Adios

My new home is at Wordpress. It's pretty primitive as of now. I'll leave this one up for the glorious posts *eyeroll* to be found on it.

Farewell, Blogger!

Great!

Good news from the Dear Leader and his fellow spreaders of Peace, Justice, and the AmeriKKKan Way of Life.

You see, the main problem with defenseless children being blasted into pieces in their homes and having their life dreams snuffed out for eternity is...that it is jeopardizing Our People's Army's efforts to spread Freedom among the unruly peasants. It might even drive the Afghans toward militant groups! What sort of ungrateful wretch would actually take a militant attitude after being having his family members slaughtered before his own eyes from the skies?? If only they could just learn to love our Democratic Way of Life and submit quietly, like us.

But as long as it's not happening to us, nothing to worry about.
Our cuntry would never turn against its own people, would it?

Why can't we be like Iceland?

(sigh) Remember the good old days?

Who can forget the self-satisfied explanations we got for this from the mainstream media? I could remember the hand-wringing that those of us who weren't enthralled with the idea of the state would have to go through when presented with cases like this, where a combination of "smart government and free enterprise" (I can't find the exact article, but remember the words) had done so much better than America's "rugged individualism". Government can be a very positive thing, as long as we entrust it with the right powers, we were told.

So, uh, how'd that work out?

Check out this guy back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth -- a year ago.

"What’s behind Europe’s comeback? It’s a complicated story, probably involving a combination of deregulation (which has expanded job opportunities) and smart regulation."

Yup, pretty smart. Smart just like you, right Paul?

This stuff would be so delicious -- but people have such short attention spans. Now Obama is telling us he will halve the budget by 2013. The media is acting like this is some sort of divine pronouncement. Hmmm...

George W. Bush (2007): "In the coming weeks, I will submit a budget that eliminates the federal deficit within the next five years."
George W. Bush (2006): "By passing these reforms, we will save the American taxpayer another $14 billion next year and stay on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009."
George W. Bush (2005): " I will send you a budget that holds the growth of discretionary spending below inflation, makes tax relief permanent, and stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009. "
George W. Bush (2004): "In two weeks, I will send you a budget that funds the war, protects the homeland, and meets important domestic needs, while limiting the growth in discretionary spending to less than 4 percent. This will require that Congress focus on priorities, cut wasteful spending, and be wise with the People's money. By doing so, we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years."
George W. Bush (2003): "Federal spending should not rise any faster than the paychecks of American families. "
George W. Bush (2001): " My plan pays down an unprecedented amount of our national debt. "
Bill Clinton (2000): "We will pay off our national debt for the first time since 1835. "

Alas: you can do this with just about every soundbite of Obama's, but who needs history anyway?

Here is an interesting article. Especially the last few sentences. I guess only the Germans can tell it like it is.

Holy Shit

I think I'm actually beginning to like this guy.

On an unrelated note: for anyone who reads this (god bless you if you do) I'm in the process of moving my blog to Wordpress, which is the main reason there hasn't been much activity lately, and may not be for about another week. As anyone who reads this probably knows me from the forum anyway, that's where I've been, and will be, in part.

Random thought:
when people are assholes, just give them the finger! (sorry.)

Anyway. Not much to say, other than I'd argue that the only thing we "owe" our Ole Massa's at this point is a free one-way ticket to the local cemetery. I honestly think a lot of smart, decent people in the LL are giving the ancrapistanis way too much benefit of the doubt. When they talk like that, they mean it. It's not so much about different "attitudes", but about having a view of human relations 100% opposed to everything that anarchists and other radicals have fought and died for over the centuries. And when push comes to shove, they will do whatever it takes to maintain their power and privilege.

But whatever. Meanwhile I continue to look forward to the global revolution.

Understatement of the day

News like this warms my spirits. I think we have a time frame of a few years to get our key talking points out there and sharpen the tension between the people of the world and their rulers, before the latter come up with some new way to shut us up (probably some combination of Brave New World-style drugs and 1984-esque repression).

You've got to love the line,

Street protests have repeatedly brought down French leaders and Mr Sarkozy does not want his government added to that list of casualties.

That's a rather delicate way of putting it, although maybe they're not even thinking of what I'm thinking of.

Put on your seat belts, kids.

Bogus anti-anarchy arguments.

All who have taken to defending the ideas of Anarchism in public are probably well aware of the core arguments that tend to come up again and again. These arguments range from the silly -- "What if..." arguments apply just as well to the State -- to the idiotic ("I'm not an anarchist because I'm a grownup"). I will deal with all of these arguments in due time, but now I'm going to examine what is probably the oldest and most pervasive argument against Anarchism, namely, that "You don't understand human nature. Anarchy would never work." This is actually probably the most serious argument against Anarchism, which isn't saying much. Although it doesn't require much intellect to make, it has been dressed in pseudo-scientific garb to come off as the "final authority" on our silly, naive ideology.

A good example of this pop-scientific view is found in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate:

A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes's reasons for quarrel. By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain. That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for retaliation and the accompanying culture of
honor. People can rest assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags. And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties
negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it. The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn't come out the way they want.
Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. Another is the
emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law. Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin. And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in homicide rates in European societies since the Middle Ages. The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities. The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals.
The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a.m. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had
competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a
foretaste of life as a scientist). The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today's still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence
is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we must combat the
racial inequities that put too many African American men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to criminals. Many on the right oppose decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in the costs of the
zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the
police, they will do so with a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people.) Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving
them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law. (Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate, 176-77)

I'm going to dissect this steaming pile of shit, piece by piece. In all fairness, he does go on to discuss the question of how to police the police. (The full text is here.)

A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes's reasons for quarrel.
Um, granted by whom? By the gods? By its own lust for power? If it is granted by its members the legitimate use of "violence" in their defense, then that is what anarchism is all about.
By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain.
(Vomits)
That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them out disinterestedly...
Go to hell, Steven Pinker.
...can obviate the need for a hair trigger for retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags.
Oh really? Who is imposing disincentives on the "enemies" (i.e. murderers) of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Julian Alexander, and Oscar Grant? Ain't it great that people blessed with governments don't have to "maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags"? Someone forgot to clue me in on that one.
And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it. The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn't come out the way they want.
This seems like a pretty good argument for anarchism; if there is a conflict between the individual and the State, there isn't exactly a 3rd party, now is there?
Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented.
I'm sorry, could you say that again?
Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence.
Well...I don't think he has the final say on stateless societies, as many anthropologists have said otherwise. But at any rate, it doesn't really matter what happened then. The State itself arose in a "stateless" situation, so obviously that alone does not guarantee freedom or justice. As Bakunin wrote, the idea of freedom has evolved and developed over time. The ignorance of mankind in its infancy made the State, perhaps, inevitable.
Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law.
Just out of curiosity, what the fuck is "the law?" For most of human history, enforcing this "violent culture of honor" has been the very purpose of "law", and only began to change when ordinary people started resisting it. Y'know, like anarchism.
Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin.
This sounds like the argument that people become wage laborers because of their "time preference" and unwillingness to take risk. Utter bullshit. People acquiesced to centralized authorities because they were killed if they didn't, and because they had beaten into submission from birth.
And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in homicide rates in European societies since the Middle Ages. The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities.
I don't even believe that. I'm too lazy to research it, but it sounds fishy. In any case, this is what is referred to as "false causation". Americans got wealthier over the course of the 19th century as well -- that seems like a much more plausible reason.
The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals.
The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s,
Let's give three cheers to Yugoslav, Soviet, and African "law enforcement"!
... but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose.
OK, stop it right there. So this is where the shrillness of the whole passage comes from -- there is no foe so dangerous as a former friend. So he used to be some cliched punk "anarchist". Cute, except no Anarchist, and certainly not Bakunin, ever said that anarchy would be achieved when the government "laid down its arms." What utter rubbish.
Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a.m. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).
You jerk. This is the most decisive refutation of the State imaginable. What does this incident prove? That while Canada was "peaceful" under government, the people were all along fuming with anger about things like the monopolization of property, law, land, and money in the hands of a ruling class; the humiliation of being subjugated, labelled, domesticated, and ruled. So of course they're going to strike back against the system when they see an opportunity! Does this maybe suggest that there was something fundamentally wrong with Canadian society, and indeed with any society that ends up reverting to "anarchy"? If so, wouldn't the solution be to fix those problems, rather than to force people to submit to a rotten system at gunpoint? Believe it or not, Mr. Pinko, anarchists do not advocate "having the police go on strike". Since rulership takes place in the mind, the revolution must also take place in the mind. As long as people are submissive, they will always get a ruler. What did you expect would happen? That the people would spontaneously create neighborhood assemblies and start governing themselves? First of all, they had not been exposed to these ideas; secondly, doing so would have been pointless since the police would be back the next day. You have no more understanding of anarchism now than you did as a teenager.
The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today's still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets.
Who gets to decide what "decent" means? What does "effective" policing mean?
Certainly we must combat the racial inequities that put too many African American men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to criminals. Many on the right oppose decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people.)
What exactly is his point here?
Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.
If only.

As formidable as the "human nature" argument might seem, it is not very convincing when you look at it up close. Mr. Pinky seems to think that what anarchists want is for the state to just spontaneously vanish and for people to never have to associate or organize for any reason. He would do well to read an anarchist text or two. All arguments about how we need a central authority to adjudicate disputes need to use a straw-man definition of anarchism, in order to avoid the awkward questions: who creates this authority? Who decides what it is allowed to do? Who prevents it from becoming "lawless" itself? Later in his book, Pinker tries to answer the last question with the usual nostrums about "checks and balances" and "limited government". He seems to advocate some sort of quasi-libertarianism mixed with soft liberalism. (Because obviously that's the system most compatible with human nature.)

Who limits the government?

And of course the question of how government can be legitimately created is conveniently ignored, since that would open up a lot of embarrassing questions.

Anyone who is reading this probably is well aware of how to respond to the "anarchy wouldn't work" argument and its endless derivatives. My point is to show that whatever its scientific veneer, this argument is at heart devoid of any substance.

These arguments put a fairy tale up against a straw man. Is a neutral system of adjudicating disputes better than no organization at all? Of course! But there are two problems here. The first is that no government in history has been an unbiased moderator in disputes between its various subjects, let alone between itself and its subjects. This may have something to do with how they were created, i.e. by conquest. In order for a "government" to even have a chance of being a neutral arbitrator, it would have to be created in an anarchistic manner -- i.e. by a group of people seeking to protect their own liberties from invaders. This is not just something that would be "allowed" by anarchists -- this is right at the core of what anarchism is.

Secondly, anarchism is not "no organization", as already shown above. Indeed, anarchism is the only political philosophy that encourages organization first and foremost.

When this has been sorted out, what possible anti-anarchism argument remains? The first argument would be that any form of human organization is, in fact, a "government". This is bullshit. But if you want to play word games, we can too. In that case we anarchists are the only people who advocate government, the rest of you want violent chaos.

The next argument might be that people would have different ideas of what their "governments" should do, so there would be violence between the groups. My first response to this is that of course this would be true if the State vanished overnight; the point of anarchism is changing people's minds about the role violence should play in public life. Secondly, I think people would be less likely to advocate authoritarian laws if they had to enforce them on their own, without the halo of support and protection the police currently have. Thirdly, people could live in different places based on their different ideas of what constitutes justice. These anarchist cities would no more likely go to war with one another than modern nation-states, and in fact be far less likely. Overall I think this objection is pretty unrealistic, and reflects a large degree of isolation from society. If there were huge pluralities of people who were in favor of murder, kidnapping, and such things, there's no way any form of society could function. The reason it isn't that way is that most people basically agree that those things are unacceptable. Places where "lawlessness" is rampant (Somalia, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, etc.) are places where people were warped by their states and had to turn to lawlessness in order to survive.

Or, thirdly, maybe there's an elite that knows just how to rule us and the rest of us are too stupid. But if coming up with "the rule of law" and "democratic government" were good ideas of ours, then why wouldn't real democracy be even better?

Always be sure to define anarchism at the outset. Define the State as well. Most people seem to have the definitions switched!

So, Mr. Pinker, you'll have to try a little harder next time. As anarchist ideas spread over the next few years, we will no doubt hear Court Scientists and assorted jesters try to shut us down in this way. Fighting against this argument does not require a detailed knowledge of human biology, as I have shown, but merely a crystal-clear understanding of the political issues at stake.

David Brooks' editorial today is titled "In Defense of Death".
Which is strange, because that title would be an appropriate one for all of his editorials, and indeed for the New York Times generally.
Of course, to anyone who takes mainstream editorials seriously, death probably needs no defense.