1. I think that if you want to help readers focus on the content column, that’s a noble goal, but as a couple of people have remarked, the fuzzed and greyed-out text in the far-right column actually hurts that rather than helping it. It’s actually intensely distracting, for the same reason that something moving in your peripheral vision is intensely distracting — it’s visible enough to attract attention but not visible enough to be processed and filtered out, so it keeps pulling your eyes over towards it in order to try and make out what it is. Solid black text would be far easier to visually filter.

2. My other recommendation, if you want to emphasize center-column content, is that you just get rid of all of the social media barf at the bottom of the post. In the new theme it is much more distracting than previously, because the theme as a whole has far less color and chrome, and so the things that stand out most brightly from the mostly-monochrome background (far brighter than the article text) are the highly-colored social networking service logos. This is jarring and makes it hard to read what’s above it. The widgets are in any case meaningless for people who don’t use these services; and not necessary for people who do use them (since people who use a social networking site will typically have it open already in another tab, and can copy and paste the URL over quickly enough. Cf. also http://informationarchitects.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/ …)

@Wesley: Data was already inducted in 2008. [1]

As for myself, I am boycotting this election, because I cannot in good conscience participate in a process that nominates johnny-come-latelies like WALL-E or Johnny 5 before even giving R. Daneel Olivaw a chance.

is going to be dropping by the Labadie Collection in a couple of weeks. If you have anything you need looked up there that I might be able to help you out with, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

had to explain the ins and outs of Rage Against the Machine’s internal band politics to someone the other day. I begin to feel old.

From a mostly OK article on indigenous land rights at Mises.com: “As the legendary libertarian writer Murray Rothbard explains …” “Legendary?” Seriously?

I mean, I guess if anyone who ever said anything right-on about anything you care about is “heroic,” calling your favorite writer the stuff of legend is the next logical step. But how do you even write this shit without falling over laughing? Like, “And his bowtie of garnet was forged and made by Telchar in the fires of Nogrod. And the Collectivists saw it, and the terrible light of his glance glinted in his spectacles. And he cried out the names of sages of the glorious natural rights tradition, and they fled in fear before his countenance.”

The usual line about RATM is that Zack de la Rocha’s the Anarchist and Tom Morello’s the Marxist. I don’t know how accurate either of those is. (Brad Wilk and tim K. are usually more or less ignored in the jawboning about RATM’s politics.)

But in fact most of their product tended to be something of a stew of urban-guerrilla and third-worldist revolutionism, which is mostly focused either on big-R Revolution, or on particular causes (like the EZLN, Mumia Abu-Jamal, American imperialism in Latin America, black nationalism, etc.), and which was pretty well calculated to appeal to those of us eating up a similar stew of intermingling, competing and conflicting views in the radical left and the global justice movement during the 1990s, especially just before and just after Seattle. (Evil Empire comes with a “book list” in its liner notes, and you’ll find Alexander Berkman, Abbie Hoffman, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn name-checked in it, right alongside Lenin, Marx, Fanon, Angela Davis et al. There’s … not too much stress here on a coherent political line, and a lot more stress on introducing a messy political-social scene. But that at least is almost certainly for the best, even if it led to some real shit being promoted; and in any case seems to have been the practical result of some pretty divergent views within the band.)

I expect Paul Ryan likes them because they cranked out some really amazing metal.

Depends on the Objectivists, of course. But certainly those who consider a nuclear massacre of the city of Tehran to be a necessary and proper response to the September 11 attacks definitely don’t have any claim on being a “tolerable” regime. At least, not if the people being asked to tolerate include everyone affected by the government, and not just those within its official borders.

This is a good point, and perhaps connected with the very long tradition of liberal thought on the state which has tended to see it as a “necessary evil,” justified only by, and to the extent that it improves on, the inconveniencies of the state of nature. If it turns out that it is not necessary to flourishing social order after all, then it is by that line of thought just an evil, and therefore not permissible.

“Clearly there is something quite good about first world countries and their governments.”

One reason may be that the effects of first-world governments have on people are not limited to the effects that they have on people within the borders of “their own” countries. In fact these effects often are dropped on third-world countries from high-altitude bombers or launched from offshore battleships.

In other cases, first-world governments sell or loan their effects to third-world governments (e.g. in Iraq and Iran, or in Egypt, or in Indonesia, etc.) so that they can do the massacreing themselves, on scales and by methods that they could not possibly have managed but for the assistance from governments that are skimming off a much larger supply of economic growth and high-tech development. This may in fact be one of the reasons worth noting when we ask why bombed-out countries have some of the problems they have with “economic growth, happiness, etc.” Of course there are many other reasons also worth noting, but it seems to me that the fact that the activities of “first-world governments” killed literally hundreds of millions of people over the course of the past century might be worth pausing over.

It may also be a reason for libertarians not to be “friendly” with the governments that do this, even if the people that they tax within their official borders happen to be enjoying a relatively high standard of living.

Kevin:

Well, that’s an interesting possibility, but if it’s one-time consent that’s enforced over yourself at a future time, even if within a fixed period, that seems like it comes under Roderick’s first horn (“an attempt to transfer inalienable rights, and so invalid”). Of course what you think of the nested inference within that horn depends on what you think about inalienability, and there are forms of “market anarchist strictures” that don’t depend on an inalienability claim.

I don’t want to spend too much more time on the definitional issue here, but (1) I am inclined to doubt that what you describe here counts as a state, all things considered (again because of the radical departures this involves from ordinary views about state sovereignty, territoriality, obligation, etc.); (2) I’m not as sure as you are that everyone looking at it would obviously call it a state (except in the sense that many people seem initially inclined to describe literally any form of institutionalized decision-making or social dispute-resolution a “state,” which is I think a confused intuition that anarchists already have to deal with in another form, and which people tend to give up under examination); but (3) it doesn’t matter much, because what you describe is objectionable for the same reason that states are objectionable.

I don’t think that any of this affects the central question of your post; while I reject the claim that states are permissible but not mandatory, my rejection of it depends on some strong ethical commitments that a lot of anarchists don’t necessarily share (e.g. to inalienable rights and to a conception of rights as side-constraints on worthwhile ends); and I agree that that’s an interesting location in conceptual space that ought to be better mapped out.

(Another thing I’d like to see mapped out here are some of the modalities. For example, almost all anarchists seem to be of the view that there is nothing that could possibly count as a state that exercises legitimate authority over individuals, under any condition. And this is in fact my view — call it “hard anarchism.” And all minarchists seem to be of the view not only that there is something that could count as exercising legitimate authority over individuals, but that there is in fact actually at least one state in the world which does so — call this “practical archism.” But that seems like a tendentious empirical claim, which has no necessary connection with the standards for legitimate authority that most minarchists propose; if meeting some set of standards would qualify a state as legitimate, that’s no guarantee that any actual state is going to meet them and so qualify. So it seems like there ought to be a third possible view left between hard anarchism and practical archism. You might be a “soft anarchist” — you might hold the view that it’s perfectly possible for there to be a state that exercises legitimate authority under the right conditions; but in fact there is actually no such state that does, so therefore, at least for the time being, there are no legitimate states in @, although there may be in other possible worlds, and there might be in the actual past or the future. A “soft anarchist” view presumably requires the claim that states are morally permissible. And it’s compatible with the claim that they are not mandatory. But it may even be compatible with the claim that they are mandatory — if failing to have a state is morally impermissible for some reason, but all the available states do something else which is morally impermissible for other reasons, etc. etc.)

In both cases, I agree that the lack of discussion seems to indicate that there is something puzzling going on. Although I guess not necessarily unpredictable or surprising. My best guess is that these parts of the conceptual map tend to go unexplored because at a fundamental level many or most people still tend to line up in debates about the State in ways that seem to be driven as much by rationalizing loyalty to, or rejection of, actually existing politically dominant authorities, as by an effort to defend a philosophical claim against all logically possible alternatives. Which I think is too bad, and has constrained the debate.