1. “You don’t HAVE an argument”, “There is nothing even remotely resembling an argument in what you have said,” etc. is useless bluster. I clearly do have an argument; that is, I gave general grounds (concerning, for example, the contexts in which courtesy is and is not obligatory) for drawing specific conclusions. You may disagree with my conclusions; you may think that my premises are undermotivated. Fine, but then your problem is you think the premises of my argument are themselves underargued, not that I haven’t got an argument. You’ve given no reasons above to suppose that the premises, if granted, do not support the conclusions. (If you have reasons for thinking my arguments are invalid or weak, and not merely unsound or uncogent, you should feel free to bring those reasons forward. In the meantime, your complaint is rather with the premises.)

2. The grounds for saying that the students were coerced has already been in evidence, both from myself and Roderick. You replied to the claim (but without claiming that the students weren’t being coerced; you just claimed that the school’s edicts shouldn’t be compared straightforwardly to the government’s laws) and were in turn replied to. At this point the question was dropped; you now come back and claim that there is “No answer” to the question of how the kids were coerced. Yes there is: the answer is that they are required to attend the damn thing and if they try to avoid it government officials will use force against them to make them attend or punish them for not doing so. You may think that this is not coercion; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. You may think that it’s coercion but that its coerciveness doesn’t erase ordinary obligations for courtesy; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. In neither case is it responsible to go around declaring that nobody has said anything to support the claim that they were being coerced into attending.

3. Nobody said that scholarly distinction is “required to speak at a school”; it is offered as one of the reasons that Blair’s appearance (which was a standard press conference for Blair to stump for his political campaign, using the school as a backdrop) is not plausibly connected to the students’ education. There are lots of reasons to bring in people of no particular scholarly distinction to speak at a school; there are even reasons to bring in people (such as Blair) who neither have any particular scholarly distinction nor any particular experience with what the students are learning about. But if you are bringing such people in then one wonders what connection their appearance does have with the students’ education. What were the students to learn by quietly attending to Blair’s press conference? What relation does it have to what the school curriculum aims to teach them? What are they losing out on by booing him? What would they have gained by not doing so? How does any of this justify the enforcement of mandatory attendance and standards of “decorum” on those who are thus forced to attend, as opposed to (say) making attendance purely voluntary or having the students spend the same amount of time watching Minister’s Questions on the television? All of these are important questions that need to be answered if you want to have a plausible case for claiming that a political press appearance of no particular direct connection to classroom work or curricular activities has an important connection to the students’ education. They are not answered above because you are too busy taking rhetorical swipes and unilaterally declaring “dialectical victory.” You may, of course, regard the conversation however you want to regard it, but you can hardly expect anyone else to care that you so regard it.

1. You claim that you are returning in kind the sort of discourse that people on this weblog promote. This would make sense if people on this weblog claimed that rudeness and bluster are appropriate in all rhetorical contexts. But they are not. Brady’s post does not entail or even suggest anything of the sort, and those of us who’ve replied to your complaints have specifically claimed that it was specific features of the situation that erased the ordinary presumption against acting that way (specific features which do not obtain, for one, in online discussions at L&P—nobody is forcing you to participate and the purpose of our discussion is argumentative give-and-take, not a press appearance). Decorum and politeness are intellectual virtues in some contexts and irrelevant in others. I take this to be a common-sense point of etiquette; if you disagree you can offer an argument against it, but judging from your claim to be responding “in kind” I take it that you don’t. We’ve already made it clear what it is that might excuse treating Blair like that at his press appearance; the question is what it is you think obtains here that justifies treating us like that. And why you think the two rationales are similar enough that it justifies the claim that you are merely “responding in kind”.

2. Supposing, however, that you were actually responding in kind, the question remains what purpose you could possibly have in doing so. If the level of discourse on L&P is bad, then what does “responding in kind” do? Improve it? (How?) Encourage someone else to improve it? (To what end?) Punish the offenders? (How, and to what end?) Amuse yourself? (Haven’t you got better things to do?)

Irfan,

The reply to you consists of six short paragraphs. You may find that a lot of space in which to discuss an argument. I don’t.

The point of it was that there are three potential worries about the students’ behavior which you seem to be raising, but none of them get a grip on the situation. (1) Booing or shouting down a speaker is a discourtesy, but the school was already far more disrespectful to the students by forcing them, as a captive audience, to sit as props for a campaign press conference for a politician that they loathe. Since there’s no particular obligation to be courteous to people who are coercing you, and no particular obligation to respect “standards” that are disrespectful towards you as a rational human being, the concerns about disrespect for the school’s standards of decorum are misplaced. (2) Neither Tony Blair nor any other government functionary is owed any special courtesies just because of his government office; this is part of the basic set of ideas about the proper relationship between citizens who hold offices and those who don’t in republican societies. So the concerns about boorishness towards an “important” guest such as Blair are misplaced. (3) It’s true that booing and shouting down speakers is not conducive to rational discourse; but Tony Blair was not there to offer rational discourse or anything at all plausibly related to the students’ education. He was going to the school, as a man of no particular scholarly distinction, to talk at them and give a press conference hawking his party’s campaign for maintaining government power. Since the event bore no plausible relationship to the students’ educations and offered no opportunity for intellectual discourse, the concerns about lowering the level of discourse are misplaced.

None of this has anything in particular to do with anarchism. I mentioned it in order to lay it aside. Since both I and many other people on L&P are anarchists, it might be thought that that’s the point of disagreement; but it’s actually not. (2) is the only one of the three points on which it might be thought to bear; but (2) is actually a part of the ideas about equality and political authority that come along with the rejection of feudal theories of sovereignty. I happen to think that the civic virtues that are sometimes priased as “republican virtue” turn out to entail anarchism in politics, but you don’t need to agree with that conclusion for point (2) to hold.

Note that these are in fact three separate points, each in direct response to a different aspect of your complaint against the students, none of which were responded to, except to say that (2) touched on an ancillary point while apparently misunderstanding the reasons given for it. It would be more edifying for you to reply to them than to nitpick my prose style, or to make blanket condemnations of the level of discourse on L&P as a whole.

Irfan: “Don’t quite see how schoolchildren have carte blanche to say what they want on school time while receiving an important guest.”

I don’t quite see how schools have carte blanche to use institutionalized force to compel students to attend “visits” from “important guests” that they’re not interested in. Since the schools have men with guns to back up their rudeness and the students generally don’t, I tend to find the former a lot more worrisome than the latter, and am also a lot less inclined to find fault with the latter when it’s in response to the former.

I also don’t see what any of this has to do with the “importance” (to whom?) of the guest. If shouting down a speaker is inappropriate in a given context I can’t for the life of me imagine any reasons that would make it more inappropriate just because the speaker is “important.” In a republican polity government functionaries are people just like you and me. They are not owed special courtesies that aren’t owed to other ordinary people.

Irfan: “A school is not a municipality, its rules are not laws, and one would think that the school has some standards of decorum, which ought to be upheld.”

This would be more convincing if both attendence and funding of government schools were not compulsory. But it is. So what difference have their edicts got from laws, other than the point of origin?

Irfan: “Don’t quite see how schoolchildren have carte blanche to say what they want on school time while receiving an important guest.”

I don’t quite see how schools have carte blanche to use institutionalized force to compel students to attend “visits” from “important guests” that they’re not interested in. Since the schools have men with guns to back up their rudeness and the students generally don’t, I tend to find the former a lot more worrisome than the latter, and am also a lot less inclined to find fault with the latter when it’s in response to the former.

I also don’t see what any of this has to do with the “importance” (to whom?) of the guest. If shouting down a speaker is inappropriate in a given context I can’t for the life of me imagine any reasons that would make it more inappropriate just because the speaker is “important.” In a republican polity government functionaries are people just like you and me. They are not owed special courtesies that aren’t owed to other ordinary people.

Irfan: “A school is not a municipality, its rules are not laws, and one would think that the school has some standards of decorum, which ought to be upheld.”

This would be more convincing if both attendence and funding of government schools were not compulsory. But it is. So what difference have their edicts got from laws, other than the point of origin?

“well could you just clarify you question? What exactly are you asking?”

Sure. Here’s what I mean: you’re recommending a particular strategy by the ACLU on behalf of Hoppe because it’s “practical, real world stuff.” But I don’t know what “practicality” means unless you are choosing about different possible means to get something that’s worth having. If you manage to pull off getting something that isn’t worth having, you haven’t been “practical”; you’ve been wasting your time and effort.

But whether a particular result in court for Hoppe is worth having or not depends, in part, on what he does or doesn’t have a right to. Now, either it’s true or its false that UNLV’s decision to punish Hoppe is a violation of his rights (by breaching contract).

It’s not clear at all that the First Amendment ought to have anything to do with the matter at all: the First Amendment is a protection of speech from government censorship, not an entitlement to keep your job and your same salary no matter what you say. (You might point out UNLV is tax-funded. True, but so what? At the strongest that’s an argument to de-fund UNLV—which is a good idea on its own merits. In the meantime, though, state-funded Universities rightly punish professors all the time for Constitutionally-protected speech that doesn’t fall within the bounds of acceptable scholarly work or appropriate faculty conduct.) But the ACLU’s argument on behalf of Hoppe (I assume that Hoppe is consenting to the arguments that the ACLU is making on his behalf) is based, in part, on the First Amendment. So one of two things is true:

(1) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court in order to force results that he doesn’t have a right to force, or

(2) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court as a legal feint in order to force results that he does have some right to force, for other reasons.

Now of course you can say, “Hey, Hoppe is trying to get by in the real world, not in Libertarian La-La Land, so he has to try to work with the prevailing winds.” But if (1) is the case, then victory in court isn’t anything that would be worth winning at all (since it would be unjust); and if (2) is the case, then why use the deceptive argument when you could just point to the other reasons you have for seeking redress? (Is achieving some result dishonestly when there are honest means to come by it something that you should want to have?)

Roderick: “Well, I guess the first question is ambiguous. If the question is whether racism and bigotry are logically incompatible with libertarianism, then no, I don’t think they are. But I do think racism and bigotry tend to undermine libertarian attitudes (or vice versa); I also think racism and bigotry are wrong for some of the same reasons that statism is wrong. (But then I accept the Socratic unity-of-virtue thesis, so I think just about any two things that are wrong are wrong for similar reasons….)”

I think this is all correct; it might also be worth adding that there are at least some historical cases (and I think also some contemporary ones) where racism and bigotry have been directly connected with specific violent political orders, in more or less the same way that statist propaganda and ideology are connected with state aggression. (Think of the connexion between slavery or lynch law and the and public proclamations of white supremacist beliefs.)

In contexts like that it’s still true that you can be a bigot without endorsing a violation of rights (many white Southerners in the 1950s would be aghast at violations of Jim Crow racial etiquette but did not support Klan or WCC-style violence), but the connexion between the bigoted beliefs and the systematic violations of rights—and so the way in which the bigotry is corrosive to libertarianism—is in some important sense even more direct than just sharing a common (or analogical) fallacy.

Kinsella: “I was assuming arguendo that loding the complaint is not libertarian—because most of the defenders of Hoppe seem to agree that for whatever reason—contract, constitution, etc.—UNLV should not punish Hoppe.”

I don’t think that UNLV should punish Hoppe either, but I have not yet seen any very clear indication that by punishing him they would be violating his rights (by breach of contract or otherwise). When it comes to cases being fought in court, the difference between vices and crimes is important, yet nearly all of the commentary on Hoppe and his legal prospects seems to have glossed over this.

Kinsella: “As for the ACLU’s position, that’s just a quesiton of legal strategy or tactics. Real world, practical stuff.”

Do you think that “real world, practical stuff” is detached from the question of what rights Hoppe does or doesn’t actually have in the matter?

“He does have a contract,”

Sure, but like most academic contracts it’s unclear at best whether what is being done to him is actually excluded by any of the terms of his contracts. (Most academic contracts these days allow the administration a fair amount of leniency in punishing professors for violations of “discriminatory harassment policies.”) In any case, Kinsella didn’t just say that the University is breaching its contract with Hoppe in this specific case. He said that it’s “not libertarian” (i.e., promoting rights-violations) to endorse the actions of a student using a college disciplinary code to “punish” a professor “in this way”.

Another way to put it: Kinsella seems to be confusing violations of academic freedom (which are bad, but not necessarily rights-violating) with censorship of free speech (which is necessarily rights-violating). Maybe he’s not; maybe he’s just speaking loosely. But given that Hoppe’s defenders at the ACLU seem to be pushing the same confusion as an argument in court, it seems like there’s some good reasons to be a bit studious about being more precise.

“… and I must insist that, contrary to Kinsella’s statement, I never endorsed the student’s actions.”

Sure. I never intended to suggest that you did—and I’m sorry if that’s what I seemed to be implying.

is because “To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

The elephant in the middle of the airport is: nobody likes flying because it’s so goddamned unpleasant to be poked, prodded, and shuffled around by government agents; to have to show up several hours in advance of your flight just to wait in interminable lines to be poked, prodded, and shuffled around; and then to sit and wait for hours on your flight to leave because you had to budget so much time in advance not to be lectured by the government agents about how to schedule your time or end up missing the flight because you didn’t allow enough of a cushion for unexpected delays.

There are market opportunities for airports and airlines to improve their service, sure, but the dominant fact about the air transport market is that it isn’t a free market. The most unpleasant aspects of flying are forcibly monopolized and forcibly implemented by the federal government (which has no reason to care whether you fly or not). Moreover, even many airline companies have little reason to make things more pleasant for their customers, because the market is cartelized and subsidized; they can reliably count on receiving billions in bailouts from the federal government if their bottom line ever falters.

The major players in the contact lens market all have strong reasons to scramble to do a better job at following what customers want on the margin. That doesn’t happen with most of the unpleasantness that flyers face.

(Similar remarks, of course, apply to why the government-cartelized rail industry remains mostly useless to the vast majority of people in the U.S.)