Lopez is exactly right to point out:

So folks chattering and foaming on about “Jews” and “organized religion” are, in the most charitable interpretation possible, missing the point entirely.

But I’m not so sure about the major premise:

The most murderous ideology in recorded history is explicitly [atheistic].

It’s true that Marxist-Leninism has a truly monstrous record, and that it alone is a good enough reason to stop laying exclusive focus on “organized religion” (or, worse, da Jooz—not that this will stop the mouth-foamers, since they have always considered Bolshevism to be one of the leading arms of ZOG perfidy).

It’s not clear, though, that the top body count goes to Bolshevism. That … honor … may actually go to militant Christianity after all: it’s easy to forget that the French Wars of Religion claimed about 2,000,000-4,000,000 lives, the Thirty Years War about 11,500,000, not to mention the millions or hundreds of thousands committed to the fire variously by the Crusades in the East, the special crusade against the Albigensians, the Reconquista, the central European witch hunts, the Inquisition, the English Civil War, the pogroms in the Ukraine and Poland, etc. Bolshevism has piled up a truly ghastly pile of bodies, but late medieval and early modern militant Christianity had a longer time in which to work and killed greater or comparable absolute numbers of people in a substantially smaller population.

People who rant about the monolithic evil of “organized religion” are wrong. But it is, in the end, not hard to see that there are some rather ghastly facts at the center of their delusions.

Kennedy: “It’s also possible that he did not contract away his IP rights to inventions.”

Except that he doesn’t have any natural rights to demand tribute for the use of the invention—unless his employer made some kind of contract with him agreeing to give him exclusionary control over their use of things he made while he was working for them.

Maybe they did make such a contract, but there isn’t any evidence of that in the story, and it would certainly make the court case much more open-and-shut than it seems to have been, since the issue wouldn’t have been “IP” but rather breach of contract. Broadly speaking, if I’m paying you to show me how to make things, and I go on to make the things that you show me, the amount that you negotiated for your job up-front is precisely what you should have the right to demand. I may like brilliant inventors a lot more than I like the sanctimonious money-men who drive most of the intellectual enclosure movement these days, but that doesn’t make putting the fences up on other people’s rightly acquired property any less odious.

Sabotta: “Private armed guards would have acted the same”

Private guards would have turned around and opened fire with live ammunition into a crowd of demonstrators after some rocks had been thrown? Gunning down four people at over 250 feet away who didn’t have anything to do with it?

If they did, they’d rightly be locked away for second-degree murder.

Are you this glib about the murder of Vicki Weaver? At least at Ruby Ridge there was shooting before she was gunned down.

Do you think that in a free society paramilitary forces would be deployed to tear-gas “illegal demonstrations” in the first place?

“Bush, he’s trying to get rid of every program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s” … Well, that’s probably [i]true[/i]. The problem with Bushists is that they wants to throw out all the old idiot programs and replace them with [i]new[/i] idiot programs: TANF, vouchers, faith-based welfare, NCLB, social security accounts, national sales taxes, etc.

And so it is that they can gleefully hop on Leviathan’s back and march through the burning town, all the while hoisting blood-red banners proclaiming “IT’S YOUR MONEY” at the front of the column.

Micha: “Barganier is clearly implying that Max is an advocate of torture, not an advocate of relative ethics.” No, he isn’t. Barganier has many standing problems with Max’s policy positions, not the least of them that Max is pro-war, whereas Barganier writes for AntiWar.com. The “boiling alive” bit is part of a longer argument about why total war against the wogs is permissible. I see no reason to uncharitably read Barganier as calling Max a boiling-advocate here rather than, say, an advocate of a morally indefensible war.

Micha: “After all, relativism is much less controversial than torture …”

N.B.: since Max’s account of rights [i]entails[/i] the monstrous consequence that you aren’t doing anything wrong to a foreigner by torturing her for no good reason at all (up to and including boiling her alive just for the sadistic pleasure of it), the position ought to be just as controversial as torture. If it’s not, then that’s merely a matter of not thinking through the ideas that you claim to be discussing.

“Proving that too many hippie swine survived the Kent State shootings…” Hey, Sabotta, you are aware that the people shot in the Kent State massacre were murdered by the State, aren’t you? Why not follow up with a crack about the death of Vicki Weaver?

Because, after all, nothing says “primo libertarian comedy material” like cold-blooded murder at the hands of government agents.

“Barganier’s excerpt and interpretation of Max’s comment implies that Max is arguing in favor of torture. He isn’t.” I know Max isn’t; but I have no idea where Barganier says that. In his “express your disgust” post I see where he points out that Borders’ argument leaves the boiling alive question open to deliberation over matters of strategy and whether we find it too gross. I see where he says that any account that leaves it open is, whether right or wrong, not a libertarian account but rather something else. But I don’t see anywhere where he says or implies that Borders condones throwing people into the cauldron. Max’s position is objectionable enough just as he has stated it, without needing any embellishment.

Micha, where and how did Barganier quote Max’s out of context? The boiling alive comment is a direct implication of Max’s own stated position; it’s just as pithy a condensation as you could fear for. Max dropped a mosntrous consequence into Barganier’s lap; Barganier pointed it out.

My favorite was this gem of a comment from “citizensoldier”:

“Gang—this individual will most likely NOT go to jail if a smart military lawyer gets hold of him. His big mistake, along with his comrades was to start talking to the media. Yes he was stressed and had been shot in the face the day before but under the Geneva conventions he is allowed to defend himself. The day prior and even after this specific incident insurgents were blowing themselves up when a soldier came close to tend to their wounds. There were also incidents of boobytrapped bodies……the shooting was totally justified..”

Of course, this reasoning would justify shooting any Iraqi anywhere at any time in cold blood since they “might” have a bomb on them. Kill them all; God will know his own.

Lopez: “I’ll just note here that I have no problem whatsoever with peaceful white seperatism. If someone wants to buy some land, fence it in, and hate homos and Meskins and Negroes, that’s perfectly fine by me. … But that isn’t the Hoppean position either.”

Well. It’s clear enough that peaceful white separatism (by definition, since it it’s stipulated to be peaceful) doesn’t tread on anyone’s rights. So there’s no problem with it whatsoever as far as a libertarian theory of justice is concerned. But although no-one has any right to force people not to form such communities, don’t you think that they are still idiots?

Justice is the only virtue that’s enforceable, but it’s not the only virtue.