n8chz:

Also, assuming someone like me is the intended audience (not saying such a someone should be, but…) implying the existence of people whose market value is below minimum wage should be accompanied EVERY SINGLE TIME by the point that the baseline cost of living is artificially high. . . .

O.K. Didn't I specifically make that point? I think in the final sentence of the article I explicitly identified it as half of "the point I'm trying to stress."

Ideally you'll offer a demonstration that the latter problem is considerably larger in magnitude than the former. Otherwise you are effectively telling me that some people aren't earning their keep; are literally worthless, and I'll have no choice but to assign you as "right of center" in my mental filing cabinet.

O.K. But the view I explicitly stated and argued for in this article is that the dominant effect of the state on working people's income is not to prop it up but to drive it down from where they would be if workers were more free to organize and seek alternatives to capitalist wage-labor employment; I'm not sure how that gets you "effectively" to a claim that people are "not earning their keep." I also suggested that minimum wage laws are a dysfunctional, or actively counterproductive, means to "ameliorating" the effects of the dominant trend of state capitalist laws, and that the right way to deal with these kind of problems is not through liberal state labor regulation, but rather through militant workers' unions, the destruction of capitalist land monopolies, and worker ownership of the means of production. If that gets you to "right of center" in your mental filing cabinet then I think that may be a problem with the filing, not with me.

Broadly speaking, I have trouble seeing much of my article in this reply to it. It sounds like you're spending a lot of time riffing on something that might be suggested to you by the words "against the minimum wage" rather than responding to the argument I wrote.
My recent post December 17th is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

is packing up the last Market Anarchy and Anarchist Classics Series orders to go about before the Christmas holidays. Anarchy is coming to Omaha, Neb. and Floral Park, NY….

Hey there,

Sorry to hear you're having this problem. I'd be happy to try and help.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on my test servers (I've attempted editing active menus while FeedWordPress was running, and didn't see any disappearances or other problems with the menus.) Could you let me know a bit more about (1) which version of FWP you're using, (2) which version of WordPress you're using it with, (3) which menus you're having trouble with, and (4) the specific circumstances or tests that led you to conclude the problem is linked to FWP? This information should help me get a better grip on how to troubleshoot the problem.

Thanks,
-C

Hey there,

Sorry to hear you're having this problem. I'd be happy to try and help.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on my test servers (I've attempted editing active menus while FeedWordPress was running, and didn't see any disappearances or other problems with the menus.) Could you let me know a bit more about (1) which version of FWP you're using, (2) which version of WordPress you're using it with, (3) which menus you're having trouble with, and (4) the specific circumstances or tests that led you to conclude the problem is linked to FWP? This information should help me get a better grip on how to troubleshoot the problem.

Thanks,
-C

TracyW -

1. I haven’t spent a lot of time offering “good solutions for [your] hypothetical As and Bs” because I think that giving detailed legal advice to the characters in an underspecified thought-experiment is probably going to be missing the point without having a lot more knowledge of the interpersonal and social circumstances that you’ve constructed for them. It seems that you have some fairly specific circumstances in mind (rain, sunscreen, etc.) but I haven’t any real way of knowing from what you say how much these people are operating in good or bad faith, how willing they are to sacrifice their putative goals in order to try to “win” the conflict, etc.

If you just want some short answer or another then, briefly, the first case sounds like a case for a medical ethics board (although I can imagine other ways of dealing with it; but whatever means they adopt it seems like all the parties concerned have a pretty strong incentive to make the process as quick as possible); and the second case sounds like a case for entering into binding arbitration, either with a professional or with disinterested arbitrators chosen ad hoc. (Let me just assert that there is every reason to think that there will be medical ethics boards and disinterested arbitrators in any anarchic society that has medicine, and contracts.) Of course you might wonder how A and B could agree on an arbitrator if they can’t agree on the terms of the contract, But historically people have figured out ways to do this when government court’s weren’t available. In any case if people are making contracts in a social environment where there is no single entity that can be presumed to exercise a monopoly on final arbitration of contracts, then there will be both an incentive to write high-stakes contracts in such a way as to specify, ahead of time, the process for arbitration; and also a reason to develop some pretty strong customary conventions for finding arbitrators after the fact if it’s not spelled out in the contract.

2. You write: “A in my medical system will have died before there is resolution, and in the divorce situation A and B’s kids will have grown up and had kids of their own.”

Of course this kind of move is exactly why I hesitate to spend a lot of time on the detailed suggestions for A and B, and why I referred you to some of the existing literature. The existence of multiple overlapping institutions and processes for resolving disputes does not mean that disputants will want to, or will be able to, avail themselves of every possible venue for their conflict; and it doesn’t mean that the disinterested parties who participate in those processes will be willing to play along with them.

Now if we begin by assuming that in each of your cases A and B will be infinitely unwilling to let an adverse decision stand, no matter what the cost involved in prolonging the case; and also that people on boards, hearings, arbitration associations, private arbitrators, folkmoots, etc. will be infinitely willing to take on a nightmare dispute that has already been heard and reheard; and that third parties (e.g. the doctor in your first case) will also be infinitely unwilling to act on any decision until every logically possible venue has been exhausted, then I don’t doubt that there is no difficulty in proving that anarchy will be an absolute nightmare for cases like these. But if you start with that presumption there is no difficulty in proving that government legal systems will produce similarly nightmarish results. (People have been known to stonewall and to drag out legal proceedings under the existing legal system; sometimes courts let them get away with it, sometimes not.) Maybe you think there is some argument that shows that in anarchy sufficiently nightmarish people with intractable conflicts will be more able to prolong nightmarish legal situations than they are under a state legal system; or that third parties would be more willing to play along with them in prolonging it. But then you’d have to give the argument. (And you’d have to show why an argument that starts from such strong starting presumptions about the hypothetical people involved in the dispute would justify a general conclusion against anarchism, rather than a narrower conclusion to the effect that anarchy might mean that some fairly narrowly specified subset of the population will be at greater risk for getting themselves into intractable legal nightmares. I don’t know about that; but maybe. But if so, is it a defeater for the claim that anarchy would on the whole be desirable for other reasons? Why?)

In any case, this is largely a retread of the argument over “legal finality” that Roderick Long discusses at some length in his article “Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism.” Note especially the section in that paper on Platonic legal finality and realistic legal finality.

3. You write: “As for your comments about the lack of a need for a single, territorial authority, etc, that strikes me as an attempt to change the topic from the anarchist solutions to an attack on the current world, . . .”

If that’s how it strikes you that’s how it strikes you, but it seems to me that this is something you’ve brought to my comments more than something I put there. My point in mentioning those peculiar features of the State is that from the start of this particular sub-thread you repeatedly asked questions on the presumption that anarchism somehow contemplates a society in which there is no “assigning of property rights , in matters of dispute,” no social “process for deciding” matters of medical ethics, no social “process … for deciding on the ins-and-outs of unclear contracts,” or at least that the idea of anarchism poses some large and obvious conceptual problem to developing any answer to these questions. And my point is that it poses a large and obvious conceptual problem to developing an answer if you assert that, in order for these social functions to be exercised, there must be a single social entity with some or all of the peculiar features (territoriality, sovereignty, etc.) that I mentioned to do the exercising. But of course that assertion is precisely what anarchists deny. And you gave no argument at all for that assertion until your reply just now.

The reason for mentioning Stringham’s anthology and the rest of the literature on this is that in the absence of a concrete argument for why you think social processes for dispute resolution would necessitate a monopoly-state-like social “entity” to handle them, I could either try and guess what the background argument for this presupposition was supposed to be; or I could point you to the people who have already written on several different arguments in the neighborhood that you might have had in mind. Unless you have something in the hole that is very novel compared to the cards you’ve shown so far, what you’ve been asking are very basic questions about anarchist theory that have been extensively dealt with elsewhere, in forums that are probably more conducive to explaining the ins and outs of how it works than is a Disqus comment thread, which I’ve already wildly overburdened just with this response.

TracyW – Well, I could rehash about 712pp or so on this, but, as briefly as possible let me just say that the answer to your question is probably going to have something to do with overlapping, competing and polycentric outlets for public hearings, dispute settlements, and binding arbitration provided through consensual civil society. (This may for example include medical ethics boards, ad hoc community meetings, private arbitration associations, and a bunch of other folks.)

There’s a lot of work in the literature, and a lot of lively arguments, about what the details are likely to look like. And I guess we can talk about that if you’re interested but the main thing to keep in mind with the kind of questions you’re asking here is that the need for some social processes to deal with all these kinds of problems does not even remotely prove that there must be one single social process which addresses them all, nor does it mean that there must be one single social entity with a permanent institutional identity, professionalized administrators, a territorial monopoly, and vertically-integrated jurisdiction to do the processing.

Anarchists do not propose a society where there’s no way of settling hard disputes or arbitrating the terms of agreements. What we propose is that a bunch of other people, not just those in positions of political power, be freed to take on the task of doing these things. That is, it’s not the end of dispute-resolution or arbitration, but the liberation of these social functions from the institutional control of a single, territorially-exclusive political entity (the state). The point is to allow them to be taken up by other associations, institutions, customary conventions, contractual arrangements, non-institutionalized social processes, etc. that don’t necessarily claim the territorial monopoly, the expansive authority, the coercive sanctions, or the unaccountable legal sovereignty, claimed by the modern state legal system.

(Maybe you have an argument for why the permanence, the professionalization, the territoriality, the hierarchy of exclusive jurisdictions, or the monopoly control, is necessary to do this sort of thing in the right way — that is, for why anarchic social processes couldn’t manage it without becoming more or less archic in the process. But if so you’d have to give that argument.)

Hi there,

Well, if you are using FeedWordPress, here is a quick way to do what it sounds like you are looking to do.

First, you'll need to add some code to the functions.php file in your theme. Are you able to do this? (If not, let me know and I can offer some alternative options.)

In your functions.php, add the following code. Replace your own preferred values for the items in ALL CAPS.


add_filter('syndicated_item_author', 'my_syndicated_post_author', 20, 2);
function my_syndicated_post_author ($author, $post) {
$author = array(
'name' => 'JOE DOKES',
'email' => 'JOE@DOKES.COM',
'url' => 'HTTP://JOEDOKES.COM/',
);
return $author;
}


If you want to make sure that this is correctly matched to an existing user in your system, the best thing to match up would be the email address in 'email'.

Note that doing this will make it so that incoming posts are stripped of any information about who authored them on the original source. This may not be a problem, if this information is already included in the content of those posts, or if it will be obvious from contextual factors who wrote it. But you may want to filter the content of posts so that some information about the author will be preserved in the post content even if it is not recorded in the wp_users table. To do this, you can add something like the following to your functions.php file, right around where you added the above author filter. (Feel free to change out the HTML in the single quotes to whatever message you want.)


add_filter('syndicated_item_content', 'my_syndicated_post_byline', 20, 2);
function my_syndicated_post_byline ($content, $post) {
$a = $post->author();
$content = sprintf('<p class="byline">By %s.</p>', $a['name']) . $content;
return $content;
}


Let me know if this helps fix your problem.

Hi there,

I'm sorry that you ran into this issue. You might want to take a look at the most recent release (FeedWordPress v. 2012.1212 at the time I'm posting this comment) to see if it fixes the issue you were encountering -- it has been successfully tested against WordPress 3.5. If it fixes the compatibility issue you were having, great; if not, let me know a bit more about the problem that you're seeing and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

Thanks,
-C

Thanks for reporting this. I'm sorry to hear you're running into this problem.

The warning message you provided makes it clear that there is a problem with one of the plugins running on your site but unfortunately it's hard to tell if the problem is coming from FeedWordPress or if it is coming from another plugin. (And if it is coming from FWP, where it might be coming from.) Could you let me know if you are running any other plugins on your system in addition to FeedWordPress, and if so what they are? That might help me figure out a bit better what's going on.

Thanks,
-C