... My suspicion -- completely unresearched at this point, so salt it to taste -- is that people tend to multiply negatives in spontaneous speech, even when

... It's low for the tiny handful of doddering incumbents who have held onto their rent-controlled apartment since 1957. It's extremely high for everyone else,

... "Bowling for Columbine" is a rather weird movie, in part because September 11th happened in the middle of producing it, and as a result (as Moore has said

... The person the quote is most commonly attributed to (as "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of

‎@Anok: “if you read what he wrote you would understand that he uses the word “crime” for immoral behavior”

Well, no he doesn’t, not that I can see. If you see a place where he does make this identification, feel free to point it out, but he…re is what I found him saying about criminality and morality:

(1) “If there are, then you merely disagree with my particular view of what is criminal and what isn’t. You say it’s a crime to abuse someone, I say not. … Now the reasoning on my part is quite clear: there’s no physical violence involved. Crime allows for force to be used. I think the abuse is a bad thing, but cannot be countered with force.” (2) “I do not like the word morality, because it is very tainted with prejudice from older times, and also, it spreads the idea that there’s a way that people have to think. I only try to think about what people can and cannot do.” (3) “Actually, to me, as abuse is not a crime, any use of force is necessary disproportional and unjustified. I think social pressure is more adapted to this scenario.”

(1) states the view that an act is criminal only if “physical violence [is] involved,” and further that there are some bad things — in particular, abuse is “a bad thing” — which are not criminal (thus, not answerable with force). (2) states the view that he’d rather not use “morality” as the term to describe what people can and cannot do. (3) restates the view that abuse, though bad (hence, answerable with “social pressure”) is not criminal (hence, not answerable with physical force), and further that to use force against someone who is not guilty of a crime is “unjustified.

As far as I can tell, this pretty clearly suggests that he is using the term “crime” to describe a SUBSET of “bad things.” (I’d be happy say immoral actions, but I don’t agree with Marcel about (2), so.) He says, or at least strongly sugges…ts, above that all crimes are wrong (immoral, if you please), but not that everything wrong (or immoral) is a crime. But the conditional “If abuse is not a crime, then it is not an immoral behavior” would only be true if you made a claim he hasn’t made — and in fact has specifically rejected (that all immoral actions are crimes).

‎@Anok: “He further states that self defense against abuse is wrong because abuse is not a ‘crime’.”

Sure; the claim is that you shouldn’t use force against people unless they are guilty of crimes. I don’t think that’s a particularly nutty v…iew. I happen to think that he’s right about that. (I don’t know if I would agree with his reasons for it; my reason, anyway, is that I’m against all forms of hierarchy and domination. And I consider controlling people through aggressive violence to be both hierarchical and dominating. Even if those people really are terrible assholes.)

@Anok: “And regardless of how he uses the word abuse is considered both a legal crime and a moral crime by the majority of non nutter societies.”

Well, I don’t much care what the majority of societies, nutter or non-nutter, think about it. Do you? If I were basing my moral convictions on opinion polls as to what the majority of societies think, I certainly wouldn’t be an Anarchist.

@Anok: ‘Eh, anyone who uses “crime”, which is a social contract regarding law in place of the word “morality” which is a pretty universal term that applies to human behavior …”

You seem to have some pretty strong views about the meaning of the word “crime,” even though Marcel (among others) is clearly using the word in a way different from the way that you are using it. One way to deal with a situation like that is to say something like, “O.K., well, the important thing here isn’t spelling; it’s clear communication. So let’s distinguish some terms for the sake of communication — ‘moral crime,’ say, to mean what you mean, and ‘legal crime’ to mean what I mean.” Or, I guess, you could just assert that “crime” means what you’re using it to mean, and insist that the way other folks are using it is wrong, and the way you’re using it is right — which is what you seem to be doing here. But if the latter, where are you getting your intuitions about what the term “crime” obviously means? From dictionaries? From common usage? (But, in case of the latter, the fact that a lot of people use it in a different way makes it clear that the common usage is ambiguous…) Somewhere else?

@Anok: “You support abuse.”

I don’t think that’s a reasonable reading of what Marcel said at all.

He didn’t say that abuse is basically O.K.; he said it is a bad thing, but not criminal. Saying that it’s not CRIMINAL is not the same thing as saying that it’s not WRONG — there are lots of things that are vices, but not crimes. (For example, winning chess matches by cheating when your opponent’s back is turned; talking during movies at the theater; plagiarizing a college paper; cheating on your partner; refusing to visit a dying friend for no good reason; etc.) The claim isn’t that these things are O.K., or that they aren’t seriously wrong. Some vices are minor — talking at the movies, say. But some crimes — stealing a grape, say, or maliciously stomping on someone’s foot — are minor too. And some vices — dishonesty, cruelty, faithlessness, etc. — are grave. Cruelty or dishonesty are far more serious wrongs than some things that are crimes, but they are wrong in different ways, and for different reasons, from the crimes. And that that difference may make a difference for the appropriate response.

Twisty / Jill of “I Blame the Patriarchy” (a radical feminist who also suffered from breast cancer a few years back) has something of a regular series on the Breast Cancer Awareness/exploitation industry, and on the worthlessness of the Komen Foundation in particular. (Crunch for the Cure, It’s Gratuitous Erotica Month! etc.)

Of course, the notion that criticizing Breast Cancer Awarifying campaigns or the entrenched corporate interests behind them (and Komen is nothing if not a well-run corporation) is “migoynist” is a straightforward result of treating breast cancer awareness as a metonymy for women’s health. Just as governments have succeeded in branding themselves so that anyone opposing the dunderheaded belligerence or parasitism or international mass-murder of, say, the United States government is therefore taken to be “anti-American” (as if the U.S. government were America, rather than a tiny, parasitic minority oppressing and robbing from the country and people of America), so also Komen and the rest of the Pink-Ribbon brigade have managed to brand themselves successfully as being simply identical with women’s health (hey, it’s got lady-parts, and unlike other women-specific health issues — like women’s reproductive healthcare — nobody will get boycotted or firebombed for associating themselves with it), so that only someone who is against women’s healthcare, or indeed against women as such, could think to criticize them or to suggest that there are other, more productive outlets for people’s resources (including the resources of those who would like to do something about pressing women’s health issues) than that particular patriarchally-correct donation-hole.

@Alex Peak: “The problem with the whole it’s-okay-to-initiate-force-against-nonviolent-assholes idea is problematic because of the slippery slope.”

I suppose that there is a slope, and maybe the slope is slippery, but is that really what you see as the problem with the judgment that “it’s Ok to use violence against people who are being major assholes”? I mean, when I read something like that, my main problem with it is that it’s a despicable sentiment, which praises thuggishness and the use of violence with the explicit purpose of domination and control. It may also have downstream consequences on other people’s behaviors in different situations which also suck, but even if it does not have those downstream consequences, it’s still a pretty sucky attempt when it comes to being a human being.

@Alex Peak: “None of this ought to be taken as a rejection of what Charles Johnson calls thick libertarianism. My understanding of (certain approaches to) thick libertarianism is that it is the view that liberty would be most easily achieved or maintained if society also adopted certain norms—e.g., rejecting racism, sexism, and homophobia—but that an embrace of these norms needs not, and ought not, be coupled with a rejection of the nonaggression axiom.”

Thanks for the nod; you’re certainly right that the thick conceptions of libertarianism that I would defend are not conceptions where the idea is to provide loopholes for justified aggressive force or fraud, or where the “thickness” erases the content of the “libertarianism” in select cases. The idea is that there are forms of oppression, abuse, social evils, etc. which are acted out by means other than physical force or fraud, and it’s important to recognize these where they exist. Not so that you can respond to them with aggression, but rather so that non-aggressive forms of oppression or abuse can be met with serious, confrontational, nonviolent resistance.

@Alex Peak: “And libertarianism, very simply, is the belief that people should be free from aggression”

@Alex Gleason: “Apparently you have cast Egoists out of the libertarian movement, Mr. Peak.”

I’m not sure how. There is nothing in most versions of philosophical egoism which require the egoist to be in favor of aggression (as Alex defines it). Indeed, egoists have generally been against that, and thought that people should be free from it; although they suggest that it’s instrumentally or strategically valuable, rather than being valuable for its own sake. That’s rather the point of Stirner’s Union of Egoists — the claim that there are egoistic reasons for free selves to abandon aggression in favor of mutual alliance.

@Jacob Vardy: “are you familiar with the Spanish term ‘acracia?'”

There is a cognate term in English-language philosophical writing, usually spelled “akrasia.” Unfortunately it already has another, mostly unrelated meaning It got picked up because the Greek moral philosophers wrote about the problem of ἀκρασία, which used to be translated “incontinence” but now is more commonly just transliterated to “akrasia.” The Greeks (and hence now English-speaking philosophers commenting on the problem) used it to refer to the predicament of people who believed in a moral principle but didn’t live up to it — who acted contrary to it. Thus Socrates seems to have argued that akrasia was impossible (if you acted contrary to the principle, he held that you must not really have believed in it in the end); Aristotle thought that it was possible but had something nuanced to say about the best way to describe the predicament; etc. Anyway, that usage also came about because of the literal meaning of “without command”; but the English-language use is meant torefer to a lack of control over yourself (the Greeks’ idea being that akratics were enslaved by their own passions or appetites), rather than a lack of control over others.

@Drew: “How about this – the state is antithetical …to individual liberty”

Isn’t that what a libertarian (at least, the kind of libertarian who would refer to the State as a criminal gang) usually means by the statement that the State is criminal?

@Anok Kropotkin: “Oh, and ‘crime’ is a general term used to define what governing bodies consider undesirable behavior.”

I don’t think that’s the only meaning of the word “crime.”

Certainly, sometimes people use “crime” just to mean “whatever the government has forbidden.” But when someone describes, say, Donald Rumsfeld as a “war criminal,” or when someone describes the Holocaust or other examples of state mass-murder as “crimes against humanity,” that they mean to claim that Pinochet or the Nazis or whoever were somehow doing something illegal. What they did was perfectly legal, according to government law, and authorized by the governing bodies (since these criminals were in charge of the governing bodies). So to describe it as “criminal” must mean something other than simply disapproval from governing bodies.

What makes you think that the Kochs have “a bizarre anti-Ludwig von Mises bias.” They’ve funded Misesian economic research (especially at GMU) for decades. It’s certainly true that they have a very bitter conflict with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But not because of some mysterious beef they have with Ludwig von Mises (who was by then several years dead).

Rather, what happened is that, the year before the VMI was founded, the Kochs and Ed Crane had an extremely bitter conflict with Rothbard, who until then had been a founding member of the Cato Institute, and the main person writing their position papers. Rothbard was fired from Cato in 1981. Rothbard certainly did not “leave” Cato in order to “stick with Lew”; he was thrown out of Cato against his will (he maintained illegally — he had “shares” in Cato that the Kochs simply confiscated — but decided not to fight it in court), and Lew set up the VMI in 1982, after Rothbard was gone from Cato, largely in order to provide a new harbor for Murray and his ideas. The Kochs got pissed off about it because they were pissed off at Rothbard, and because the Institute was founded as a direct challenge to Cato’s approach to libertarian advocacy. Not, particularly, because the Institute was named after Ludwig von Mises.

You can read all about the whole sorry story in Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (Chapter 7-8), or (for Rothbard’s side of the story specifically), in Rothbard’s “It Usually Ends With Ed Crane.”

Crispy: “the very fact that a group would have ‘diffuse, locally based structures’ is extremely troubling to the naacp. i suppose now they will be attacking … the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for being too local and diffuse.”

Well, hell, why not? That basically was their criticism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s back during the 1960s — when the NAACP was constantly ragging on sit-in groups and then SNCC for not having “structure” (meaning unitary centralized chain of command) and for being too locally-driven, which supposedly led to adventurism and getting local movements into all kinds of messes that NAACP chapters and the Legal Defense Fund would then have to clean up after. (Hence, e.g., the recriminations over the fizzle-out in Albany, efforts to shut SNCC reps out of civil rights “unified leadership” summits and fundraising events, etc.) To abandon this proud tradition of pissing and moaning about diffuse, locally based movements, and those factions of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that actually got some shit done here and there, would mean abandoning all kinds of time-honored NAACP traditions. (Of course I refer here to the NAACP central command. NAACP local chapters did all kinds of courageous work alongside the direct-action movement, and generally didn’t waste time wagging fingers at SNCC’s lack of “structure.”)