Absolute Sexual Equality

Over at Philosophical Disquisitions, John Danaher is discussing the "Polygamy, Incest, Bestiality" (PIB) slippery slope objection to homosexuality. He reviews several attempts to counter this argument by describing how homosexual activity is different from PIB, and (paraphrasing John Corvino) rightly points out that there is logically no need to make such arguments because the people who equate homosexuality to PIB do not provide any argument supporting that position (the only similarity being that they are all "forbidden" or "gross").

Along those lines, the PIB argument really isn't an argument in itself; it seems to be a reductio ad absurdum for some unspecified justification for acceptance of homosexuality. The logic seems to be:

1) You say that we should accept homosexuality because of principle X.
2) Principle X would cause us to accept PIB (or pedophilia) .
3) Therefore, principle X is invalid.

Of course, the force of this argument relies entirely on what "principle X" actually is; if principle X does not apply to PIB, then the PIB-argument is pointless.

So this brings us to my favorite "principle X" : absolute sexual equality.

My principle is that I should not treat a person differently due solely to their biological sex (aside from my own sexual relationships). I realized that this principle applies to homosexuality when I read that some opponents of the sexual Equal Rights Amendment had predicted that the ERA would forbid discrimination against homosexual relationships. Many proponents of the ERA reject this interpretation. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say anything about that -- but I do agree that the principle of sexual non-discrimination implies acceptance of homosexuality.

Attempts to distinguish homophobia from sexism often rest on the idea of reciprocal equality: that discrimination against homosexuality will limit a man's options just as much as it would limit a woman's options-- both men and women would be limited to sexual relationships with the opposite sex (let's ignore the intersex in this argument).

Superficially, this argument seems reasonable, but for any American it should quickly raise a red-flag, since it is reminiscent of the principle of "separate but equal". Based on history, we know that an arrangement that is superficially egalitarian can act as a cover for severe oppression. Based on logic, we know that when we treat people differently, it is very difficult to perfectly balance the moral worth of those differences; this is especially true in a world where people have different opinions regarding the moral worth of different conditions. In essence, requiring that men marry women and women marry men is the same as requiring that men work outside of the home and women work inside the home. We may believe that we can put aside our personal preferences and assert than marrying a man is objectively just as good as marrying a woman. However, as with a belief that working inside the home is just as good as working outside the home, this is actually a personal preference and not an objective description of reality. Furthermore, we cannot give the benefit of the doubt to these assertions of equal value, because such arrangements are quite easy to manipulate in favor of one group or the other (as we have seen in history).

For the sake of illustration, consider these two ways in which this "reciprocal equality" could lead to clearly non-equal outcomes. These may seem silly on their own, but they are sufficient to demonstrate the inequality implicit in considering sex when judging relationships.

The first inequality arises from the physical and emotional differences between men and women. For instance, men (as a group) are stronger than women (as a group); if we were to forbid a person from choosing a partner from either group, then we clearly would be influencing the likely characteristics of the partner that they eventually find.

The second aspect of inequality is apparent when the population is divided into two "reciprocal" groups that vary drastically in size. Consider splitting the human population into two groups, each of which is forbidden from marrying within its own group. Now imagine that one group constitutes 90% of the population, and the other is 10%; the 10% is clearly the elite group here, having their choice of partners from the other group, whereas most of the members of the larger group will be effectively forbidden from marrying at all (unless the members of the smaller group can take multiple spouses). Normally, the population of males and females is nearly equal, so this isn't a big deal, but this thought experiment does emphasize the fact that men and women are selecting their partners from different groups, competing for attention with a different group of people, and that these group dynamics will influence the likely outcome of their quests to find partners. To bring this back to the real world, some societies have experienced substantial imbalances between the male and female population -- a deficit of males following major wars, and a deficit of females is societies that practice prenatal sex selection.

Now that I've stated my position, let's consider how it compares to the position of others. Many people consider themselves "anti-sexist", yet would balk at taking this position of non-discrimination between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Looking at the marriage issue and their behavior in general, they apparently think that discrimination is quite appropriate; they actually are sexist, they only object to the idea that one sex is superior to the other. They will treat men and women differently in everyday encounters and believe that it is totally just for the law to recognize these categories for issues such as marriage. My objection to such categorization is both moral and empirical. Morally, individuals should be free to structure their lives as they see fit, and pigeonholing a person into a gender role places a fairly arbitrary restriction on their freedom. Empirically, many people lack the stereotypical traits of their gender on which theories of sexual discrimination are based (e.g. many men have less strength than the median strength among women). Trying to force a person into a role based on their genitalia is a simplistic approach that ignores the many ways in which each person deviates from any sexual ideal.

On the other side, there may be people who consider my view of sexual equality to be limited, in that I do consider there to be difference between men and women. These differences are apparent both in how I relate to them sexually (which only applies to my wife now) and that the male and female populations differ in many socially important respects. I won't deny that our sexual preferences and relationships have myriad ramifications in other aspects of society (thereby undermining the idea of sexual non-discrimination); however, by recognizing that the male and female populations are in fact different, I do not automatically assume that any difference in social/economic standing is due to discrimination. There is simply no getting around the fact that people are different from each other, and the details of how these differences arise (e.g. genetic, chemical, social) are not really important. We cannot and should not treat each individual identically, all we can do is make sure that our discrimination is not based on unsound ideology and prejudice.

So to bring this back to the issue of social acceptance of homosexuality and the "PIB objection", I think that it is immediately clear that this principle of equality does not compel us to accept polygamy, pedophilia, or bestiality. A variant of this principle (non-discrimination on the basis of parentage) could be used to argue that incest should not be discouraged. Of course, this would in no way affect the situations where incest could be viewed as rape (whether statutory or forcible). I'm not too concerned by this use of the argument to destigmatize incest,partly because I don't think that cousin marriage needs to be stigmatized, and so this issue is limited to sibling marriage. More importantly, most of these arguments for sexual equality do not apply strongly to incest -- primarily because the the prohibition of incestuous sexual activity does not place a substantial restriction on a person's choice of mates.

The advancement of sexual equality is one of the major struggles of our age, and no attempt to equate it with sexual perversion should distract us from eliminating sexual discrimination from our institutions.

Cousin marriage: science, prejudice, and lifestyle mandates

Reposted from Freedom Democrats, 2009.

A perspective from PLoS Biology by Diane Paul and Hamish Spencer argues that there is no scientific basis for social stigma and laws against marriages of first cousins. The basic argument is that the risk of birth defects from first-cousin mating is negligible, and fear of such defects is the only basis for these attitudes and laws. This issue is interesting to libertarians as an illustration of how lawmakers often pretend that they are implementing the scientific management of society, when in fact their acts are based on nothing more than ignorant prejudice.

This issue is also interesting in how it connects with the evolution of our views towards government:

The laws must also be viewed in the context of a new, post–Civil War acceptance of the need for state oversight of education, commerce, and health and safety, including marriage and the family. Beginning in the 1860s, many states passed anti-miscegenation laws, increased the statutory age of marriage, and adopted or expanded medical and mental-capacity restrictions in marriage law. Thus, laws prohibiting cousin marriage were but one aspect of a more general trend to broaden state authority in areas previously considered private. And unlike the situation in Britain and much of Europe, cousin marriage in the US was associated not with the aristocracy and upper middle class but with much easier targets: immigrants and the rural poor.

One flaw in the argument from Paul and Spencer is that they emphasize the low costs of mating among cousins, but they ignore the low costs of prohibiting cousins from marrying--laws against cousin incest produce a negligible reduction in the pool of prospective spouses (as opposed to laws against same-sex marriage or inter-racial marriage, for example). I'm sure that this issue is terribly important for those few people who are romantically in love with their cousins, but it will never get onto the radar screen of anyone who is considering the total welfare of humanity, or the overall injustice in the world.

Paul and Spencer also largely ignore the social issues around cousin marriages. From modern American perspective, cousin marriages may disrupt the stability of the extended family. Conversely, in some societies, cousin-marriages seem to increase family stability and support--providing the child with benefits that may outweigh the risks of genetic problems (I'll link to the report if I can find it). We could also speculate that frequent cousin marriages may result in a more fragmented society with insular families: at its most extreme, it may facilitate the formation of cult-like social structures. Ultimately, I suspect that day-to-day social concerns play a much more direct role in policy formation than expert-mediated scientific knowledge.

A Google search reveals a fair amount of commentary on this issue. At Slate.com, William Salaten notes that we will soon be able to genotype everyone to look for couples who carry identical alleles: if we embrace the logic of the prohibition on marriage of cousins, does that mean that genetic testing (a la GATTACA) should be a mandatory part of a marriage application, and the application be rejected if both individuals carry a potentially harmful recessive allele? Of course, as GATTACA illustrates, genetic selection on in vitro embryos is a solution to that problem.

Pirate parties and the new economic power

A few posts back, I ruminated on a potential shift in the nature of economic power and how that could play out in the political realm. The rise of the Pirate parties seems to fit into the process that I was pondering:

the success of the Pirate Party cannot simply be explained away by saying it’s a symptom of social exclusion or ignorance. The supporters of the new party are anything but on the margins – they are highly educated and media savvy. And above all, they are young and in a position to attract like-minded individuals in cities all over the country. To a certain extent, they represent the future elite of Germany. For mainstream-party strategists, realising that they are unable to connect with this section of society must come as a kick in the teeth.

From How Germany’s Pirates might sink the mainstream parties | Matthias Heitmann | spiked

Anyway, this suggests that the "new power" may be centered on the ability to generate large ad-hoc communities around current issues, and motivate these communities to act. So the new power is based on social networking assets (including both old-fashioned "people skills", familiarity with those newfangled devices, and a reputation that encourages others to pay attention), as opposed to the old powers built on land ownership, industrial ownership, and institutional control. The funny thing is that the assets of this new power are pretty much identical to the assets of the financial industry-- the main difference being that these assets are now widely distributed, and the "clients" are not just millionaires and large institutions.

Frankly, they don't deserve our protection

I know that most "realists" will say that the assassination of a diplomat on our soil is a clear casus belli, but I think we have to ask whether we really want to make any sacrifices to protect members of the Saudi government. They are scum. That doesn't meant that we can't talk with them and try to work with them under some circumstances, but it does mean that I have no interest in making any sacrifices to protect them, regardless of the circumstances.

The judicial system: The feeblest branch | The Economist

This is crazy:

A typical lawsuit now goes to trial within a couple of years, says Ms Feinstein, but that could soon stretch to five years. The backlog of traffic infractions is already so daunting that it compromises enforcement (and the deterrence of bad driving). And so on. The Californian constitution guarantees criminal defendants a right to speedy trial, but it does not technically require courts to administer civil law at all, Ms Feinstein says. So, in theory, civil adjudication could stop altogether, as it already has on one judicial circuit in Georgia. That, she says would bring about the “unravelling of society”.

The judicial system: The feeblest branch | The Economist

While pondering whether a smooth transition to anarchy is possible, I had thought of the government dismantling itself by folding up the executive branch-- leaving a court to adjudicate disputes between people, and a (possibly reformed) legislative branch to set the rules for such adjudication. Here we seem to have the opposite: the state continuing to micro-manage the lives of the people, but refusing to settle disputes. It's as if the people in charge are trying really hard to leave behind the minarchist ideal of the "night-watchman state".

Following the invasion of Iraq, I had a nagging feeling that Bush and Co. were trying to liquidate the welfare state -- Bush created large deficits by cutting taxes (retroactively!) on the rich, and then guaranteed a long term drain of the budget by invading Iraq even as we were facing a major nation-building challenge in Afghanistan. Before long, we'd have a debt crisis requiring the gutting of state economic support (ranging from Social Security to education funding), but we'd still have to pay taxes (directly or indirectly) to avoid default and to maintain the armed-forces of the state (both domestic and deployed). Our only interaction with the state would be the police-man's baton.

The new economic power

Even when I'm trying to focus on my job, I get drawn into thinking about social activism. My most recent distraction comes from two articles by Pieter Hintjens. The main essay is called "A User's Guide to the Digital Revolution", the introduction to a book called Software and Silicon. Hintjens presents recent economic developments as a "digital revolution" on par with the "industrial revolution" of the early 19th century, and predicts similarly radical changes in social organization and political power. In a slapdash theory of class struggle, he makes analogies between then and now:

The new social concentrations of 19th century cities allowed an entrepreneurial middle class to emerge, and quite rapidly their economic power turned into political power, and in 1848 there was political revolution across Europe and the establishment of parliamentary democracy in many countries. Political change follows economic change, which follows social change.

Hintjens posits that the "old money" ruling class attempts to constrain the rising power of the "new money" entrepreneurial class with laws such as the Corn Laws of 19th century Britain, or the Intellectual Property laws of today's global system.

This narrative is all well and good (though it seems simplistic relative to the theories described in my current nightstand-book: a biography of Friedrich Engles), but it got me thinking about how the economic power of the "new money" differs from the "old money" in such a way that it demands radical change to the political system. Today, it seems that new money merges seamlessly into the old money; software entrepreneurs sell their start-ups or they draw salaries and dividends, which they then deposit in banks or stock-market investment funds -- just like everyone else with money. This is not anything like the difference between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie in the 19th century.

For there to be a true conflict between a rising economic class and the establishment, the new power has to be fundamentally different and incompatible with the old power. The aristocratic and bourgeoisie power structures were ideologically incompatible, and functionally non-convertible (though some industrialists were granted titles of nobility). I have to look hard -- and squint -- to see that sort of conflict in existing classes.

Hintjens provides a hint of this new form of power in another essay, called Testing Considered Evil. While this is superficially a technical essay about software design methodology, it is actually part of a manifesto about economic organization and how to motivate workers. Here is where we begin to see a radical form of economic power; Hintjens is focusing on how to get programmers involved (and obsessed) with Open Source Software development. This is economic activity that falls outside of the established channels -- it doesn't generate cash revenues, or any sort of property that can be owned by a corporation. The only economic asset gained by the entrepreneur is organizational: a network of motivated programmers, and a reputation that enables the entrepreneur to call on their services.

When this form of economic organization is viewed alongside the efforts of people such as the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd, I can imagine that something big is happening, and that tomorrow's power will not look like yesterday's.

Please stay tuned...

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"Diaspora* means a brighter future for all of us"

Diaspora is an interesting project, and seems to be finally bearing some fruit. It is essentially a user-owned social networking system (e.g. Facebook)

According to a recent press release from the group (Diaspora* means a brighter future for all of us):

Diaspora’s distributed design is a huge part of it. Like the Internet itself, Diaspora* isn’t housed in any one place, and it’s not controlled by any one entity (including us). We’ve created software that lets you set up and run your own social network on your own “pod” (or server) and connect your network to the larger Diaspora* ecosystem...

This means you can do what you want. You can express yourself candidly, and be your authentic self. You can go by whatever name you like on Diaspora*. Pseudonyms are fine, and this both protects you (if you want to say something your boss or your parents disagree with) and opens the door to real connection.

The Mass Transit Police State

Normally, I'd think that this is just pathetic partisan fearmongering without any basis in reality:

the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

However, when a heavily subsidized commuter train system (BART) attacks the First Amendment...

My favorite sci-fi fantasy books

Something fun... my thoughts on the "Top 100 Sci-Fi Fantasy books": audience picks from NPR's.

Following Russel Arben Fox, I've noted which ones I've read... and I've added some notes. I have one comment in preface: it's hard to believe that all these stories get lumped together in one category; the tone and style varies so much! It's also a shame that they separated these from stories of supernatural horror.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I read it once in middle school, and once when I was thirty. I appreciated it much more upon my second reading (especially the romance). I then got sucked in and read "The Children of Hurin" (powerful, though the quality of the writing varied...as might be expected given that Tolkien left it unfinished). Then read the Silmarillion(below).

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Load's of fun... though I may like the Dirk Gently stories better.

3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

Clever story... and the series develops in an interesting direction.

6. 1984, by George Orwell

I read it more than once... then saw the movie.

7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

I heard it first on audiotape, then I read it.

8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov

I've read much of Asimov's work, and my favorite story is not on this list ("The Gods Themselves")

9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Brilliant. Both in concept and execution. I've read it two or three times.

13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell

14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson

16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov

17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

Read this, and think about the riots in London.

31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

Really? Decent book, excellent movie, awesome drinking game.

32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams

Didn't think this was Sci-Fi... but a good book. I read it twice; both as child and adult.

33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

Brilliant vision. Excellent writing... if you like dark humor. I read it two or three times.

44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven

I don't recall if I read this. I know I read a story that took place on the ringworld though. I've read so many of Niven's stories, it's hard to keep them straight. He's a great storyteller and explores a lot of interesting (speculative) social issues, but I don't find any of his stories particularly profound. The only one I read twice was "Protector".

46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

An ambitious attempt to create a new genre of modern literature. Brilliant.

53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

Neat idea, and amusing writing... but should have been half as long.

54. World War Z, by Max Brooks

Started off strong... but quickly turned to drivel. I don't think I actually finished it, even though I had selected it as "light" beach reading.

76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

I read this or another book about Rama.

80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Fun series, good stories. I get a kick out of imagining how to resist a totalitarian regime.

84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart

This is one of the first "adult" books that I read...I didn't realize it had such a following. Maybe I should read it again.

94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov

So, that comes to 26 / 100. I'll add three more books/series to the list:

• The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This book was engrossing (though he spent too much time explaining his mythology), and got me into Lovecraft. Unfortunately, none of his other stories were as good as this one.
  
• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. This is a great work of supernatural horror (Lovecraftian)-- but it's presented as a space-exploration story.
  
• The Berserker series by Fred Sabrahagen. I haven't read these since I was a kid, so they may be juvenile... but they sure made an impression on me.

I seen the movie version of many of those books, and had never even realized that there had been a book!

Phillip Dick has been on my reading list since I've seen three or four movies based on his books, and since I saw that Neuromancer won the "Phillip Dick award".

Ian Banks has also been on my reading list; the culture series sounds awesome. I looked for it at my local library, but found "Song of Stone" instead, which is itself an excellent story (though hardly Sci-Fi/Fantasy).

Update: I saw Flatland at the local bookstore in the SciFi/Fantasy section. If it belongs in that category (rather than, say, philosophy), then it belongs on this list.

The value of radical political thought

Outline:
the conservative presumption
conceptual limit: ideals
conceptual limit: the ambiguity of tradition
contextual limit: the existence of problems
contextual limit: the sustainability of the status quo


Gary Chartier recently tried to outline how the state harms the most vulnerable members of society ("Should Bleeding Hearts Be Anarchists?"). The post was basically a "hit-and-run", lacking any substantial explanation or examples, and the comment thread was largely a muddle of semantic ambiguity and unsupported assertions about moral values. However, one of the arguments against anarchism stood out as being worth a considered response:

Damien S. wrote:

The anarchist bears the burden because the anarchist is arguing for change, radical change even. I can look around the world and see dozens of states that are pleasant though not perfect places to live in. The anarchist brings no such evidence to the table.

This is essentially the conservative case against any radicalism. Or rather, it is the conservative presumption against radicalism. It is a rule of thumb that helps to generate good strategies, as long as circumstances don't clearly demand alternative strategies. On its own, it is quite reasonable, but it also has very limited applicability, which I wish to explore here. I hope to provide an explanation for why it is worthwhile to give serious consideration to radical ideas, even if this conservative presumption is itself taken seriously.

As a preliminary note, the conservative presumption is not the only good presumption out there. In particular, I consider it to be equal to the libertarian presumption. Here's how I phrase the two:

• Conservative: If there is no problem, don't change anything.
• Libertarian: If a person is causing no harm, don't interfere with his actions.

Clearly, in a somewhat authoritarian/communitarian society like ours, these two principles are often at odds. For instance, the libertarian presumption would weigh in favor of decriminalizing drugs, whereas the conservative presumption would favor continuation of the existing policy (assuming that the drug war has no substantial problems). However, this tension is not insurmountable, and can be resolved with compromises such as incremental decriminalization resulting in a heavily taxed and regulated drug market. The two presumptions can even reinforce each other; in America, this is most prominently seen in the arguments over gun-control.

With that being said, I'd like to consider the limits of the conservative presumption on its own merits, and how this affects our interaction with radical political ideas such as anarchism.

The first limitation is that the presumption only applies to actions and institutions, not to thoughts and ideas. The fact that the state exists does not mean that we have to accept every argument put forth extolling its benefits, even if those arguments have seeped into mainstream political culture. A person is perfectly capable of holding the opinion that the state is a worthless if not dangerous institution, while still going to work and paying taxes; the conservative presumption encourages us to continue acting like a "responsible citizen" regardless of these theoretical conclusions. A convinced anarchist does not have to seek constitutional reforms that would undermine state power (as if an anarchist would consider this line of activism worthwhile to begin with), nor does the anarchist need to assassinate state agents or instigate riots.1


The second limit on the conservative presumption is that it does not always indicate that one course of action is preferred over another. This is most obvious when we are seeking a solution for a problem that has never been seen before: if both solutions are novel, then we will have to evaluate them on the basis of other criteria, such as which one most favors one's ideals. More subtly, this limit arises when it is impossible to truly maintain traditional arrangements, and we are forced to chose between two aspects of the status quo. An example of this is the American Civil War, where the southerners were faced with either the abolition of slavery or rebellion against the USA. This sort of limit is also encountered when we consider the diversity of traditional behaviors; for instance, America has always been a "government of law", yet many Americans have openly or covertly resisted laws that they deemed unjust or misguided. Examples include the fugitive slave laws, alcohol prohibition, the military draft, Jim Crow laws, and laws against homosexuality. Once these scofflaws are recognized as part of the American tradition (indeed, they are heroes of American history), it becomes less than clear that an anarchist is encouraging radical behavior when he asserts that we have no obligation to obey bad laws.


In addition to these conceptual limits to the conservative presumption, there are also contextual limits. As I described it above, the conservative presumption assumes that there are no problems; once we encounter serious problems in our lives, the presumption against change is discarded. When the status quo is bad enough, a change may be worthwhile even if the final outcome is uncertain. Especially when a person's hardship can clearly be attributed to a particular institution, their best strategy may be to undermine that institution, even if they suspect that the elimination of their target will have sweeping and unpredictable consequences.

Many Americans may live in conditions that provide rational incentive to attack fundamental social institutions. For instance, many Americans are impoverished or in jail. Indeed, poverty and police supervision (such as incarceration) tend to be focused in particular cities and neighborhoods, creating an environment that justifies radicalism even among those who are not personally impoverished or in jail. Those who manage to avoid outright poverty and incarceration may still feel that the dominant institutions of our society have failed them. Living in fear of thugs and gangs, hemmed-in by a transportation system designed for the benefit of others, or condemned to malnutrition by geographical and financial inaccessibility of nutritious food-- many people have good reason to doubt that existing social institutions will allow them or their loved-ones to live fulfilling lives.

Historically, the promise of progress and the myth of democratic authority have persuaded many dissatisfied Americans to go along with the powers-that-be and relinquish control over their own lives. But over the past few decades, it has become unclear whether "progress" sill includes Americans with lower socio-economic status. Likewise, the traditional vehicles of working-class political power have withered, thereby undermining confidence that the political system is truly democratic. If people in this situation abandon faith in the authorities and take responsibility for their lives, the conservative presumption will hold little sway over them (and to address the original question -- bleeding-heart elites may want to support them).


It's worth noting that the above paragraphs refer to other people; I have lived my life comfortably in the upper half of the socio-economic scale. I feel no pressing need to change our fundamental social institutions, even if several of them limit the flourishing of myself and my peers. Presumably, most of the readers and writers at blogs like "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" have similar security. But even for the comfortable middle-class (and elite), there is good reason to seriously consider -- and even promote-- radical political ideas.

Those of us who are served well by existing institutions still need to consider the conditions under which these institutions might collapse, what sort of institutions we would build following a collapse, and how we could minimize the hardships associated with the transition from failed institutions to new ones. We need to consider these scenarios because collapse is inevitable-- all systems collapse; political/economic systems are prone to crisis every few generations, and they only survive their crises if they are substantially reformed.

Our current institutions could last for several generations more, or they could collapse in the next decade. The fact that America is "the strongest nation" should not be taken as evidence for the stability of the American system, since even powerful political systems can collapse in the space of a few years (for instance, the USSR). Furthermore, our institutions are showing signs of strain from several chronic problems, and similar troubles are faced by other liberal capitalist nations: unbalanced financial systems, natural resource depletion, high unemployment and economic stagnation, political paralysis, and frequent military interventions that fail to produce a clear victory...but could easily instigate a exhausting arms-race or devastating war.

Radical political thought prepares the American middle class for the eventual crisis that we will encounter. It helps us to avoid getting excited over false crises (such as high levels of immigration), and recognize the decisions that are likely to provoke a true crisis (such as military adventurism). It will help us to recognize when our institutions have outlived their usefulness, and prevent us from desperately clinging to them as they collapse. Overall, radical political thought will help us to prepare ourselves -- economically, socially, and emotionally-- for the inevitable transition to new social institutions that are better adapted to our current conditions and desires.

When the time comes to replace our current institutions with new ones, we will either undertake the project guided by a set of principles that will ensure the greatest opportunities for our children and grand-children, or we will cling to past glories and desperately grasp for solutions to unanticipated hardships. If America does not prepare itself with radical political theory, then it will devolve into an emotionalist mob that is easily manipulated by the empty promises and scapegoating of demagogues.



1: Of course, there are many reasons for a person to refrain from violence, regardless of ideological opinions or a unwillingness to upset the existing system. Two that come to mind immediately are first, a pacifist presumption, and second, a rational limit on how much one is willing to personally sacrifice to promote a political agenda.

Nation building, from the bottom up

The Economist has a brief description of the state-building process in Somaliland, a de facto independent region within de jure jurisdiction of Somolia.

Aid and Somaliland: Mo money mo problems

The basic thesis is that in the absence of foreign support for the Somaliland state, the government was forced into developing a web of alliances and relationships with regional leaders, resulting in a government that is accountable to the people. Contrast this with the internationally recognized government of Somalia, a pathetic assemblage of warlords who have been constantly attempting to subdue the Somali people by force, backed by immense funding and direct military intervention from foreign states, including the USA.

I've been wondering for awhile if the USA's "nation building" activities have been fundamentally misguided, in that they are largely "state building" activities. This top-down approach assumes that foreigners can establish a functioning legal and political system, which will then create the conditions for the development of the economic and social relations that define a nation. This is the basic approach that Westerners have collectively used when dealing with their former colonies, and 50 years after decolonization, much of the territory assigned to these artificial states is still racked by warfare. I'm afraid of what will happen if the internationally recognized Somali government ever subdues Mogadishu, and then then seeks to assert its dominance over Somaliland.

This top-down approach ignores the fact that a legal and political system must be compatible with local culture, and even the most sensitive foreign intervention will probably fail to identify the appropriate structure for a given society. Even a native would often fail to establish a sustainable national system, simply because many of these societies lack the basic institutional framework on which a national government could be built .

The opposite approach would be "bottom up" nation-building: encouraging commercial relations and the development of dispute-settling frameworks. Once local institutions are developed, they can provide the framework for creating national institutions (for instance, when the USA was established, it was a relatively simple matter of getting 13 states with similar cultures to agree on a national constitution). This seems to be how the Islamic Courts Union got established in Somalia.

Of course, most "realists" would assert that a proper nation-building strategy would address the whole range of issues -- seeking synergies between the top-down and bottom-up approach. For instance, commercial relationships and a fair legal system help to support each other. However, when we allow the state to take the lead on nation-building programs, we will most likely see a bias towards state-building. In part, this is the consequence of perspective: the agents of the state think in terms of the state. But it also results from the ulterior motives of any outside participant in nation-building. They are not simply seeking security and prosperity (or even stability) for the people of the post-colonial territory in question, they are seeking their own economic and geo-political advantage. States have the ability to exploit their people, and by getting involved in the establishment of new nation-states, the ruling class of one nation essentially inserts itself into the ruling class of another nation.

This feature of state behavior is worth keeping in mind, lest we get fooled into once again bearing "the white man's burden".

"The man who screwed an entire country ": Berlusconi

The Economist has provided an aptly named review of Silvio Berlusconi's Prime Ministership: The man who screwed an entire country.

While they focus on his economic policies (or lack thereof), I was most stricken by this comment:

Over the years, he has been tried more than a dozen times for fraud, false accounting or bribery. His defenders claim that he has never been convicted, but this is untrue. Several cases have seen convictions, only for them to be set aside because the convoluted proceedings led to trials being timed out by a statute of limitations—at least twice because Mr Berlusconi himself changed the law.

As hard as it is to admit this, George W. Bush looked tame by comparison. When Bush pardoned Scooter Libby of obstruction of justice (without spending a day in jail), I interpreted it as a message to all of his other henchmen that they were above the law. However, the extent of Berlusconi's crimes and the length that he will go to in order to retain power makes Bush look like an amateur. With any luck, the Italians will soon reign in this would-be tyrant.

Following the Libby pardon, I suspected that the Bush administration was covering up a variety of abuses of power. None have come to light yet, and if they aren't revealed in the next few years, I'm guessing we will never have solid evidence of anything. It's possible that the Libby affair was a one-off situation; alternative, it's possible that Obama and the Democrats endorsed any secret and extra-legal activities of the Bush administration, and so they will continue to play along.

Italians win referendums

Italian Referendums Deal A Blow To Berlusconi : NPR:

Without commenting on the content of these referendums, I must say that I am impressed by how the Italian people successfully opposed Berlusconi's formidable political/propaganda machine.

Italians turned out in large numbers for four referendums and voted overwhelmingly this week to overturn key legislation passed by the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi had urged voters to boycott referendums on nuclear power, privatization of water utilities and trial immunity for the prime minister and other government officials. The vote was a humiliating defeat for the scandal-prone prime minister but does not automatically lead to his government's collapse.

...

Italy's three government-run TV networks and the three owned by Berlusconi himself more or less ignored the referendum campaign. The prime minister and several government officials said openly they would not vote, and urged Italians to go to the beach instead.

...

Cheers erupted when it was announced that turnout topped 57 percent, surpassing the quorum needed to validate the vote — the first time since 1995 the referendum quorum had been reached.

...

Each referendum was approved by around 95 percent of voters.

Is it wrong to pay a bribe?

There's recently been a bit of commotion about government corruption in India (particularly, bribery), with a lot of public pressure to eliminate it. According to the Economist magazine, (A novel way to combat corruption: Who to punish), one aspect of the debate is whether the laws should be changed to actually eliminate criminal penalties for people who pay bribes, as long as they are only paying to secure a service to which they are legally entitled.

There is some debate as to what the consequences of such laws would be. Such concerns seem irrelevant to me. It is praiseworthy to resist a demand for a bribe, but it should not be treated as an obligation. People need to get on with their lives, and can't be expected to bear the arbitrarily large burden associated with having licenses revoked or not being given access to money that is rightfully theirs.

The proposal described in the Economist is probably the most orderly way to deal with the problem. If some communitarian view of justice demands that the victim of corruption be held accountable for the crime (and he has no realistic administrative or legal remedy), then maybe the victim should have an alternative. Perhaps ad hoc tribunals should be able to run a corrupt official out of town. Or more realistically, if the state cannot effectively administer all of its regulations, the people at the top should aggressively move to eliminate them. If they can't do that, then their power should be eliminated.

UniLeaks: wikileaks for education

I just came across a new website called UniLeaks, which solicits...

restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working in partnership with an institution, e.g., a University.

As yet, I do not see the point in creating a system targeted at particular institutions. Maybe this is a way to attract specialists who would be interested in these documents. However, my first suspicion is that this is the work of anti-intellectuals who are digging for any possible dirt on academia.

In part, this is because I can't imagine that they would find particularly interesting documents that are distinctive of universities. The most likely "dirt" will relate to fund-raising, resource allocation, and employee relations -- just like with any large institution. My fear is that these people will be digging for documents like the stolen* emails at the center of Climategate, which they can then pass to the right-wing noise machine for selective quoting.

As I suggested in Privacy and Transparency at the University, this strategy seems to be increasingly common among some political factions. Michael Mann suffered legal harassment as a result of the Climategate brouhaha, and Frances Fox Piven was singled out and demonized by Glenn Beck at the height of his popularity. This may be a strategy of attacking soft targets -- mid-level public figures who will never wield political power and do not have a mass-audience.

With that being said, I am cautiously optimistic about the establishment of UniLeaks. I am deeply interested in maintaining transparency and accountability (but also political independence) among universities. I am also hopeful that the proliferation of Wikileaks-style organizations will help to move these whistle-blower systems into the political mainstream, and reduce the risk of retaliation.

Update: I found an article about UniLeaks in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rhetoric used by the (Australian) administrator of the site seems to be a mixture of academia-idealist (e.g. students are not clients), and government-accountability (e.g. universities get a lot of state money). Also, some articles noted that this is just one of many specialized WikiLeaks clones.

*I say that these emails were stolen rather than leaked, because a leak requires that someone had legitimate access to the documents being leaked. Since no-one should have had access to the email database at the center of Climategate, that data must have been stolen.

Iceland: the friendly rogue state

Iceland's voters have rejected a plan by their government to cover the losses of Iceland's banks (and their foreign creditors). This is creating tension with the British and Dutch governments, which will probably keep Iceland outside of some of the main international financial systems; as such, Iceland will not participate in the heavily regulated and subsidized regime that defines modern global capitalism. They seem to be rejecting the speculation-driven growth that had created an illusion of great wealth, only to leave them with a shattered economy.

Having told the foreign economic powers to "shove off", Iceland has also freed themselves of any need to appease them in its other activities. Perhaps the next conflict will come over the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a set of laws that will help journalists and dissidents to criticize the powerful with less fear of retribution. Before long, the champions of corporate capitalism may start pointing to Iceland as a "rogue state" that refuses to play by the rules. If that should be the case, we need to remember that their only "crime" would have been to decide to live as free and equal members of a political community.

Privacy and Transparency at the University

The Mackinac think-tank has filed a broad Freedom of Information Act request for the emails of professors of labor studies at three universities run by the state of Michigan. This appears to be nothing more than political harassment, similar to the harassment of climate researcher Michael Mann by Virginia's Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, following the "Climategate" brouhaha. It is specifically to avoid this type of political pressure that we have the notion of "academic freedom", and that universities jealously guard their independence from the state.

The heavy use of the Internet by university professors has clearly opened them up to new forms of encroachment by political actors. Universities should dedicate some serious thought to how they manage their data, so as to keep private communications private, and properly document and release any information that should be made public.

I propose that, by default, all internal communications of university staff and students should be considered private, and should be handled in a way that maintains confidentiality. To accomplish this, university IT departments should develop encryption standards for individual email accounts and encourage their universal adoption. This is not a terribly difficult technical issue, as strong encryption systems have already been developed and deployed, such as Pretty Good Privacy. One of the big hurdles to adopting PGP encryption is to establish a network of users with trusted encryption keys; universities are in a perfect position to accomplish this.

This idea of secure communication within universities probably scares a number of people -- I've repeatedly heard mumblings about universities being sinister, oppressive forces in society (for example, view the first comment on this blog post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians). You don't have to be an anti-intellectual conspiracy theorist to insist that universities develop a high level of transparency. Universities provide some important public services where the quality of the final product (e.g. research results, student certification) cannot be easily evaluated without knowledge of the process by which it was produced. To maintain public trust, universities should develop a process that provides relevant information to anyone with a legitimate interest.

Documents relating to student evaluation should be available, both to administrators and to each student or their representative. If encrypted emails are among these documents, the student should keep a copy, and perhaps the university could keep a copy of the student's encrypted emails (at least, any from a professor), which could be recovered if the student provides his decryption key. One nice side-effect of widespread encryption would be widespread signing of electronic documents (using the same key), so that if a document is deemed relevant to an accusation, its authenticity can be easily validated.

Finally, we have the raw data that goes into research publications. The issues here are complicated, and many extend beyond individual universities. For instance, data accessibility has been a major source of contention in climate research, but much of the raw data is treated as a commercial asset by non-academic institutions, so there is little that universities can do. Additionally, scientists will always hesitate to release data until they have had a chance to analyze it themselves. Each field of research probably has to develop its own process for making raw data accessible. For instance, biologists have developed a massive database of DNA sequences (Genbank), and all major journals require that any sequence discussed in a publication be submitted to the database. There is currently a push to mandate the publication of the source code for any program used in an analysis. There has even been some frivolous dispute over accessibility to the raw data from traditional microbiological techniques (which is rarely digitized).*

The complete archiving of research data is an unreachable ideal, though it may become more common with the increasing automation of data collection. Every innovation in data collection and data storage will require researchers to develop new systems for archiving data, possibly leading to the loss of older data archived with obsolete systems. University IT departments (and perhaps librarian/archivists) may be able to provide resources that enable researchers to record their data in an accessible form, but ultimately the focus and extent of archiving and distribution will be determined by the value of the data to other researchers, not curious laymen.

*Addition: There are also experiments relating to transparency in the peer-review process.

Books: Inside Wikileaks

Daniel Domscheit-Berg (DDB), a hacker and member of the Chaos Computer Club, had been keeping an eye on Wikileaks for over a year, nursing a suspicion that it was some sort of front for an intelligence agency. That suspicion fell away in November of 2007, when Wikileaks published the Guantanamo Bay handbooks. Shortly thereafter, DDB invited Julian Assange to speak at the December meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, and began collaborating with Assange on the Wikileaks project, becoming a major coordinator of Wikileaks activities in Europe. By September of 2010, DDB had fallen out with Assange, and left Wikileaks to establish a competing system, called OpenLeaks (I've added the blog to my list).

This book is a description of DDB's experience working with Wikileaks. The main theme of the book is the unstable genius of Assange, which provides the context within which all of the technical, administrative, and political problems of Wikileaks had to be addressed.

DDB obviously has a bone to pick with Assange, and is using this book to publicize his own competing project. Like everything, it should be read with a skeptical eye -- this is simply the story that one man is telling. I actually had trouble finding independent information about DDB. His Wikipedia entry is sparse, and I only found one news article describing the release of this book. (ForeignPolicy.com has posted a video of a recent interview.)

Anyway, this book provides some insight into what drives an entrepreneur like Assange. Wikileaks was a visionary project, and perhaps such a project can only be pushed through by someone with an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Based on DDB's story, not only did Assange essentially dedicate his life to this high-risk project, but he also had the charisma to convince several volunteers and journalists to make substantial contributions to Wikileaks. This type of achievement is not possible for people with a healthy sense of their own limits.

DDB's thesis is that Assange's egocentrism* is destroying the project. DDB presents Assange as insisting of keeping total control over the project, while also being a completely inept administrator. I suspect that many visionary projects encounter this type of problem. The entrepreneur basically has to get the project off of the ground on his own because no-one else understands what he is trying to achieve, or they doubt that it is possible. Once the project has demonstrated success, the visionary entrepreneur will suddenly have collaborators, but he will not necessarily have any ability to manage a team. Even worse for a visionary project like Wikileaks, the entrepreneur cannot assume that his team-mates actually have a clear understanding of his own goals for the project -- after all, there are no examples from which they can derive shared expectations or even terminology. The visionary project has to deal with all of the problems of any start-up, plus the additional burden of having to deal with issues that no-one has dealt with before.

DDB sees three major core objectives for a project like Wikileaks:

1. Maintain the anonymity of the source (while possibly enabling further communication)
   
2. Organize and filter the documents, perhaps removing information about private persons.
3. Publicize the documents.
   

These objectives can conflict with each other, especially when resources are scarce. DDB describes these conflicts, how Wikileaks tried to balance these objectives, and how the conflicts led to arguments among volunteers on the project.

Ultimately, DDB decided to start a competing institution, OpenLeaks. I wish him luck in this endeavor. This represents a maturation of the industry that Wikileaks established. Now we know what an institution like Wikileaks can accomplish. Now some people (like DDB) have first-hand experience tackling the problems of these anonymous leak systems. The only question now is how many of these institutions can be supported, and how will the public interact with them. Should a leak-source provide documents to both Wikileaks and OpenLeaks? Will that increase the chance of being identified? Will it assure prompt publication, or would it just waste resources with duplicate effort? How can a new institution gain the trust of potential sources? How does it demonstrate its ability to maintain anonymity?

It appears that the Wikileaks revolution has only just begun, and at some point it may be able to continue even if Wikileaks itself fails.


*my word, not DDB's; not meant as a psychological diagnosis

Panel urges TSA to implement ‘trusted travelers’ program - The Washington Post

There's recently been a lot of talk about a "trusted travelers" program, where a person could win the privilege of going through an expediated (less intrusive and less bothersome) security check once they have passed a background check and provide biometric identification.

According to The Washington Post:

Even a voluntary trusted-traveler approach would require passengers to provide credit information, tax returns and other personal data to verify that members pose little or no risk.

I'm not sure what I think of this as a stand-alone policy. I'm suspicious of the long term political implications, as frequent fliers (who tend to be richer and have more political influence) are treated differently from the politically faceless masses. I also wonder if this will be used to punish and neutralize people with unpopular political views. For instance, would they "trust" an anarchist who has never advocated violence? Finally, will this be used as an excuse to open an investigation on anyone who applies for Trusted Traveller status? The backfround check could reveal suspicious financial patterns, perhaps related to drug purchases. Alternatively, it could end up being another enforcement tool for the Copyright lords.

In the end, the reality is that many people would need to submit to a background check just so that they can efficiently engage in an activity that is practically essential for the business and social lives of many Americans. Just another brick in the new class barrier.

Politics has failed

The ongoing budget stalemates, at both the state and federal level, are just the most recent demonstration that American political institutions are in decline. As far as such institutions go, they are still pretty good; however, we can only expect them to become an increasing burden on our society. These institutions are committed to maintaining the status-quo, yet they have made so many implicit promises over the past decades that they cannot realistically fulfill all of them, let alone face new challenges. They will continue to devise band-aid solutions to mounting problems, and continue to prop up other failing institutions (e.g. banks), thereby draining an ever increasing amount of our economic produce.

In contrast, many developing countries (e.g. Brazil, India, China) are ambitiously reforming their core political and economic institutions, which may soon be just as good as America's. While nationalists present this as some sort of threat, we should be thankful for the rise of these other economies that will provide alternatives to our own ailing institutions and pick up the slack for our own decreasing ability to innovate. With our institutions becoming increasingly parasitic, the only opportunity for economic growth will come from technological advances and disruption of our lethargic economic institutions (despite political backing) by way of new competitors. America will continue to contribute to some advances, but not enough on our own to maintain our standard of living in a world with fewer natural resources per person.

This is really our only path forward -- to replace our current bloated institutions with new ones. The hope of reform from within the political system is dead. President Obama was elected on the hope that he could bring this reform, and revive the legitimacy of the state. Two years into his term, there's no sign of success. Obama and his allies dedicated their political capital to major initiatives that changed everything but solved nothing. All they did was reallocate the spoils of power among various special interest groups.

Obama hasn't even done much to increase the transparency, efficiency, or lawfulness of the state. Treaties are still negotiated in secret (e.g. ACTA and such), without public comment, but with plenty of input from corporate bosses. Government departments (e.g. Treasury) still cover up mistakes and corruption. We've actually seen a startling increase in harassment of political opponents under Obama, as Wikileaks was systematically crippled the state-corporation cartel, and Private Bradley Manning has been threatened with exaggerated charges and mistreated prior to his trial.

The end fact is that the state is the enemy of the people. It's officials constitute a class with separate interests and ideology than the public at large. They act to increase the power of their offices and their own wealth. They are co-opted by various wealthy interests (e.g. big corporations) who help them acquire power through elections, exercise power once in office, and reward them with plush jobs after retirement -- as long as these officials manipulate the markets to increase the profits of their benefactors.

There is no real hope of reforming the state. It is evil by nature. We can try to restrain it by political means, but our best hope is to directly break its economic grip on our lives, while we build institutions that actually do serve our needs.

Update: Another good essay on this topic at C4SS: The Last “Political” Essay

The Innocence Project -- puts your money to good use

The Innocence Project is fund-raising via The Liberty Papers: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is — The Innocence Project

Getting innocent people out of prison? I don’t see how you can argue with that. Note also that The Innocence Project is spending their time and money on the ground, helping actual convicts. This is not an activism organization lobbying your legislators, it exists to actual help individual convicts trying to prove their innocence.

This is surely one of the best uses of my charity/activism budgets.

1. It helps people directly, unlike donations to political campaigns or regular advocacy groups
2. It benefits the "least-advantaged members of society", unlike donations to cultural institutions
3. It increases the total productivity of society be enabling the released prisoner to fulfill his social and economic roles, unlike institutions that only relieve suffering of the targeted individuals
4. It increases awareness of widespread injustices, unlike charities that help people in the shadows
5. It improves my own society, unlike charities that intervene in foreign societies

All in all, the Innocence Project may be the best charity around in terms of its potential to produce immediate and lasting benefits to myself and the people I care about, without potentially offending any reasonable people or displacing more sustainable solutions.

My only concern would be that we would come to rely on pro-bono lawyers to defend the accused, rather than modifying our court system to provide sufficient resources for the accused. However, the current indifference of the politicians to the plight of the falsely convicted is not a response to pro-bono defense lawyers. In fact, these advocates for the wrongly convicted may be the only ones who can bring public attention to this problem, thereby changing public attitudes towards punitive laws and placing pressure on politicians to actually think about justice when they write their laws and construct their budgets.

To Israelis and Palestinians

I don't want your fucking war.

Don't try to sell it to me. Don't tell me how evil or barbaric "the other side" is. Don't try to delegitimize entire nations or deny their right to basic freedoms -- whether individual or communal. When you do that, you only discredit yourself.

If you want me to respect you and your institutions, then don't allow fanatics to gain influence in those institutions. I will not support any institution that implements the agenda of fanatics. I don't care if "the other side" is more fanatical.

Your nationalist squabble is on the other side of the planet. Don't bring it here.

PATRIOT Act extended

After my earlier post accusing Tea Party types of not being particularly libertarian, there was some talk about them possibly blocking the reauthorization of the PATRIOT act. Well, it has finally gone through, and here's how they voted. Of note, Bachman "aye"; Sen. Rand "nay" (same for Rep. Rand, of course).

Corruption is worse than terrorism

Chetan Bhagat, writing from India, asserts that corruption is worse than terrorism:

Corruption is worse than terrorism. Terrorists blow up existing infrastructure such as roads, airports and power plants. Corruption prevents such infrastructure from being made in the first place. Terrorists take innocent lives. Corrupt politicians prevent hospitals from being built, which means innocent lives that could be saved are not.

The rest of the letter is worth reading for its perspective on corruption in India, but I wanted to focus on this particular excerpt because it mirrors a dispute that occurs in our own country also. This dispute essentially boils down to "utilitarianism vs. moralism". From the utilitarian perspective, our efforts should be focused on those issues that have the greatest impact on our welfare; in contrast, moralism insists on focusing on the individuals who are most evil. This creates a tension between giving our attention to evils that are mild but ubiquitous (driven by the petty sins that are common in humans) and giving our attention to the evils that are extreme but rare (driven by the exceptional sins of a few individuals). From the utilitarian perspective, terrorism is a relatively small threat, definitely not deserving of the great efforts we have gone to in order to reduce it (not to mention the suffering we have caused). However, from the moralist perspective, there really isn't anything worse than intentionally killing civilians.

I often wonder how to reconcile these two impulses. Maybe the "moralist" focus on evil actually has a utilitarian basis, arising from the great variation in the damage done by people with ill intent. While terrorists only kill a few hundred people a year worldwide, there's a slight chance that they could kill several million next year. It is easy to focus on these worst case scenarios when we talk about terrorism, but I suspect that these are nothing more than rationalizations for the venting of our anger. We don't need evil intentions to create catastrophes -- we have created numerous disasters just by our ubiquitous indifference to the harm that we are doing. The prime example of this is the collateral damage that the USA has caused in our "wars on terrorism", which was easy to predict beforehand.

Ultimately, I am discouraged from finding a justification for moralism because it is increasing clear that the moralists are themselves immoral. Using "collateral damage" as an example: it is immoral to knowingly cause a person's death, even if that was no the desired outcome. These moralists often cloak their crimes in rhetoric of "personal responsibility", but there is no personal responsibility when a person causes actual harm in the hopes of reducing the potential harm that someone else may cause. Each person is responsible for the harm that they cause, and talking about another person's irresponsibility does not provide any excuse for one's own actions.

And so we come full circle, and we ask "how do we achieve the greatest good with the resources that we have?" To do so, we seek good wherever we can find it. We face down evil if that is necessary, but otherwise, we allow the evil ones to wallow in their own filth. As long as we create faster than they can destroy, we will win.

Patents and progress in the method of discovery

I am often shocked by the rapid advances of scientific techniques, and how major accomplishments from a decade ago can be repeated with a tiny fraction of the effort. Recent advances in biology -- particularly with DNA sequencing and synthesis - may be exceptional, but the basic principle surely holds across all sciences: advances in the methodology of discovery will increase the ease with which future discoveries are made.

Through the recent past, the most general advances are probably related to computing -- the storage, transmission, and analysis of data. These advances are continuing, along with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Regardless of whether these advances will create a technological "singularity", they will surely contribute to additional discoveries in all fields of science.

Recently, a "robotic scientist" has even been built. Specifically, this "scientist" is a geneticist, with a very limited toolkit (both in design and implementation of experiments). However, as a proof of concept, it does raise the specter that robotic systems will soon be able to make discoveries that traditionally required a lot of time from highly trained scientists. Perhaps over the course of a decade, we will see 100-fold reductions in the price of discovery, across many fields of research.

If we put this rate of advancement in the context of patent law, we see a startling incongruity. Patents grant a 20 year monopoly to the inventor of a new tool or process, supposedly providing incentive for research and development. This monopoly allows the inventor to capture all of the benefits of the new invention for himself -- which makes like more costly for everyone else, but seems fair as long as we assume that it was necessary to produce the invention in the first place. While this assumption has always had some problems, it seems extremely shaky in light of the current rate of progress.

Great Book: Founding Myths by Ray Raphael

Having finished Ray Raphael's "Founding Myths", I want to reiterate my recommendation of this book. It was exceptionally enlightening for a book that is so short and accessible. I effectively covers historical aspects of the Revolutionary War that are typically ignored, while also providing an overview of how the study of the Revolution has been changed over time.

Guns: Liberty or Authority?

When in comes to gun laws, I am typically "pro-choice". There are several reasons that I oppose restrictions on gun ownership:

1. Simple liberty: in general, a person should be able to do what he wants to do unless it directly interferes with the right of another person to do as they wish. To prohibit gun ownership is to instigate actual violence in the hope of restricting a remote potential for violence.
   
2. Economic liberty: Guns play an important economic role for some people, particularly for use in hunting or removing predators from the vicinity of livestock.
3. Personal security: some people reasonably feel that owning a gun increases their personal security.
4. Political security: Political authorities have a tendency to transform into tyrannies; in these situations, guns may be useful as a last-resort form of resistance.

While those are my reasons for supporting a right to own guns, much of the "gun lobby" clearly does not share all of these concerns (even if we ignore the people who sell guns for profit). For one thing, much of the gun lobby is specifically pro-gun, rather than being pro-freedom, regardless of their rhetoric. Many of them clearly do not embrace the general libertarian principle of "live and let live", since they often favor drug prohibition and various other "conservative" restrictions on personal liberty. For all their talk about "free markets", they aren't even supporters of general economic liberty, since they are quite comfortable with restrictive zoning, professional license regulations, and state-granted monopolies, among other things. But it's really over the notion of political security that we part ways.

The mainstream gun lobby (e.g. the NRA, Republicans, and socially conservative Democrats) has quite an authoritarian streak. They may talk about the right to resist tyranny, but I often get the feeling that they are most concerned with their own ability to intimidate others into submission. This desire to intimidate and control others is apparent in their militaristic foreign policies, their obsession with severe punishment of criminals (even petty or victimless criminals), and their desire to limit the sexual options of others (e.g. restricting information about pregnancy and STD prevention, disparaging homosexual relationships).

So how is this desire to intimidate others displayed in their conception of political security?

First, despite their assertion of the importance of an armed citizenry, this group has no real critique of government, nor a theory of tyranny. Most of them regularly embrace the expansion of the state's surveillance and detention abilities. The only serious thought of resistance comes from the fringe militia movements, which are anxiously awaiting the initiation of mass arrests or a systematic civilian disarmament program, at which point they will rise up. The other place where people talk of imminent armed resistance is at the Tea Parties. But here, they assert the right to armed resistance even in the absence of any serious assault on our liberties, or any assault on the people's ability to resist tyranny. They speak as though abstract and mild restrictions on liberty are sufficient to warrant armed resistance -- "threats" as limited and fleeting as losing an election, or the implementation of moderate health care reform. Michael Austin documented and summarized how easily some conservatives turn to the rhetoric of rebellion:

[O]ur modern revolutionaries...have tried to co-opt the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers without accepting any of the responsibility that they pledged their lives to, who have repeatedly called the President of the United States a tyrant and a dictator, who have insisted (without a shred of evidence) that he is not a citizen of the United States, and who have equated government spending with slavery and health-care reform with satanic evil. People within this faction have accused entire congressional majorities of trying to destroy America, and they have called for revolution by any means necessary.

Here we see a startling partisan double standard -- a strong and active state is a good thing as long as their people are in control, but as soon as this group finds themselves in the minority and the state does anything that they dislike, armed resistance is appropriate. This is not a freedom movement: when one faction within society clings to power, that is tyranny.

It isn't only in their rhetoric that pro-gun conservatives show their authoritarian tendencies. If you look at the National Rifle Association's "law enforcement training staff", you'll see a man who had to resign from the Fort Lauderdale police after being video-taped abusing his authority. This obviously does not bother the NRA. As with many gun loving conservatives, they worship the police and military, and almost any excess on the part of the government's gunmen can be excused as either being necessary to keep the riffraff in line, or an unfortunate but unavoidable mistake resulting from the demands of the job. This is not the attitude of anyone who has seriously contemplated resistance to tyranny.

Their authoritarian streak is also apparent in how they respond to constitutional crises in foreign countries. At the only Tea Party rally that I observed, there was outspoken support for the coup in Honduras. These people who claimed to represent "regular Americans" were obsessing over an issue that most Americans could not have cared less about. While the coup was arguably a win for democracy, it was clear that their concern was with the specter of socialism, and fears that President Obama would support the ousted socialist President Zelaya.

While Zelaya may have been leading Hondoras towards a dictatorship (albeit a popular one), the current crisis in Egypt has presented a clear alternative between a brutal tyrant and a popular uprising. Yet in this case, popular "anti-government" conservatives, such as Glenn Beck, have sided with the tyrant. They have chosen fear-based "stability" over the uncertainty of a democratic election, where socialists or Islamists could win power. This decision has clearly demonstrated that these conservatives fear freedom more than they fear tyranny. In such a context, the apparent purpose of the "right to bear arms" is to keep the rabble down.

Look to the rhetorical foundation for this "right to armed rebellion"--the Revolutionary War--and the "imperative to suppress slave rebellions" will be clearly seen as an equal basis for this concern with guns. As described in Founding Myths, one of the main fears of the rebellious colonists, particularly in Virginia and the southern states, arose from the risk of "domestic insurrection", i.e. slave revolts. In essence, if the British crown had disarmed the Southern colonists, then the colonists would have had this sword dangling over their heads, restrained only by the will of the British military. Much of today's pro-gun rhetoric evokes the same fears of a rampaging underclass.

Given the evidence above, there is good reason to suspect that their concern with gun ownership is driven by a desire to exclude poor people from political power. My final evidence for this takes us back to the gun lobby's dismissal of any form of direct resistance other than armed rebellion -- they don't talk of non-violent mass actions such as boycotts, strikes, or the less-violent disruption of commerce; instead, the conservative gun advocates go straight for bodily violence. This suggests that they do not expect to have the numbers needed to effectively implement the less-violent strategies. Their power depends on their control of property, including weapons -- not their numbers.

Having seen the authoritarian nature of the conservative (i.e. mainstream) pro-gun lobby in the USA, what is a libertarian to do? Participation in mainstream, single-issue advocacy groups is often presented as a strategy to achieve the limited goals of that group and to publicize libertarian ideas. However, if these mainstream groups are providing support to anti-libertarian activists and politicians, then any achievements on that single issue may be outweighed by regression on other issues. To anyone with a libertarian perspective on government, protection of the right to own guns would have to be a lower priority than resistance to military adventurism and the expansion of a police state.

Is there any way to protect the right to own guns without undermining more fundamental rights? Might there even be some synergy to be had? An extreme strategy would be to subsume all pro-gun activities inside of the libertarian movement -- essentially creating a "gun rights committee of the Libertarian Party". What this gains in purity, it loses in popularity (even if "Libertarian Party" is understood to be the decentralized, informal libertarian movement). The alternative is to try to establish non-political organizations that appeal to gun owners. Competing with the NRA may be difficult, but there may be other constituencies of gun owners who are not well served by the NRA -- the Pink Pistols may be a prototype for such a group, as may others who are turned off by the NRA's authoritarian and Republican tendencies.

In the end, I won't personally do much about this because I am not a gun owner, and I don't think that they are a terribly important issue. However, every time that I give a passive defense of the right to bear arms (e.g. "live and let live") or point out the numerous weaknesses in the arguments to ban guns, I'm going to get branded as one of those people (described above). While the actual prohibition of guns would not be a crippling blow to liberty, this issue is one of the main battlegrounds against the authoritarian mindset. Any time someone tells me that we have to establish a structure of systematic and widespread violence against non-violent people (e.g. confiscating property and arresting people) in order to prevent sporadic and relatively rare violence by others, I'm going to have to respond.

Update: Shortly after I wrote the above post, news came in that the PATRIOT act re-authorization had a mild setback in the House, as several Republicans defected from the party leadership and voted against re-authorization. Rumor was that this had something to do with the Tea Party, strengthening their claim to being a libertarian movement. Upon further consideration, there seems to be no difference between the Tea Party and the Republican Party in general, both groups overwhelmingly supporting the re-authorization.

I also came across a nice example of a conservative trembling at the thought of Democracy, because most people just can't be trusted.

Erosion of the rule of law

From Time Magazine:

Opinion: Tea Party's Rand Paul Correct, Laser-Pointer Law Absurd - TIME

It takes only about five seconds of thought to see that Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's amendment to impose federal penalties — up to a five-year prison sentence — for [aiming a laser pointer at a plane] would be completely useless. How exactly would it be enforced?

That is a VERY important question... how is the law enforced? One way to enforce a law is to identify situations where it has been broken, and then catch the perpetrator. The other way to enforce the law is to choose a person to prosecute, and them watch him until he commits a crime. In a country where the vast majority of crimes are never prosecuted, and the "criminals" often don't know that they are breaking the law, it won't be to hard to follow the later strategy.

Those reasonable anarchists

It's no secret that I find much value in anarchist writings; particularly in anarchist criticisms of statist ideology and institutions. When I see the clear thinking of such essays, I sometimes wonder how anarchists got the reputation for being unreasonable. Of course, there are less "rational" or "realistic" aspects of anarchism. For instance, anarchists put a lot of effort into dreaming up institutions that will replace the state, and the problems of establishing these institutions may seem insurmountable, making the anarchists into a bunch of dreamers. At the extreme, there are frequent calls of alarm and the repetition of conspiracy theories (aside from those "conspiracies" that have been well documented, even if ignored by most people).

Anyway, even the most extreme and alarmist anarchists are no more wild-eyed than plenty of "respectable" voices in mainstream political debate. Over the past few days, I checked in on the local talk-radio station, and got an earful of conspiracy theory and alarmism from nationally syndicated conservative stars -- Glenn Beck and Michael Savage.

If this type of stuff is respectable these days, then there is no good reason that anarchism shouldn't be mainstream.

Easy but important reading: "Founding Myths" by Ray Raphael

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past by Ray Raphael.

Who was Sam Adams? According to Ray Raphael, "Sam" Adams is only a myth, loosely based on a man named Samuel Adams who was one of many activists involved in organizing resistance to British rule in Boston. Raphael traces the development of this myth, including the origins of the name "Sam", and how Adams came to be credited with masterminding the resistance to British rule. Throughout, he evaluates the ideological basis of the myth, and how it contrasts with the reality of Massachusetts politics at the time.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in American history, the American Revolution, or political revolutions in general. The book is interesting for a couple of reasons, yet still an easier read than most history books. Raphael revisits several familiar stories from the American Revolution, but uniquely emphasizes the role of "regular people", which is often overlooked in mainstream histories that focus on the men who held high offices in the government. Aside from providing a different perspective on the Revolution, Raphael uses these stories as case studies to illustrate how history is written -- or perhaps, how myths are made. For each of these stories, Raphael starts off by describing the oft-repeated myth, and then describing how it is wrong, why he believes that it is wrong, and how other historians got it wrong in the first place.

While the scholarship is impressive, this is not a dry academic work; as the subtitle makes clear, Raphael has an ideological agenda. He clearly states that he is interested in emphasizing the hyper-democracy of the revolutionary era, and tearing down the elitist stories concocted by later writers. While I happen to sympathize with his ideological aims, I often feel that his ideological assertions are heavy handed and that he is being unfair to the people that he disagrees with. While this could get irritating, I don't think that it detracts from the serious scholarship.

Despite being a serious book, it is still easy to read. In part this is due to Raphael's writing style, but moreso to the structure of the book. Each chapter discusses a different "myth", so it is easy to put it down for a week, and then resume with the next chapter. Also, most Americans are familiar with the basic stories, and should not have any trouble remembering the context for the issues being discussed.

My only qualification to recommending this book is that this is not an introduction to American history or the Revolutionary war. It assumes that the reader is familiar with the basic geography and politics of the Revolutionary era.

"Anarchy" in Cairo

Reports from Cairo indicate that state authority has collapsed, except for a military presence at a few strategic locations (reports NPR). The police have fled, prisons have emptied, and shops have been looted. Citizens are forming neighborhood defense squads. Apparently, this prevents people from protesting, but it seems that the protests have served their purpose (eliminating the Mubarak government) and the revolution has entered into a second stage.

Sunday is a business day in Egypt, but shops are largely closed in Cairo. The NPR reporter suggested that this is mainly due to security concerns. However, another thought occurred to me: do they have a currency anymore? I'd like to know what has happened to the Egyptian currency. A government-issued currency typically becomes worthless when that government is on the verge of collapse. However, I've seen little indication that that the Egyptian protesters are pushing for the type of revolution that would nullify the currency -- many of them seem to simply want Mubarak to leave.

So this period of "anarchy" is unlikely to last long, since the Egyptian people probably are not anarchists. As with many revolutions, this one may quickly degenerate into a civil war among various statist factions, each seeking to dominate the entire society.

Afterthoughts:

• Rising food prices (i.e. inflation of a sort) may have been the trigger for these protests.
• As of Friday, the Egyptian pound was falling on international exchanges, as were other currencies in the Middle East. Likewise, the credit rating of the Egyptian state had been downgraded. Egyptian banks are closed due to the protests (by government order, I believe).
• Fun Facts from Wikipedia: this all started on "National Police Day".

Update:

John Robb at Global Guerrillas reports rumors of police being involved in the looting, and speculates about the use of looting as a counter-insurgency strategy. Tip to Reason.