Comments Elsewhere

Anna: I just meant that I believe that lots of the racists are working class (not that they’re the only or whole working class). They might be white racist or arab racist (or sexists, or subculturists), but the result is the same – spontaneous action results in a frenzied attack at the nearest scapegoat (white, wife, arab, chinese, child, immigrant or local) rather than at the true oppressor.

That’s what I meant by saying “when the working class errupts, it is against itself”. Sections of the class bash other sections, and it sucks.

That’s fine, and it’s a point well taken, but I think there’s still an important point here, and the question isn’t purely one of wording. Part of what I want to know is how the way that the “working class” is talked about affects our idea of what “vanguardists” are and what sort of “intervention” they need to provide.

In particular, it’s not like “the working class” tout court needs a bunch of revolutionary specialists to come in and tell them what racism is. Muslim working class folks who are getting bashed know what it is, know who is truly doing the oppressing (in this particular case), and have the bruises to prove it.

And when white working class folks participate in, or enable, violent racism, it seems to me like the people most qualified to confront them on it and show them that what they are doing is wrong, are the folks who have been bashed; in this case Muslims organizing and agitating for their own safety and dignity. Do they count as “vanguardists” and does this count as “intervention” in the uprising of the working class? If so, I don’t have a problem with it, but I think long historical experience should tell us how rarely self-proclaimed vanguards of the working class operate in that way, and how very dangerous this kind of language can be, because it tends to give the picture of the working masses, on the one side and the vanguardists on the other, with the vanguardists herding the workers in the politically correct direction, rather than the picture of folks within the working class taking the initiative to confront each other and fight with each other and hopefully learn from each other and eventually work together with each other. (In point of fact, given the number of “interventions” by “vanguardists” that had nothing to do with workers and everything to do with murderous power, I wonder whether the language of the Vanguard is helpful at all.)

Dave: [The death penalty’s] real basis is to enforce just retribution against the criminal.

Most people who oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle deny that violent retribution can be just. Most people who don’t oppose the death penalty in principle but do oppose this or that instance in fact, deny that violent retribution against the condemned would be just in that particular case (for whatever reason).

Of course, you’re free to disagree with them and give reasons for your disagreement, but thus far you’ve only begged the question against them in the course of your description.

Dave: Before the strong state was established the job of executing those who allegedly deserved it was in the hands of the decedent’s family or clan. As mankind has become progressively civilized the state took over this function and rationalized and democratized it, which has resulted in increased justice and eliminated the problem of the killer’s family then seeking reciprocal vengeance and the resulting destructive vendettas. For the life of me I don’t see how this is so horrible.

Because if you think that the death penalty is unjust, increased bureaucratic rationality as applied to injustice is not something to be cheered. Again, you may not think that the death penalty is unjust, but since you’ve given no argument for that position, you can hardly expect this to convince those who don’t already view deliberate, non-defensive killing of prisoners as permissible.

Dave: Sure it is an imperfect procedure, but what system is perfect.

These happen to be people’s lives that you are fucking talking about. Even if you think that killing people who pose no further credible threat is, in principle, permissible, how many innocent lives do you consider acceptable losses for the sake of the “system”?

Dave: You will hear no comparable outcry when child killer John Gacy or similar persons are executed.

It’s true that people often find some of the condemned more sympathetic than others, and those who elicit more sympathy tend to get more people trying to defend their lives. That’s too bad, but so what? Some people don’t turn out for unsympathetic victims because they’re unprincipled; other people because they oppose the death penalty only in some specific cases but not in others; others because they genuinely oppose the death penalty in all cases but have only so much time and energy to spend and choose to spend it on some cases but not others. (And none of this has anything to do with whether or not the death penalty is in fact justified, of course.)

Dave: The public wants it. This is a democracy.

Oh, well. If it’s popular that must mean that it’s alright.

Thanks for clearing that one up.

Nicely done, Marc, but I have to say that I’m rather puzzled by this: “… many northern Whigs—who prized stability over chaos and uncertainty— simply couldn’t abide the anarchy caused by John Brown and his fellow abolitionists.”

John Brown was virtually unknown to anybody other than his neighbors and a few abolitionists until his Kansas campaigns in 1856; Harper’s Ferry was in 1859. Given that the Whigs had more or less completely disintegrated already by 1856, I have trouble taking seriously the suggestion that John Brown or the guerilla tactics associated with him had very much bearing on anti-abolitionist Northern Whigs’ thought…

THorne: “This is a cultural force that causes them to be ultra competitive and results in violence against men by men.”

Culture is not an airborne virus or a gaseous medium. It’s us, that is, you and I and our neighbors. The things that you are talking about are not cultural forces; the process is neither impersonal nor anonymous. What you’re describing is men bullying other men to toe the party line.

That’s too bad — no one should be bullied, least of all into acts that are both immoral and dangerous. But it ought to be obvious what men get out of maintaining a culture of male violence. And I might be more sympathetic to my fellow men’s complaints of being victimized by expectations of masculinity that they would rather reject, if I saw any evidence that they were doing a damn thing to challenge or undermine that culture of male violence or those norms of masculinity, rather than just complaining about it as a strategic response to radical feminist arguments.

Kennedy: My only purpose here was to explain why I have a distaste for unions in general as they have evolved in historical practice, not to offer an exhaustive analysis of the history of unions.

That’s fine. My purpose was to try to explain why I think you ought to take a more nuanced view of people in the labor movement who happened to use the letters S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M to tag the views they held.

Kennedy: When did he sentence anyone or carry out their execution? When did he kill?

When he deliberately declined to order subordinates, over whom he had direct and unquestioned control, not to kill someone that he knew they planned to kill, when he claimed the authority and in fact had the power to stop them by a simple order, because he approved of the actions that he was permitting.

Are you claiming that to count as one of the people responsible for killing Tookie Williams, Schwarzenegger would have had to issue a direct order stating “Kill Tookie Williams,” or jabbed the needle in himself?

Kennedy: I’ll leave it to others to document the double standards, they were evident to me when Tookie’s supporters were calling Schwarzenegger a cold-blooded killer.

He is a cold-blooded killer. Last I checked, executing a death sentence meant killing somebody, and carrying out a deliberate, premeditated killing 24 years in the planning could hardly be described as a crime of passion. Making the words “cold-blooded” and “killer” longer and more Latinate (“the execution of the unquestionably guilty mass murderer and violent gang founder Tookie Williams — after a jury trial and multiple judicial appeals …”) doesn’t change the fact of the matter.

Maybe you were objecting to something else? E.g. the express condemnation of Schwarzenegger without a corresponding condemnation of Tookie? But most people who objected to Tookie’s sentence either thought (1) he wasn’t guilty, or (2) whether or not he was guilty killing him would be unjustified. Those who believe (1) may or may not have been dishonest about the facts of the case (I wouldn’t know; I don’t care whether Tookie was guilty or not and I haven’t studied the case). But what’s that got to do with their opinion of Schwarzenegger? (It’s not a matter of dispute as to whether or not Schwarzenegger authorized the killing.) Those who believe (2) are under no obligation to make sure they denounce any murders that they believe Tookie committed before they denounce Schwarzenegger’s having him killed—since they think that whether Tookie was evil or not is irrelevant to whether or not Schwarzenegger should have him killed. If you mean (3) the attempt by many to portray Tookie as a good person in spite of any crimes he may have committed, since he supposedly turned his life around, then I have no idea whether or not he became a good person or was just trying to save his skin (how would I know?), or whether the people who believe this are being dishonest, but I don’t see what any of this has to do with Schwarzenegger either.

You seem to think there’s some kind of comparative judgment involved here instead of a simple statement to the effect that Schwarzenegger killed somebody when he shouldn’t have. If there is such a comparison, explicit or implicit, where is it?

Schreiber: Libertarianism, which I generally support, isn’t justified by recourse to objective deontology (nothing is) and as a meta-ethical point, the functioning of all ethical systems are predicated on a hypothetical imperative. … But in the latter case, the first argument of Mackie’s Error Theory will apply and the position is untenable.

These are bold claims for which you have provided absolutely no support. I don’t know which argument of Mackie’s you’re referring to as the “first”; if you mean the Argument from Relativity (the first one he uses to attack the existence of objective values in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) then the argument is not even remotely decisive. (So people disagree on ethics and it’s hard to resolve the dispute by introducing bits of evidence that one of the parties has not got. So what? You could offer the same worries about meta-ethics or philosophy generally that Mackie offers about normative ethics. If it doesn’t entail that there’s no objective fact of the matter as to whether or not error theory is true, then it doesn’t entail that there’s no objective fact of the matter as to whether a given normative ethical claim is true, either. Broadly speaking, if your argument depends on this kind of crude verificationism, you should probably give the argument up.) For discussion of the second claim, see Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, in which she revisits (and rejects) her own earlier argument from “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” The first claim is also simply irrelevant, since the claim was merely that slavery is an evil in itself and not for its causal contribution to something else. That may be true under deontology but it’s also perfectly compatible with virtue ethics, some kinds of consequentialism, and many other theories about the nature of the Right and the Good. It’s not compatible with hedonism, but the fact that hedonism blocks you from viewing slavery as an evil in itself is one of the chief reasons that hedonism is false.

But to press my earlier point on real freedom: there is somethign that you know you will never do, the government suddenly bans it, is your freedom diminished?

Yes. Freedom is a term with modal weight; it has to support counterfactuals.

Kennedy: Yes. He’s quite right that many actively excuse rights violations in these other places and hold the U.S. to be a worse offender when it usually is not.

I certainly agree with you that there are people who do this, and that the examples that you give are good ones. But is this just a general beef on your part, or do you have specific examples in mind having to do with the killing of Tookie Williams, or even the death penalty in general? Because frankly, the only evidence that Greenwald seems to offer is that some people vocally objected to the killing of Williams but he personally hasn’t seen them objecting to executions in other countries where the death penalty is used more freely and against people who certainly didn’t do anything wrong. Which is frankly a ridiculous standard for concluding that someone is being dishonest or selective; there are lots of honest reasons that you might object to both A and B but only mention A at some particular time. (Maybe there are some Leftists in Europe, or some libertarians in America, whose outrage over Williams’ execution is dishonest; but the argument certainly hasn’t shown that.)

WhiskeyJuvenile: People post a lot of words about Kelo because:

a) we have a more realistic chance of dealing with it; b) we actually are arguing against an opposition, whereas nobody is defending the events in the Congo.

That’s fine. Maybe similar considerations to (a) and (b) explain some people’s decision to spend a lot of words on the killing of Tookie Williams without first having made sure that they denounced every murderous regime in the world that also deliberately kills prisoners?

Kennedy, that’s fine. Did anyone suggest that the premeditated murder of prisoners in the US is worse than the systematic human rights violations in the P.A., Iran, Syria, Cuba, China, etc. that Greenwald mentions? Or are they just focused on things that happen bear on them at the moment?

Schreiber, of course there seems to be nothing instrinsically wrong with slavery if you don’t think that people have any rights not to be enslaved. So what? The question is why you’d believe such a ridiculous thing.

As far as freedom goes, you seem to be either neglecting or intentionally obfuscating the distinction that libertarians make between freedom in the sense of uncoerced choice and freedom in the sense of the choice between available alternatives. There are lots of reasons alternatives might not be available to you, but that’s only an actionable problem, from the standpoint of libertarian theory, when what’s restricting your choices is coercion by another person. You might think that that distinction doesn’t bear logical scrutiny, but it’s silly to pretend as if it didn’t exist when trying to make a point in a mostly libertarian forum. And I am not at all clear on why having a different theory about the logical status of the categorical proposition in A, when the domain is empty, commits you to any particular claims about the proper functions of government at all. (I happen to think that they have false presuppositions, and like Strawson, I think that sentences with false presuppositions are neither true nor false, but rather failed attempts at asserting. So what now?)

Schreiber: This reasoning is fallacious because there can be no inherent moral rightness or wrongness in some purely instrumental function like government or capitalism (or even a particular government) independent of some goal exterior to it.

“This reasoning is fallacious because there can be no inherent moral rightness or wrongness in some purely instrumental function like slavery (or even a particular slave-pen) independent of some goal exterior to it.”

Please identify the relevant difference, if any, between your argument and mine, and any auxiliary premises that one must accept in order to recognize the difference. (If there isn’t any, do you accept the conclusion that there can be no inherent moral rightness or wrongness in slavery?)

Jonathan, there’s a terrible civil war raging in the Congo, in which as many as 3,000,000 innocent people have been slaughtered in the past 8 years by warring pretenders to State authority, backed by various ethnic factions and by neighboring states. Clearly, even to ardent eminent domain opponents, the stealing of houses by the New London, Connecticut city government, after a long administrative process authorized by state law and municipal ordinance, ranks very, very low on the list of the world’s human rights outrages and grave injustices compared to the Congolese civil war.

Yet I have seen endless posts about Kelo and eminent domain on this blog, and not one mumbling word about the Congolese civil war. Where’s the outrage? Clearly you are just pretending to be libertarians as rationalization for your pathological, manipulative hatred of the New London, Connecticut city government.

Right?