"If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall come much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic argument. Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great moment. It is this definition which has generally guided practice. In times when men feel themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as the spice of life. During a war liberty disappears as the as the community feels itself menaced. When revolution seems to be contagious, heresy-hunting is a respectable occupation. In other words, when men are not afraid, they are not afraid of ideas; when they are much afraid, they are afraid of anything that seems, or can even be made to appear, seditious. That is why nine tenths of the effort to live and let live consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is really a matter of indifference."
EDIT: Wow, the entire article is full of gems like this. Most lucid writing I've ever read in the Atlantic.
"But in public affairs the stake is infinitely greater. It involves the lives of millions, and the fortune of everybody. The jury is the whole community, not even the qualified voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public sentiment—chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents... If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor’s cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible."
The key thing to remember about Lippmann, though, is that when he says these "lucid" things, he is not actually complaining; he's describing what he and people like him intend to do to "manufacture consent". Lippmann actually had no problem telling the people lies if he thought it was in a good cause. His objection to the lies others told was not that they were lies, but that they were not in what he considered to be a good cause.
And this is basically Machiavellian political theory. Acting in an immoral or unethical way is not necessarily a bad thing if it is warranted to bring about a good thing.
The problem is that 'everyone is the hero in their own story'. Everyone who spreads falsehoods in service to some cause is convinced that they are doing the right thing and are trying to "bring about a good thing".
Is there any advantage in winning the war if by doing so you lose your soul?
This is - of course - a very rough synopsis of Machiavelli's treatise - even if he never actually said that.
But the other way of looking at his work was that he was the first person to develop a code of ethics that led to the idea of "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people"
I highly recommend the series from the blog of the this Renaicance scholar and specialist in Machiavelli which I discovered via HN the other day: https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/
He argues quite compellingly that Machiavelli's work led to classical utilitarianism ethics ("the greatest good to the greatest number of people") since he was the first to consider judging actions on their consequences rather than "what was in someone's heart".
> "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people"
Determining this, even with the information available today, seems like folly; like a never ending circle of statistical manipulations and justifications to support preconceived notions.
Action on just about any social issue of note can be argued one way or another to be satisfying this guideline.
I recall a rather amazing paper a while back arguing that markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P=NP. There are too many brutal NP-hard optimizations involved. I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. If these things were possible we would live in a utopia.
> I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning.
It would be worse for central planning, because in addition to the problem you mention, central planning has the problem of getting the necessary information to the central planner, which in the general case is impossible: the information goes up as the exponential of the population size, but the bandwidth of information channels to the central planner only goes up linearly with the population size.
They are at least in the sense that instead of a small group of individuals attempting to process all the information (impossible), you have a large number of individuals processing subsets of the information (possible, but can have it's own issues like missing the forest for the threes).
It's true that you could use twisted logic to change the outcome of what the greatest good is, but they don't stand up to reasoning. Anyone can say anything to defend their position. Many have just said "It's God's will".
Does that mean you can't actually know what the greatest good is? We can probably get very close to knowing it, and the little details shouldn't matter. But most of our "social issues" are squabbles over these details, and the good never gets done, or becomes reduced.
For all the popularity of the phrase "the end never justifies the means", I have never met someone who actually believes it. Just to begin with, almost everyone agrees with state sanctioned violence as means to maintain a social order, even if they find the action itself horrible.
I found the phrase itself more commonly used as a way to dismiss certain ends on the grounds of PC than an actual moral objection.
I have never met someone who actually believes it.
I've definitely met people who agree that choice and liberty is so important that it's better people lead shorter, less healthy and more miserable lives through their own choices, than be tricked or forced into prosperity, health and happiness.
I feel Machiavellian theory is more that some times terrible acts are needed to bring about "good" or necessary or worthy outcomes and should be accomplished towards those ends, but that the terribleness of the actions is in no way cleansed or justified by a worthy outcome. You might murder someone to protect a bunch of other people but you're still a murderer. 'Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown.'
I really loved and got a lot from his early books like Liberty and the News–about how democracy needs good journalism–and Public Opinion–about how public opinion was manipulated in WW1, and many other things. I've read it many times, one of my favourites. A Preface to Morals was the first Lippmann book I read, decades ago, and have read many times since. It's about..philosophy/spirituality and the deep needs of civilization.
Forgive me sharing a passage from Public Opinion, one of my favourite bits from any book. I call it "Two sides to a fact":
The statement is, I think, susceptible of overwhelming proof, that moral codes assume a particular view of the facts. Under the term moral codes I include all kinds: personal, family, economic, professional, legal, patriotic, international. At the center of each there is a pattern of stereotypes about psychology, sociology, and history. The same view of human nature, institutions or tradition rarely persists through all codes. There is a war supposed to affect all alike. Two men are partners in business. One enlists; the other takes a war contract. The soldier sacrifices everything, perhaps even his life. He is paid a dollar a day, and no one says, no one believes, that you could make a better soldier out of him by any form of economic incentive. That motive disappears out of his human nature. The contractor sacrifices very little, is paid a handsome profit over costs, and few say or believe that he would produce the munitions if there were no economic incentive. That may be unfair to him. The point is that the accepted patriotic code assumes one kind of human nature, the commercial code another. And the codes are probably founded on true expectations to this extent, that when a man adopts a certain code he tends to exhibit the kind of human nature which the code demands.
That is one reason why it is so dangerous to generalize about human nature. A loving father can be a sour boss, an earnest municipal reformer, and a rapacious jingo abroad. His family life, his business career, his politics, and his foreign policy rest on totally different versions of what others are like and of how he should act. These versions differ by codes in the same person, the codes differ somewhat among persons in the same social set, differ widely as between social sets, and between two nations, or two colours, may differ to the point where there are no common assumptions whatever. That is why people professing the same stock of religious beliefs can go to war. The element of their belief which determines conduct is that view of the facts which they assume.
That is where codes enter so subtly and so persuasively into the making of public opinion. The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them. That is why, with the best will in the world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature, literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes. “There are no classes in America,” writes an American editor. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” says the Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor’s pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and ineffectively those that contradict. If you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for different things, but you will see with a totally different emphasis what you and the editor happen to see in common. ...
And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgements or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole. It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a “question”, they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a “fact.” And they never do believe it until after long critical education, they are fully conscious of how second-hand and subjective is their apprehension of the social data.
So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an interpretation. They look upon it as “reality”. It may not resemble the reality, except that it culminates in a conclusion which fits a real experience.
...For the opponent presents himself as the man who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that scheme is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme. Rarely in politics or industrial disputes is a place made for him by the simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality and seen another aspect of it. That would shake the whole scheme. – Public Opinion, 1922, p81
> The point is that the accepted patriotic code assumes one kind of human nature, the commercial code another. And the codes are probably founded on true expectations to this extent, that when a man adopts a certain code he tends to exhibit the kind of human nature which the code demands.
Jane Jacobs wrote a whole book 70 years later about how important she thought this particular distinction was. (Her view is that both are necessary but that either can corrupt the other.)
I'll restate something that's often misunderstood about democracy.
The use of elections is not to find the "best" leader (for any definition of "best" that you have) but to prevent civil unrest. It offers an alternative to pushing for opinions violently in order to be heard.
For this it needs to offer a credible and legitimate path towards political changes.
Agreed. One of the best features of small "d" democracy is that it lends the government a pretty powerful argument for legitimacy. Which is perhaps the most important feature a government needs to last.
Edit: Consent of the Governed is probably the most powerful legitimacy arguments there is beside maybe Divine Right.
I disagree that democracy provides consent of the governed. To write with broad strokes:
Half of people don't vote. Half that do don't get what they want. Half that do don't understand the issues, and without understanding can't give consent.
You don't know what laws your representatives will write. You don't know how the obtuse legal language will be interpreted through a myriad of other legal artifacts by unelected judges. You don't know how the administrators of the executive branch will selectively enforce whatever does get written.
How does giving an almost entirely symbolic vote (for national elections) in any way convey the consent of the governed?
I never said the argument was true. An argument can be powerful without being true. I didn't express my personal values in regards to democracy or any other form of government.
Have thought about this a bit. Moving towards DD used to seem like an obvious evolution to me, particularly with modern technology. Following recent political developments I see a lot more risks now.
First of all is how do we choose what to vote on; a lot of power is rests on whoever drafts and sets the "framing" of votes. If we also do this "directly" in some manner then the filtering mechanism is vulnerable, and if we try to crowd source all the things we are likely to get "government by reddit".
Direct democracy moves power away from politicians and towards media (traditional and social), celebrities, opinion makers. If you believe we live in a world of misinformation now, there is a potential for direct democracy to make that much worse.
It's also not obvious in a direct democracy how you would control for holistic things that result from many decisions. The obvious one is how do you balance a budget without making the voting process very complicated.
I think liquid democracy is a reasonable proposition: delegate your vote to professionals, but take it back on any propositions you have a strong opinion about.
Having met some representative and politicians, I can confidently say that they are as vulnerable to misinformation, hubris and inadequate education than the average voter.
Switzerland has actually a system pretty close to DD with its petition-triggered referendums. I believe California has something similar?
DD is the possibility to vote, but it is fine to have representatives, as long as you can take your cote back when you want.
What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail?
Regarding the budget question - could we still vote on important issues and leave the rest up to the bureaucracy? i.e. The people have spoken. Make it so... If there is a major budgetary issue with a given decision, we vote on where to get the money...
Even if direct democracy wouldn't work officially - I think it would be interesting if there were a way to collect the general populations opinion on a matter at any given time and make it known. I'm surprised Facebook/Google hasn't done something like this yet. I bet you they would if some startup came along and tried to market an app like this.
> What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail?
You don't have to lie in order to make people vote in a certain direction. For example, you could give more coverage of one side of the argument than the other. E.g. in the case of the topic of terrorism you can choose to ignore it, or you can frame the issue in such a way that it seems that the viewer is at a high risk of being attacked, e.g. by showing old footage in every news bulletin. As another example, take euthanasia; you can explain the humanitarian side of it, or you can zoom in on the mistakes that have been made by doctors in other countries in this context, and make them look horrific. You can apply these kinds of tricks to almost any topic, I'm sure you get the point.
Online polls are notoriously inaccurate. If Facebook/Google tried this and it gained traction, it would likely trigger an onslaught of fake and stolen accounts.
understanding the world is a full time job. not saying the current crop of politicians are doing a great job of it, but the chances for Joe Random to understand the ramifications of his voting in direct democracy are slim
Moreover the risk of unmitigated populism storming the masses into voting some real shit is ever present; while a populist leader still have to work within the framework of the houses it would be extremely easy to con the people into, say, voting xenophobic measures during circumscribed but substantial crisis like the Syrian war.
Indeed, there are many obvious shortcomings and risks with DD and any other system - pointing them out is about as difficult a shooting fish in a barrel. But I find this style of argument utterly unconvincing of the popular truism that it would inevitably result in a clusterfuck.
Not only that, any time I read such criticisms, they seem to overlook the fact that DD would change the landscape. Perhaps people are "ignorant of the facts" now, and I certainly don't disagree, but can you blame them? If a democracy offers you only two choices of party, who differ very little if viewed from a perspective outside the Overton Window (which is constantly drilled into people's minds as a true representation of reality), then why bother putting much effort into it?
Of course, the average Joe's reasoning doesn't get down into such detail, but I believe the common man has a reasonably accurate intuitive sense for discriminating between sincerity and theatre.
To know with any level of confidence whether DD could work, it would have to be tried, with many variations, over a very long period of time. To me, this seems unmistakably true due to the complex nature of reality - and yet, the overwhelming consensus opinion seems to be that It Is Known that it could not possibly work, full stop. To me, this seems like yet another an example of intuition being mistaken for fact, a general idea that this [0] excellent comment touched upon.
> To know with any level of confidence whether DD could work, it would have to be tried
No, you can also build up a set of ideas of how people behave in response to desires, norms, and stimuli. Those ideas let you make predictions of how people would act.
Can those ideas be wrong? Totally. So they should be tested. But at what scale do they need to be tested?
If you've seen a 20-person student group engage in a long wankerous meeting for 6 hours until 1:30am, does that experience provide valid information about what can happen in a Direct Democracy the size of Singapore (pop: 5.6 million)?
> ...you can also build up a set of ideas of how people behave in response to desires, norms, and stimuli. Those ideas let you make predictions of how people would act.
Correct. But I'm sure you realize that there is a difference between predicting something and knowing something. Don't forget, "knowing* something is actually limited to under a certain set of unique circumstances - whenever human beings are involved, very few things are absolutes, there's just too much randomness and inconsistency (matters of opinion vs matters of fact, hypocrisy, etc).
> But at what scale do they need to be tested?
That's the thing: we don't know - once again, you can make a well-reasoned prediction (now we have nested predictions) about how well they need to be tested, but forget that you're making predictions at your peril (see: the current state of affairs on planet Earth).
> If you've seen a 20-person student group engage in a long wankerous meeting for 6 hours until 1:30am, does that experience provide valid information about what can happen in a Direct Democracy the size of Singapore (pop: 5.6 million)?
Yes, absolutely - the key phrase being "can happen". However, what else can happen?
- do we know?
- how would we know?
- does anyone actually care? Let's say, just for the sake of conducting a thought experiment, we could magically invoke an omniscient being who could provide us the answers to these and other questions. Based on your reading of political arguments on HN and elsewhere, what percentage of people do you believe are truly interested in discovering The Truth (the best approach to yielding the maximum benefit to all people on planet Earth)? Personally, I would put that number at about 5%, tops. To be clear, I'm not talking about people that truly desire the best outcome - that number would be much higher - but rather, I am talking about people who are willing and able to set their egos and axioms aside and truly open their minds to all opinions and reasoning in pursuit of maximizing the outcome for all people. Most everyone thinks this is what they're doing, but watch how they react to the slightest hint of criticism of that belief.
EDIT: I won't mention the dreaded d-word, but excluding "Let's say, just for the sake...." and onward, I would absolutely love to know any thinking on how one might disagree with what I've said? I say this in interest of improving my personal thinking, which I perceive to be sound, but have no actual way of knowing.
> difference between predicting something and knowing something
In common speech, someone will say "I know this will happen" when they merely predict it with high confidence. So would you agree that we've reached the point where we need to be more meticulous about definitions?
If so, lets go back up the thread a bit:
/u/LoSboccacc said:
> the chances for Joe Random to understand the ramifications of his voting in direct democracy are slim
> the risk of unmitigated populism storming the masses into voting some real shit is ever present
To which you said:
> the overwhelming consensus opinion seems to be that It Is Known that it could not possibly work, full stop.
The distinction between "chances are slim" and "could not possibly" is as meaningful as the distinction you make between predicting and knowing. Its not the same type of distinction, but it is just as meaningful.
So if you actually think "I don't think it's 100% inevitable that DD would result in chaos", then sure. We agree on that.
But if you think "I don't think chances are slim of DD being stable and happier than our current system", then we inherently start to talk about probabilities of future events -- we start to talk about predictions.
>
So that is the path of how one might disagree: By pointing out that you're also making predictions and that I'm making different well-reasoned predictions.
--------
> does anyone actually care?
I think for this question to be meaningful, you have to resist the temptation to treat the verb "care" passively. To care about something is to direct attention to it... hopefully to direct action toward it. We eat, sleep, and care within finite time. So we can try to choose what to care about based on:
- What impact we predict the thing has on our lives.
- What impact we predict our care and its actions would have on the thing.
- How much time and effort we predict we would need to spend for our care to make that impact.
- How frequently that prediction of impact is re-enforced with evidence-of-success that we recognize.
And we strive to parcel out our attention well among all our responsibilities. Some are better at controlling their attention than others, but all have limited time.
Consequently, I think very few people direct a lot of their care to the question "what is the best approach to yielding the maximum benefit to all people on planet Earth?"
> So would you agree that we've reached the point where we need to be more meticulous about definitions?
Most definitely, ages ago.
> The distinction between "chances are slim" and "could not possibly" is as meaningful as the distinction you make between predicting and knowing. Its not the same type of distinction, but it is just as meaningful.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but people not realizing (so it seems) when they're making a speculative prediction (as opposed to stating a ~proven fact) seems like a rather big deal to me. The "chances are slim" and "could not possibly" comparison is from two different contexts. We must have our wires crossed somehow?
> But if you think "I don't think chances are slim of DD being stable and happier than our current system", then we inherently start to talk about probabilities of future events -- we start to talk about predictions. So that is the path of how one might disagree: By pointing out that you're also making predictions and that I'm making different well-reasoned predictions.
Had I made any predictions, I would obviously agree.
I guess my point is, I take a bit of offence to:
a) people strongly suggesting our options are limited, without evidence
b) people using speculative predictions as some sort of a proof of widespread racism: "Moreover the risk of unmitigated populism storming the masses into voting some real shit is ever present; while a populist leader still have to work within the framework of the houses it would be extremely easy to con the people into, say, voting xenophobic measures during circumscribed but substantial crisis like the Syrian war."
If similar negative generalizations were made about people based on skin colour or culture, I suspect the reaction would be far different.
> To care about something is to direct attention to it
100% agree. And I have noticed a pattern of people not being willing to direct attention to the possibility that their predictions of the future, and observations of reality, may be in part speculative.
> Consequently, I think very few people direct a lot of their care to the question "what is the best approach to yielding the maximum benefit to all people on planet Earth?"
100% agree, which is my complaint. However, there is simultaneously no shortage of people directing significant attention and effort into pointing out that certain groups are "the" underlying problem with the world, typically with no evidence other than popular opinion.
You could use that same argument to say a representative democracy would never work.
As obvious as some of the problems are with DD so is it obvious the system would need some guard rails. Just as modern republics looked at the failings of historical ones and added features to protect themselves.
I have no idea whether it could work or not but it seems to me there's little empirical evidence to validate the commonly held strong opinion that it would necessarily be a disaster.
That's right. Democracy is not without drawbacks. However democracy solves one big problem - anything else is much worse.
Inventing a better form than democracy would be a huge boon to the humanity. It's a pity that research for better forms of democracy doesn't get that much funding, if any at all. For some reason it's considered less important than yet another food delivery service.
Yes, but put that in perspective. The middle class in the US today is significantly larger and better off than in most dictatorships in the world, and there are structural reasons for that.
Those European countries are also democracies, though. In many cases, they are more democratic, because they don't have undemocratic features like the Senate.
The Senate is not meant to be representation by population - it is representation by geography. A different slice of the country that isn't undemocratic.
Since both houses of congress need to agree on a bill, both of those different slices need to agree to pass a law.
This is just a different slice of society - one that doesn't favor the political party you are in favor of, and so you're happy to miscategorize it.
...but be careful. Eroding the public perception of legitimacy in the American system won't have the impact you intent. The only realistic way to convert to a pure representation-by-population system would be a revolution - and those seldom produce any form of democracy at all. ...and usually involve quite a bit of death and destruction in the process of NOT achieving their goals.
What are the policies they use for this? Education loans? I know the tax brackets help keep well paid professionals from transitioning too easily to living off of assets, ( which is what I would call upper class). If every good doctor and lawyer graduated to idle rich, we'd have only bad ones, and a bigger wealth gap.
Similarly, police do not exist to prevent - or even punish - crime. They exist to prevent vigilante justice because vigilantism is unreliable and destabilizing.
This realisation almost made me somewhat pessimistic about the fate of democracy.
Leaders always have to do the bidding of their citizens to some extent - if they cross the line too far, the citizens might overthrow them violently. They have incentive to respect democracy, because that will allow them to avoid physical violence when the citizens want to get rid of them.
The flip side of that would be that this means that there's an equilibrium to be found, i.e. the point where citizens are not dissatisfied enough (but as close as possible to it) to revolt, or are not powerful enough to. In other words, we're getting less and less democratic in search of that equilibrium.
I think Karl Popper ("The Open Society and its Enemies") puts it best: a democracy is not defined by how the governed elect our leaders, but how they get rid of them. Popper came to this idea when looking at Hitler's Germany. Hitler came to power through elections and then used the existing laws to become absolute dictator. But clearly his government was not a Democracy, so clearly the fact that elections had been held did not define a democracy.
Getting rid of leaders is also particularly relevant in the context of the article. President Wilson claimed extraordinary powers to conduct the war (sedition laws, espionage act, etc) and at the time the article was written, Wilson’s wife and aides were concealing that the President had been rendered infirm by a debilitating stroke. His wife was essentially functioning as the president.
The author, Walter Lippmann, was a close advisor to Wilson and had been an intelligence officer in France. I wonder if he was aware of the President’s condition?
Illegal and violent methods played large role in Hitlers ascent to total power. Hitler did not just used existing laws, he ignored them where possible and suited him, he used threat of violence and violence to ensure he will have power.
Existing law did not defended democracy enough and we're easy to be exploited, but did not allowed actual complete take over of power.
I note in this context that threatening to lock up either Hillary or Trump are not helpful. Say that in 2020, Trump loses the election, and feels that if he leaves office, his political enemies will find a way to imprison him. He therefore has very strong incentive to find a way to stay in power. That really might not be what you want...
I think it was a retired diplomat who was defending the highly criticized policy of offering retired dictators a comfortable and protected life in France. He was explaining that this was a condition to many peaceful transitions.
This is balanced by the desire to keep leaders accountable and is a compromise against the rule of law.
Saying that this applies to the US is really saying you have dictators who abuse their powers and are willing to bend the law in the name of a democratic transition.
It can be an exceptional temporary measure, but certainly not a sustainable norm.
1. Some on the left believe that Trump deserves prison, not just removal from office, and are quite public about saying so.
2. Some on the left fear that Trump will not leave office when the rules say that he must, and are at least somewhat public about saying so.
You don't have to believe either of these things to see the problem. The more they shout about #1, the more likely they are to create the conditions for #2 to happen.
I am not claiming that #2 would actually happen, even given the right conditions. I am merely pointing out that, given their stated beliefs, they should stop publicly calling for Trump to go to prison.
A real cynic might suspect that such people don't actually believe what they say, and are just looking for anything possible to yell at Trump about. A cynic of a different flavor might suspect that they aren't bright enough to see the problem. A charitable person might suspect that different groups of people on the left are shouting #1, and darkly muttering about #2.
...unless you're optimising for other things, like keeping leaders accountable to laws. If you believed a given leader had broken laws which would theoretically result in their imprisonment under the current system, and you believed that pursuing their imprisonment would definitely cause them to seek illegal extensions of their power, you still couldn't come to a "should" statement about whether or not to pursue legal action without weighing the competing goals of "enforcing the rule of law" and "preventing further abuse of power" against each other and deciding which one you care about more (perhaps with some assumed probabilities of various outcomes attached) -- and that's if you accept that the ends justify the means, meanwhile the means-over-ends crowd will want to pursue justice even in the face of armageddon.
Jailing Trump would be counterproductive. Taking such an extreme step would be destabilizing and make it more difficult to bury the whole affair of the Trump presidency. Would you really want a slow drip of Wikileaks about how compromised a US President was going public?
If I were a victorious president-elect, I would offer to pardon him with the condition that he STFU, and appoint a special counsel to investigate his crooked family if he failed to remain silent, or some kid decided to run for Congress.
With that kind of figure, it’s better to have him sell out and take away the mystique than to get a conviction and make him a martyr. The more you directly persecute him, the longer you’ll have people wearing Trump hats, etc.
On the other hand, normalizing corruption like has been done since the Iran-Contra affair, where people faced no consequences and were pardoned, is the reason why you end up with blatant corrupt administrations like we have today.
If Nixon or Cheney had served jail time, there would probably be more push back against Trump's actions.
The problem is that the president can only pardon for federal crimes, but it's quite likely that some of Trump's action also constitute state crimes - indeed, there are ongoing investigations. As president, he is still immune to prosecution on those grounds, but that ends the moment he leaves the office.
And there's an especially strong motive for state-level actors in blue states to prosecute - it's a massive political boost with the electorate there, it'll score a lot of points.
I think it's a difficult situation, and the only way I see out for the US is if someone developed another powerbase within the Republican party (quickly!) and it was in their interest to see him removed from office.
Outside that it just breed contempt for the rule of law. Ether he is convicted in a Democrat state and Republicans explicitly use that in the culture wars, or he's not and people see that the powerful don't even have to pay lip service to the law.
It seems pretty clear that in 30 years time we'll look back at this and think it is a miscarriage of justice that he wasn't removed from office (I'm assuming he won't be). But in 30 years it will be pretty irrelevant.
That reminds me of a truism I heard about protesting:
The purpose of protesting is to demonstrate the need for violence to the fence-sitters. If protesting results in change non-violently, so much the better. But the purpose is to demonstrate that violence is absolutely necessary.
One does have to wonder if MLK and Gandhi would have been successful, if they weren't alternatives to something much more violent.
Or if their opponents weren't willing to ramp violence up enough. The thing about Gandhi in particular is that he is famous precisely because he won. How many like him were there that didn't win, and we have no idea that they even existed, because their body was dumped into a ditch behind a prison tucked away in the middle of nowhere?
And sometimes we do know about them, because they did survive to tell the story - but it's not a very inspiring story when they lose, and so it gets eclipsed. This guy was a Gandhi to his people before Gandhi was even born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta-haji - how many have heard of him?
MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" basically says that one reason that the non-violent movement should be supported is because the alternative is violent Black Nationalism.
As an aside, if you haven't read it I highly recommend it.
I think it's an excellent example of arguing that a position is consistent with people's existing worldview instead of trying to force them to adopt a different worldview.
It's a gambit that can be used as leverage. I think they were expecting those in power to cave to their demands when those in power realized that people realized that peacefully protesting wasn't going to work, which is ironically what made it work.
Furthermore, in other cases, people don't have to realize the purpose of the strategy that they're applying in order to apply it. Intention isn't function.
Probably not, but there were other leaders within those larger protests who did believe in violence and called for it, but were not followed as much. From the government perspective, those leaders did present a threat of violence. Meaning that at any point Gandhi/MLK could fade into irrelevance and one of those leaders could lead the charge.
I don't think that's necessarily accurate. The Nazi's conquered many countries without exterminating their population. As I understand it they only attempted to exterminate Jewish people, homosexuals, and the disabled.
Granted even that is deeply evil, but it doesn't mean that they would wipe out any given people group that they conquered.
They also planned on wiping out 100% of Latgallians, 85% of Poles, 85% of Lithuanians, 75% of Belarusians and large portions of most of the rest of Eastern Europe[1]. The groups you listed were some of their top priorities, but by no means where they intended to stop.
> The Nazi's conquered many countries without exterminating their population.
On top of Generalplan Ost the holocaust had 12 million victims, 5 million of whom were Slavs. The only reason why they aren't counted as genocide victims in the West is because it was not convenient to admit that during the cold war.
As a percentage of the population of the time it would have been similar to the British gassing 17 million Indians after starving another 45 million. And that would have been in three years of occupation, not a century and a half.
So yes, India was incredibly lucky to have the UK as their colonial overlord.
I really don't understand how protests became conflated with violence (mostly in the US, as far as I can tell).
Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful.
Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise.
Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.
In the US, very little. That's because there really aren't many meaningful protests these days, because the US has effectively killed the public spaces protests rely on. But the Tea Party movement was arguably influential, and protests were its main tool. Occupy Wall Street was also far more successful than commonly believed: the 1%-vs-99% divide has become a central narrative of US politics, even on the right.
Outside the US? The Arab Spring was nothing but protests, and it did topple something like a dozen governments. Yes, the new ones mostly failed, but that's a different matter.
In Ukraine the protests succeeded. In Hong Kong, they certainly seem to be a major pain for the local government as well as China.
Environmental protests have succeeded almost spectacularly over the last decade or so. Germany's anti-nuclear movement relied on protests as their main method-the Green party was actually founded by a group of people who first met at a protest. Today, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and similar keep climate change in the news week by week. That's the sort of pressure without which the Paris accord would have never been attempted.
Compare any agenda from a G7/G8/G20 meeting a decade or two ago, and you'll notice that issues such as the environment, labor protection, or fair trade have gone from zero to dominating these meetings.
The US-EU trade agreement basically died on the day that half a million people in Berlin protested against it.
Obviously, it is often impossible to unambiguously assign causality. It's a complex system where everything affects everything.
But purely subjectively, I am actually surprised by how effective protests are. Consider Ukraine, where a single protest at a central square toppled the government. In practical terms. a Tiannanmen-style massacre was entirely possible. But the protesters won. Why? How?
It's a measure that's a few steps before violent revolutions - its a "we could, if we wanted to, but we hope there's another way", sort of statement.
I think a more correct way to put it/think about it is: protesting is a threat, not a statement that "violence is absolutely necessary". If violence were absolutely necessary, then they'd all just skip the protesting and do the violence.
Seems like they often exist to expose systemic violence that is underappreciated, undocumented, forgotten, etc. That is, show what the violent are really willing to do to get them to alienate themselves.
It's partly that, but it also serves to fracture and de-motivate the "violent people". A ruler cannot necessarily count on blind obedience from the military and the police if they start ordering them to attack their fellow citizens.
While some regimes get overthrown by mass uprisings, many more lose power because they either lose support from the security state or create an insurrection inside of it. Of course the lines here are often fuzzy.
That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about it in those terms before.
An issue that I see is what to do with groups who are two small to achieve their aims via democracy but large enough that they can cause unrest.
The textbook answer would be that the constitution places limits on democracy in order to protect the rights of the minority. However, looking at current American culture it seems like that hasn't worked since society outside of government is still free to punish minority views and lifestyles.
What do you mean by "punish minority views"? An important component of the classical notion of "state" power is that the government has a monopoly on the use of force. When coupled with the limits to the power of the majority (i.e. individual rights and limited government), holders of minority views should be protected from "punishment" that involves any use of force related to their protected rights.
That just sounds like normal consequences. I don't think it is reasonable to think that the government is going to protect you from the private-actor consequences of your "political views, worldview, and way of life".
To do so would require the government to become an arbiter of those things, which would be antithetical to the protection of individual rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and in general individual liberty.
Another point of view is that elections are way to make people believe they are represented and therefore won't fight a state that maintains the monopoly of force, which can impose taxation, arbitrary laws, and a lot of other attacks to individual freedoms that people wouldn't be keen to accept naturally.
Yes, that's a common view among several schools of anarchism. Reading Makhno's criticism of democracy, and his alternate proposals, which to my eyes seemed to be a railroad towards dictatorship, made me realize that I was not an anarchist but a social-democrat. Which is often a slur in anarchist circles.
A society where democracy can not work because it would be "corrupted by bourgeoisie" has even lower chances of making anarchism work IMHO.
Anarchists generally criticize representative democracy, not democracy in general. Makno's own experiments in the territory that his forces controlled were basically a form of very distributed and localized council democracy.
Having read the proposals he made after his defeat, his "Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists" [1] I disagree. He just talks about democracy, indeed talking mostly about representative democracy, but the system he proposes has no voting of any sort.
Actually, reading it reminded me of another such book I had read a while ago. Qaddafi's Green Book, where he lays down his ideal system, the Jamahiriya.
On paper, it is pretty cool: every matters of state are decided by local assemblies that can call for a higher level assembly when deemed necessary. But devil is in the detail. The Guide has a final say, in a bit of an unspecified way, exactly how Maknho stays pretty vague on the whole decision process.
I am sure that if Qaddafi had been defeated in his youth, many anarchists would be musing about this system in the way we do Makhno's.
Note that I was referring to the actual practices in the Free Territory, not Makhno's theorizing. The local councils did run things in most communities.
Qaddafi's green book is just a rehash of the council democracy. But yes, it can certainly be implemented differently - just as you can have a multi-party representative democracy on paper that is a totalitarian dictatorship in practice, as in e.g. DPRK.
I think better examples of functional democracy along these lines can be seen in the Zapatista-controlled areas in Mexico, and especially in Rojava/AANES. Rojava is interesting because they have an actual written social contract that captures the details of the electoral system, which is not very typical for such forms of governance: https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...
I think Anarchism is ultimately but radical direct democracy with strong emphathis on the principle of subsidiarity.
A paraphrase of a bit from the Makhno article on Wikipedia:
""" The first Congress of the Confederation of Anarchists Groups issued five main principles:
1) Rejection of all political parties
2) Rejection of all forms of dictatorships (including the dictatorship of the proletariat, viewed by Makhnovists and many anarchists of the day as a term synonymous with the dictatorship of the Bolshevik communist party)
3) Negation of any concept of a central state
4) Rejection of a so-called "transitional period" necessitating a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat
5) Self-management of all workers through free local workers' councils """
There may be a discussion to be had about these principles, but they certainly do not sound like "a railroad towards dictatorship" to me.
"Democracy is one of the forms of bourgeois capitalist society.
[...]
As a result, democracy is merely one variety of bourgeois dictatorship, its fictitious political freedoms and democratic guarantees are a smokescreen designed to conceal its true identity. " [1]
In his "constructive part" [2] he carefully avoids talking about assemblies or votes. It is clear he does not know really how to solve conflicts and just hope none will arise.
He also mentions the need of an army to have a unity of command, but just specifies this must be decided quickly, without giving clear advice on how to do that without dreaded centralization nor democracy.
Given that the "Platform" document was written with anarchists in mind as the target group, maybe the authors just took it for granted? It seems to be more about strategy and tactics than about ideological basics. Which makes sense, as it is an attempt to address and explain the anarchist movement's failures during the Russian revolution outside Ukraine.
One can claim anything about the goal of a democracy. Politicians are particularly good at "selling" it to the public with all sorts of marketing strategies.
In practice I think it's hard to fight that the ultimate goal of any form of government is to make the government itself persist.
I’m very curious as to how you define “work[ing]” in the context of a currently operating government. It would seem that democracies all over the world “work” for quite a few more people by ratio than other forms of government.
I’m also quite curious as to if you have alternatives; it’s all well and good to bash democracy, especially in the current moment, but are there better realistic alternatives? Are you advocating for revolution?
They certainly don't work for me. I have to pay something between 20-80% of all my income and financial gains to governments despite the fact I don't agree with anything they do, or with their existence. I never signed a contract with them agreeing on that sort of taxation, and if I don't pay the taxes the government imposes on me I can have my property taken away from me, get arrested and even be assassinated. I also have to comply with laws that are created out of some old man's ass, "respect" the police and the military otherwise they will kidnap, torture, or kill me, etc.
That said, I don't advocate for anything, nor I think revolutions or reforms would "fix" a centralized system that persists on the basis of the monopoly of force, such as the so-called "democratic" governments we have all over the world.
What I think, however, is that those centralized systems will inevitably and progressively fail due to their own inefficiencies, and as the transaction costs [1] diminish. As that happens, the centralized state's functions will leak into the decentralized market, until the state loses its ability to hold a monopoly of force.
I think we're a few decades away from seeing the end of the governments and states as we have today. The "alternative" will be a free, decentralized market that will emerge progressively as the governments disappear. We don't have to do anything "special" for that to happen. Just sit down and observe.
And who prevents the criminal or military leaders from taking over once the governments fail in your scenario? Are you saying there won't be anyone around who attempts to seize power? That isn't how things have played out in areas of the world where central governments have failed.
The more likely scenario is that we're headed toward a world state. That's the direction civilization has been heading since nation states and regional trade became a thing.
A third scenario (if cooperative globalism doesn't work out) is currently democratic countries gradually converting into totalitarian states in order to compete with China, who seem to be clearly demonstrating that Totalitarianism Done Right >> Democracy (and yes, with this approach comes greater systemic risk, but such risks can and are routinely ignored).
A fourth (ideal) way is a true New Enlightenment - true as opposed to (for example) what globalism is often mistakenly considered, imho due to hardly anyone thinking in a disciplined and critical manner, but rather rationalizing their personal in-group ideology.
That again disregards the fact that those regimes have to be sustained economically.
See, no matter what people believe, which gods they pray for, what ideologies they follow and how they manage their lives, they inevitably increase the means of production. Even if a given person is dumb and useless, that person would still prefer cheaper goods to more expensive ones, therefore generating economic signals for investments in production improvements.
Increased means of production mean lower transaction costs. Lower transaction costs generate decentralization. Decentralization progressively make centralized regimes not viable.
> That again disregards the fact that those regimes have to be sustained economically.
I don't really see how I'm disregarding that. I mean, sure, I didn't explicitly include a list of necessary pre-requisistes, of which this is just one, but I don't see why either of my scenarios are not possible because of economic constraints. I'm totally open to hearing any reasoning behind this belief though.
> See, no matter what people believe, which gods they pray for, what ideologies they follow and how they manage their lives, they inevitably increase the means of production.
Unless I'm misunderstanding (am I?), this suggests no examples can be found in history of ideologies being adopted that result in decreased production.
> Increased means of production mean lower transaction costs. Lower transaction costs generate decentralization. Decentralization progressively make centralized regimes not viable.
Sometimes, maybe. Many things are possible, this theory is just one of them.
"China, who seem to be clearly demonstrating that Totalitarianism Done Right >> Democracy"
I wish that was not the main take-away people had. China has a very unique economic system that does not require totalitarianism: free-market capitalism with many public actors especially in finance.
China could be democratic and maintain such a system. I'd like to see it tried somewhere else.
They could retain their micro economic system, sure, but could they retain their superior social harmony? Of course, it's possible, but totalitarianism (censorship, cultural cleansing, etc) is far from irrelevant.
And what about their ability to rapidly implement strategic policy initiatives, including displacing massive numbers of people against their will? Unfortunate for the individuals, but incredibly beneficial for the group, compounding over time.
The idea that "if a government fails, another government will take its place" only makes sense in an environment where centralization is viable economically.
There's this idea that "because things have been playing out in a way, they'll keep being played out this way", despite the fact the increased means of production (call it "technology") change things fundamentally all the time.
It's very expensive to maintain the military. It's only possible nowadays as governments can impose taxation and due to the currency monopoly they can print as much money as they want to fund that sort of self-preserving activity, which is technically called "debt spending".
As decentralization spreads over, the management costs of taxation skyrocket, and the currency monopoly disappears. Without that governments can't fund their own activities. Which means they'll shrink progressively. As time goes by, they'll start failing at providing law and order, and private companies start providing protection, insurance and private arbitration services to people. Further down the road those companies in their aggregate will start protecting people from the state itself. The state then either becomes a company which some people voluntarily contract services from, or it vanishes.
I'm pretty sure someone would say that the "evil companies" would then merge and become another government, but that's only if that person missed the whole point: in the long term centralization is not economically viable, and in a non-regulated free market environment monopolies are not really possible. As those companies are voluntarily contracted by people, an attempt to fight their customers would be catastrophic as they'd unrecoverably lose their business to competitors.
It's telling of your bias that you lament imposing taxes but ignore imposing ownership. I guess the latter is included in "accepted naturally" for you but there's really nothing natural in ownership if you step outside the prevailing dogma.
Ownership is an abstract concept enforced by society. It recognize the right to "use and abuse" of a thing. Some societies will forbid you to do things to your body. Some will outlaw some opinions. It makes sense to say that in such cases, you do not own your mind or your body.
I am of the opinion that it is good that individuals have total ownership over their mind and bodies, but it is just that: an opinion. I can't demonstrate it.
If I could somehow infer it being a "natural law" it would not be a satisfying justification, it would just be a naturalistic fallacy. Most of human society's goals are to fight against "natural order" because we, collectively, aim at unnatural things like justice and fairness.
I'd encourage you to read about the logic derivation of natural law based on private property through argumentative ethics, as described in the article I mentioned.
I have. I think they are bollocks. Have you read and understood them and are ready to defend steps and axioms of this thesis or are you just enamored with his conclusions?
Specifically, I think this is nonsensical:
"Second, it must be noted that argumentation does not consist of free-floating propositions but is a form of action requiring the employment of scarce means; and that the means which a person demonstrates as preferring by engaging in propositional exchanges are those of private property."
It is a well accepted rule in logic and debate that propositions have merit on their own, therefore the way they are stated is irrelevant, whether they consume scarce means or not.
The jump from scarce means to private property is laughable.
Actually I have a hard time charitably following his reasoning. It is obvious the conclusion he wants to reach, but it is hard to understand where he sees an unfolding of logic arguments.
Even if his claims were true, which are, if I understand correctly, that the mere fact of engaging in a moralistic discussion presupposes the speakers assume a kind of private property instinctively, it does not follow that this presupposition is correct.
That's a naturalistic fallacy. It can be used to justify domination, sharing, violence, death of the weak. Using it to defend something as obviously artificial as private property is news to me, and I think pretty hard to defend, but even if it did, it presupposes we should care about "natural law", something most philosophers learned to dismiss since the 19th century.
From what I can tell, having followed several mises.org links over the years, castles-built-on-sand reasoning is kinda their whole thing. They rely on the reader missing some obvious objection, or some unjustified leap or connection between two things, early in their “logical” argument to make it all work. It’s dumb writing in smart writing’s clothing.
If property rights are derived by the ability to argue then babies can't own property. But they can... If the argument is that someone else does the argument on behalf of the baby then anything can use that argument.
We see other numerous counter examples - court cases on behalf of animal rights, collectively owned property etc.
It's a simple circular argument disguised in lots of complicated writing.
That's only if you didn't bother reading it carefully.
You missed the point about the ability of performing arguments. Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. Therefore, for as long as they don't achieve maturity, tutors can act in the interest of the child.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property. Collective property can't be reasoned either. In any case, I invite you to try to reason about said "rights" without resorting to positive law.
Which other articles didn't you like and that you claim are "nonsensical"?
Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation.
This is the "shifting sands" technique that was previously mentioned.
Counterexamples are simple to find: a baby with a terminal disease, a mature person in a vegetative state.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
So you say. And yet animal cruelty rules are a good counterexample.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property.
Of course they can. Building code rights are a good example. Appealing to Hume's razor is another example of the technique on that site - it makes it sound like something is factual whereas actually it is completely non-obvious that it applies at all.
"appealing to Hume's razor"... I don't want to sound disrespectful, but that's laughable.
It seems that you believe that positive law (meaning: law that you "think" is right and want to impose on others) is perfectly reasonable.
The deal with argumentative ethics is that it derives natural law through logic reasoning. You may not like it, you may hate the conclusions it achieves, but it's only way you can build an ethical system that allows for the pacific co-existence of individuals in a way that is perennial in time and space that we can possibly agree on (but not necessarily will). Once you start removing constraints (eg. no need to allow for pacific co-existence, or no need for being perennial), then pretty much anything goes, and we're in the authoritarian/totalitarian land we live with today.
In any case, it really doesn't matter what I think or what you think, as decentralization removes the ability states and governments to exist, law will be progressively handled by the free market. How do you believe that law will be handled in a competitive environment, with no government, no "constitution" and Kelsen's pyramid for people to bow to?
In the end the only thing we can possibly agree on is that we hold negative rights on other people's properties. Even if someone doesn't agree on that, the market will find a way to record that person's actions against other's property in a distributed database, which can make the life of that person a living nightmare in a fully technologically decentralized society. We are not there though, so let's have authoritarian ideas pushed right and left while we can.
It seems that you believe that positive law (meaning: law that you "think" is right and want to impose on others) is perfectly reasonable.
Both of our biases should not affect if the argument is valid. If I can find counter examples to that argument that simply then there is something wrong with the argument.
we're in the authoritarian/totalitarian land we live with today.
Ignoring the pejorative judgement ("authoritarian/totalitarian"), yes indeed we are in the land we live in today.
I'm not interested in an ethics system for some world that lives as a thought experiment.
Seriously, do not waste time on the details of the "reasoning". The pillars of it does not hold water either. Even if you assume these falsehoods, nowhere you go from "you need scare resources" to "private ownership is therefore natural"
"I think this is nonsensical" ... "Actually I have a hard time charitably following his reasoning".
Let me help you a bit by over-simplyfing the logic:
- If I state an argument to you, it can either be true, false or indeterminate. No matter what argument you make to me in that regard, you'd end up agreeing with that argument, which means that specific argument is "a priori". Moreover, you can only reach a conclusion about my argument by being you, which means you need to have control over your own thoughts to achieve that conclusion (self-ownership)
- If we define ethics as the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space, the only possible way we can achieve those ethics is through an argumentative process (I invite you to think of a refutation of that statement)
- Self-ownership can't be maintained (therefore invalidating the time and space requirement) without some means (food, water, shelter, etc). Those means are scarce, and can only be used by a single person at a time. So if we define property as something that is scarce (therefore delimitable) and is being used (therefore modified and protected), private property is a necessary requirement for sustaining self-ownership.
- In conclusion: A minimal system of ethics require arguments to be produced. Arguments require self-ownership to be produced. Self-ownership require private property to be sustained. Therefore if the aim is to achieve a minimal system of ethics that allow for the stable and pacific co-existence of individuals over time and space, the agreement on private property is required -- and that itself constitutes the minimal ethical.
That said, it doesn't mean that you'll agree with anything I exposed. By not agreeing, however, you are implicitly agreeing (by stating an argument). The moment you generate an argument, by the means of logic, you're agreeing on the minimal ethics of private property (although you may not be acting in alignment with that ethics).
Yes, we are in agreement to what this so-called reasoning is. So let's criticize it then. I'll refer to your proposal by numbers if you don't mind.
1. is actually two propositions, the first one unnecessary to the discussion. But useful to frame the second part as as self-evident as the first one.
2. is simply false. We could agree to a relation of dominance. Several non-violent ways of doing that through cultural, religious, familial, societal means have existed in the past. Luckily for you, 2. is also totally useless to the argument being made.
3. Yes, if you define private property as the act of eating and drinking, then it is consubstantiated with our human condition. That's not the definition generally admitted though. My son (who is 5 yo) does not own anything, yet he eats food I own, is sheltered at our place, receives water we pay for. Does it make him incapable of reasoning? He frequently argues, occasionally reasonably.
Actually this jump from scarce to private property is the main problem of the argumentation. Scarce things don't have to be owned. That's the whole subject of the debate, you can't just assume it is true to prove it is true.
4. follows from 3 so I consider it invalidated. I'll just ask this: is a slave unable to produce arguments? Or do you consider a slave owns their body, food, water, shelter?
Firstly, the definition of ethics ("the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space") is wrong. Firstly, ethics are not-minimal. Secondly, there are numerous codes of ethics which lead to non-peaceful relations (eg many religious ethics).
"> Moreover, you can only reach a conclusion about my argument by being you, which means you need to have control over your own thoughts to achieve that conclusion (self-ownership)"
I don't see this as a given at all. A conclusion can be formed about some "arguments" (eg, X > Y) by mechanical means and others by other non-thought based means (drawing lots, dice etc).
Lemma (2) ("If we define ethics as the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space, the only possible way we can achieve those ethics is through an argumentative process") is false in many ways.
For one thing "voluntarily" ignores the numerous cases of involuntary peaceful relations. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) gave Europe its longest period of peace in history and was not voluntary.
Secondly there are numerous protocols that lead to peaceful coexistence without argument. Hereditary rule and collectives are good examples.
Lemma (3) ("Self-ownership can't be maintained (therefore invalidating the time and space requirement) without some means (food, water, shelter, etc). Those means are scarce, and can only be used by a single person at a time.") is incorrect.
There are numerous examples of collectives where people do not own food and just use what they need. Hunter-Gather societies are another example.
Still confused. The argument goes: we can only assess the truth of statements through computing, computing requires control over some resources (e.g., you can’t have somebody come in and flip some bits randomly, or else your computation might be flawed), thus any use of logic requires control of resources because they are finite, hence private property?
Doesn’t the first step conflate verification of truth with truth?
Argumentative ethics is not about determining "truth".
It's about deriving the minimal ethical that we can agree upon using a logic derivation.
If the aim is to determine possible agreement it requires arguments.
Coming up with arguments require private property, starting with self ownership, and extending it to objects that can be delimited, modified, and protected.
Turns out the requirement for private property is the minimal ethical, as we can only agree (or disagree) that we can form arguments.
> For this it needs to offer a credible and legitimate path towards political changes.
This, but it also needs to be trusted. The losers need to feel that they lost, not just be told they have by the winners.
This is why American democracy was stable after GWB’s initial election. Also, one of the reasons the UK voted to not change its voting mechanism in a recent referendum was that STV was portrayed as too “complicated”, while FPTP has an intuitive definition of “winner”.
This is why American democracy was stable after GWB’s initial election.
I don't understand this comment. I agree American democracy was stable after GWB (George W Bush)'s election (although I'm unclear if you mean the end of the vote counting or the judicial process here?). But I don't think the Gore camp felt they had legitimately lost at all.
recent referendum was that STV was portrayed - what is STV?
Yes! I want to say that the good flows from this stability. But I'm not sure there is enough of a track record to make the claim.
Another fun way to put this and make the point perhaps a bit provocatively is to say there are no wrong outcomes from a [free and fair] election - even if your choice didn't win.
I think it relevant to mention Lippmann's statement on Congressional investigations:
"So bad is the contact of legislators with necessary facts that they are forced to rely either on private tips or on that legalized atrocity, the Congressional investigation, where Congressmen, starved of their legitimate food for thought, go on a wild and feverish man-hunt, and do not stop at cannibalism. "
lippman also wrote a fake dialogue between socrates, thomas jefferson and william jennings byran after the latter died -- worth a read and also it dramatizes his views on elitism in public thought
What strikes about the theory Lippmann develops in this piece back in 1919, is that the entire argument remains coherent and powerful just as is, a hundred years later in 2019. In the meantime, various implementations of democracy across the world (differing in the way the elections are held, the distribution of power between the legislature, executive and the judiciary and the elections of those etc) have all pretty much encountered the same faultlines emerging.
By that I mean that the majority votes based on a confused jumble of propaganda and misinformation and this voting pattern has not produced the best outcome for 1) the protection of the minorities and 2) solving problems that impact every individual, that also require collective effort, such as climate change and poverty.
While Lippmann blames the impossibility of gleaning facts from the "inconceivable confusion" that is presented to the common person -- and this problem has only become much worse in 2019, given the ease of access to opinions in the internet age -- is it possible that fake news to undermine democracy is an inevitable feature? In other words,
is it possible that even if everyone was presented with crystal clear facts, they would not become rational agents?
That the opinion of the masses will still converge to something based on external variables rather than facts?
The article gives the impression that once the problem of misinformation is eliminated, the democratic model will truly achieve liberty, as Lippmann defines it, but it does not seem rational to subscribe to this belief, simply because there is no historical precedent (fake news and
propaganda are as old as democracy itself and the information age has merely provided infrastructural strength for its spread) and if we were being factual/Bayesian, there is no reason to believe in the redemption of democracy in the absence of misinformation.
>If I asserted that the Japanese secretly drank the blood of children, that Japanese women were unchaste, that the Japanese were really not a branch of the human race after all, I guarantee that mot of the newspapers would print it eagerly, and that I could get a hearing in churches all over the country.
Given how well Icke is doing, Lippman wasn't wrong.
"In a passage quoted previously in this essay, Milton said that differences of opinion, ‘which though they may be many, yet need not interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace.’ There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than of aim; the unity of the disciplined experiment. There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: the increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs. With a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact, differences may become a form of coöperation and cease to be an irreconcilable antagonism."
> We all use absolutes, because an ideal which seems to exist apart form time, space, and circumstance...
A 100 year old typo!
I always understood that the terms liberty,freedom,independence,slavery,bondage and servitude must imply a subject to have meaning. Two persons can talk about liberty but they presume the other person agrees the subject of the term in the listener's understand is the same as theirs. I think that's what the author means. But also, it's not just an ideal that is the subject but specific person(s).
The basic problem of our democracy in fewer words: „It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.“ Aristotle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)
Matt Stoller puts this into context in his recent and excellent book “Goliath,” specifically the pro-monopoly, proto-fascist forces dominating America at the time. And of course, he brings this forward to the present, where we are currently contending with and suffering from monopolization.
The other question to ask, is "What actually works better?". Precious few governments in the history of man have not been large-scale atrocity generating machines. Democracies generally seem to offer most, more of a chance than the others. There's always Trump... in democracies, the Trumps are constrained by law. In most other cases, the Trumps wield absolute power. Pick your poison.
I see no reason to disbelieve that ignorance decreases the human desire to act politically. If you don't know you've been wronged (or limited) and you don't know what change is effective, or you are supplied with necessarily limited misinformation...you spend your efforts in other pursuits.
Perhaps consider leveraging Occam's razor while you accumulate more evidence to satisfy a firm position. Or do you adopt a similarly ambivalent approach to everything you encounter if it lacks immediately presented evidence?
A potential problem I see in this approach is that many people seem to mistake Occam's Razor conclusions, aka intuition as far as the common man is concerned, as the truth.
I would argue that widespread adoption of explicit acknowledgement that in fact, many (if not most) of the the current Top 100 Disputes in the public sphere actually have an answer of UNKNOWN (as opposed to what 95% of politicians, intellectuals, and thought leaders would have us believe), would go a very long way towards kicking off a process whereby global society could start towards reaching consensus compromise on all issues.
I fully realize this belief is amazingly naive if considered within the context of objective reality and history, but I also believe it is absolutely true (if perhaps unachievable given our current state of affairs).
Knowing things for certain is hard. People are uncomfortable when an answer is unknown. They are usually even less happy when told something can't be known.
But I agree. My hope is that the frailty of human reason and the limits of human knowledge can become wider spread and that can help people stop holding such confident and unwaivering views.
Are the emergent properties of a near random system preferable to live alongside/underneath? I suspect your answer mostly depends on your current socioeconomic status and overall faith in “the system”.
If you support unrestricted speech, then you support legalisation of lies, fraud, vilification, threats, child abuse pornography, yelling "Fire!" in crowded theatres, abandonment of copyright, spreading of state secrets, insider trading, you name it. It's not surprising that few dare to advocate it.
As the article discussed, people generally want free speech for the things they approve of, and restrictions on speech about things they think are bad. There are some things that seem to have overwhelming public support, like bans on child porn, terrorist videos, and copyright violation. I'm thinking of specific events like the Christchurch shootings, where there was a lot of public outcry along the lines of "such things shouldn't be allowed on the Internet", and 8chan was eventually kicked off Cloudfare. I guess when people want something banned, they want it gone for good, including from the likes of Tor hidden services. But that won't stop them from going to the same kinds of services to access some information that they think has been unfairly banned.
I also find it ironic to be censored when commenting on topics related to censorship, or at least greyed out to -4, which is about as much as can be achieved without moderator assistance, I think.
A very curious thing happened in Australia wrt the Christchurch shooting.
In NZ, there was a law at the time that allowed the government to basically designate the video as illegal, forcing ISPs to take it down - or perhaps it would be better to say, allowing them to avoid making a choice either way. But that was not the case in Australia. So after NZ took it down, the Australian ISPs voluntarily censored the video - all of them in concert, acting, effectively, as a private censorship cartel. And it was a very intrusive form of censorship - not only they blocked the video itself, but any blog or forum that posted a link to it, and refused to remove it, was itself blocked. There were several large forums that were blocked in that manner, because they had a subforum with an "everything goes so long as it's not illegal" policy, where people can rant and vent and have flame wars. Furthermore, the ISPs refused to publish the exact list of websites that were banned, or even confirm or deny whether any particular one was banned.
And despite it being a country-wide block on some information - much as the Great Firewall censors e.g. any Tienanmen photos - as a private action, it was completely legal, with no third party review, oversight, or appeal. Something to ponder when we're talking about freedom of information in developed Western countries...
ISPs should be neutral information carriers. It should be illegal for them to try to influence society by censoring data flowing through their networks. What stops them from voluntarily censoring everything related to a political party they don't support?
> child porn, terrorist videos, and copyright violation
One of these is not like the others.
> "such things shouldn't be allowed on the Internet"
This is why people created things like Tor in the first place. The internet is not a country. Nobody should get to decide what is and isn't allowed on the internet.
> the reality is every first world country's internet backbone is controlled by the state
We need to move beyond this. Some kind of world-wide mesh network would be great. Perhaps phones will become this one day.
If we don't, the internet as we know it today will be destroyed. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. This will lead to a regionalization of the internet: each country will have its own.
> should information be allowed to flow freely?
Yes. If some information is not meant to flow freely, it shouldn't exist at all. Laws must be enforced before the data is created. Instead of making information illegal, target the activity that generates the information.
There's obviously tension between the typical belief that not all information should be allowed to flow freely, and the limited tolerance of "safe spaces" like Tor, encrypted chat channels and sites like Sci-Hub where information does indeed flow freely.
I can't think of anything less controversial in international main-stream politics than copyright. Pretty much every country in the world has signed up to at least the Berne Convention, even certain so-called rogue states. When was the last time any country reduced the length of its copyright terms? Are there any large political parties, anywhere, that even advocate it?
Countries step out of other treaties occasionally, even major things like the EU, climate change and weapons limitation, but copyright is sacred.
I suspect that some form of state secret law is also found in practically every country, and any political controversy is only in the details of how its used and misused, not in the concept.
Copyright was pretty much imposed on the entire world via trade agreements. Adopting US-style intellectual property laws is pretty much a requirement for trading with the US. They even put countries with lax enforcement on a watch list. It's sacred because the multibillion dollar copyright industry spends a lot of its money lobbying governments.
This doesn't change the fact that copyright infringement is so trivial copyright might as well be incompatible with the 21st century. Actually enforcing copyright requires sacrificing free computing and the free internet as we know it today. Humanity should sacrifice the entire copyright industry instead so that computers can remain free. Abolish copyright and let them die if they can't adapt.
My problem is not with state secrets but with how governments prosecute their revelation. Whistleblowers are treated like traitors when they reveal the abuses perpetrated by governments under the cover of national security. Of course, the governed doesn't have the privilege of keeping secrets by using encryption: authorities and judges feel disrespected when they can't get access to information and punish people without proof almost out of spite.
The EU is pretty enthusiastic about copyright too, I don't blame solely the US.
> Humanity should sacrifice the entire copyright industry instead so that computers can remain free.
I agree, but I don't think it's likely to happen. Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information. At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue.
> Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information.
True. It's not just copyright though. Free computing is a direct threat to the power of governments. Encryption is powerful enough to defeat entire militaries. They don't want mere citizens to have this power. They want a future where computers only run software signed by the government.
This is likely to happen because electronics manufacturing is extremely expensive and centralized. We can write our own software but we can't make our own processors. Due to Intel ME, we already know how dangerous trusting these manufacturers can be.
Perhaps FPGAs will change this one day. What if people could design and implement their own CPUs? Someone just posted this:
> At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue.
It's not an uneasy coexistence. It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, people make technology that circumvents those laws. The government must always increase its reach just to maintain the same level of control over the governed. We'll end up with either a tyrant government that considers programmers a threat to national security or an ungovernable population that has access to ubiquitous subversive technology.
Governments wouldn't have much trouble shutting down Tor nodes in their own territory, as far as I know, since they can trace the IP addresses back to physical computers. Generally, they don't, which is the "uneasy coexistence" aspect. Perhaps they have legal reasons for not shutting it down, such as the US constitution, or perhaps they find it useful for their own purposes to keep it running, or perhaps they just don't care because it's not used widely enough.
I can imagine an outcome in which the illegal information is driven further underground and no longer accessible at publicly known locations. Like the hidden ftp sites that supposedly exist in the "Warez scene".
The trend that most people no longer keep their own data on their own devices, but use streaming sites and cloud servers, will presumably help keep information under control.
EDIT: Wow, the entire article is full of gems like this. Most lucid writing I've ever read in the Atlantic.
"But in public affairs the stake is infinitely greater. It involves the lives of millions, and the fortune of everybody. The jury is the whole community, not even the qualified voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public sentiment—chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents... If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor’s cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible."