Comments Elsewhere

The statements on race and homosexuality are perfectly vile and deserve condemnation, whoever wrote them. However, I’m a bit baffled by this:

Paul’s newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society”

Well, shouldn’t it?

Most of the time, when we talk about a free society, part of what we are talking about is a society in which the powers of rulers derive from “the consent of the governed” rather than from unilateral command. But that would seem to mean that where consent has been refused or withdrawn, a right of secession must be recognized. Do you disagree?

and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. …”

Is there something wrong with this? If so, what?

Scheule: Even if one girl lies about hearing demons, it’s nonsense to believe this explains the entirety of diagnosed schizophrenics.

I can’t vouch for Caplan’s views, but certainly Thomas Szasz has never claimed anything of the sort.

Scheule: Alternatively, Caplan thinks the girl is telling the truth but doesn’t want to call it a disease–but c’mon, she feels non-existent spiders itching around subdermally. If that’s not an illness, please, what is?

Smallpox is a disease. Feeling non-existent spiders itching around under your skin is a hallucination, not a disease.

Depending on the breaks, the hallucination may be a symptom of some identifiable neural disease. Or it may not be. Lots of well-defined neuropathologies can result in hallucinations, such as Parkinson’s disease, or brain tumors, or for that matter the syndromes that result from certain kinds of drug abuse. But lots of unpleasant things can also happen to your body without being to anything that you could call a “disease.” If you intend to bring in the medical model, it’s up to you to explain what the disease actually is and produce some evidence that it’s present in this case.

You might say, “Oh, well, the disease here is schizphrenia.” But just referring back to a term explicitly defined through a grab-bag of loosely-related symptoms, rather than in terms of etiology, doesn’t cut much ice. Since schizophrenia is defined in terms of things like the experience of hallucinations, citing it as the explanation for hallucinations is either tightly circular, or at best an unbacked promissory note for a physiological explanation, rather than the explanation itself. It’s hard for me to see what function, if any, pseudomedical terms like “schizophrenia” serve in helping us to understand what’s going on with someone like Tiffany Sitton.

Thank you for this excellent post. I say that not just because you make use of my favorite Edmund Burke quote, but also because this is something very important that needs to be said, and needs to be remembered at all times when people start talking about institutions of power like prisons and psychiatric “hospitals.”

For what it’s worth, on the Burke quote, the “against all three” bit sounds funny because 2/3 of the antecedent is lost in the sections that are clipped out of the excerpt. The full beginning of that second paragraph is: “I need not excuse myself to your Lordship, nor, I think, to any honest Man, for the Zeal I have shewn in this Cause; for it is an honest Zeal, and in a good Cause. I have defended Natural Religion against a Confederacy of Atheists and Divines. I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper….” The problem is that I wanted to leave the bit about pleading for Natural Reason against Politicians in, but to leave the distracting stuff about natural religion out. Hope this helps.

Burke is best known today for the rather vile conservatism and authoritarianism in his opposition to the French Revolution. But Burke’s earlier writings were much more liberal, and sometimes even radical. There is some debate over whether the Vindication of Natural Society was meant as a serious argument against government, or as a satire. See Roderick Long’s first and second posts on the Vindication for the details, if you’re interested.

Constant: I have never said, “if you want to know what a libertarian is, look at Ron Paul”. Do people do that? I guess if people do that, then that’s probably a mistake if they don’t agree with his whole platform. But do people really do that?

I don’t know whether anyone’s done that, but a lot of people have given money to the campaign, or put up signs and banners (“Ron Paul 2008,” “Ron Paul Revolution,” “Google Ron Paul,” etc.), or made personal endorsements of Ron Paul’s campaign, all of which they’ve justified on the grounds that Ron Paul’s campaign literature, debate answers, etc. promote libertarian ideals, and so getting more attention for his campaign will, in turn, educate more people about libertarianism and perhaps persuade more people to embrace it.

Presumably that’s only a good argument to the extent that Paul’s campaign actually is promoting libertarian ideals. If the money, for example, goes to produce nasty nativist-statist propaganda rather than propaganda that actually promotes libertarianism, then the money may be going towards promoting Ron Paul, but it’s not going towards promoting, or educating people about, libertarianism.

Anthony,

Suppose that Prez Ron Paul decided — as Harry Browne, for example, promised to do when he ran on the LP ticket — to issue blanket presidential pardons to all nonviolent drug offenders in the United States, including both those in federal and those in state custody. In one sense, this action wouldn’t increase the net extraction of taxes against anybody (it would dramatically reduce spending by both state and federal government). But then, neither would the action of declaring all local government schools abolished. In some other sense, both actions would make use of some non-zero amount of tax money — to pay for the paper and the pens and the administrative costs of notifying the prison and so on — but that money would have been extracted whether it was used to pay for one thing or for the other thing, and neither nullifying drug laws through blanket pardons nor declaring local government schools abolished would directly increase the amount of taxes extracted in the future, either. (In fact, both actions would stand some small chance of indirectly decreasing the level of taxation.)

That said, would you make a similar argument to the effect that if even one taxpayer objected to releasing nonviolent drug offenders from state prisons, the nullification-through-blanket pardon would (1) have an identifiable victim, and (2) victimize that victim in such a way as to be fairly characterized as “an astonishing act of centralized tyranny”? If so, why? If not, what’s the difference between the one case and the other?

Stephen W. Carson: Would he abolish public schools? I hope I don’t need to remind anyone that that would be an astonishing act of centralized tyranny for a president to do.

An act of centralized tyranny against whom?

For something to count as an act of tyranny, it must have an identifiable victim. Whose individual rights would be violated by the President abolishing local government schools?

Robert,

One shouldn’t ignore the effects that conscription had, and the shifts in consensus within the military where it has been abolished. But in a line of work where your boss has the legal power to treat striking or quitting as a hanging crime, the line between volunteers and conscripts is fuzzier than it might at first appear.

That mattered a lot for the boys who signed up voluntarily in the Great War, not knowing what they would find in the trenches. And it matters a lot today in this age of stop-loss and endless reserve call-ups.

Ah well. If I can’t sauté mushrooms, I don’t want to be part of that revolution, anyway.

Sheldon: The Constitution is just as easily used by the advocates of big government. No one ever says, “Ignore the Constitution.”

Well, I do. And now you can too, for just $17.99.

Keith wrote: “Also when I read that radical feminist literature the thought that kept going though my head was how similar it was to some KKK propaganda I had seen before. I wonder if you would be so quick to excuse pictures of people with grotesquely large lips being lynched.”

White supremacist caricatures of black men and women were forms of propaganda by the supporters and perpetrators of an actually existing pervasive system of violence (lynch law under white supremacy) that killed, maimed, and terrorized thousands of innocent people. Their purpose was to support and reinforce that system of violent domination in the name of race privilege.

Radical feminist caricatures of men are a response by the VICTIMS of an actually existing pervasive system of violence (male violence against women) that kills, maims, rapes, and otherwise terrorizes millions of innocent women. Their purpose is to PROTEST and UNDERMINE that violence in the name of sex equality.

This facile attempt to equate the two, while completely ignoring their contrary relationships to a context of actually existing violent domination, is grotesque. It also completely glosses over what should be a central issue for libertarians — whether the violence depicted is aggressive, or a defense against prior aggression.