-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:56 PM +0200 10/24/04, Eugen Leitl wrote:
Can you guys please take it outside? The majority of us just isn't interested.
Oh, please. <Tanto>Who's this "us", white man?</Tanto> Personally, I'm having a lot of fun watching this. What amazes me the most is that no matter how finely James cuts his logic, I'm still following him through the changes -- and I end up agreeing with him to boot. Tim McVeigh made a direct attack on his own nation-state because he thought it impeded progress and freedom. Islamist barbarians, and other luddite neo-feudal terrorists, attack the public in order to weaken their resolve to support their nation-state so they can impose, well, luddite neo-feudal barbarism. Fuck that. The libertarian argument against war is the most ethical one that exists, as far as ethics goes, but physics causes philosophy, not the other way around. From where I sit it looks to me that, whether he's trying to or not, James has been making about the best case for classic liberalism -- as opposed to recent cryptocommunist "liberalism" that can't even use that heisted label anymore -- I've seen in a very long time, and certainly around here. Look, guys, the internal and external use of force is just about the only legitimate act of a state there is anymore, and ethics has almost nothing to do with it. Force monopolies are an *economic* fact of life, no matter how much anarcho-capitalists -- like myself -- wish it weren't so. Call it Coase's revenge, or whatever you want, but transaction costs are sufficiently high in markets for force that they create local monopolies. These monopolies tend to gigantism because high-speed -- but still human-mediated -- communication in those markets causes large information hierarchies and concomitant economies of scale. Modern geodesic communications have started to reverse that, the Afghan war is a case in point, heck, the collapse of the Soviet Union into multiple states, possibly recursively from now on, is a canonical example. China's current cohesivity is a perfect exception to the rule, more a testament to their common 5000-year cultural heritage and their rapid adoption of market economics than anything else, the same as America's, for the time being, though for a much shorter period of time and for entirely different cultural reasons, freedom vs. feudalism, and all that. Nonetheless, humanity is probably a long way from completely *private* markets for force with a collapse to the bottom of recursively smaller nation-state "firms" in the meantime. My point is, you dance with the girl that brung ya. If the only way to kill barbarians is to kill barbarians in their bed before they kill you in yours, to pave over nation-states that support them, starting with the easiest first, it can't happen fast enough, as far as I'm concerned, and I'll gladly "vote" my expropriated tax-dollars for the purpose of draining the swamp that is the Middle East. Hell, the fact that every middle-class born-again islamofundamentalist jihadi "freedom-fighter" in the world is making a beeline for Fallujah, makes me *happy*. They're doing our work for us. Concentrate their forces, go in in force, shoot whoever shoots at you, and let Allah sort 'em out; wait for newbies to fill the bowl again and flush, um, liberally, until they stop clogging the porcelain like so much human excrement. Finally, the more that those expenditures on external force bankrupt the "welfare" system, and all the other anticoagulant bribes that "democratic" force-monopolies use to keep the tax-catheter from clotting up, the happier I'll be anyway. That's what Reagan did, deficits and all, and if it puts second-tier genocides out of business the way that he did to the first-tier ones, then "America, Fuck Yeah". Finally, apropos of every political development on this list since November 2000, and especially 9/11, doesn't everyone find it positively apocryphal that all the former Republican "libertarians", "anarcho-capitalists", "crypto-anarchists", whatever, reverted instantlyl to Republicans, and the former Democrats doing the same? Even the "lifelong Libertarians" are positively transparent in their underlying politics at times like these. Binary choices are such a bitch, ?Si? Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQXxftcPxH8jf3ohaEQKPDwCeM5A0xUmU7gsMuhLiGJIHR5xifQQAoJP3 HKxNhnNE0d5OTsCLG59yQ3JH =9NeO -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'