Brian,

But the ban is an invasion of religious liberty, and one which was pushed by western politicians deliberately targeting Muslims, n’est-ce pas?

Jenn,

Interesting post, and interesting point. I was struck, though, by this phrase: “Ultimately, I think what researchers need to do is not fall into the trap of removing the science from the presentation and to remember that our goal is not to schmooze but to act as ambassadors from the scientific community to the public.”

Maybe the self-conception of popular science lecturers as “ambassadors” to an alien and benighted people is a central part of the problem. Scientists don’t think of themselves as “ambassadors” to their colleagues when giving a presentation or as “ambassadors” to their students when giving a lecture (even though in the case of the students they are working over material for people who are presumed to be more ignorant of the discipline than they are). The notion puts a lot of distance between the scientist and the “general public” and I wonder how much that distance plays a role in the temptation to present yourself as an oracle of Scientific Knowledge, rather than as someone explaining the research and methods behind the interesting conclusions you’ve been able to draw from them. Maybe scientists need to think of themselves less as ambassadors to the public, and think of what they’re doing as different only in degree from what they do when they discuss research with their colleagues or their students.

Wild Pegasus: “#3 is going to cause problems with federal highways. It’s going to increase prices on a lot of basic goods.”

Since #3 entails the elimination of federal and state gas taxes, you need to balance whatever effects you think the tolls will have with the effects of correspondingly lower prices at the pump. In any case, though, “raising prices on basic goods” isn’t an argument against ending subsidies. If you can’t make the basic case that subsidies are economically destructive then no platform that’s libertarian at all is going to work well for you.

Wild Pegasus: “#5 is a sure-fire loser. People will rightly claim that the loss of patents and drug protections will lead to less research and slower advancement in healthcare. People want free healthcare, not bad healthcare.”

Then you point out that #5 will decimate drug prices (which is rather a hot issue these days), and you contest the idiot notion that gigantic pharmaceutial companies are the only or even the best way to do drug research.

Wild Pegasus: “#7 will lead to screams for tort reform. Juries are, generally, grossly incompetent at complex litigation. Finding norms will be difficult without the guidance of legislatures. And you’re right back to regulation.”

I don’t understand this argument. Are you claiming that legislatures or appointed bureaucrats are better at fairly settling complicated cases than juries? Using ex ante regulation rather than case-by-case judgment, no less? Or are you just claiming that people blame juries while not holding regulators to the same standards?

If it’s the former, why are you claiming that? If it’s the latter, why isn’t the solution to educate people about the failings of bureaucrats and legislators?

Kevin,

How about something on the prison-industrial complex? Or, for that matter, the good old military-industrial complex?

Also, broadly speaking, do you think that the sort of alliance you envision should only focus on undermining state capitalism, or do you think that you’re just fleshing out the point on state capitalism that would be part of a broader set of principles for action? After all, I can think of a number of other common points (abortion on demand, abolishing the death penalty, decriminalizing prostitution, a principled anti-war/anti-imperial stance, etc.) that would seem like obvious candidates for a shared platform between left Libertarians, anti-statist Greens, and anti-statist Democrats.

“If the US had not run off to the Iraq quagmire, and had stayed the course in Afghanistan and properly rebuilt it, we could have completely uprooted al-Qaeda and the Taliban, put an end to the poppy trade, and created an economic efflorescence that linked major Asian powers in the kind of trade networks that discourage war and instability.”

Why is forcing Afghan farmers not to grow opium poppies a necessary or even worthwhile policy goal for the occupying forces to pursue?

Is there some kind of requirement that all countries everywhere have to go along with the drug regulation policies popular in Washington, D.C.? Even if it involves arresting farmers and destroying their most lucrative cash crop?

LoneSnark,

I’m not defending Mugabe’s policies. I’m saying that the white planters — who are overwhelmingly either robbers, the heirs of robbers, or people who knowingly bought land from robbers — aren’t in any moral position to complain about it.

LoneSnark: “Because the statute of limitations on grand theft has expired. Or, if you prefer, because the quick-deed duration of five years has expired without contestation.”

What statute of limitations? What duration? Are these elements of positive law that the otherwise rightful owners of Zimbabwean land agreed to abide by, or are they numbers that you’ve made up for them? If the previous rightful owners can be identified then they have as good a right now as they did then unless they’ve agreed to quitclaim their interest in it. If they cannot, then that only makes the farmland unowned land available for homesteading. It does not make it the respectable personal fief of the robber.

LoneSnark: “Either-way, to make a system of land management work you have to have a way of proclaiming ownership.”

Here’s one: the land to the people who till it.

Feudal land-claims granted by the Rhodesian government do not confer any legitimate ownership, so the land either rightly belongs to the people who owned it before it was stolen (if they can be identified) or to the people who have homesteaded it by cultivating it with their labor. On large plantations with many farmworkers, that means that the greater part of the land rightly belongs to the farmworkers, not to the planter. The planter has at the most a claim to the share of the land that he personally occupies or has cultivated.

Dain: Rad, I agree with the French head scarf ban comment, but in the Sudan isn’t the aggresion going in the direction of Christians and ‘animists’?

You’re probably thinking of Khartoum’s war on southern Sudan, which was supposedly settled by a brokered peace treaty in January 2005 (after two years of negotiations). How stable that is remains to be seen, but the human rights catastrophe that currently has Sudan in the news is the ongoing genocide against farming peoples in Darfur, in western Sudan. The victims (as well as the perpetrators) in Darfur are overwhelmingly Muslim; the conflict is divided along ethnic and socioeconomic lines rather than religious or geographical ones as it was before.

I think bin Laden’s claims that this is all the result of divide-and-conquer politics by the “Crusader-Zionist” axis are silly. The imperialists in Khartoum and their hired killers in Darfur have plenty of their own reasons and interests at stake in slaughtering Muslim farmers. But setting the debate over the explanation to one side, it is empirically true that the victims in Sudan are, indeed, Muslims, and that bin Laden is correct to claim that the genocide involves professed Muslims slaughtering fellow Muslims.

“He sees France’s banning of headscarves in school as part of the Western war on Islam.”

Well, isn’t it?

“He sees Muslims as victims in Sudan.”

Well, aren’t they?

Kennedy: We each are entitled to recover money from you. But if Hoppe takes $2500 from you do I have any more legitimate a claim against him than against the casino?

I don’t know. Sometimes people who accept stolen goods certainly are obligated to return them to the owners. Sometimes they aren’t. The question is which category this case falls under. Does Hoppe know where the money comes from? And what’s he accepting the money for? It seems like both of these may be relevant to whether or not the act of accepting it makes him an accessory to the theft or not.

Stefan: Who then has a ‘right’ to any of the remaining 3 clocks? Why shouldn’t it be first-come first-serve?”

I think it should unless the claimaints make some kind of contractual agreement with each other to the contrary, and I mentioned this above. My question for Kennedy is whether, in each given case, anybody at all can lay claim on a first-come first-serve basis, or whether the class of people who can lay claim on a first-come first-serve basis is limited to the people from whom the loot was taken in the first place.

Mugabe and the regime he commands are appalling. But what makes you think that the white farmers in Zimbabwe have any legitimate claim to the land they’re sitting on? Because the colonial government of Rhodesia stole it, fair and square?

Richard,

If I accept your claims of non-supervenience, it’s unclear to me that this demonstrates anything remarkable about natural laws. It would demonstrate nothing, in particular, about whether natural laws apply necessarily or only contingently to the stuff our world is in fact made of (lead, gold, atoms, quarks, matter, whatever). At the strongest it would demonstrate that there are possible worlds made of alien stuff that behaves according to correspondingly alien laws. But it tells us nothing about the modal status of “Lead does not transmute into gold just by being put into such-and-such a shape.” Since pretty much all of our natural laws are already expressed using natural kind terms, it’d be hard for world-descriptions that systematically exclude them to tell us anything about the natural laws.

Second, why should we accept that a “purely non-dispositional account of the world” is even possible? What sort of purely non-dispositional properties do you have in mind? As an exercise, just try describing what qualities water and XYZ have in common with each other, without mentioning any dispositional properties at all. (Transparency, tastelessness, odorlessness, wetness, etc. are all qualities typically mentioned here, but none of them will do for your purposes: they all involve dispositions. Water, for example, is odorless whether you’re actually sniffing it or not, and XYZ would still be transparent even when it’s dark.)