Posts from November 2012

Comment on Opting Out of the State by Rad Geek

… do the first responders get to "opt out" of helping you? … (etc. etc., blurgle blargle)

Of course they do get to do that. Nobody is obliged to rescue me if I've never made a prior agreement with them.

Now was this actually intended as a good-faith question? Are you willing to take "No" as an answer? If I agree (as I do) that they obviously have every right to opt out of rescuing me, will you agree that I have every right to opt out of being taxed to fund them?

However, the entire discussion here is based on the really quite insane notion that agencies of government violence (e.g., the police, the military, and the fortification of U.S. national borders) are social services rendered to me. They are not. Government force is not a social service, let alone a service I have requested; it is antisocial coercion, a condition imposed on me, through the threat of overwhelming force if I should resist, without my consent, and quite against my will. You and I are not their customers, or their clients. We are their victims, and their milch-cows. You can decide for yourself whether that is what you personally like being; but speaking for myself, I would be immensely better off if I had never been subjected, and if my friends and loved ones had never been subjected, to coercion by government drug police, government highway police, government border police, and all the rest of the host of political control.

Lest you forget, "market anarchy" is what followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Today, we refer to it as the Dark Ages. . . .

Well, it sounds like you believe a lot of ridiculous nonsense about what "market anarchy" means. (Manorialism, of course, is the antithesis of both markets and anarchy, in the usual meanings of those terms.) Or else you believe a lot of ridiculous nonsense about what medieval Europe was like. Or, most likely, both.

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Comment on Martins on Gitmo Military Commissions: “The Will of Our People!” by Rad Geek

I don't know, I hesitate to spend too much time refighting the Spanish Revolution yet again, but I do think that experience may have shown that the Republic was not really altogether on the "side" of the Anarchists when it came down to it, and that the Anarchists' "siding" with them, and entrusting as much as they did to a strategic relationship with the Republicans and the Stalinists, may have been a mistake. I think CNT in particular assumed a lot more good faith than was actually there to work with.

Of course this isn't an argument for siding with Franco instead. It's an argument for not siding with any of the warring states when governments go to war with each other.

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Comment on So, What Are You Doing After the Victory Celebration? by Rad Geek

The quote is an excerpt from a transcript of a talk that Chomsky delivered, possibly at St. Michael's College, "around 1990." Chomsky is perfectly clear what he means by "the Nuremberg laws" — viz., the international law precedents on war crimes coming out of the Nuremberg and Tokyo international military tribunals. Here's a fuller selection: "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo. So first of all you've got to think back as to what people were hanged for at Nuremberg and Tokyo."

Of course, "Nuremberg laws" is often used in English to refer to the Nürnberger Gesetze of 1935, and "Nuremberg principles" or similar locutions are often used to refer to the legal precedents on war crimes and crimes against humanity. But while it's obviously important to distinguish one from the other, successfully distinguishing them is a matter of context and understanding, not a matter of linguistic fiat. It's not as if the phrase "Nuremberg laws" were the actual name of the German racial segregation bills, and which one somebody is referring to is probably something best determined by context, not by arbitrary fiat. And from context it is perfectly clear that Chomsky does know which of the two sets of legal acts he is referring to.

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Comment on Martins on Gitmo Military Commissions: “The Will of Our People!” by Rad Geek

"Because Marxist-Leninist and anarchist–no leftist, in general–revolutionaries are well known for giving out fair trials, right?"

Of course this is a tu quoque, not an argument.

Professed revolutionaries do all kinds of heinous shit when they have the guns pointed at their enemies. This is admittedly a serious problem with any form of social organization that depends heavily on violence and the exercise of armed might. Perhaps it's a serious problem for having revolutions; or perhaps it's a reason for acknowledging that even the most justifiable revolutions will often be accompanied by evil deeds, — deeds which deserve to be condemned as evil, whatever cause they may have been committed in the name of. In any case, it is certainly not a reason for accepting such deeds as justifiable, let alone accepting or signing off on the institutionalized violence of the national security state.

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