FreedomsAdvocate: Right this instant, we have an opportunity to grab a good portion of the small-government portion of the republican party.

Pull the other one. The Libertarian Party’s primary outreach for more than a decade has been directed at “small government conservative” types, particularly through targeting AM talk-radio audiences, readers of right-wing publications, and supporters of right-wing “free market” think tanks. This strategy was especially promoted by Harry Browne and his coterie from the mid-1990s until 2001 (cf. Operation Drumbeat, Project Archimedes, etc.), and continues to influence the LP’s outreach efforts in a lot of ways. Given how gleefully this constituency has alwaysdefected to march in formation with the G.O.P. in every election cycle, I can’t say that this strikes me as a strategy well-justified by its success.

FreedomsAdvocate: I am about a noninterventionist as you can get. But I also realize that sometimes the best defense it a good offense. Sometimes war is necessary to avoid worse possibilities. In WW2 we intervened. Was that wrong?

Yes, it was.

I say this not because I think the world would have been more free or less free as a result of U.S. neutrality (how would I know?) but rather because the U.S. government’s involvement in the war committed it to doing things that were absolutely immoral, including a gargantuan increase in the size and invasiveness of the State domestically, the summary imprisonment of political dissidents, the confinement of innocent Japanese-Americans to internment camps, the creation of a slave army through massive conscription, a policy of total warfare throughout Continental Europe and the Pacific, and terror-bombing using incendiary weapons and, for the first time in history, nuclear weapons.

Look, if you want to argue that war is sometimes necessary or justified, then you should feel free to make that argument. But you can’t sensibly call yourself “about [as] noninterventionist as you can get” while also endorsing the U.S.’s involvement in the biggest and most destructive military intervention in the history of the world. To be “as noninterventionist as you can get” means being an absolute pacifist. I am not an absolute pacifist, but I (and a number of other libertarians) are substantially closer to the position than you are; thus you are substantially more interventionist than we are. You can make whatever arguments you want on behalf of your interventionist position, but it serves no-one to pretend that your position is something other than what it is.

I didn’t mean to sound as if I were coming out in favor of lizard marriage.

The point isn’t that I think the government should recognize lizard marriages (whatever that would mean). It’s that I think it’s a mistake to concede the government any authority over marriage in the first place. If George Bush signed a Presidential decree stating that Citizen Kane is trash and nobody should see it, I would not be outraged by that, either, even though it’s a patently ridiculous claim; I never considered G.W. an authority on film in the first place, and I simply don’t care enough about his opinion to get worked up over it. At the most, it would be an occasion for expressing some contempt about his taste in film.

The people whose opinions about marriage matter are the families (for secular marriage) and the churches (for religious marriage). In either case, the best thing for the government to do is not try to fix up its policy in one direction or the other, but rather simply to butt out and stop acting as if it had any business offering its opinions on what is or isn’t a valid marriage.

War collectivism happens on both ends of the sword.

It’s certainly true that collectivism is often used to make excuses for commandeering people’s lives and property in the name of the war effort. But it’s also certainly true that collectivism is often used to make excuses for burning villages and dropping bombs on innocent people’s heads. Sometimes this is done explicitly as terrorism or collective punishment; sometimes it is done on the idea that the national military or diplomatic aims justify continuing the war by any means necessary, no matter the cost to innocent third parties.

Kennedy’s right that anti-war libertarians don’t put nearly enough stress on the first sort of collectivism. But why in the world shouldn’t one challenge the second sort of collectivism, too?

I’d be outraged if the courts said that two lizards could become married.

I wouldn’t.

What does it matter who (or what) the government says can get married? What makes them an authority whose opinion is worth caring about? Good marriages don’t depend on the government’s consent and bad marriages aren’t made better through the government’s busybodying.

The problem is that marriage is properly (1) a civil ritual and (2) a religious sacrament, and I don’t see why any respect at all — even the minimal respect involved in treating something as a serious matter for outrage — is due to the government’s arbitrary meddling with either.

Brandon:

I don’t have a problem with this. The simple fact that something is publicly owned doesn’t mean it must or should be a free-for-all. Government shouldn’t own parks, but as long as it does it should try regulate their use in ways that maximize public enjoyment.

I suspect that the new law will reduce enjoyment of the parks by the part of the public that happens to be homeless, or involved in charity for the homeless. Or do they not count?

hein:

I think Brandon is right. This is a property rights issue.

No it’s not. The city is not the rightful owner of the land and therefore has no legitimate authority over its use.

Constant:

And public parks are the property of the city.

No they aren’t. Public parks are built and maintained with stolen money, and very often located on stolen land. The parks are no more the property of the city government than a cache of buried treasure is the property of the pirate who stole it.

And sometime in the next week, everyone who is serious about imposing web filtering will add http://libertyfilter.com/* to their list of filters.

Who are you thinking of in particular?

It may just be that the church leaders you’ve been noticing lately have been from different denominations. The United Methodists have always had bishops; the Southern Baptists have never had them. Some Pentacostals (PCG) did change the title of their District and General Superintendents to District and General Bishops as of 2002, but the positions were already oversight positions; they just changed the name, apparently to make it sound more spiritual and less like secular upper management.

E. Simon,

I don’t know what you mean by my “contingent position.” Contingent on what?

My position is that warfare as it is conducted in the modern world is almost never justifiable because the circumstances under which you can excusably kill innocent people in the course of protecting yourself from an unrelated menace are very limited, and the number that you can excusably kill is “almost none.” For a more detailed discussion, see Roderick Long’s essay Thinking Our Anger. I’d be glad to discuss the issue at more length if you want, but I’d like to suggest that it’s far less urgent for me to spell out the details of my view than it is for you to spell out the details of yours, because I’m not trying to defend a fucking war as proportional retaliation.

I should note that I am no more ignorant of the doctrine of double effect than you are. I’ve nowhere suggested that civilians were deliberately targeted by the IDF (how would I know?). What I am suggesting is one of the traditional conditions on the doctrine of double effect: that to be excusable, the evils inflicted must not be disproportionate to the goods achieved. So just pointing to double effect does not absolve you of the intellectual responsibility of spelling out how many people can be (regrettably but expectedly) killed and maimed in the course of retaliating against unrelated menaces, and how much killing and maiming of the innocent would make the policy intolerable for reasons of proportionality.

I’ve accused you of dodging the issue because if you do not have an answer to that question, then you can have absolutely no moral basis for endorsing the war. If you don’t even have a ballpark estimate of what a tolerable civilian body count is, then you have no idea whether or not the killing and maiming of innocents has gone beyond the limits of proportional self-defense. And if you don’t know that then you don’t know whether or not the war is legitimate self-defense or a massacre. If you treat the question as some higher mystery beyond your ken, then you have thereby admitted that you have no idea whatever whether justice demands that the IDF continue or that it relent.

If, however, you profess not to be able to answer the question, but then turn around and continue supporting the war, particularly with polysyllabic hand-waving at pacifying abstractions such as “collateral damage” and “appropriately disincentivizing,” then what I have to conclude is that you are quite satisfied with the level of killing, burning, bombing, and maiming being inflicted on innocents, but that you’d rather not say so because it would sound too brutal coming from your lips. If that’s not so, then you could refute my claims by actually coming out and giving us some idea of what you consider acceptable rather than setting the question aside unanswered and trying to describe what happens to men, women, and children when bombs are rained down on their neighborhoods, when their homes or farms are destroyed, when their flesh is burnt by fire or torn up by sharpnel or crushed by rubble, and when their lives are snuffed out or forever marked by permanent wounds, with words like “cost” and “disincentivize” and “collateral damage.” If you want to defend war, then there it is: defend it. And if you don’t like Orwell being quoted at you, then stop writing about real violence being inflicted daily against real people as if it were nothing more than some debit on an accountants’ ledger somewhere in the Ministry of War.

As for States and their boundaries: I am an anarchist, so I don’t give a damn about which side of the bloody line in the sand people are on. But even if I were not an anarchist, it would hardly change my position on this question. However many special obligations a State may have towards its subjects over and above the obligations it has towards the subjects of other States, it is no more entitled to go out and slaughter alien subjects than it is its own subjects. If you accept the legitimacy of the State then you might very well think that governments have more of a duty to rescue their own subjects than to rescue the subjects of other governments from a pre-existing danger; but that does precisely nothing to license going out and actively killing or maiming innocent subjects of other governments in the process of trying to rescue your own subjects from an unrelated menace.

Max,

Not everybody in those “building complexes” has any particular choice about who stays there. For example, how exactly are the scores of children who have been killed in the bombing and shelling of residential targets to blame for who is or is not quartered in their homes, or riding with them in their cars? What did families vacationing on a beach do to deserve getting shelled by the IDF? What attempts are the IDF making to limit the killing and maiming of unrelated third parties from bombing of houses in residential neighborhoods and rocketing of cars on civilian streets? The answer appears to be “more or less nothing,” given the massive scale of destruction to civilian infrastructure and the escalating body count in both Lebanon and Gaza. Not surprising, because aerial bombardment is not exactly a precise form of warfare and it is nearly impossible to carry it out in civilian areas without killing or maiming a lot of innocent people.

You mention, “Since, [terrorists] are not a formal group of war, which is distinguishable by uniform or location. They are difficult to attack.” But I find it hard to work up much sympathy for the IDF in spite of the difficulties the poor dears must be laboring under. If it is difficult to identify the guilty or difficult to attack them without snuffing out or ruining the lives of lots of innocent people, then you had bloody well be much more cautious about doing the attacking.

The current war on Lebanon, let us remember, started over the death or capture of some 10 Israeli soldiers in combat. Even if one stipulates to the claim that the Hizbollah attack on the soldiers was an act of aggression (something I’m willing to stipulate to, but others might not be), that does not give the IDF a blank check to use any level of retaliatory violence they please in order to try to stop future attacks. Not even the subsequent murder of about 10 Israeli civilians following the beginning of the onslaught does that. So far about 280 Lebanese people, most of them civilians, have now been killed in the bombardment and Israel shows no signs of letting up. It seems to me that on absolutely any plausible understanding of the principle of proportionality this is morally criminal, whether or not the cause for which the IDF is going to war is a just cause. Just causes neither justify nor excuse wholesale slaughter of unrelated third parties, whether they are killed as the result of direct targeting (terrorism) or whether they are killed as an expected and accepted side-effect of attacking some unrelated target (so-called “collateral damage”).

Incidentally, pointing to Dresden (or the terror bombing of World War II more broadly) won’t get you very far. I consider the firebombing of Dresden to have been an indefensible massacre and a war crime of the first order.

As for sympathy, well, it’s not about sympathy. While there are some people in Lebanon who celebrated Hizbollah’s attacks and some people in Gaza who celebrated Hamas’s attacks, there are also many who were disgusted by them, but people are being killed quite independently of what they thought. And no matter how unsympathetic I may be towards people who “celebrate” such attacks, merely celebrating an evil is not a hanging crime.

E. Simon: And yet, the use of Israel’s military will prevent Hizbullah from intentionally causing the loss of similarly incalculably valuable Israeli lives.

I’m aware that this is one of the professed aims of the attacks. However, you’ve merely dodged the question rather than answering it. Just how many of those “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent third parties in Lebanon is the IDF entitled to snuff out or ruin in the process of trying to to protect the “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent Israelis? What are acceptable ratios here in your view, and what would amount to disproportionate violence? Fewer civilians killed than were saved by the attack? One-for-one? Two or three Lebanese civilians killed for every Israeli civilian saved? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Or is any body count at all acceptable?

I should note that I’m asking you this, not because I’m naive about what modern warfare involves, but rather because I’m all too familiar with what it involves, and I happen to think that the nature of modern warfare makes concerns about proportionality of violence very important. Given the fact that some 235 people, most of them civilians, and including scores of children, have been killed in Lebanon so far in retaliation for the death or capture of ten soldiers, along with the murder of about ten civilians in various attacks over the course of the conflict, it seems particularly urgent in this conflict.

E. Simon: But Israel is not responsible for Lebanon’s failures in necessitating that most unfortunate decision.

No, but neither are unrelated third parties who happen to live in Lebanon responsible for Hizbollah’s crimes. Whatever causes the Israeli government may have for going to war, it is certainly not entitled to use any means necessary to achieve its war aims, and if there is no way to carry those objectives out without inflicting wildly disproportionate suffering on innocent third parties in the process, then its objectives had jolly well better be left unachieved.

E. Simon: There are costs, no doubt. But the costs of not thusly, and appropriately disincentivizing against murder are much riskier, given the total analysis.

Please. Do you think I give a fuck about “appropriately disincentivizing against murder”? The issue here is how many innocent people you can maim or kill in the process of protecting yourself or others against being maimed or killed by some unrelated menace. This is life and death that we are talking about, and passing it off as “costs” of diddling with incentive structures is frankly obscene.

George Orwell: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

(from Politics and the English Language)