Comments Elsewhere

... This (the position Greenwald is criticizing, not the one he's expressing) was also David Brooks's basic take

In LeftLibertarian2@yahoogroups.com, "Nathan Byrd" ... Yes, that's one common claim. We could in fact parse it out into at least three separate

... Bill, Well, this is not a team sport. I understand that it's natural for you to feel embattled or ganged-up-on, given the way that discussions on

... (1) John Hinckley's attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and (2) Arthur Bremer's attempted assassination of George Wallace were both apparently

... That's an accurate gloss but hardly a detailed one. My point is that Russell and Frege had neither the same conception of "the basic postulates of logic,"

... Sure, and perhaps Russell was, but I don't think that he was mistaken about it in the way that you seem to think he was mistaken about it, or at least if

... He's frequently referred to as such, but I don't know where he claims the title for himself (I tried and couldn't find it in Human Action, at least). As

MBH,

(1) If Jocasta is not really Oedipus’s mother, then there is nothing wrong with him sleeping with her.

(2) If Oedipus (reasonably?) believes that Jocasta is not really his mother, then there is nothing wrong with him sleeping with her.

Some people believe that if (1) is true, so is (2). (Generally because they are internalists about justification.) I do not believe that. Perhaps you believe it; but you claimed to be sussing out my views. Of course, if you want to cherry pick some of my views here and there, ignore the rest, then roll them up with some views I don’t hold, which you made up, and pretend that this constitutes a knock-down response to my views, I can hardly stop you. But I don’t know what you think it proves. Certainly, when I explicitly tell you that my view about justification is P, and then you immediately proceed to repeat a counter-argument that depends on the claim that I accept not-P, what you are doing is hard to count as an even minimally honest response. And I do know that it’s not a game that’s worth my time to play.

Bystander,

Well, I’m inclined to agree that “initiation” is not the most useful conceptual framework for this, but I don’t think it’s obviously unworkable, either. We could start with examples. It seems to me that when Emma Goldman is speaking in a hall, and not physically attacking anyone, and when some police roll up on her and physically attack her and force her off to jail at gunpoint, that’s initiating violence against someone who was not herself engaging in violence. (Even if, say, she made an argument to the effect that people have the right to resist or rebel.) Now, perhaps I’m oversimplifying matters. But if so I’d like to know how.

To return to the earlier discussion about media monopoly and right-conflationism, I’m done trying to engage with MBH’s trolling, so I’ll beg your leave to come back around again and say things a bit more succinctly, and more clearly, in response to your specific question.

“Right-conflationism” and “left-conflationism” are terms that apply to the analysis of structural outcomes, not of individual market transactions. (Claiming that BP’s business model would not exist in a free market is one thing; claiming that BP did not have the right to sell me gasoline last time I took a road trip is another.) If one were to claim that the prevalence of a particular viewpoint in the (profoundly constrained and monopolized) media indicated that the idea must be genuinely popular, or that it must have won out in the “marketplace of ideas,” that would be an instance of right-conflationism. (Because there isn’t a genuine “marketplace of ideas;” access to the press is profoundly constrained and monopolized, etc.) But I don’t think I made that claim.

On the other hand I don’t think that defending the individual rights of people — including those who might plausibly be called media monopolists — to print their own views, in a particular instance, without forcible interference would be an example of right-conflationism. Certainly I didn’t anywhere claim that the virtues of a freed market in ideas justify the evils of right-wing advocacy in the media. What I said is that the right way to deal with those evils, where they occur, is not by forcibly censoring them.

If it’s not right-conflationism, my position might still be an example of some other error — although, of course, I don’t think that it is. Besides the fact that allowing that precedent would be extraordinarily dangerous (when they start clamping down on “irresponsible” or “inflammatory” speech, it’s always the Anarchists they have come for first), I think it is also fundamentally immoral to treat your fellow human beings that way. As I said, it seems like the natural response to such a monopoly is to remove the prohibitions on others. Not to lay down some new prohibitions on the monopolists. Does that make sense?

> what they're elected to do is serve. Members of Congress are elected to make laws. Making laws is not "serving" the people who are subject to those laws, on any coherent conception of the term "to serve;" it is ordering them, making them do something whether or not they had wanted to do it. Perhaps you think that the ordering around is justified; perhaps you think that the people who vote for members of Congress are asking for it, and are better off for it. But it is still a matter of giving orders to people who do not have the option to refuse them. A person who makes their living by governing other people is not a servant under any meaningful definition of that term. > We can UN-elect them if they fail to serve, so trying to label them rulers is inane. The fact that a ruler is elected by the majority doesn't make them something other than a ruler. In Rome, dictators were voted in and served for fixed terms. But what they did while in office was to dictate. I'm glad Giffords heard from her constituents. In some companies, bosses read the notes that employees put in the suggestion box. In some companies, bosses may even get fired if employees lodge too many complaints against them. This does not, however, make the bosses into the employees of their employees. They are still bosses, and the normal course of affairs is that they spend day after day telling everybody else what to do.