Comments Elsewhere

The following statements are counterhistorical outrages.

The Holocaust did not happen to the European Left. At best, they are neutral observers of it, … – Glenn

In fact the first victims of Hitler’s round-ups, summary executions, and concentration camps (beginning with Dachau in 1933) were German leftists, particularly Communists and Social Democrats. The European Left had extensive, first-person, decidedly non-neutral experience of Hitler’s terror and mass murder.

If you mean “the Holocaust” to refer to the specific campaign of terror, slavery, and extermination that he directed against European Jews, then it’s certainly true that non-Jewish European Leftists were not victims of that (by definition). But so what? I rather expect that the Jewish Leftists in Europe weren’t “neutral observers” of that, and the claim that non-Jewish Leftists were “at best, … neutral observers” at the time is demonstrably false.

The reason that Europeans are against the death penalty is that their governments use it to exterminate rival ethnic groups. The reason we Americans support the death penalty is that we have a different and superior history. – Tantor

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of the death penalty in the United States (whether formally approved by a court or executed, with more or less open police complicity, under lynch law), as it applies to Black people in the South and immigrants in the North and West, ought to find this claim laughable, if the facts being blanked out were not so terrible.

N.B.: the fact that whites in America have an ugly history of using the death penalty as a tool of racial terror does not make the use of the death penalty as a tool of ethnic terror in Europe O.K., or any less bad. If you are going to argue from history, however, you do have a responsibility to begin from actual history and not your mythistorical fantasies.

The following statements involve elementary errors of fact.

PS As far as I understand, governors are only supposed to give clemency if they have doubts about the case, i.e. not their opinion re. the death penalty. But why let minor details get in the way of a good antiUS story? – blubi101

This is not true. The Governor of California holds the authority to grant reprieve, pardon, or commutation of sentence, under Article 5 Section 8 of the California Constitution, as a discretionary power that he or she can exercise “on conditions the Governor deems proper.” There is no constitutional or statutory limitation on the reasons that he or she can give for clemency, and they certainly include doubts about the death penalty in general and doubts about the justice of inflicting it in a particular case.

The European left says nothing about the thousands of political prisoners executed in China. Zero, zip, nada. Until they generate at least the same amount of faux moral outrage over the true evil regimes in the world, their phony protests mean nothing to me. – Lou Minatti

Lou Minatti could have disabused himself of this error by doing elementary research on European left groups. For example: “Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison — for the crime of raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson wrote to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on May 28, published Benenson’s article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners [1] that asked readers to write letters showing support for the students. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, writing to defend victims of injustice wherever they might be. By mid-1962, Amnesty had groups working or forming in West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Ceylon, Greece, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaya, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burma, and India. Later in that year, a member of one of these groups, Diana Redhouse, designed Amnesty’s Candle and Barbed-Wire logo.” (Source: WikiPedia: Amnesty International.) By any reasonable standard, the British-founded, London-based Amnesty is an example of the European Left. Amnesty also says a lot about human rights abuses, including the torture and murder of political prisoners, in China. I conclude that Lou Minatti has not done the basic background research needed to make himself less than ignorant about the European left. That only leaves the question of why he insists on talking about it.

The following statements involve grave conceptual confusions.

Whatever else it may be, Williams’ execution is not murder. To call it so is to erase the distinction between killing the innocent and killing the guilty. – Anonymous

2. Legal execution is not murder, which is illegal by definition. Every death is not murder, look it up. – Jabba the Tutt

Legally authorized premeditated killing is often rightly considered murder. For example, the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were acting well within the limits of German law and under direct orders from their government when they rounded up and summarily slaughtered about 1,200,000 Jews in Soviet territory. But so what? That was an act of mass murder, and the law has nothing at all to do with that fact.

You might claim that there are relevant differences between wanton mass slaughter and the execution of convicted criminals after the appeals process has been exhausted and clemency denied, that make the former murder and the latter some other kind of premeditated deliberate killing. That’s fine, but you have to give some argument for that position. Pointing at statute-books and trying to avoid the discussion by way of conceptual gerrymanderings will not do.

If Europe has learned so much from the Holocaust, why did they create new death camps in the Balkans in the 1990s? – Anonymous

“Europe” created new death camps in the Balkans in the 1990s? All of them at once, or one at a time?

If “anti-American” means anything, I’d say it means an inclination to blame America for every world problem, and to vigilantly search for America’s guilt while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies. – Glenn

This is sheer obscurantism. If “anti-American” means anything, it means “against America;” if you want to coin some new term to discuss people who have “an inclination to blame America for every world problem, and to vigilantly search for America’s guilt while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies,” you’re free to do so, but I have no idea why you think that this psychologistic reading has anything to do with the way that the word “anti-American” (as in: anti-Americanism, anti-American sentiment, anti-American activism, anti-American protests, anti-American politics, etc.) has thus far been used in political discussion.

The following statements commit overt logical fallacies.

If the death penalty is so barbaric, why is a significant proportion of Europe’s population in favour of it? – blubi101

This is a fallacy of appeal to the people. The number of Europeans who favor the death penalty has no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not the death penalty is barbaric.

You self-righteous Europeans who have committed horrifying atrocities throughout history, … you self-righteous assh-les are absolutely in NO POSITION to lecture the United States about human rights and imperialism! – Anonymous

This is a textbook case of the argumentum ad hominem. The fact that Europeans have committed atrocities in the past has absolutely no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not charges of imperialism and human rights violations by the United States are or aren’t accurate.

While there is an argument to be made that things like the Holocaust (not to mention the two world wars spawned by European countries in Europe) should no longer be used to suggest that the Europeans have an inherent propensity towards violence and savagery, those historical events certainly cannot be used, as Europeans and their worshipers try to do, to prove the opposite — namely, that Europe is somehow now the central repository for moral wisdom and universal human rights such that they have some unique ability to decree what is and is not just. – Glenn

This is quite likely a strawman. I think the claim involved in these kind of appeals is that they’ve learned from (horrific) historical experience.

Maybe you think they haven’t, or haven’t learned the right lessons, but this rhetorical assault on the supposed claims of superior “moral wisdom” and “some unique ability to decree what is or is not just” doesn’t seem to make any contact at all with a reasonable reading of what real human beings are claiming.

Incidentally, one of the essays to be presented at APA Eastern Division later this month will be an essay on libertarianism and organized labor (specifically endorsing a “thick” libertarianism advocating an appreciation for, and an alliance with, anti-statist traditions in the labor movement). I don’t think that the questions of rights surrounding strikes are specifically addressed in the essay, but it’s no doubt potential fodder for Q&A.

In any case, it seems like there are at least a few background questions that need to be answered before there can be any fruitful effort towards an answer. E.g.,

1. Does a “right to strike” mean (a) the right to coordinate mass work stoppages without retaliation from the State, or (b) the “right” to coordinate mass work stoppages without losing your job? (That’s an important question, since there’s a very plausible libertarian case for (a) but no plausible libertarian case for (b); libertarian theory would indicate (a) by the RIGHT to strike, but a lot of labor relations law leans more towards the latter interpretation.)

Also,

1. Do INDIVIDUAL people have the right to walk off the job?

… which involves several sub-questions…

2a. If you walk off the job, is there a breach of contract involved?

The answer to 2a seems clearly to be false in many workplaces, where employment is explicitly or implicitly at-will, without any specific term on the labor contract. But in cases where there is some contract that has burlier provisions about how long you’re supposed to continue working, there are the further questions:

2b. If there is a breach of contract, can you rightfully be forced to complete the job as you contracted to complete it (i.e., can you be compelled to specific performance)?

2c. If there is a breach of contract, but the answer to (2b) is “No,” can you be forced to pay compensation to your former employer? If so, how much and for what specifically?

My understanding of the current state of contract law on this point is that generally you can’t compel specific performance (so 2b would be answered “No”), although there may be exceptions where failure to do your job may constitute culpable negligence (e.g. airplane pilots can’t walk off the job in the middle of the flight). Also that you can be forced to pay compensation only for any costs incurred in replacing your labor (and of course compelled to return any portion of your money that you received for work that you eventually failed to render).

That understanding may be flawed, or oversimplified; I’m certainly no lawyer. But I’m inclined to think that contract law is mostly in the right here. Compelling specific performance seems to be either slavery or something creepily close to it, and if you have a right to withhold specific performance (provided you return advance payment for withheld work and cover any liabilities incurred in replacing you) it’s no longer clear what sort of damages you would be paying for if you were forced to pay compensation.

I don’t know if that’s your inclination too, but I think that any good discussion of strikes will, anyway, need to sort out the normative questions involved under the heading of (2), i.e., the questions about INDIVIDUAL rights, before any questions about the status of COORDINATED work stoppage by many individuals cooperating with one another, i.e. strikes, can be sorted out. (This on the plausible auxiliary premises that if you have a right to do something individually then you and your allies have the right to do it cooperatively, and that if you don’t have the right to do something individually, you and your allies’ right to do it cooperatively is at best dubious and in need of some special justification.)

Me:

It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.

Kennedy:

Stalin made it clear enough for me.

Kennedy, I’m no export in labor history, but the general impression that I got is that the Stalinist influence on Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) and the ST&LA (1895-1899) was pretty minimal.

In any case, the “at this point” is a clear reference to the later paragraph in which I distinguish the period in which the dominant force among American state socialists in the labor movement were electioneering Social Democrats, and the later period in which they were Communists in the direct service of Moscow. You can complain that even “social democracy” means a steadily growing and increasingly ravenous State, and that the SDs paved the way for echt Bolshevism in the statist Left, and that’d be fair, but if you’re basing your complaints on the more resolute versions of statism that came after, then it would be just as far to cite Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo as the end result of nativist, war-mongerng state capitalism of the sort practiced by “anti-socialist” statist labor “conservatives.”

Maybe we shouldn’t invest too much in picking sides in spats between warring statists.

REALITY CHECK:

Unionism is based on violence. It’s a criminal activity, which only exists because of the State. This exists in both theory and fact.

The Knights of Labor were founded in 1869, predating the Wagner Act (1935) by six and a half decades. Given that half of organized labor’s history in the United States was carried on without any grant of government recognition or privileges, and in fact in the face of massive police and military violence against organizers, strikers, and people who just happened to be in the wrong crowd at the wrong time, I conclude that your claim that “Unionism … only exists because of the State” is what we colloquially call “making shit up.”

Kennedy: I have no problem in principle with unions in a free market. In historical practice though unions have often tended to be dominated by out and out socialists.

What Holmes said.

Also, you need to distinguish at least three different kinds of socialists within organized labor. Early on, there were the electoral socialists (such as Eugene Debs or the ST&LA), on the one hand, and the anti-statist socialists (such as Benjamin Tucker, the International Working People’s Association, and the Wobblies), on the other. Both of them were considered the radical opposition (from different directions) of the mainline conservative unionism and “state capitalism” endorsed by Gompers and his cronies. But while it’s clear that there are objections from libertarian principle against the social democrats, it’s not nearly so clear that there are against the anarchists. (It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.)

After the Bolshevik conquest of international socialism, and the State colonization of the labor movement through the Wagner Act, the main ideological debate within leadership ended up between “anti-socialist” corporatist union bosses backed by Washington, and communist union bosses backed by Moscow. So much the worse for the labor movement, and the world, but there’s no reason to do these bandits the honor of giving them a monopoly on the names “socialism” or “unions,” any more than the rampant Mussolinism of the owning class over the past 70 years justifies giving them a monopoly on “markets” or “business.”

If you’re going to complain (rightly so) about the media’s language when it arrogates the term “locals” for violent white racists and “Muslims” for their victims, shouldn’t you also be a bit more careful than to talk about “the working class,” “the Australian working class,” et cetera as if it were composed entirely of young white men? Lots of working class folks in Australia are suffering on the business end of the bashing at the moment.

Fontwell, the question here is what you mean by the “wrongness” of a statement. If you mean that the statement is ill-formed or meaningless, many if not most philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries would agree with you. (In fact, I would too.) But the question is what sort of principled and motivated account we can give to explain why it is ill-formed or meaningless. Just pointing out a problem doesn’t solve it; the question is how you can have a language that allows you to make assertions of the form “A is true,” where A is a name or description that designates a particular sentence, while avoiding the awkward consequence that one of the sentences you might deny is the very sentence by which you deny it. Just banning sentences that lead to contradictions, solely on the basis of their leading to contradictions, has a couple of awkward effects: (1) it seems to be nothing more than linguistic gerrymandering; if I write “Johnson’s thesis is false,” then why should I be able to name it “Jackson’s thesis” but not “Johnson’s thesis”? What’s to stop me? (2) There are in fact self-referential sentences that don’t result in logical contradictions, but do cause philosophical headaches in other ways. Sentences of the form “If this sentence is true, then P” don’t directly result in any contradiction, but do allow you to prove absolutly any proposition whatsoever that you care to substitute for P. M, as discussed above, seems to be a part of our ordinary language, but it also seems to allow for the possibility of the bizarre disagreement between the normal believer and the perverse skeptic. And T, as discussed by Blar, is logically completely compliant — if it’s true, it’s true, and if it’s false, it’s false. But its semantics seem to shrink to a vanishing point; there seems to be nothing even in principle that could make it true, or make it false.

Blar, I think you’re right to show interest in T (in my essay I talk about it as an essential part of understanding what’s wrong with L) but I don’t think that M can be reduced to it. The simple reason being that T can’t meaningfully be asserted but M can (and was, by Marco Polo). I think that part of what a theory has to do in accounting for the “data,” as it were, is to account for the fact that Polo wrote M (or rather, wrote its equivalent in Italian) and we understood what he wrote.

One way to think about this is that when we evaluate M (and so, if we try to evaluate your looped case of M1, M2, M*, in such a way as to capture what M said) there seems to be a right order to do the evaluation in. First you figure out whether the normal believer or the normal skeptic is right about all the other statements in the book, then you count the assurance as false only if that’s entailed by the falsity of one of the other conjuncts. And that’s how you get the truth-value of M.

You could say, “O.K., well, that gives us a convention for calling M true or false and so also a convention for calling T true or false.” But of course if that is the convention, then we don’t have one for T, since T doesn’t have any “conjuncts” besides itself. There doesn’t seem to be any point at all at which it could be tied down to anything in logical space. So it does seem to me that there has to be an important difference between M and T; the question is how to spell out what that difference is.

As for the suggestion that we can translate M simply as M2, and so get the truth-conditions that we want, well, I agree that we can, but I’m not at all sympathetic to the claim that that’s how we should understand what Polo said. Because, well, that’s not what Polo said, and there are also technical problems that surface in most of the accounts that would give you some motivation for making the translation. I don’t know about you, but it certainly seems true to me that if Polo lied when he said, “This book contains nothing but the truth,” then his book contains at least two counterexamples to his claim: first, whatever it was he was lying about as far as his journey is concerned, and second, the assurance that he was telling the truth.

The difference is brought out by imagining a case of memory manipulation. You have a false belief about the way things actually seemed at the time, but it nevertheless truly seems actual to you now.

Well, you needn’t invoke sci-fi memory manipulation; faulty memory happens all the time, in small ways. But isn’t this just a case of distinguishing a difference in scope, rather than any kind of burly objective-subjective distinction? “It seems to me that I did in fact tell you ‘Happy anniversary’” [= S(P(T(i,u, h)))] and “It did in fact seem to me that I told you ‘Happy anniversary’” [= P(S(T(i, u, h)))] are just two different propositions on the face of it, because the scope of the past-tense qualifier is different. (Indeed, it’s not hard to see how different the conditions for their appropriate use are.) I think pretty much everyone who’s discussed the seeming infallibility of first-personal mental ascriptions has then limited it to first-personal present mental ascriptions, haven’t they?

Excellent post, Amanda. This is part of the reason that I very quickly came to hate the way that University panels on rape would always feel obliged to invite a campus cop as one of the “experts” on rape. Their (that is, his) talk would inevitably consist of a bunch of know-nothing hectoring of young women to keep to well-lit areas (there was very little talk of the University shelling out to improve the lighting of course), to keep their keys out for slashing an attacker and jog without headphones on. I’m sure that’s decent advice, but it’s not like they haven’t already posted this all over campus, it makes stopping rape a matter of constraint on individual women rather than working together for the freedom of all women, and it generally wasn’t even the point of the damn panel. (They were almost always convened by the sexual assault counseling center to talk about acquaintance rape. But, of course, the campus counseling center is hostage to campus bureaucratic politics, so they have to invite a cop to make sure that everyone feels like their “expertise” is being respected.)

Anyway, this post reminded me of the passage in Susan Brownmiller’s chapter on “the police-blotter rapist,” i.e. men who rape or gang-rape relative strangers in everyday circumstances:

The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.

A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or “spoilers of purity,” men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.

— Against Our Will (1975), p. 209.

Me:

It’s well known that habitual practice can change our beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, desires, pleasures, and behavior

mythago:

Then why are we complaining about porn?

Because the fact that men habitually use pornography for sexual arousal, sexual pleasure, and orgasm during masturbation makes reactionary content in pornography importantly different from reactionary content in other media. Both are objectionable and both ought to be analyzed and criticized. But it does not make sense to go around, quote Treating Porn Like Every Other Media unquote, when the consumption of pornography in our society has specific characteristics that give special reasons for interest and concern by people who are worried about (among other things) the fusion between sex and aggression in many men’s minds and actions. I already spent quite a bit of time explaining this above in explanatory comments to Amp, an attempt at saying it more concisely, and an attempt at explaining at greater length for reddecca.

mythago:

It’s ridiculous to pretend that boys grow up in a media culture that treats women as empowered, intelligent, fully equal beings, and suddenly when a boy picks up a copy of Penthouse, for the FIRST TIME he is exposed to the idea that women are inferior, fit only for sex, and the magazine will create a Pavlovian conditioning whereby masturbation will cement sexism in his impressionable male mind.

I agree. That is ridiculous.

Shulamite, “This sentence is false” does not attempt to ascribe falsity to the words “This sentence,” any more than “The first sentence written by Plato was false” attempts to ascribe falsity to the words “The first sentence written by Plato.” Both of them attempt to ascribe falsity to the sentence picked out by the denoting phrase.

Even setting that issue to one side, though, I don’t think your solution is even materially adequate. Among other things, it would require us to dismiss statements such as (M) for precisely the same reasons that we dismiss (L). But (M) is a perfectly ordinary bit of understood language. I think any theory that discards it is, for exactly that reason, not a good theory.

Shulamite: If “this statement is false” refers to some other statement (like “paradoxes are fun”), then the whole paradox disappears from the very beginning, and there is simply nothing to explain or even puzzle about.

This is not so. There are what are called “looped liar” paradoxes. Consider:

(P1) P2 is true.

(P2) P1 is false.

If P1 is true, then it follows that P2 is true; thus that what P2 says obtains; thus that P1 is false. But if P1 is false, then it follows that P2 is not true; thus what P2 says does not obtain; thus P1 is true. Similarly, if P2 is true then P2 is provably false, and if P2 is false then P2 is provably true. Any theory of truth that ascribes either truth or falsity to both P1 and P2 is therefore false, because internally contradictory.

There are also cases where we simply don’t know the contents of the sentence to which we are referring. For example, you might say, “the first assertive sentence Plato ever wrote was true,” or “the first assertive sentence Plato ever wrote was false.” Provided that Plato existed and did write one or more assertive sentences, one of these is true (although we will probably never know which one of them is). But allowing these kind of descriptions can be risky. For example, suppose that the first thing I say on Tuesday was, “The first thing Shulamite said today is false.” And the first thing you said on Tuesday — not knowing that I had said this — was “The first thing Rad Geek said today is true.”