Comments Elsewhere

> 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.

MBH:

Since no one could ever carry out an insurrection with objective knowledge of the outcome, you imply that if someone thinks they have good reason to believe the insurrection will be successful, then they ought to do it.

Well, no. You seem to have inferred that, but nothing I said implied it; your inference involves an especially crude confusion of metaphysical and epistemic claims (as a brief reminder, “If P, then it is permissible for Smith to do V” does not imply “If Smith believes that P, then it is permissible for Smith to do V”).

you see no connection between rhetoric like yours and someone who decides to assassinate their Congressman.

Well, I didn’t say anything about “rhetoric like mine.” You started talking about the Kochs and I (among others) answered and then decided to change the topic to me. That said, I am pretty confident that the contents and the rhetoric of “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism” played more or less no causal role in the Loughner’s decision to shoot up a supermarket in Tucson. If it did, I have a much broader readership than I imagined.

However, if it did, I will also simply say that someone who reads the essay and comes away thinking “It’s time for me to shoot a member of Congress,” they have not read the essay carefully or honestly, and while I am perfectly happy to take intellectual responsibility for the conclusions that people might reasonably draw from things that I write, I think it is fundamentally absurd to expect anyone to take intellectual — let alone legal responsibility — for admittedly irrational reactions that admittedly irrational people might independently decide to take after reading something that they did not understand.

I’ve already addressed why it’s not correct to shoot Congressmen in the face.

Not at the link you just pointed to. That’s a discussion of the gold standard and government regulation of hedge funds. Did you mean to point to something else? Or is this yet another example of you throwing shit around and expecting people not to read what you link to?

I asked you for an argument for your position. You haven’t, as yet, given one.

Literally.

Do you have an argument against that conclusion? Or a logical response to the arguments that I’ve already given for it?

MBH:

From the perspective of a polycentric legal system, any organization that refused arbitration in a court that held persons responsible for a particular kind of negligence would be aggressive organizations.

Whatever you want, man. So, since you regard the Kochs (in this rather strange hypothetical scenario? about a nonexistant polycentric legal system?) as being involved with “aggressive organizations,” you support using violence towards them in order to extract damages, yes?

MBH:

You think that Jared Loughner is justified in killing the Congresswoman?

No, I don’t. I think that the shooting was foolish, and also that it probably fails a test of proportionality. (Certainly, carrying out the shooting by murdering innocent bystanders does.)

Again. Do you have an argument against that? Or against anything said in the passage you are quoting?

Hell, if I did (as I do not) think that the shooting of Giffords (but not the innocent bystanders) were justified, would you have an argument against that conclusion? Or just some more shit to sling at the wall?

You know how I know when someone has almost certainly not followed the logic of the source that they are supposedly replying to? When they lead off with “by that logic ….”

As you already know, or ought to know if you do not, the passage you’re quoting from is specifically a passage which is discussing why the unconditional right of revolution need not necessarily involve armed insurrection or other uses of force. It says literally nothing — deliberately so; it says that it says nothing — about what strategy or tactics for resistance I am or am not willing to adopt, suggest, condone, accept, or tolerate. You cannot possibly have missed this point if you read the essay seriously and with understanding. As you already know, I do not think very much of most violent tactics, and I specifically advocate strategies (such as agorism and nonviolent syndicalism) which avoid violent confrontations, even in many situations where I think that such confrontations would be well within the rights of the resisters (e.g. people defending themselves against imminent assault by cops, soldiers, border guards, tax collectors, etc.).

As you may also know, I endorse the right of tyrannicide. (I have written about this in places other than the L/E/S essay — e.g. in my Tyrannicide Day posts — and it would be more on point to mention those than it would to try to pull it out of L/E/S.) However, believing that someone is within their rights to do X (i.e., should not be themselves forcibly restrained, gunned down, jailed, etc. if they try to do it) is not the same thing as believing that someone is acting rightly to do X. (Acts which are within one’s rights may well be foolish; and they may indeed be immoral.) More to the point, I also don’t think that killing 1/435th of 1/2 of the legislative authority in the U.S. constitutes a legitimate act of tyrannicide, and considerations of proportionality would rule out any kind of use of deadly force (particularly since the force would in no conceivable way remove the threat that Congress poses). The issue in tyrannicide is the threat that an individual poses by exercise of their political power; but Caesar exercises a kind of unilateral individual power that Gabrielle Giffords does not.

That said, while it’s sad when anyone dies, Gabrielle Giffords is a moral criminal, and I’m a lot more concerned about, say, innocent 9 year olds being killed than I am about what happens to Congressional conspirators.

Do you have an argument against that position?

Yes, I do. Do you have an argument against it, or a logical response to the arguments given for it?

MBH:

Martin, I never say that anyone should kill them. In fact, any violence toward the Koch’s would be completely antithetical to my advocacy

As I recall, you specifically stated that you thought they should be held legally liable for (the downstream effects of independent third parties’ reactions to) the political rhetoric of groups that they provided money to. How exactly do you think government holds people legally liable for torts? With soul-force?

MBH: Reading his “Final Thoughts” gives me literally no idea what caused him to do that?

Correct. Reading that incoherent, almost purely meaningless ramble, which says nothing about shooting anyone and nothing about death panels or Obamacare or Koch-funded organizations, provides you with literally no idea what motivated him to shoot people, and it especially gives no evidence for the speculative claim that he decided to start shooting people because of any conclusions who drew from any Koch-funded organization’s statements or rhetoric.

Negligence is not a crime; it’s a civil wrong.

Negligent homicide is generally considered a crime, which can be prosecuted as manslaughter or murder in most jurisdictions. However, if you intend to make up a novel meaning for the word “negligence” which is unmoored from its actual legal use, and “merely” to initiate a legal process which will end with sticking a gun in their faces and seizing wrongful death damages from them — a few mil here and there, I guess — on threat, as usual, of jail or death if they refuse to comply with the court order — well, then, it’s the gun in the face that object to, not whether you call the gun “criminal” or “civil.” In either case, it is an overtly tyrannical legal assault on freedom of the press.

The whole point is that the Kochtopus is institutionalizing neuroticism.

Suppose it is. So what? Being “neurotic” is not a crime, and neither is encouraging other people to become neurotic. Incidentally, your ongoing and increasingly vitriolic efforts to abandon the field of rational argument, and simply pathologize those who disagree with your political conclusions, whether through pseudoscientific diagnosis-at-a-distance (“neurotic”? really?) or through flat-out cartoonish personal abuse (“poop-eaters”? seriously?), are despicably authoritarian and really quite disturbing.

What percentage of your anti-state followers are rational objectors and what percentage are black-helicopter fearing poop-eaters?

I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask “my followers,” whoever you imagine those to be. But I will say that this is an obvious and crude argumentum ad hominem (abusive form): if 75.4% of the “followers” of position X turn out to be crazy, that’s not an argument against position X at all.

Bystander: Is Radgeek guilty of some (out of character) right conflationism in equating the media monopoly with “free speech.”

1. Could you tell me what part of the “media monopoly” the Koch brothers own?

2. Supposing, counterfactually, that they did have a “media monopoly,” that’s a good reason to seek to undermine their monopoly — by removing the legal restrictions on other people’s freedom of the press. It’s no reason to try to control their monopoly, by imposing even more legal restrictions on the monopolist’s freedom of the press.

This is the same kind of reasoning that leads many statist “Progressives” to believe that, e.g., they should be able to force drug companies to subsidize AIDS drugs for the developing world — “Well, these sky-high prices are the result of a government granted monopoly, so where’s the harm in having government force them to sell at lower prices?” Well, why not just get rid of the damn monopoly instead of trying to contain its effects?

The only difference is that the control proposed, when it comes to political speech and the press, is an even more dangerous and politically toxic form of control, which has already repeatedly been used in the past by tyrannical governments (among them the government of the United States of America, where I live) to spy on, disenfranchise, beat, jail, deport and murder political dissidents — including, as you may recall, quite a few Anarchists — for their “seditious” speech.

If that be right-conflationism, let us make the most of it.