Dear The Nation magazine: Just received your e-mail of 5/24, asking “Why Is Obama Funding A Murderous Regime?” Seriously?

I am glad that you have discovered U.S. foreign aid to the Honduran government, and that you have realized that this is a problem. But I have no idea why you act so surprised. Mr. Obama’s administration has killed thousands of people every year in by perpetuating wars, escalating wars, and starting new wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc. And the Obama administration’s military and police aid policies in Honduras are in no significant respect different from U.S. military and monetary support to generation after generation of repressive regimes in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, etc. etc. etc. by literally every President of the U.S.A. for more than 100 years now. Does it really take much wondering to figure out why the primary alliances of one murderous regime, are to other murderous regimes?

Sincerely, Charles W. Johnson

is scanning the second year of The Liberator (1832) this afternoon.

It is a photograph of George Monbiot, but for a few years it was being widely circulated on the Internet misidentified as a photograph of Kevin Carson. (For example here.) Probably because of a Google Image search mishap, related to one of Kevin’s frequent responses to Monbiot’s columns. (For example here and in about a half-dozen other posts.) Given the other folks listed as post-WWII anarchists (the person making the poster includes left-wing market anarchists as well as anarcho-capitalists, but no other lefties), and given that Monbiot certainly hasn’t ever claimed to be an anarchist, my guess is that the makers of the poster probably intended it as a portrait of Carson, not of Monbiot.

Well, “gotcha!” I guess, but surely it matters that religions (at least, the kinds of religion that Hanson was asking about to begin with) purport to be true, while novels, movies, et cetera do not. People who tried to answer the prior question about religious belief in good faith pretty generally were aware that people who are religious believe in religions in specific ways that people who enjoy fiction definitely don’t “believe in” the stories they enjoy, and that religious commitment directly involves making assertions about the world that enjoyment of a story obviously does not. (Suppose that Hanson had asked, not about whether people ought to give up being religious, but whether people ought to give up reading Bible stories as literature, or Paradise Lost, or The Almighty Thor; I’ll bet that the answers would have been rather different.)

It may be that reading stories has, as a side-effect, an increased probability of believing something else which is false, even though it doesn’t involve any belief in the fiction itself. (People who read a lot of novels may be more inclined to believe in something false even though they don’t believe in the truth of the novels they read — say that life is going to tend to work out more like a novel than it really tends to.) If so, that’s sad. But saying that people who care about truth should never believe things they have no reason to believe is a rather different claim from saying that people who care about truth should never do things that could possibly expose them to an increased risk of error in other, not logically related beliefs. (Drinking whiskey will no doubt do that too, but if the argument had gone from abandoning religion to teatotaling this would quite rightly be seen as a really gross sort of bait-and-switch.)

They’re all bolsheviks.

They aren’t even all communists, bro. (*)

They wouldn’t recognize anarcho-capitalism as real anarchism, …

I’m inclined to doubt this is true… (**)

so why should he care to recognize them as real anarchists?

… but even if it is, two bad arguments don’t make a good one.

Anyway, if J.J. wants to invest his time and energy in endless sectarian squabbling about who ought to count as a Troo Anarchist and who ought to be excluded, he should feel free to squabble as much as he wants. But to be able to even realize that there is squabbling to be done, he will first have to do some minimal work at making himself less than ignorant about the field he is squabbling over, and that requires doing something to make himself less than ignorant about the existence of folks like Kropotkin or Goldman. Otherwise, he will have no idea what he is talking about. And if he has no idea what he is talking about, then why talk about it?

(* Bakunin was specifically not a communist.)

(** You seem to think that Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, and Goldman obviously had the same sort of sectarian attitude towards “the Anarchist tradition” that, say, AFAQ does. But I don’t think that this is obvious at all. Indeed based on the explicit definitions of “Anarchism” they gave in their journals, the way that they wrote about folks like Spencer, etc., I’m pretty confident that it is false. The fact that somebody like Iain McKay makes this sort of argument now hardly means that they had any interest in making it at the time. They would of course have thought that anarcho-capitalists are wrong on important points — since they were not anarcho-capitalists. But disagreement is a different issue from excommunication.)

As a supporter only of normal [sic], heterosexual marriage, I am not bound by
what some people said historically that was overly legalistic or silly.

As you please. But I think that Roderick made his point fairly clear. If you want to defend only monogamous heterosexual marriages between legal equals, then you can't with full knowledge and good faith defend that on the basis of an appeal to what was historically or traditionally "normal" for marriage. (Because in fact marriages between legal equals represent a massive change from what was historically the "normal" form of marriage.) Now if you do not want to be bound by what people have said historically about marriage, then of course you have every right not to be bound by that. But you can't then expect gay marriage advocates to be bound by that, either. If you have conceptual room to introduce the radical conceptual innovation of marriage between legal and social equals, then gay marriage advocates must also have room to introduce the radical conceptual innovation of marriage between members of the same sex. There may be other arguments you have for limiting marriage to straight couples, which dispense with, and go beyond bare-assed appeals to historical normality or tradition. But if so, you will have to make those arguments. Because the bare-assed appeal to historical normality or tradition isn't going to support the position you say you want to support.

Me: Incidentally, I like the part where JJ gets pissed about you being included in the collage, ‘coz you’re a left-libertarian, but apparently doesn’t notice or has no objection to the portraits of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta right at the top of the poster, or Emma Goldman right in the middle of it.

John James: You’re right…I’ve never even heard of those people.

O.K. So when you try to weigh in on who should or should not be on a poster about “ANARCHISTS,” if you have never even heard the names of Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, or Emma Goldman (who are all quite famous; Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Goldman are probably three of the four most famous Anarchists in the history of the world), then let me try to suggest, as gently as possible, that you are talking outside of your area of expertise. And you probably ought to take some time to educate yourself a bit more about the history and the full range of Anarchist ideas before you weigh in on who ought, or ought not, to be on that poster.

**racistkramer:** From your comments it looks like you are an anarcho-capitalist. Is that correct? If so, why are you using the communist tendency icon? It defeats the purpose of the icons if you choose one which is misleading. Anyway, you state: > Indentured Slavery? It is only analogous to slavery if at any given time they change their mind and want to leave and their master does not let them ... This is what actually happened with indentures in, for example, the Americas. Servants often tried to leave, for various reasons, but governments generally held that masters had the legal power to hunt them down and force them back into servitude, as well as to beat or whip them as physical punishment. It was common throughout the 18th century for newspapers to run Wanted notices for "runaway" indentured servants, much like the ads that they ran for masters trying to recapture fugitive slaves. (You can read some examples here: <http://www.questia.com/library/book/eighteenth-century-white-slaves-fugitive-notices-vol-1-by-daniel-meaders.jsp>.) So, yes, in that respect the condition was directly analogous to slavery. (And was treated as such by the law.) **xsdc:** the answer to your question depends on the anarcho-capitalist's view of inalienability. Anarcho-capitalists who believe that self-ownership is inalienable (like Rothbard, say) would say that the servant has a right to leave at any time, including before the end of the term of the indenture, and also including if they still owe money on the debt. The employer holding the indenture may demand compensation for the part of the loan that hasn't been paid off; but if the debtor hasn't the means to pay there's nothing that the employer can really do about it except complain. Anarcho-capitalists who reject inalienability (like Walter Block) generally think that if the contract was initially voluntary then the employer can use force in order to make the indentured servant keep on working until the end of the indenture. For whatever it's worth the inalienabilists like Rothbard seem to be a pretty clear numerical majority of anarcho-capitalists, rather than the alienabilists like Block. Which view is more consistent or a truer interpretation of anarcho-capitalist ideas, I don't know; I guess someone who cares about the prospects for anarcho-capitalism would have to answer that one. But in any case the Rothbardian position is directly opposed to the way that indentured servitude was historically practiced and legally enforced.

Sure, no problem, and thanks. Certainly there's a lot to disagree with in the section (since at a minimum everybody in it disagrees with each other) and hopefully some things worth thinking through and chewing on. I'll look forward to hearing what you think.

John James: That being said, I actually still don’t know what exactly a “left-libartarian” is, so maybe it is somehow a synonym for anarchist…but I doubt it.

Evilsceptic: Dude… Roderick Long is the most anarchisty anarchist that has ever anarchisted!

John James: Then why does he take the “left-libertarian” position in a debate that I can’t seem to find right now?

O.K., this is already the funniest thing that I will read all day.

Incidentally, I like the part where JJ gets pissed about you being included in the collage, ‘coz you’re a left-libertarian, but apparently doesn’t notice or has no objection to the portraits of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta right at the top of the poster, or Emma Goldman right in the middle of it.