Anarchoblogs in English

• Seeing Like a State. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-07-03). I was just watching part of a Congressional presentation on C-Span honouring the slaves who built the u.s. capitol – not by making restitution to their heirs, of course, but by setting up some sort of plaque. What especially bugged me was the speakers’ continual references to expressing “thanks” and... (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• July 4 thoughts. Thoreau, Unqualified Offerings (2010-07-03). By Thoreau First, I should preface this by saying that I just went through a DUI checkpoint.  A dozen cops standing around at a low-traffic intersection, and I’ll bet that a lot of them are collecting overtime for this.  Interestingly, he didn’t ask me “Have  you had anything to drink... (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• The America John Boehner Grew Up In. Matthew Yglesias (2010-07-04). Conservatism Vs. The Past (Cont'd.) (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• Homeland Security Works For Disney Now? Announces Shut Down Of Movie Sites At Disney. Mike Masnick, Techdirt (2010-06-30). Well, here we go. Remember how, a few months back, we noted how odd it was that the Justice Department (which, of course, employs many former RIAA/MPAA/BSA lawyers) was designating a special task force to fight copyright infringement? After all, copyright infringement is mostly a civil issue, between two private... (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• Sumner Time Blues. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-07-04). William Graham Sumner said lots of things I like. (See, for example, his “Conquest of the United States by Spain.”) The following (which I apparently transcribed a couple of decades ago and just came across today) isn’t one of them: [H]ow are we to appreciate the work of the Constitution-makers?... (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• feministhulk: HULK NOT DOWN WITH COMPLACENCY IN THE FACE OF HEGEMONY. IF THAT'S "JUST THE WAY IT IS," LET'S FUCK IT UP! Twitter / feministhulk (2010-07-04). feministhulk: HULK NOT DOWN WITH COMPLACENCY IN THE FACE OF HEGEMONY. IF THAT'S "JUST THE WAY IT IS," LET'S FUCK IT UP! (Linked Sunday 2010-07-04.)

• On Celebrating Your Freedom… Radley Balko, The Agitator (2010-07-04). Libertarian activists Pete Eyre and Adam Mueller have been arrested for filming police in Greenfield, Massachusetts. (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• More on Immigration. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-07-03). I'm sick of all the pro-immigration articles showing how good immigrants can be for us. It's not that the arguments are wrong. They're just not terribly relevant to the essential issue -- the freedom of people to move without permission, unmolested by governments or private individuals. Emphasizing how good immigration... (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• The Political Animal. Cafe Hayek (2010-07-05). Here’s a letter to DC news-radio station WTOP: In this morning’s 6 am hour, your Capitol Hill reporter, Dave McConnell, excused Sen. Robert Byrd’s long-ago active membership in the KKK as simply being “something that had to be done in West Virginia back then to get ahead in politics.” No... (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• Blogs and peer review. Eric Crampton, Offsetting Behaviour (2010-06-30). I had coffee with Bryce Edwards over the weekend. His two year old is a week younger than ours; good times were had by all. But we both pondered what the New Zealand academic evaluation mechanism - the Performance Based Research Fund - will make of our blogging when we're... (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

• Let 560 Nations Bloom – Within the Boundaries of the U.S. flowidealism, Let A Thousand Nations Bloom (2010-07-02). This post by Michael Strong is part of Secession Week 2010: Federalism and Secession Arguably the simplist and most immediate path for “Letting a Thousand Nations Bloom” is to support tribal sovereignty movements around the world, especially in the Common Law nations of the Anglosphere like the U.S.  Other colonialist European... (Linked Monday 2010-07-05.)

I was just watching part of a Congressional presentation on C-Span honouring the slaves who built the u.s. capitol – not by making restitution to their heirs, of course, but by setting up some sort of plaque. What especially bugged me was the speakers’ continual references to expressing “thanks” and “gratitude” for the slaves’ “sacrifices” and “contributions.” If I take your wallet at gunpoint, it would be rather a euphemism to call your handing it over a sacrifice, and what I owe you is not gratitude. (Of course the language of sacrifice and gratitude is also used in connection with conscript soldiers shipped off to die in lands they’ve never heard of.)

• i just want to express my support for what julian assange is. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-06-17). i just want to express my support for what julian assange is doing with wikileaks. listening to the msm, you'd think it was obvious that videos of america's heroes slaughtering civilians should be kept secret. um, why exactly? i guess i could see how some information should be kept secret, though... (Linked Saturday 2010-06-19.)

• There is no libertarian case for restricted immigration. Less, Anarchy Without Bombs (2010-06-19). It is almost 30 years to the day since Libertarian Party Presidential Nominee Ed Clark set off a firestorm of criticism within the party for indicating that he didn’t think free immigration should be immediately adopted.  One of the strongest criticisms came in a post-mortem of that campaign by Mr.... (Linked Saturday 2010-06-19.)

• Bobbing Along on the Beautiful Briny Sea. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-06-19). From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department: [BP CEO Tony] Hayward took a break from overseeing the energy giant’s efforts to contain the undersea leak so he could watch his 52-foot yacht “Bob” participate in the J. P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race. If you put... (Linked Saturday 2010-06-19.)

• The Machinery of Freedom now online! Less, Anarchy Without Bombs (2010-06-18). More than 30 years ago, the first edition of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom was the book that first made me comfortable calling myself an anarchist. The second edition, from 1989, has been out of print for a while, but David has just put online a complete copy of... (Linked Saturday 2010-06-19.)

• Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Kevin Carson, Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism (2010-06-15). The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto is now available in hard copy format. The eBook version is here. (Linked Saturday 2010-06-19.)

• Three more officers fired - Burbank Leader. police excessive force - Google News (2010-06-18). Three more officers fired / Burbank Leader / All of the officers were fired for allegedly acting improperly or using excessive force. While some of the alleged misconduct occurred during the robbery ... (Linked Saturday 2010-06-19.)

• Louis Armstrong death metal version of "What a Wonderful World" Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing (2010-06-16). (Thanks, Adam!) (Linked Sunday 2010-06-20.)

• What We Read When We Don’t Read the Internet PRESENTS! Au Revoir, Pretty Horses; Or, Why I Don’t Read Man Books Any More. Tiger Beatdown (2010-06-20). "Some more telling characteristics of Manfiction: ... 2. Male characters cannot communicate with their sons, brothers, and fathers. Or anybody else, really; but they are particularly hampered in inter-man relationships (this is important to emphasize regularly, because the only men who are capable of talking in polysyllabic phrases to other men are gay, and the only thing less manly than writing thoughtfully about women is writing about gays. An inability to communicate is the literary equivalent of the empty seat between two dudes in a movie theater). Instead of communicating the men will drink a lot, commit random acts of violence, beat their sons or pets, and drive around in trucks without speaking. These men do not have daughters." (Linked Sunday 2010-06-20.)

From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department:

[BP CEO Tony] Hayward took a break from overseeing the energy giant’s efforts to contain the undersea leak so he could watch his 52-foot yacht “Bob” participate in the J. P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.

If you put that description in fiction people would say: “the J. P. Morgan reference is too much; your satire is too heavy-handed.”

Just saw Jack Conway (Rand Paul’s opponent) on Olbermann, explaining that he can woo conservative-leaning voters away from Paul because “I’m fiscally responsible in certain areas.” So which are those other areas where he’s fiscally irresponsible?

Apparently foot-in-mouth disease is rife on both sides of the aisle in the Kentucky senatorial race.

Okay, the main thing that caught my eye in this report is completely irrelevant to its topic. The first person to guess what silly thought crossed my mind wins what Stan Lee used to call a No-Prize.

I never actually knew what itching was for, so I looked it up. According to this article, it’s thought to be an evolutionary mechanism that is sending the signal something is happening on your skin that’s like a bug crawling on your skin, so go flick that bug off before it bites you. (Of course, as is often the case with such mechanisms, it generates more false alarms than genuine ones.)

Interesting. But this next paragraph bugged me (pun not originally intended):

The same fibers that send itching signals are also used to send pain signals to the brain, which once led some scientists to believe that itching was a form of light pain. That notion has since been dispelled by research, which showed that pain and itching elicit opposite responses. Pain causes us to withdraw and itching causes us to scratch.

Now I haven’t read the research the article refers to; there may be better arguments in it than the one described here. But the one described here is not impressive.

First, and most obviously: pain just doesn’t always cause us to withdraw; sometimes it does, but there are many different kinds of pain. People usually clutch their heads when they have headaches, for example; that’s the opposite of withdrawing.

Moreover, even if, counterfactually, all pains did in fact cause withdrawal behaviour, it’s not obvious that this fact should be regarded as part of the essence of pain. What’s essential to pain, surely, is that it makes us want to avoid doing whatever causes of the pain; but wanting to avoid touching the location of the pain seems a distinct and accidental feature (since touching the location of the pain does not always necessarily increase the pain).

In any case, if you find that case X differs from standard cases of Y by lacking feature Z, you’re then faced with a choice of either denying that X is a Y or denying that feature Z is essential to being a Y. In this case, then, scientists were faced with the choice between either denying that withdrawal behaviour is essential to pain or denying that an uncomfortable sensation that inherently makes us want to get rid of it counts as a pain. Which is the more plausible choice?

More broadly, while the question of what physiological mechanisms underlie pain is presumably an empirical, natural-scientific question, the question of whether a particular kind of sensation is a pain seems more like a conceptual, philosophical question to which scientific “research” is irrelevant.

Here’s my argument for that claim. Suppose that scientific experts announced tomorrow that headaches are not actually a form of pain. (I choose headaches because they’re more paradigmatically a form of pain than itches.). Headaches may feel like pains, these experts aver, but they’re really not pains, because they involve neuronal thingummy B instead of neuronal thingummy A. Would you take this seriously? Surely not, because feeling like pain is simply what we mean by pain – it’s part of the conceptual grammar of the term. Anyone who talks of something’s feeling like pain but not being pain would have to be using the word “pain” with a new, nonstandard meaning, just as someone who talked of something’s being a regular quadrilateral but not a square would have to be using the word “square” with a new, nonstandard meaning. (Or else using some of the other words in the sentence nonstandardly.)

The researchers described in this article may well have confused constitutive with enabling conditions. And that takes me to a broader grump about scientists, namely, that scientists tend to be unaware that there is such a thing as a philosophical objection to a thesis. They tend to assume that anything that sounds like a coherent hypothesis (such as the possibility of time travel, or the suggestion that the universe we live in is actually 2-dimensional – to pick a couple of actual examples) is thereby fit for empirical investigation, without considering that in such cases a) there is a prior question as to whether the thesis so much as makes sense (for if it does not, then those who take themselves to be performing an empirical investigation of it will actually not be investigating anything – or at least not that), and b) the training and tools to determine whether it does makes sense are the specialisation of a field other than their own.

(But then, a still more egregious problem is the philosophers who are confused about this.)

Intellectual property rights are a cause of disagreement between Lysander Spooner, Stephan Kinsella, and Ayn Rand.

That’s the first sentence of a paper I’m grading for my business ethics class. It seems true (grammar aside). But it strikes me that this creates a problem for my anti-IP position.

After all, it’s an established philosophical principle that nothing nonexistent can cause something real. Yet intellectual property rights are the cause of a real disagreement. Therefore, intellectual property rights must exist. Damn.

Okay, back to grading.

The Good is not being, but beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power. — Plato

According to CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security has had its eye on Faisal Shahzad since 1999. That’s pretty impressive for a Department that didn’t exist until 2002.

Wow, so government agencies can do their jobs just as well when they don’t exist as when they do! I guess that settles the debate over anarchism.

You’d think that if someone were going to make a whole movie about piranhas, they’d at least bother to find out how to pronounce the name of the damn fish.