army Chief of Staff, General William Westmoreland. The general disagreed with Friedman by claiming that the economist’s free-market approach would be akin to leading an army of mercenaries. Friedman replied: “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?”
March 22, 2021
Happy 75th anniversary to the Foundation for Economic Education
The Foundation for Economic Education was founded by Leonard E. Read in 1946:
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Foundation for Economic Education. As I have benefitted from reading FEE’s literature for nearly two thirds of that time and contributed to it for decades, I feel that it is definitely worth celebrating.
This year is also the 50th anniversary of Then Truth Will Out, by Leonard Read, FEE’s founder, which he wrote involved “An assessment of position on the freedom road after passing the 25th milestone at FEE.”
That sort of compound anniversary — 25th, 50th and 75th rolled into one — suggests that we might profit from a look back at “the freedom road” with Then Truth Will Out.
I think it is one of Read’s best books, as attested to by the fact that four of the chapters in my Apostle of Peace, which discusses what I consider some of his best sustained arguments, derive from it. But in looking at the book now, I have been most struck by its opening chapter, “A Confession of Faith.”
- Perhaps the clearest way to identify one’s politico-economic position — at least in broad outline — is to reveal his idea of the ideal, that is, what he means by civilization or by a civilized people.
- To me, civilization can mean nothing less than a society of civilized people. So how is a civilized person to be identified?
- A civilized person, according to my ideal, must recognize that man is at once a social and an individualistic being.
- Thus, he must not only be self-responsible but, at the same time, understand that he owes to others no infringements on their rights.
- In a word, the truly civilized person is a devotee of freedom; he opposes all man-concocted restraints against the release of creative human energy.
- The civilized person realizes how incorrect it is to think of freedom as synonymous with unrestrained action.
- Freedom does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the freedom of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that freedom can be composed of freedom negations, patently absurd.
- Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the freedom of others is the exercise of license, not freedom. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of freedom.
- In order to achieve this ideal, it is necessary that there be an agency of society — representative of the social side of man — which codifies the thou-shalt-nots, the taboos, the destructive actions and enforces their observation.
- The fact that society’s agency — government — has a historical record of getting out of hand, of becoming destructive itself, only testifies to how far from civilized we are. It does not warrant discarding the idea of the ideal; it does not justify anarchy.
March 20, 2021
QotD: Flipping the table on gun ownership regulation
The Hon. Rep. Maslack is joking. I think. And I’m against requiring people who don’t want to bear arms to do so. But gad, how tempting – because underlying his argument is a truth that the drafters of the Vermont and U.S. constitutions understood. People who refuse to take arms in defense of themselves and their neighbors are inflicting a cost on their communities far more certainly than healthy people who refuse to buy medical insurance (and yes, I do think that proposed mandate is an intended target of Maslack’s jab). That externality is measured in higher crime rates, higher law-enforcement and prison budgets, and all the (dis)opportunity costs associated with increased crime. And that’s before you get to the political consequences …
I’ve never made a secret of my evaluation that refusal to bear arms is a form of moral cowardice masquerading as virtue. Real adults know how precious human life is, when they are ethically required to risk it on behalf of others, and when killing is both necessary and justified. Real adults know that there is no magic about wearing a police or military uniform; those decisions are just as hard, and just as necessary, when we deny we’re making them by delegating them to others. Real adults do not shirk the responsibility that this knowledge implies. And the wistful thought Rep Maslack’s proposal leaves me with is … maybe if moral cowardice cost money and humiliation, there would be less of it.
Eric S. Raymond, “Maybe if moral cowardice cost money, it would be less common?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-11-05.
February 10, 2021
Victor Davis Hanson on Animal Farm, America’s nightmare 2021 version
Victor Davis Hanson outlines the original George Orwell novel and then contrasts today’s situation with what progressives demanded back in the 1960s and 70s:
Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm.
But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.
We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.
Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis.
Our left-wing American revolutionary cycle from the barricades to the boardroom was pretty quick — in the manner that the ideology of the Battleship Potemkin soon led to Stalin’s show trials, or Mao’s “long march” logically resulted in the Cultural Revolution. The credo, again, is that the noble ends of forced “equity” require any means necessary to achieve them.
The Left censors books in our schools, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer. It is the Left who organizes efforts to shout down campus speakers or even allows them to be roughed up.
The Left demands not free-speech areas anymore, but no-speech “safe spaces” and “theme houses” — euphemisms for racially segregated, “separate-but-equal” zones. “Microaggressions” are tantamount to thought crimes. The mere way we look, smile, or blink can indict us as counterrevolutionaries. Stalin’s Trotskyization of all incorrect names, statues, and commemoratives is the Left’s ideal, as they seek to relabel Old America in one fell swoop. No one is spared from the new racists, not Honest Abe, not Tom Jefferson, not you, not me.
For “teach-ins,” we now have indoctrination sessions. But the handlers are no longer long-haired 1960’s dreamy, sloppy, and incoherent mentors. They are disciplined, no-nonsense brain-washers.
The Left’s Russia is our new old bogeyman. Putin is the new “We will bury you” Khrushchev.
January 30, 2021
Obey your technocratic elites, peasant!
Scott Alexander considers some historical (and current) examples of you peasants being steamrolled by the powers of the government at the behest of the technological elites of the day:
I am not defending technocracy.
Nobody ever defends technocracy. It’s like “elitism” or “statism”. There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers.
[…] it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
1. Mandatory vaccinations: Technocrats used complicated mathematical models to determine that mass vaccination would create a “herd immunity” to disease. Certain that their models were “objectively” correct and so could not possibly be flawed, these elites decided to force vaccines on a hostile population. Despite popular protest (did you know that in 1800s England, anti-smallpox-vaccine rallies attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators?), these technocrats continued to want to “arrogantly remake the world in their image,” and pushed ahead with their plan, ignoring normal citizens’ warnings that their policies might have unintended consequences, like causing autism.
2. School desegregation: Nine unelected experts with Harvard and Yale degrees, using a bunch of Latin terms like a certiori and de facto that ordinary people could not understand let alone criticize, decided to completely upend the traditional education system of thousands of small communities to make it better conform to some rules written in a two-hundred-year-old document. The communities themselves opposed it strongly enough to offer violent resistance, but the technocrats steamrolled over all objections and sent in the National Guard to enforce their orders.
US Highway System needs in 1965 from “Needs of the Highway Systems 1955-1984”, a letter from the Secretary of Commerce to the House Committee on Public Works, approved May 6, 1954.
US Government Printing Office via Wikimedia Commons.3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn’t.
4. Climate change: In the second half of the 20th century, scientists determined that carbon dioxide emissions were raising global temperatures, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climatologists created complicated formal models to determine how quickly global temperatures might rise, and economists designed clever from-first-principle mechanisms that could reduce emissions, like cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes. But these people were members of the elite toying with equations that could not possibly include all the relevant factors, and who were vulnerable to their elite biases. So the United States decided to leave the decision up to democratic mechanisms, which allowed people to contribute “outside-the-system” insights like “Actually global warming is fake and it’s all a Chinese plot”.
5. Coronavirus lockdowns: The government appointed a set of supposedly infallible scientist-priests to determine when people were or weren’t allowed to engage in normal economic activity. The scientist-priests, who knew nothing about the complex set of factors that make one person decide to go to a rock festival and another to a bar, decided that vast swathes of economic activity they didn’t understand must stop. The ordinary people affected tried to engage in the usual mechanisms of democracy, like complaining, holding protests, and plotting to kidnap their governors – but the scientist-priests, certain that their analyses were “objective” and “fact-based”, thought ordinary people couldn’t possibly be smart enough to challenge them, and so refused to budge.
Nobody uses the word “technocrat” except when they’re criticizing something. So “technocracy” accretes this entire language around it – unintended consequences, the perils of supposed “objectivity”, the biases inherent in elite paradigms. And then when you describe something using this language, it’s like “Oh, of course that’s going to fail – everything like that has always failed before!”
But if you accept that “technocracy” describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?
I want to make it really clear that I’m not saying that technocracy is good and democracy is bad. I’m saying that this is actually a hard problem. It’s not a morality play, where you tell ghost stories about scary High Modernists, point vaguely in the direction of Brasilia, say some platitudes about how no system can ever be truly unbiased, and then your work is done. There are actually a bunch of complicated reasons why formal expertise might be more useful in some situations, and local knowledge might be more useful in others.
January 29, 2021
QotD: Banishing racism
We can – we must, in fact – learn to judge individuals as individuals, not as members of racial or other ascriptive groups. This has always been the right thing to do; as knowledge about genetic group differences becomes more detailed and widespread, we will need to learn how to focus rigorously on individuals with the same discipline (and the same justified fear of failure) that we now apply to averting our eyes from genetic group differences.
Part of the reason this evolution won’t be easy is that so much of our politics has been distorted by racial grievance-mongering. It’s not only the obvious bad guys like neo-Nazis, Black separatists like Louis Farrakhan, and Bharatiya Janata who are invested in racialist categorization as a lever to power. The political Left has fallen into a lazy habit of screaming “racist!” at anyone who disagrees with them, won’t readily relinquish that rhetorical club, and have a lot invested in the present system of taboo, resentment, “disparate impact” legislation, and racial identity politics; expect them, too, to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Still, the right strategy is clear. Actual knowledge makes both prejudice and repression unsustainable. “Know thyself!” said the oracle, and behavioral genetics will allow – actually, force us – to know ourselves in ways we never have before. That way lies the pain of revelation, but also the path of redemption.
Eric S. Raymond, “A Specter is Haunting Genetics”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-06-19.
January 20, 2021
“Canada Post … is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada”
Colby Cosh on a recent incident in Regina where a Canada Post employee took it upon himself to act as a local censor for people on his delivery route:
Today’s idiot of the day is not, perhaps surprisingly, the Regina postman who got suspended for refusing to deliver the Epoch Times, the oddball anti-communist newspaper that’s affiliated with China’s persecuted Falun Gong religious movement. Don’t get us wrong: Ramiro Sepulveda is clearly a bit of a nitwit. He seems to believe that a newspaper founded by commie-hating Chinese-Americans is designed to provoke hatred toward “Asian communities in North America.”
Sepulveda didn’t want to deliver free copies of the Times to non-soliciting customers because it “spits lies.” Perhaps regrettably, the strong reaction by Canada Post means that our junk mail, quite a lot of which consists of boastful missives from politicians, is not destined to be fact-checked and aggressively suppressed by the corporation’s rank and file.
Sepulveda was properly punished for not doing his job. And Canada Post used the opportunity to promote its content-neutrality as an agent of the state, although it did not quite dare to use the phrase “statutory monopoly.” In a statement to the broadcasters who reported on Sepulveda’s off-piste personal fact-checking, the agency said: “Canada Post is obligated to deliver any mail that is properly prepared and paid for, unless it is considered non-mailable matter. The courts have told Canada Post that its role is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada.”
They might have added that access to the mail has been denied to individuals for spreading hatred only a handful of times in the history of the country; this, too, is as it ought to be, and it is certainly not postal employees who ought to be improvising such bans. Ideally, all postmen would be doing their best not to create the suspicion that they are eyeballing what is sent to our homes with the intention of ringing up a reporter and causing a fuss. Say what you like about these poor toilers: most of them never give us any reason to doubt their discretion.
QotD: Helping the homeless
I see a number of sources nowadays trying to pin these closures entirely on tight-fisted Republican governors, and I am sure this is partly true. But this misses an important element — that civil libertarians had real issues with both the conduct of these institutions (e.g. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and the fairness of the forced-institutionalization process. Also tied up in all this were Cold War stories of Soviet Russia using institutionalization in mental hospitals as a way to dispose of dissidents. After all, it is a short step from the totalitarian view of ideology (ie that everyone must believe, not just comply) to declaring that any deviation from the official orthodoxy constitutes mental illness.
Warren Meyer, “Why I Go Back and Forth On Issues of Forced Psychiatric Institutionalization”, Coyote Blog, 2018-09-20.
January 14, 2021
QotD: Collective-action problems – perfect state response versus flawed private responses
The implicit burden of the article, after all, is indignation that the government has been done too little and the wrong things. What the author fails to grasp (because his thinking is warped by the religion of state-worship) is that this sort of dysfunction is not a sporadic accidental failure that could be corrected by sufficiently virtuous thoughts and deeds; it is an essential failure, entirely predictable from the incentives operating on all the actors (including the actors within government).
His sort of fantasy thinking implicitly throws a burden of proof on anarchists to construct a perfect response to something like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in a stateless system, or else have their critique of statism dismissed as heartless and inadequate. But the correct analysis is to notice that we can only do what we can only do, and compare the rationally expectable effectiveness of flawed government action against the rationally expectable effectiveness of flawed individual and market action.
The second level of error, once you get this far, is to require that the market action achieve a better outcome without including all the continuing, institutional costs of state action in the accounting. So, for example, other parts of the continuing costs of accepting state action to solve this individual toxic-exposure problem in the Deep Horizon aftermath is that Americans will be robbed every April 15th of five in twelve parts of their income (on average), and be randomly killed in no-knock drug raids. And it’s no use protesting that these abuses are separable from the “good” parts of government as long as you’re also insisting that the prospect of market failures is not separable from the good behavior of markets!
Irrational anarchists believe that utopia is somehow achievable in a stateless system; they make the exact reciprocal error from statists, believing that all evil proceeds from government. Rational anarchists like myself know that stateless systems will have tragic failures too, but believe after analysis that they would have fewer and smaller ones.
If this seems doubtful to you, do not forget to include all the great genocides of the 20th century in the cost of statism. It was contemplating those that turned me into an anarchist – because that sort of eruption of fire and blood, too, is not accidental but essential given the logic of state collectivism.
Eric S. Raymond, “Pessimistic anarchism”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-09-15.
January 13, 2021
Driving people offline will break essential political feedback loops
Larry Correia on the ongoing purge of Trump supporters from many social media networks:
Screencap of a Fox News report on the social media networks that have deplatformed President Donald Trump, January 2021.
For all of history when people have a problem they have been able to talk about it and hash it out. Solutions to complex problems don’t spring fully formed into existence the instant you note the problem. You get ideas from others. Their perspectives help you better articulate the issue and recognize consequences you didn’t expect.
Lawyers know law, engineers know engineering, artists know art, so on. So when there is a big problem that spreads across multiple fields, of course you need to talk it over with people who know those areas, because they know things you don’t. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in others. We all need help. Big problems require discussion and brainstorming. Even if it isn’t effective, it’s still useful for the clever people who can make solutions to be able to listen to what the regular populace thinks and feels so that they can get the scope and understand how the problem hurts the public.
In the old days these conversations happened at churches, taverns, colleges, that kind of thing. All the famous places where big solutions to big problems were hashed out have a historical marker on them today. For us, those things are now illegal or stifled and we get the internet.
So of course the people who don’t see the problems as problems — or sometimes they are the problem — are trying to stop the rest of us from discussing the problems or they are trying to control where and how the conversations happen. Since they benefit from the problem, they will squash or sabotage people talking about solutions. It is in their best interests to do so, and when you give a bully a stick, they will beat you with it.
The topic of the current problem isn’t the important thing. This is our public square now whether we like it or not. We have foolishly abdicated the public square and now we are paying the price. Of course they can’t just let people they don’t like converse. That’s dangerous to their positions.
So when information they don’t like appears, they hide it. If they can’t hide it, they “fact check” it, and often that’s just a headline screaming false followed by an article full of straw grasping excuses they know most people won’t read. The goal is to shut you up or discredit you.
In the old days, at your pub or church, your drinking buddies or co-religionists probably shared your concerns and faced the same problems. So at least you were working toward a common goal. But now, big tech doesn’t want that. They don’t like groups or forums that don’t share their orthodoxy. They want/need to keep you here, and they need strangers to constantly kick in the doors and blunder in to tell you that you are stupid or crazy, that way we waste time arguing with them. It used to be a village had one idiot. When we talk now we get to deal with a thousand villages worth of idiot.
January 2, 2021
This is the dawning of the Age of the Putz
At least, that’s how David Warren sees it:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
… the spirit of Resolution has been dying in our society, and that is among the principal reasons that our public life has been down-trending. It is what we may call the Age of the Putz, using the term with its full Yiddish vigour, yet in English where we may say it in the presence of women and children. Yes, it means stupid, foolish, worthless, idle and so forth. But as I understand, at the fulcrum, it means “easy to swing around.” It means being led by one’s rope, as it were. A putz (understandably confused with a schmuck, or a nebbish) does what he has been told by the authorities, and oddly like the brave, he does not hesitate. But this is because he can’t endure pain. He can be agreeable, yet without charm. (Reader warning: my Yiddish may be defective.)
This would be acceptable, in the sense that there is nothing we can do about a putz — he has already surrendered — but a line must be drawn somewhere, if only for our own edification. This is where, in current jargon, we cross over from a putz, to a Karen. In my apartment building alone, there must be a dozen who have made this “transition.”
They are the ones who think they will die, if you’ve forgotten your bat-muzzle, or threaten to step within seventy inches of them, in an elevator. They may appear to be making a threat, by the shrieks of complaint they utter, but really it is only fear. It is, to be plain, the opposite of Resolution. The authorities, taking them for putzes, have easily instilled the “public health” terror, with “science” they have made up, and may yank them here or there as they want.
Could I make videos, I would record a snide little number that composed itself in my head, last May (when we were only two months into “fifteen days to flatten the curve”). It was entitled, “You’re Going To Kill People!” The dance component was a variation on the hippie-days twist, in which Walmart shoppers try to stay two feet clear of each other, while looting modest consumer durables.
