philosophy/life


Shorter Noam Chomsky interview:

Question 1: “blahblahcognitivescienceblah?”

Noam: “Yup, and it’ll make psycho’s eyes glaze over!”

Question 2: “Anarchist movement…WTF, yo?”

Noam: “Coherence & foresight would be nice.  Oh yeah, and no more Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea stuff”

Question 3: “Government as check on other power, at least in long run: you = for, but reality = why bother.  So…why bother?”

Noam: “You silly idealist!  State > Corporate or collapse!!  Organize!  BTW: health care reform?”

Me, in reaction to response #3: “Circle any more & GoDaddy’ll slap a logo on your ass…”

So, according to Noam, though he in the long run rejects government, it in his view has to be kept & “improved” before then to ameliorate the same things that it has enabled in its entire existence, even though the effect is two tears in a bucket & the effort for even that is like pulling teeth, because…well, just because.  Yet in the next breath he talks about organizing radical labor in the meantime, as if Roderick could possibly be unaware of such a strategy.

It appears that Noam Chomsky thinks the point behind such moves outside of electoral politics as he mentions must be to maintain the socio-political system they respond to, rather than to undermine it.  If that kind of organization works though, then what would be the point?

That is, if you think of it as a poker game with a prolific cheater.  Or as a dog that the owner tired of watching practice his multiplication…

^^^^my general though w/r/t the type of attitude Kevin Carson talks about here, in a nutshell.

At CPAC, Glenn Beck gave his usual rant about The Coming Apocalypse to an enthusiastic crowd.  Along the way, he mentioned that he learned what he “knows” (LOL) at the library.

Cue realization of contradiction for comedic effect in 3…2…1…:

“Glenn, the library isn’t free! It’s paid for with tax money. Free public libraries are the result of the Progressive movement to communally share books. The first public library was the Boston public library in 1854. It’s statement of purpose: every citizen has the right to access community owned resources. Community owned? That sounds just like communist. You’re a communist!”

-John Stewart

Good for a chuckle, but there’s a larger tell of what this says about the Right & its incoherence.  It’s obvious why Shouty Glenn didn’t realize what he was saying with that line: he, like myself & like most reasonable people, sees nothing particularly bad about public libraries.  In fact, I think it’s safe to say if the extent of government were merely communal availability of books then there’d be little for all but staunch Objectivists to complain about.

Now, since Beck & presumably most other right-wingers in the U.S. aren’t including libraries on their list of Absolute Collectivist Evil, they can’t possibly be as purely anti-collective as their rhetoric suggests.  Of course, we already know this because they hold sacrosanct even more such things as the public army, public police forces & public national bouncers AKA “immigration agents”.  Their true argument, as a result, is haggling over what should be collectively provided for & what shouldn’t — making them no different than the people they scream about on the means.

As if that wasn’t enough, we have the fact that government is not the only way to do collective provision of goods.  Some on the Right even mention charity, of course, but there have also been co-ops, mutual aid associations, various cultural organizations, myriad methods of providing something to and as a group.  If something is a collective outside of government then there is no grounds, political or moral, to interfere.  Approve of it?  Then join.  Disapprove?  Then don’t.  Simple.

Sure, there’s the hypocrisy of using anti-collective rhetoric when you don’t have a problem with collectivism for things that you personally like.  But I would go further & say that other than the most devout of Ayn Rand followers, we’re all collectivists to some extent.

I personally want “public” to actually mean the public rather than the state, which makes me a radical.  Others, though they acknowledge their collectivism, don’t make that distinction, so they’re part of the mainstream.  Those who make arguments that suggest the mere idea of commons is downright wicked, when their true reasoning is “my collective is wonderful, yours is evil”, have a more appropriate label: dumbass.

Matt Yglesias had a post about think tanks, mainly about how the Right has plenty of them already & the progressive ones were established as responses.  I pointed out a less mainstream one in comments &, well…:

The term “market anarchism” is a dead tell that it’s a right-wing group. Proudhon, for example, wouldn’t be associated with “market” anything. Those idiots are followers of Gustave de Molinari . So we’re firmly in Bob Roddis* territory here.

This logic sounds familiar

(* - I added the Bob Roddis link so you can tell who he’s talking about.  I’d never heard of him until I did a search.)

Edit: I didn’t want to turn it into an argument.  Honestly, I more wanted to see Matt’s reaction, considering unlike most of the prog bloggers he’s actually encountered a left-libertarian before on a serious issue.  Didn’t even intend on this becoming a subject of a post.  I brought up the Labor Theory of Value as an example of something a right-wing group wouldn’t support & got this response from a commenter:

Actually Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner were both right-wing anarchist who adhered to the labor theory of value. It looks like these guys are mostly Rothbard fans, and Rothbard was influenced by both of those guys. Of course, being a good little Austrian, Rothbard rejected LTV himself. But I guess those guys didn’t get that memo.

Benjamin Tucker: right-winger.  You know, that guy that said of his own philosophy that “it wants to deprive capital of its reward”…

Matt Yglesias, regarding cynicism about the motivations of politicians:

If a politician admitted on television “I’m running for office out of a lust for fame and power” that politician would be in big political trouble.

If a politician didn’t WANT fame and power, then they wouldn’t be a politician…

If I too had operated by what Ta-neishi Coates now refers to as the John Mayer rule, I would’ve been a tea-totall — tea-TOLLT –fuck it, non-drinker until 2004. Where I came from, it wasn’t even a matter of getting fucked up with whoever I wanted to get fucked up with (though I wasn’t picky), but doing so with who was around & would accept you, which in my case meant white folks.

+2, but of this, which is like being +4 of the macros.  A bit on the high side but hella worth it.

No, not that kind.  Get your head out of the gutter…

This kind: if you have a Reddit account, I ask that you do Roderick Long (and by extension me, since I’m curious the answer) a favor & vote this up.

At Balloon Juice, a bunch of comments waxing philosophic on the purpose of the State — in the lead-up time to a State of the Union speech.

Now if only there were a little less “Conservative?  Anarchist?  Same thing!” shot through among most of it…

BTW: no, I will not be live-blogging it.  I only did the VP debate last election because I was expecting to be laughing half of the time.  Instead, I will be engaging in a more productive activity: playing Guild Wars.

When there is a void, fill it.

For example, here’s one, complete with helpful illustration:

In general, much of the U.S. population does not trust the large institutions that currently hold power over the system they live within.  Naturally I’d argue they never should’ve trusted them in the first place, but the million dollar question is how to replace them with something that CAN be trusted.

BTW: whether the limitation of the top two responses to yourself & blood relatives was intentional or not makes a suggestion about a possible void-filler that would actually be worse than the status quo.  Try to guess what it is.

On one of the many sites talking about the All-Consuming Turd Sandwich bill of the moment, someone from Europe chimes in about their system:

Where i come from, The Netherlands, which is far from perfect, i pay 125 Euro’s for full coverage. Dentists and pre-existing conditions included. I can have a television at my bed and a minibar if i want to, but that’ll cost me extra. We have 6 or 7 big insurance companies here who facilitate this and who are bound by government rules on maximum charges and minimum coverage. It works fine, there’s no deficit created and everybody is fully covered. Besides that there’s a government subsidy for everyone who doesn’t earn enough to pay for the premiums.

We’re a democracy, with politicians, which are to some degree polarized into left and right, but everybody agrees we need good healthcare. If our people are denied that, we go out onto the streets and make known that we disagree.

It’s that simple: Your system is broken because the will of your people is broken. (emphasis mine)

So, humoring this interpretation, the people of the Netherlands imply willingness to bring their entire political system to a screeching halt if things suck enough.  Well, if that’s the case then maybe you don’t need the politicians at all anyway?  If The Will of the People is that damn strong, skip the middlemen.

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