Tom, honestly, what does this comment say? That the authors of this blog should make a concerted effort to criticize liberal bloggers who say intemperate things about the right? Is that their purpose? It's never seemed to me to be that, or to make a concerted effort to criticize conservative bloggers who say intemperate things about the left. Once again, you seem to be doing little more than butting up against the edge of trolldom.
p.s., you know what they really think but won't say, because you're psychic, or because you just read between the lines, or because you read the tea leaves, or as a result of any other method of divination, doesn't count.
Which Democrats, by name, want to take away your right to bear arms? I don't mean which want assault weapons bans, or which want to close the gun show loophole, both of which are pretty common Democratic positions, but which want to actually take away your right to bear arms? Because I don't recall any of them actually stating that. So I wonder if you can provide some names and sources (preferably quotes, their actual websites, or voting records). I'd love to see that.
Mike, the "gnostic Muslims" thing is just Bob regurgitating, which is what most of what Bob says. It's a script, almost. At least Heidegger has the decency, one might even say the brain power, to spew all sorts of different kinds of nonsense.
I guess they didn't read Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
I like that they read the Constitution out loud and then, immediately after, the first (or at least one of the first) law they propose is blatantly unconstitutional. Not “it’s a matter of interpretation” unconstitutional, but directly contradicting the language of the constitution. And the reason for doing it as a law rather than trying to amend the Constitution? Because, you know, amending it is too hard.
You can’t write comedy like the American House of Representatives (or tragedy like the American Senate).
Robert, I like how you keep acting as though "commie-dem" were the truly offending remark, and not "Kenyan-Marxist." You haven't even mentioned that little epithet. That's particularly interesting given Jason's political orientation. Anyway, your silence on that label is much more informative than anything you've said in your replies to Jason.
Also, I wonder if you understand the difference between criticizing speech and suppressing it. Something tells me that, like Sarah Palin, you don’t.
Bob, I’m not sure if you are just dodging Jason’s question, or if you answer is, “Because it ‘eschews pc silliness,’ racism is now a good thing.” Either way, nice job.
I have to say, while the Kenyan stuff is offensive and stupid, I don’t really mind the “commie dem” nonsense. It has the benefit of at the same time displaying your ignorance and making me laugh, which makes it a definite positive. I am, however, tempted to refer to Republicans/conservatives as fascist-repubs in any thread that you comment in. The label would, at the very least, be no less accurate than “commie-dems.”
James, this kinda sucks, because I was happy to see that you (and Jason, though he transitioned earlier, and DAT, and Jon) were going to be exposed to a larger audience by moving here. One of my favorite things about the blogging you guys do is that the vast majority of your posts, regardless of whether they’re educational, or I agree or disagree, or really what my opinion of any particular post is at all, are incredibly conducive to discussion. The number of comments you guys got once you came here is evidence of that, as is the fact that, even with significantly fewer commenters over at Positive Liberty and The One Best Way (No, That Name Really Sucks), discussions often went into the hundreds of comments and lasted days, even a week or more, which is virtually unheard of in the blogging world. I liked having you guys all collected in one place, but that was simply because it made my life easier. But at least you’ll still be blogging.
Jason, I don't mean philosophically, I mean practically. We don't think like that, so that when we try to come up with minimal criteria like these, they can quickly be undercut by others. Nietzsche once said that he profits most from philosophers who live their philosophy. To my mind, the best way to "define" libertarianism, or any other ideological position, is simply to live it (in this case, I'd include writing it). Libertarianism is what libertarians say and do, and there's no one set of conditions that comprise that.
Also, I highly suspect that most people would say that their political party embodies those two principles, but the other one doesn't.
I suspect, nay, I’m quite certain that if you asked 100 conservatives/Republicans and 100 liberals/Democrats in the U.S. whether they agreed with your 1 and 2, that is, people are better at running their own lives than those of others and that coercion should be a last resort if at all, you’d find that 95 of each group did agree. This is partly because those two criteria are pretty abstract, vague even, but also because they seem like common sense. But when you build up from them, or around them, then you quickly find that the devil is in fact in the details, as 62across said, and that the resulting differences in interpretation, combined with inherent differences in world views, result in those 190 people being able to justify just about anything their favored political party does.
That doesn’t mean, or at least doesn’t necessarily mean, that those two things aren’t an important part of a political philosophy, just that they’re not very good candidates for a “mere” libertarian, or else just about everyone is a mere libertarian.
Not being a libertarian myself, I wouldn’t want to even attempt to define what one is, at either the minima or the maxima. I would, however, as someone who studies concepts, and who’s quite familiar with how we represent and use them, suggest that trying to distill libertarianism down to its essence is a losing cause, because like every other concept of this sort (that is to say, abstract, social, and human), an “essence” is probably not there to be found. It’s going to be a family resemblance sort of thing, with a label much better suited for reasoning about individuals or ideas than for rigid designation. This particularly true when, as for libertarianism, the abstract social construct we’re trying to define is itself built upon other abstract social constructs, which are in turn…
Of course, this lack of an identifiable essence to exactly the sort of perversion of the term, or at least unwanted use, both by opponents and seeming proponents, that leads to misunderstandings. It’s not surpsing, for example, that some see libertarians as being in favor of increased corporate power when there are visible individuals who use the label to describe themselves and act in such a way to increase corporate power. It’s also not surprising that some see libertarians as being selfish egoists, because of all the Randian crap that gets bandied about by some libertarians (I’ll leave aside whether they’re accurately reflecting Rand’s philosophy). I suppose you have two choices if you want to avoid association with the uses of the term libertarian that you find inapt: use a different term to describe yourself, which will at some point result in repeating the process for the same reasons, or if you think it’s important, work hard to point out why the particular views of libertarianism with which you disagree don’t apply to you. It sucks to have to do that regularly, but it is the price one pays for using a label, and it’s a price that’s paid all the more by people who use a label to describe themselves that most people wouldn’t. Jason and James obviously do this well, but I’m afraid that you’re both going to be doing it for a long, long time.
And no, I don't have a Marxist view of history, and just because you believe something different from the consensus, or in this case, from the facts, doesn't make you right.
Heidegger, you must have missed what Robert said at the end of his comment, to which I was replying (though it was so far nested that I had to reply to an older comment to reply to it). You're a strange puppy.
And yes, I've bullied my way through life. Just today I locked a kid in his locker, and put another's head in the toilet and flushed it.
Robert, I grew up in a house a mile from the site of the destruction of the Army of Tennessee under Hood in 1864, in a small town where the schools were all (at the time, all) nicknamed "the Rebels," and where Civil War buff-ism wasn't so much a hobby as a city-wide obsession. I have spent far, far too much of my adult life arguing with other grown men (always men, of course) about whether Gettysburg would have turned out differently had Jackson been alive, or what widespread guerrilla warfare in the mountains after April 12 would have meant. I suspect that I'd forgotten more about that war by the age of 25 than you will ever know, even if my interests in warfare have moved on to other conflicts (mostly the two major Prussian wars in the 1860s and early 70s, World War I, and World War II). I point this out so that you'll understand that I speak from a position of knowledge when I say that Hummel's work is widely regarded (and rightly so) as bull fuckin' shit.
Anyway, my main point was that the tariffs remained high for decades after 1861, and the South wasn't supplying 75% of the revenue. They wouldn't have been in 1860, either. They were protectionist tariffs, designed to promote northern industry, but since the South imported most of its stuff from the north, that just meant that the South would be funding industry, not the government.
Robert, I agree with you that the foot soldier wasn't, generally, fighting for slavery. I disagree with you that this has anything to do with the cause of the war, and I also disagree with you that slavery was merely one amongst a constellation of causes. It was the cause, the one without which there would not have been an American Civil War.
It's clear you really know nothing about the period. The Morrill Tariff did pass, in 1861, and tariffs like it were in place for decades, but the southern states didn't end up paying 75% of the federal budget, or any other number you've made up. It is true that tariffs played a role in Lincoln's election, though not because it hurt him in the southern states, but because it helped him in pro-protectionist northern states. Southerners din't want high tariffs, but they weren't going to war over it, and until they left Congress over the issue of slavery, the Morrill Tariff and other high tarriffs had been unable to pass and southern states had been
able to keep tarriff rates low.
Anyway, the main reason I don't reallyagree with you is that the sort of Confederate apologia in which you're engaging, w hich actively tries to minimize the absolutely crucial and, above all other issues, causal role of slavery in the war, disgusts me.
That's not quite the story (OK, it's not really even close to the story), but it's undeniably true that most of the food soldiers were fighting because they were down here, or because it was the honorable and manly thing to do (and if you didn't, you'd have a hard time facing your neighbors). That's how the Southern elite sold it to them, too. Of course, the Southern elite were fighting to preserve their way of life, which is to say, their source of wealth, which is to say, slavery. I think it's safe to say that if the southern elite, who organized, financed, and for the most part commanded the military were the ones who chose to go to war, so that if they didn't go to war because they were down here, then the cause of the war wasn't them being down here, any more than the cause of the Iraq war is that there are soldiers who want to defend their country.
I see nothing wrong with discussing and even praising the military savvy, and perhaps even genius, of Forrest or Jackson. They were two of the few genuinely innovative American military minds in our relatively short history (how much shorter might the war have been if we'd had a Blumenthal or a Moltke, two pick two names from the same period?), and that's something worth mentioning. That doesn't mean we should name schools after them, or have holidays celebrating them, or anything of that sort. Hell, it doesn't even mean we should go out of our way to talk about them, particularly when there are more noble individuals to celebrate from that period, as this post was, I believe, trying to say.
By the way, I've always thought Company Aytch was a good look inside the mindset of a Confederate foot soldier. If Watkins' post-war version of his motivations are to be believed, it's a little more complicated than "Because they're down here," and southern propaganda certainly played a role, but he wasn't thinking to himself that he was fighting to preserve slavery (though he certainly wasn't opposed to slavery).
I saw a documentary about Smalls about 2 years ago, on PBS maybe. His story is even more impressive. He served in the S.C. state legislature, apparently very successfully, and when he went to the U.S. House of Representatives, he was a fighter, even trying to desegregate the military, though unsuccessfully (obviously). Oh, and when he returned to South Carolina, he bought his former master's house. That's just awesome.
It's a crying shame that there are so many people who still celebrate the men who fought to preserve a way of life that was dependent on the enslavement of almost 40% of its residents, but so few who celebrate men like Smalls.
I believe DAR is speaking of qualia, rather than consciousness more generally, when he says that Dennett denies its existence; and of these he does, quite clearly, deny existence. This is of course why he talks about automata with the same brain states being conscious, because this directly answers not an argument for the existence of consciousness, but an argument for the difficulty of it as a philosophical/scientific problem (though we should use the highly technical and esoteric term of the literature, even if it's a slight anachronism for discussions of Consciousness Explained: zombies).
There's much that's wrong with Dennett's view of consciousness, in part because the science has advanced well beyond where it was back when Dennett was writing extensively about consciousness, but also because, well, given everything we know, first person experience is not only real (and therefore a real problem for materialism, even if we don't dig bats, zombies, or two-dimensional semantics), but given everything we know now and knew then, which includes the best conceptual and empirical evidence available to us, it is logically impenetrable from a third-person perspective. The only way to deny this, which is what denying the existence of qualia amounts to, is to deny that consciousness itself exists (at least, this is the only way to deny the impenetrability of first-person experience from a physicalist perspective -- it's apparently perfectly penetrable by god under some non-physicalist views). At least, I think this is what DAR was getting at, and if so, then he and I agree on this point.
Also, Dennett looks like Santa Claus. Given the season, I think this needs to be pointed out. That is all.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot at Tucson rally”
Tom, honestly, what does this comment say? That the authors of this blog should make a concerted effort to criticize liberal bloggers who say intemperate things about the right? Is that their purpose? It's never seemed to me to be that, or to make a concerted effort to criticize conservative bloggers who say intemperate things about the left. Once again, you seem to be doing little more than butting up against the edge of trolldom.
"
p.s., you know what they really think but won't say, because you're psychic, or because you just read between the lines, or because you read the tea leaves, or as a result of any other method of divination, doesn't count.
"
Which Democrats, by name, want to take away your right to bear arms? I don't mean which want assault weapons bans, or which want to close the gun show loophole, both of which are pretty common Democratic positions, but which want to actually take away your right to bear arms? Because I don't recall any of them actually stating that. So I wonder if you can provide some names and sources (preferably quotes, their actual websites, or voting records). I'd love to see that.
On “Limits? What Limits?”
You gonna answer the question?
"
Heidegger, when and where did Lee suggest that Bush had something to do with 9/11? Or is this just another of your many made-up “facts?”
On “A Sterile Constitution”
Punching a police officer is significantly different from being born.
Eh, six of one...
On “An “I Told You So” Post”
Mike, the "gnostic Muslims" thing is just Bob regurgitating, which is what most of what Bob says. It's a script, almost. At least Heidegger has the decency, one might even say the brain power, to spew all sorts of different kinds of nonsense.
On “A Sterile Constitution”
Steve King's bill on birthright citizenship.
I guess they didn't read Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
"
I like that they read the Constitution out loud and then, immediately after, the first (or at least one of the first) law they propose is blatantly unconstitutional. Not “it’s a matter of interpretation” unconstitutional, but directly contradicting the language of the constitution. And the reason for doing it as a law rather than trying to amend the Constitution? Because, you know, amending it is too hard.
You can’t write comedy like the American House of Representatives (or tragedy like the American Senate).
On “An “I Told You So” Post”
Robert, I like how you keep acting as though "commie-dem" were the truly offending remark, and not "Kenyan-Marxist." You haven't even mentioned that little epithet. That's particularly interesting given Jason's political orientation. Anyway, your silence on that label is much more informative than anything you've said in your replies to Jason.
Also, I wonder if you understand the difference between criticizing speech and suppressing it. Something tells me that, like Sarah Palin, you don’t.
"
So your answer was "It's OK to be racist if it's eschewing pc silliness." Got ya.
"
Bob, I’m not sure if you are just dodging Jason’s question, or if you answer is, “Because it ‘eschews pc silliness,’ racism is now a good thing.” Either way, nice job.
I have to say, while the Kenyan stuff is offensive and stupid, I don’t really mind the “commie dem” nonsense. It has the benefit of at the same time displaying your ignorance and making me laugh, which makes it a definite positive. I am, however, tempted to refer to Republicans/conservatives as fascist-repubs in any thread that you comment in. The label would, at the very least, be no less accurate than “commie-dems.”
On “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu”
James, this kinda sucks, because I was happy to see that you (and Jason, though he transitioned earlier, and DAT, and Jon) were going to be exposed to a larger audience by moving here. One of my favorite things about the blogging you guys do is that the vast majority of your posts, regardless of whether they’re educational, or I agree or disagree, or really what my opinion of any particular post is at all, are incredibly conducive to discussion. The number of comments you guys got once you came here is evidence of that, as is the fact that, even with significantly fewer commenters over at Positive Liberty and The One Best Way (No, That Name Really Sucks), discussions often went into the hundreds of comments and lasted days, even a week or more, which is virtually unheard of in the blogging world. I liked having you guys all collected in one place, but that was simply because it made my life easier. But at least you’ll still be blogging.
On “Aggrieved libertarians”
Heidegger,
"A satellite campus of both MIT and CalTech." Man, you crack me up.
On “The Art of Letting Go”
Jason, I don't mean philosophically, I mean practically. We don't think like that, so that when we try to come up with minimal criteria like these, they can quickly be undercut by others. Nietzsche once said that he profits most from philosophers who live their philosophy. To my mind, the best way to "define" libertarianism, or any other ideological position, is simply to live it (in this case, I'd include writing it). Libertarianism is what libertarians say and do, and there's no one set of conditions that comprise that.
Also, I highly suspect that most people would say that their political party embodies those two principles, but the other one doesn't.
"
I suspect, nay, I’m quite certain that if you asked 100 conservatives/Republicans and 100 liberals/Democrats in the U.S. whether they agreed with your 1 and 2, that is, people are better at running their own lives than those of others and that coercion should be a last resort if at all, you’d find that 95 of each group did agree. This is partly because those two criteria are pretty abstract, vague even, but also because they seem like common sense. But when you build up from them, or around them, then you quickly find that the devil is in fact in the details, as 62across said, and that the resulting differences in interpretation, combined with inherent differences in world views, result in those 190 people being able to justify just about anything their favored political party does.
That doesn’t mean, or at least doesn’t necessarily mean, that those two things aren’t an important part of a political philosophy, just that they’re not very good candidates for a “mere” libertarian, or else just about everyone is a mere libertarian.
Not being a libertarian myself, I wouldn’t want to even attempt to define what one is, at either the minima or the maxima. I would, however, as someone who studies concepts, and who’s quite familiar with how we represent and use them, suggest that trying to distill libertarianism down to its essence is a losing cause, because like every other concept of this sort (that is to say, abstract, social, and human), an “essence” is probably not there to be found. It’s going to be a family resemblance sort of thing, with a label much better suited for reasoning about individuals or ideas than for rigid designation. This particularly true when, as for libertarianism, the abstract social construct we’re trying to define is itself built upon other abstract social constructs, which are in turn…
Of course, this lack of an identifiable essence to exactly the sort of perversion of the term, or at least unwanted use, both by opponents and seeming proponents, that leads to misunderstandings. It’s not surpsing, for example, that some see libertarians as being in favor of increased corporate power when there are visible individuals who use the label to describe themselves and act in such a way to increase corporate power. It’s also not surprising that some see libertarians as being selfish egoists, because of all the Randian crap that gets bandied about by some libertarians (I’ll leave aside whether they’re accurately reflecting Rand’s philosophy). I suppose you have two choices if you want to avoid association with the uses of the term libertarian that you find inapt: use a different term to describe yourself, which will at some point result in repeating the process for the same reasons, or if you think it’s important, work hard to point out why the particular views of libertarianism with which you disagree don’t apply to you. It sucks to have to do that regularly, but it is the price one pays for using a label, and it’s a price that’s paid all the more by people who use a label to describe themselves that most people wouldn’t. Jason and James obviously do this well, but I’m afraid that you’re both going to be doing it for a long, long time.
On “The Wall Street Journal’s Darwin-Free Zone”
Tom, you should read up on chimps.
On “Captain Robert Smalls, Bona Fide Hero”
"
My work is cited at the Army War College too!
Look, we can both make stuff up.
And no, I don't have a Marxist view of history, and just because you believe something different from the consensus, or in this case, from the facts, doesn't make you right.
"
Heidegger, you must have missed what Robert said at the end of his comment, to which I was replying (though it was so far nested that I had to reply to an older comment to reply to it). You're a strange puppy.
And yes, I've bullied my way through life. Just today I locked a kid in his locker, and put another's head in the toilet and flushed it.
"
Robert, I grew up in a house a mile from the site of the destruction of the Army of Tennessee under Hood in 1864, in a small town where the schools were all (at the time, all) nicknamed "the Rebels," and where Civil War buff-ism wasn't so much a hobby as a city-wide obsession. I have spent far, far too much of my adult life arguing with other grown men (always men, of course) about whether Gettysburg would have turned out differently had Jackson been alive, or what widespread guerrilla warfare in the mountains after April 12 would have meant. I suspect that I'd forgotten more about that war by the age of 25 than you will ever know, even if my interests in warfare have moved on to other conflicts (mostly the two major Prussian wars in the 1860s and early 70s, World War I, and World War II). I point this out so that you'll understand that I speak from a position of knowledge when I say that Hummel's work is widely regarded (and rightly so) as bull fuckin' shit.
Anyway, my main point was that the tariffs remained high for decades after 1861, and the South wasn't supplying 75% of the revenue. They wouldn't have been in 1860, either. They were protectionist tariffs, designed to promote northern industry, but since the South imported most of its stuff from the north, that just meant that the South would be funding industry, not the government.
"
Robert, I agree with you that the foot soldier wasn't, generally, fighting for slavery. I disagree with you that this has anything to do with the cause of the war, and I also disagree with you that slavery was merely one amongst a constellation of causes. It was the cause, the one without which there would not have been an American Civil War.
It's clear you really know nothing about the period. The Morrill Tariff did pass, in 1861, and tariffs like it were in place for decades, but the southern states didn't end up paying 75% of the federal budget, or any other number you've made up. It is true that tariffs played a role in Lincoln's election, though not because it hurt him in the southern states, but because it helped him in pro-protectionist northern states. Southerners din't want high tariffs, but they weren't going to war over it, and until they left Congress over the issue of slavery, the Morrill Tariff and other high tarriffs had been unable to pass and southern states had been
able to keep tarriff rates low.
Anyway, the main reason I don't reallyagree with you is that the sort of Confederate apologia in which you're engaging, w hich actively tries to minimize the absolutely crucial and, above all other issues, causal role of slavery in the war, disgusts me.
"
That's not quite the story (OK, it's not really even close to the story), but it's undeniably true that most of the food soldiers were fighting because they were down here, or because it was the honorable and manly thing to do (and if you didn't, you'd have a hard time facing your neighbors). That's how the Southern elite sold it to them, too. Of course, the Southern elite were fighting to preserve their way of life, which is to say, their source of wealth, which is to say, slavery. I think it's safe to say that if the southern elite, who organized, financed, and for the most part commanded the military were the ones who chose to go to war, so that if they didn't go to war because they were down here, then the cause of the war wasn't them being down here, any more than the cause of the Iraq war is that there are soldiers who want to defend their country.
I see nothing wrong with discussing and even praising the military savvy, and perhaps even genius, of Forrest or Jackson. They were two of the few genuinely innovative American military minds in our relatively short history (how much shorter might the war have been if we'd had a Blumenthal or a Moltke, two pick two names from the same period?), and that's something worth mentioning. That doesn't mean we should name schools after them, or have holidays celebrating them, or anything of that sort. Hell, it doesn't even mean we should go out of our way to talk about them, particularly when there are more noble individuals to celebrate from that period, as this post was, I believe, trying to say.
By the way, I've always thought Company Aytch was a good look inside the mindset of a Confederate foot soldier. If Watkins' post-war version of his motivations are to be believed, it's a little more complicated than "Because they're down here," and southern propaganda certainly played a role, but he wasn't thinking to himself that he was fighting to preserve slavery (though he certainly wasn't opposed to slavery).
"
I saw a documentary about Smalls about 2 years ago, on PBS maybe. His story is even more impressive. He served in the S.C. state legislature, apparently very successfully, and when he went to the U.S. House of Representatives, he was a fighter, even trying to desegregate the military, though unsuccessfully (obviously). Oh, and when he returned to South Carolina, he bought his former master's house. That's just awesome.
It's a crying shame that there are so many people who still celebrate the men who fought to preserve a way of life that was dependent on the enslavement of almost 40% of its residents, but so few who celebrate men like Smalls.
On “What Is Politics?”
I believe DAR is speaking of qualia, rather than consciousness more generally, when he says that Dennett denies its existence; and of these he does, quite clearly, deny existence. This is of course why he talks about automata with the same brain states being conscious, because this directly answers not an argument for the existence of consciousness, but an argument for the difficulty of it as a philosophical/scientific problem (though we should use the highly technical and esoteric term of the literature, even if it's a slight anachronism for discussions of Consciousness Explained: zombies).
There's much that's wrong with Dennett's view of consciousness, in part because the science has advanced well beyond where it was back when Dennett was writing extensively about consciousness, but also because, well, given everything we know, first person experience is not only real (and therefore a real problem for materialism, even if we don't dig bats, zombies, or two-dimensional semantics), but given everything we know now and knew then, which includes the best conceptual and empirical evidence available to us, it is logically impenetrable from a third-person perspective. The only way to deny this, which is what denying the existence of qualia amounts to, is to deny that consciousness itself exists (at least, this is the only way to deny the impenetrability of first-person experience from a physicalist perspective -- it's apparently perfectly penetrable by god under some non-physicalist views). At least, I think this is what DAR was getting at, and if so, then he and I agree on this point.
Also, Dennett looks like Santa Claus. Given the season, I think this needs to be pointed out. That is all.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.