Airport insanity

[R.A. Hettinga]

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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

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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'