Oh, they're delinquents, then. Better call for backup.
Seriously--you read that mess o' incoherent pottage E.D. linked in the article and don't call that "scattering"? Ninety percent of the libertarian rejoinder to Metcalf is laughable rubbish. The other ten percent is normative disagreement.
"The fact that there have been so many anti-libertarian hit pieces means, if nothing else, that libertarians represent a threat to both conservatives and liberals"
Not really. It's just that sometimes when the teenage boys are having a kegger things get so out of hand you gotta call the cops.
I don't think Carson would substantively disagree with very much of what I had to say. He'd probably object to the tone. And he'd probably agree with at least half of what Metcalfe said.
As for my tone, your hold-my-breath-til-I-turn-blue demand to be treated with "seriousness" seemed to beg for that response.
I don't think I agree with that. When every aspect of social organization is reduced to or drawn from a simple principle of transactional relations, it actually IS homogeneous. You can't be anything except in lockstep when you're working from such a categorical first principle.
The only way out of it is to say what so many of your pals on the other thread said, in effect, "libertarianism is always right except when it's wrong."
"treat its subject with any sort of seriousness or grace"
Why? Why should that subject be treated with seriousness and grace?
A bunch of teenage boys think the world should be organized according to the sensibility of teenage boys. They may be precocious, but really, after a while you just have to tell the teenagers to sit down and shut up while the grownups, you know, get some real work done.
"I think a lot of welfare-state policies are basically remedial efforts to make up for all the poverty created by cronyism between government and corporate rent-seekers."
Well. DUH. Tell me something I don't already know. How about a force to countevail the corporate rent seekers? Oh NOOOOES. We can't use government because government is bad, and we can't organize the working classes because that's class warfare, we can't do anything about it except let the corporatists have their way because everything else would get the teenage boy libertarians all resentful about their greedy self-centeredness being challenged by institutions that don't conform to their dorm-room bullshit-session desires.
God am I sick of this liberaltarian crap. I finally figured it out though. Like the Republicans who won't mention Bush, it's a way for libertarians to avoid facing the crushing fact that their model is useless, stupid, simple-minded, dangerous and inhumane
I already did. Compensating someone for a random combination of DNA strings (or, for that matter, for some non-random combinations like Prince William's) is unjust. That puts Wilt, Tyler and Prince William all in the same category.
It's relevant because you're the one who sneered at the idea of Tyler singing free.
"If that’s the case then neither can just or unjust be the proper framework to evaluate the resulting wealth distribution."
As I said, if I were being strictly formalistic, that's probably the argument I'd make.
"Then your definition of unjust is so wide that it has no bite. "
And Nozick's is so narrow it's all bite.
"... my casual purchases are permissible according to rules that can be defended positively as just."
You see, it's not about you and your casual purchases, it's not about Nozick, Wilt or Tyler as individual parties to a transaction. The idea that human social behavior and organization can be reduced to a set (no matter how large) of individual transactions is simplistic and adolescent.
The instant, the very instant, you begin to generalize from those individual transactions--from paying a quarter to Wilt or Tyler to "rules that govern the paying of media of exchange to sex-addicted basketball players and dope-addled rock singers," it starts to get complicated and ambiguous as those rules try to govern things like externalities, imperfect information, random chance, duress, etc. Then suddenly we're not living in a world of seven-foot thought experiments anymore.
"One should also note that abolishing Nozick’s specific arguments does not refute libertarianism."
No. It's proven inability to encompass viable institutions of social organization does that all by itself.
Man, I wish I had a dollar for every time some libertarian told me I missed the point. I'd be properly compensated with untolled millions for the waste of my time .
"Anarchy, State and Utopia" is fundamentally a text of argument from moral first principles. It defines justice, then proceeds more or less syllogistically to determine whether certain human behaviors fall inside or outside the boundaries of justice.
"Is it unjust for me to pay 25 cents to watch (let me modify the example) steven tyler sing?"
Why, Yes indeedy, it would be. Strangely, Stephen Tyler pretty much got his start singing for free about 100 yards from Nozick's office at exactly the time he first came to Harvard, at the Saturday afternnon free concerts/dope markets on Cambridge Common in the early 70s. I wuz there.
The dope market, I mean, not Harvard.
Actually, if I really felt like arguing it I'd suggest that "just" and "unjust" simply aren't the proper framework in which to assess the paying of a quarter to hear, but I'll go with Yes, it's unjust predicated on the condition that actions that cannot be defended positively as "just" are by definition "unjust."
Personally, I think libertarianism is simplistic, adolescent, faux-philosophizing, but since I'm a nice guy I'll give a genuine "natural experiment" that matches the Wilt argument pretty closely. No need to give me credit.
For years Tiger Woods promised his caddy Stevie Williams that he'd play the New Zealand Open "someday," (it's ordinarily a minor stop on a minor tour).
The year before Tiger made good on the promise tickets were $25. The year he played tickets were $200.
"I don’t know if Nozick was much of a basketball fan, or if he just used Chamberlain because he was really famous at the time – but if it was the former, the irony is shocking."
Well, he was a tenured professor in Boston when the Celtics were great. He could not have not known. In fact, if I had to guess I'd say it was deliberate bit of impishness. Maybe a shot at Rawls? He was apparently a sports fan, though I presume Red Sox more than Celtics:
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/rawls.php
Even at the time I thought the Wilt argument was silly because it rests on compensating random DNA combinations. Seriously. Why is that even theoretically "just"?
Steyn's Eurabia writings can be dismissed on rudimentary demographics alone, for the same reason that Papist, Jewish, feeble-minded and now Hispanic "takeovers" of the USA never occurred, despite two hundred years of "warning" about it.
His only intellectual defense is that, well, he's making the same idiotic mistake lots of other smart folks have made for two hundred years.
As for the doctrinal/ideological questions you raise about his understanding of Islam, I yield to your superior knowledge.
Seriously. My assessment probably seems strangely misplaced for a person of my general political persauasion because I read and adored his movie reviews in the Spectator for years before he became a notorious right-winger (or before I discovered he was a notorious right-winger).
Whachagonna do? I can't go back and un-enjoy the film column, so I'm kinda stuck.
Au contraire mon frere. He may be crazy wrong, or possibly even dishonest in his premises, but his prose style is elegant and sharp.
"Hansen blows his rusty bugle and urges us to study the Greeks and Romans, as if they were exemplars for modern life. Nothing could be farther from the truth"
That's a more than fair criticism.
To clarify, I mentioned Steyn and Hanson not because I agree with them, but because of all the Movement Conservatives with any kind of public profile, among all those wingnut welfare fellows on think-tank mastheads, those are the only two who could plausibly fit Rufus's "liberals and conservatives sharpen each other" criterion.
"the paleocons can be summarized as genteel bigots"
That might be a little stronger than I'd say. Or maybe not. At any rate, the reason I like the paleos is because at least they're honest, indeed proud, of the anti-Enlightenment implications of their thinking--unlike the Movement Conservatives, who corrupt and poison Enlightenment values while claiming to champion them.
" I think having more conservatives in academia would sharpen the ideas of liberal and conservative academics;"
Movement conservatives have nothing, pardon me, less than nothing, to contribute to academic discourse. Sheesh. Just look at the pop-culture criticism at Big Hollywood or National Review. It's somewhere between AP high school and solid-B freshman writing, when it's coherent, which it frequently isn't, and not simply an excuse for talk-radio skreeee masquerading as criticism, which it frequently is.
Mark Steyn and Victor David Hanson are the only exceptions. The rest of them couldn't get through the first semester "burn" course in most grad programs. Not only should we not encourage such conservatives to join the academy, we should actively discourage them.
Having said that, paleoconservatives are not just another story, they're the opposite story. I've read the Rockford Institute's "Chronicles" pretty much monthly for pretty much twenty years, and, the NBA All-Star Game being tonight, I can only say "Ball Don't Lie." Those paleos can both think and write with profound insight and elevated rhetoric.
In fact, one of the great joys of reading the paleocons is when they demolish Movement Conservatives like David Horowitz or Jonah Goldberg. There's usually no stone upon stone remaining, with the bonus being the target doesn't get to whimper about liberal bias in the review.
The funniest part is, you'll NEVER hear a paleocon whining about underrepresentation in the academy. Either they figure one of them against the rest of the liberal department is a fair fight (One riot, one Ranger) or they settle in at a congenial school of the sort Blaise mentioned above and just do their work.
I do not reject the possibility of metaphysics or God.
What I object to, indeed, what utterly offends me, is only when those proposing a metaphysical construct demand that their construct be treated as an empirical hypothesis.
If you want to do science, do science. If you want to do God, do God. Just don't do God and tell me it's science.
I don't think you quite understood my point. I too believe that the adversarial approach is useless, frequently, WORSE than useless in the Creationism/Evolution discourse.
When I get involved in a Creationism "debate" (always, later, I realize, against my better judgment) I do NOT use every trick in the book to win the debate because there's no possibilty of "winning" when one side is propounding a metaphysical construct while the other is proposing an empirical hypothesis.
Mostly I just go with my mood. If I'm feeling angry, I get insulting. If I'm feeling mischievous, I'll cite the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If I'm feeling generous, I'll cite a gentle rebuttal from Discover magazine or something.
But I don't expect to "win" and I never expect to argue because people can't be argued out of a metaphysical construct.
" There’s no particularly good reason to view such ignorance as anything but a teaching opportunity"
I'm sorry, but conversing about Evolution with some adult faux-intellectual armed with Discovery Institute hogwash is simply not now, never has been and never will be a teaching opportunity.
Whether you're charitable or contemptuous, shrill or soft, short or patient, has no bearing on the outcome. For whatever reason, they have obviously chosen to give their metaphysical construct precedence over empirical knowledge.
That's fine. Like I said, whatever gets you through the day.
But that means that not only is the call to charity pointless, in certain circumstances, charity is positively destructive, as when you know your interlocutor is perpetrating a fraud. Many times that fraud is to sucker money out of poor rubes, like Ben Stein and that loathesome movie he produced.
Those folks don't get charity. They get the opposite.
Fair enough, so let me try another angle which I've been trying to articulate.
I got the impression from the original post, DeLong's response, and the post above, that Jason was concerned with the civil discourse, that is, the argumentation that goes on between observers and actors of politics and society concerning the controversy about Evolution and Creationism. Call that the "argumentative discourse." And let's go with "dialectic" for rhyming reasons that will soon become clear.
That was my original point, and I stand by it. Hence, a charitable tone has no bearing on the outcome of the discourse. Hell, substantive content has no bearing, let alone the style Jason was pleading for.
What I was trying to describe, and what you did in fact describe, is didactic. The didactic project and argumentative dialectic are quite different processes.
Teacher engaged in the didactic owe their students charity and patience, and it seems as if you were lucky enough to encounter at least one such teacher. But as a party to a dialectic, I owe my adversary nothing, not charity, not patience, no benefit of the doubt, in fact, if I feel that ridicule and mockery would be an effective rhetorical device, ridicule and mockery they get.
To agree and disagree--I agree that empiricism can't answer everything, or even what many regard as the most important thing, but when empiricisn can answer something, it must.
I don't see "charity" and "lack of mockery" as synonymous.
And I don't see where what I said and what you said are mutually exclusive. Those teachers who did not mock you also did not argue with you, either, they taught you--hence, no need for a charitable tone.
They taught you the principles of methodological naturalism. They could otherwise be nasty, or brutal graders or whatever other noxious personality traits you can imagine, but ultimately, you weren't argued out of Creationism except to the extent that you argued yourself out of it.
Whether you were charitable to yourself is an intriguing question.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “No such thing as bad publicity”
Mark:
Oh, they're delinquents, then. Better call for backup.
Seriously--you read that mess o' incoherent pottage E.D. linked in the article and don't call that "scattering"? Ninety percent of the libertarian rejoinder to Metcalf is laughable rubbish. The other ten percent is normative disagreement.
I'll pick up in another reply to Erik below.
"
Mark:
The teenage boys hear the sirens and scatter anyway.
"
Erik:
"The fact that there have been so many anti-libertarian hit pieces means, if nothing else, that libertarians represent a threat to both conservatives and liberals"
Not really. It's just that sometimes when the teenage boys are having a kegger things get so out of hand you gotta call the cops.
On “Still More Caricatures of Libertarianism”
Erik:
I don't think Carson would substantively disagree with very much of what I had to say. He'd probably object to the tone. And he'd probably agree with at least half of what Metcalfe said.
As for my tone, your hold-my-breath-til-I-turn-blue demand to be treated with "seriousness" seemed to beg for that response.
"
Erik:
I don't think I agree with that. When every aspect of social organization is reduced to or drawn from a simple principle of transactional relations, it actually IS homogeneous. You can't be anything except in lockstep when you're working from such a categorical first principle.
The only way out of it is to say what so many of your pals on the other thread said, in effect, "libertarianism is always right except when it's wrong."
"
Jay:
The Republicans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the corporate class. They rent the Democrats by the hour.
"
Erik:
"treat its subject with any sort of seriousness or grace"
Why? Why should that subject be treated with seriousness and grace?
A bunch of teenage boys think the world should be organized according to the sensibility of teenage boys. They may be precocious, but really, after a while you just have to tell the teenagers to sit down and shut up while the grownups, you know, get some real work done.
"I think a lot of welfare-state policies are basically remedial efforts to make up for all the poverty created by cronyism between government and corporate rent-seekers."
Well. DUH. Tell me something I don't already know. How about a force to countevail the corporate rent seekers? Oh NOOOOES. We can't use government because government is bad, and we can't organize the working classes because that's class warfare, we can't do anything about it except let the corporatists have their way because everything else would get the teenage boy libertarians all resentful about their greedy self-centeredness being challenged by institutions that don't conform to their dorm-room bullshit-session desires.
God am I sick of this liberaltarian crap. I finally figured it out though. Like the Republicans who won't mention Bush, it's a way for libertarians to avoid facing the crushing fact that their model is useless, stupid, simple-minded, dangerous and inhumane
On “The rise and fall of libertarian thought”
Murali:
I already did. Compensating someone for a random combination of DNA strings (or, for that matter, for some non-random combinations like Prince William's) is unjust. That puts Wilt, Tyler and Prince William all in the same category.
It's relevant because you're the one who sneered at the idea of Tyler singing free.
"If that’s the case then neither can just or unjust be the proper framework to evaluate the resulting wealth distribution."
As I said, if I were being strictly formalistic, that's probably the argument I'd make.
"Then your definition of unjust is so wide that it has no bite. "
And Nozick's is so narrow it's all bite.
"... my casual purchases are permissible according to rules that can be defended positively as just."
You see, it's not about you and your casual purchases, it's not about Nozick, Wilt or Tyler as individual parties to a transaction. The idea that human social behavior and organization can be reduced to a set (no matter how large) of individual transactions is simplistic and adolescent.
The instant, the very instant, you begin to generalize from those individual transactions--from paying a quarter to Wilt or Tyler to "rules that govern the paying of media of exchange to sex-addicted basketball players and dope-addled rock singers," it starts to get complicated and ambiguous as those rules try to govern things like externalities, imperfect information, random chance, duress, etc. Then suddenly we're not living in a world of seven-foot thought experiments anymore.
"One should also note that abolishing Nozick’s specific arguments does not refute libertarianism."
No. It's proven inability to encompass viable institutions of social organization does that all by itself.
"
Ru fus:
The music?
What about the dope bazaar?
"
Murali:
Man, I wish I had a dollar for every time some libertarian told me I missed the point. I'd be properly compensated with untolled millions for the waste of my time .
"Anarchy, State and Utopia" is fundamentally a text of argument from moral first principles. It defines justice, then proceeds more or less syllogistically to determine whether certain human behaviors fall inside or outside the boundaries of justice.
"Is it unjust for me to pay 25 cents to watch (let me modify the example) steven tyler sing?"
Why, Yes indeedy, it would be. Strangely, Stephen Tyler pretty much got his start singing for free about 100 yards from Nozick's office at exactly the time he first came to Harvard, at the Saturday afternnon free concerts/dope markets on Cambridge Common in the early 70s. I wuz there.
The dope market, I mean, not Harvard.
Actually, if I really felt like arguing it I'd suggest that "just" and "unjust" simply aren't the proper framework in which to assess the paying of a quarter to hear, but I'll go with Yes, it's unjust predicated on the condition that actions that cannot be defended positively as "just" are by definition "unjust."
"
Density:
Personally, I think libertarianism is simplistic, adolescent, faux-philosophizing, but since I'm a nice guy I'll give a genuine "natural experiment" that matches the Wilt argument pretty closely. No need to give me credit.
For years Tiger Woods promised his caddy Stevie Williams that he'd play the New Zealand Open "someday," (it's ordinarily a minor stop on a minor tour).
The year before Tiger made good on the promise tickets were $25. The year he played tickets were $200.
"
RTod:
"I don’t know if Nozick was much of a basketball fan, or if he just used Chamberlain because he was really famous at the time – but if it was the former, the irony is shocking."
Well, he was a tenured professor in Boston when the Celtics were great. He could not have not known. In fact, if I had to guess I'd say it was deliberate bit of impishness. Maybe a shot at Rawls? He was apparently a sports fan, though I presume Red Sox more than Celtics:
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/rawls.php
Even at the time I thought the Wilt argument was silly because it rests on compensating random DNA combinations. Seriously. Why is that even theoretically "just"?
On “Liberal Academia (Part 1)”
Blaise:
Steyn's Eurabia writings can be dismissed on rudimentary demographics alone, for the same reason that Papist, Jewish, feeble-minded and now Hispanic "takeovers" of the USA never occurred, despite two hundred years of "warning" about it.
His only intellectual defense is that, well, he's making the same idiotic mistake lots of other smart folks have made for two hundred years.
As for the doctrinal/ideological questions you raise about his understanding of Islam, I yield to your superior knowledge.
"
Blaise:
I guess I like shiny things.
Seriously. My assessment probably seems strangely misplaced for a person of my general political persauasion because I read and adored his movie reviews in the Spectator for years before he became a notorious right-winger (or before I discovered he was a notorious right-winger).
Whachagonna do? I can't go back and un-enjoy the film column, so I'm kinda stuck.
"
Blaise:
"[Steyn's] writing is not all that good"
Au contraire mon frere. He may be crazy wrong, or possibly even dishonest in his premises, but his prose style is elegant and sharp.
"Hansen blows his rusty bugle and urges us to study the Greeks and Romans, as if they were exemplars for modern life. Nothing could be farther from the truth"
That's a more than fair criticism.
To clarify, I mentioned Steyn and Hanson not because I agree with them, but because of all the Movement Conservatives with any kind of public profile, among all those wingnut welfare fellows on think-tank mastheads, those are the only two who could plausibly fit Rufus's "liberals and conservatives sharpen each other" criterion.
"the paleocons can be summarized as genteel bigots"
That might be a little stronger than I'd say. Or maybe not. At any rate, the reason I like the paleos is because at least they're honest, indeed proud, of the anti-Enlightenment implications of their thinking--unlike the Movement Conservatives, who corrupt and poison Enlightenment values while claiming to champion them.
"
Rufus:
" I think having more conservatives in academia would sharpen the ideas of liberal and conservative academics;"
Movement conservatives have nothing, pardon me, less than nothing, to contribute to academic discourse. Sheesh. Just look at the pop-culture criticism at Big Hollywood or National Review. It's somewhere between AP high school and solid-B freshman writing, when it's coherent, which it frequently isn't, and not simply an excuse for talk-radio skreeee masquerading as criticism, which it frequently is.
Mark Steyn and Victor David Hanson are the only exceptions. The rest of them couldn't get through the first semester "burn" course in most grad programs. Not only should we not encourage such conservatives to join the academy, we should actively discourage them.
Having said that, paleoconservatives are not just another story, they're the opposite story. I've read the Rockford Institute's "Chronicles" pretty much monthly for pretty much twenty years, and, the NBA All-Star Game being tonight, I can only say "Ball Don't Lie." Those paleos can both think and write with profound insight and elevated rhetoric.
In fact, one of the great joys of reading the paleocons is when they demolish Movement Conservatives like David Horowitz or Jonah Goldberg. There's usually no stone upon stone remaining, with the bonus being the target doesn't get to whimper about liberal bias in the review.
The funniest part is, you'll NEVER hear a paleocon whining about underrepresentation in the academy. Either they figure one of them against the rest of the liberal department is a fair fight (One riot, one Ranger) or they settle in at a congenial school of the sort Blaise mentioned above and just do their work.
On “How Not to Read with Charity”
Tom:
"But that would take us down to the second tier, that of people not ideas."
Actually, No. It takes us up a rung to ideology.
"
Jay:
I don't have an argument with people proposing dispaassionate use of the scientific method.
"
Tom:
I do not reject the possibility of metaphysics or God.
What I object to, indeed, what utterly offends me, is only when those proposing a metaphysical construct demand that their construct be treated as an empirical hypothesis.
If you want to do science, do science. If you want to do God, do God. Just don't do God and tell me it's science.
"
Jay:
"The existence of the dialectic is a tool used by your opponents to defend the validity of Creationism."
Quite right. Which is why I reject it in these circumstances in favor of the didactic.
"
Tom:
I don't think you quite understood my point. I too believe that the adversarial approach is useless, frequently, WORSE than useless in the Creationism/Evolution discourse.
When I get involved in a Creationism "debate" (always, later, I realize, against my better judgment) I do NOT use every trick in the book to win the debate because there's no possibilty of "winning" when one side is propounding a metaphysical construct while the other is proposing an empirical hypothesis.
Mostly I just go with my mood. If I'm feeling angry, I get insulting. If I'm feeling mischievous, I'll cite the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If I'm feeling generous, I'll cite a gentle rebuttal from Discover magazine or something.
But I don't expect to "win" and I never expect to argue because people can't be argued out of a metaphysical construct.
"
Blaise:
" There’s no particularly good reason to view such ignorance as anything but a teaching opportunity"
I'm sorry, but conversing about Evolution with some adult faux-intellectual armed with Discovery Institute hogwash is simply not now, never has been and never will be a teaching opportunity.
Whether you're charitable or contemptuous, shrill or soft, short or patient, has no bearing on the outcome. For whatever reason, they have obviously chosen to give their metaphysical construct precedence over empirical knowledge.
That's fine. Like I said, whatever gets you through the day.
But that means that not only is the call to charity pointless, in certain circumstances, charity is positively destructive, as when you know your interlocutor is perpetrating a fraud. Many times that fraud is to sucker money out of poor rubes, like Ben Stein and that loathesome movie he produced.
Those folks don't get charity. They get the opposite.
"
Jay:
Fair enough, so let me try another angle which I've been trying to articulate.
I got the impression from the original post, DeLong's response, and the post above, that Jason was concerned with the civil discourse, that is, the argumentation that goes on between observers and actors of politics and society concerning the controversy about Evolution and Creationism. Call that the "argumentative discourse." And let's go with "dialectic" for rhyming reasons that will soon become clear.
Nobody. Ever. Abandons. Creationism. Through. Argument.
That was my original point, and I stand by it. Hence, a charitable tone has no bearing on the outcome of the discourse. Hell, substantive content has no bearing, let alone the style Jason was pleading for.
What I was trying to describe, and what you did in fact describe, is didactic. The didactic project and argumentative dialectic are quite different processes.
Teacher engaged in the didactic owe their students charity and patience, and it seems as if you were lucky enough to encounter at least one such teacher. But as a party to a dialectic, I owe my adversary nothing, not charity, not patience, no benefit of the doubt, in fact, if I feel that ridicule and mockery would be an effective rhetorical device, ridicule and mockery they get.
"
Blaise:
To agree and disagree--I agree that empiricism can't answer everything, or even what many regard as the most important thing, but when empiricisn can answer something, it must.
"
Jaybird:
I don't see "charity" and "lack of mockery" as synonymous.
And I don't see where what I said and what you said are mutually exclusive. Those teachers who did not mock you also did not argue with you, either, they taught you--hence, no need for a charitable tone.
They taught you the principles of methodological naturalism. They could otherwise be nasty, or brutal graders or whatever other noxious personality traits you can imagine, but ultimately, you weren't argued out of Creationism except to the extent that you argued yourself out of it.
Whether you were charitable to yourself is an intriguing question.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.