Ha!

Another one bites the dust:

Jerome Tuccille: Left and Right - the Psychology of Opposites

and good riddance

Butcher Augusto has joined his buddy Reagan in Hell.

Now what's irritating is that the Polish libertarian community is blindly devoted to anything that's ever been said to be in favour of free markets, murder or no murder, corporate fascism or no corporate fascism. Consequently, we can expect lots of fawning over Miracle Boy and miscellaneous posthumous adoration. And that's really sad - that Polish right-wing libertarians - or conservative-liberals, as they like to call themselves, who are usually stepped in the arcana of Christian theology and philosophy have failed to absorb one basic lesson that so many American libertarians have been repeating for such a long time - never trust a polititian.

I suppose that it's the extreme socialistophobia that marks my fellow libertarians in our part of the globe pushes them to revere anything anti-communist. How fortunate for us (paradoxically) that libertarianism has not yet become a particularly well-known political truth and we've managed to avoid being branded by the media with the stigma of Reaganism or Pinochetism. Before we venture out into the wide, wild world of Polish politics we first have to shed libertarianism of this kind of ignorant reverence towards strongmen.

In other words, Poland needs a Libertarian Left.

Now.

[Technorati: left, libertarianism, Poland]

Self-Promotion

My Polish translations of various articles are available at the Liberator portal, but they're already pretty much buried under the news, so I'll post the links here if anybody is interested:

Karl Hess "The Death of Politics" (the letters at the end are cut a bit)

Murray Rothbard "Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"

Ben Tucker "State Socialism and Anarchism"

I've also sent Tom DiLorenzo's "Tax Gouging" and MacKenzie's "Myth of Functional Finance" to the Polish Mises Institute and Tucker's "Why I am an Anarchist" to Liberator and the translations are still pending publication I guess.

It takes an Agora

It's always the children, always for the children, always through the children. But it's never really about a child. It doesn't really come into the governmental equation. Its usefulness to the State is limited to its belonging to a particular abstraction.

Such was the case with the child of the Monahan family, which went through purgatory at the hands of the airport Cheka four years ago. I'm not exaggerating when I say my hand are still trembling after reading the horrifying account, which just about shows the ingenuity power-adorned officials display in coming up with new ways of depriving of their dignity the victims of their protection. As if the injury and insult weren't enough, some officer-in-league decided to show in this letter just how unmitigated his gall and indifference are. Our nigh illiterate friend does have an uncanny aptitude towards irony as he prompts all to 'put down our newspapers full of bs, one sided stories and get an opinon of our own' just before implying that to be indignant over the embarrassment and emotional trauma that one's wife incurred because of the 'job' the screeners are 'doing' is to want another 9/11 to happen.
Our humble officer feels 'disgusted' because of the 'total lack of confidence' of Mr. Monahan's 'in the TSA'. That's interesting, cause I'm likewise disgusted at the lengths to which some people, the letter's author included, are willing to go in order to justify their colleagues' deeds and, more generally, the perverse rules that they are willing to obey as part of their employment.

I feel dirty trying to use Mr. Monahan's terrible experiences to make some kind of point, especially that they largely speak for themselves. I think that the behaviour of the Portland screeners shows just how alienated public officers are from the very people they are supposed to serve. They've stopped seeing people as people and started portraying them in categories, in faceless blobs: there's the 'officer' blob, the 'terrorist' blob and the 'potential terrorist' blob. That's how we are all supposed to think in the modern world, especially post-9/11. As blobbying becomes more prevalent, fear of one another becomes more acute and we're coming to a point where trust is too dangerous a feeling to harbour, a burden, a liability. Is this intentional on the part of the lawmakers and their lapdog corporate media? I don't know and I don't think it's really all that relevant any more. What matters is that the USA are fighting an enemy they can never defeat and whose hostility is probably fueled by the very struggle against it and that until that enemy is defeated - that is, never - society cannot function any more. Communities dissolve into tribes kept alive by some semblance of mutual trust - the officer tribe, the elderly tribe, the million mom tribe - whatever - and are pitted against each other in a carnival of hatred on display for our leaders. Though I'm not trying to jutify what the screeners were doing, I'm willing to say they're just as much victims of this new world chaos as everybody else is. It's just so much easier to be indifferent and blame it on the law, on the superiors, on the 'job'. And it's just the beginning of the road that we're facing. These tensions will not just dissipate - they will aggravate. And that's a scary thought.

All this fear and tension can be easily traced back to the State - its wars, its unjust laws, its conflicts and attritions. But some people would never let society organise itself spontaneously and voluntarily - ooo no! After all, a nation not moulded in their image would offend their delicate sensibilities. Their utopian schemes would be - gasp! - left unenforced on everybody else in the world. It reminds me of an article by Jerome Tuccille (I believe) in one Libertarian Forum issue about the "right-wing" and "left-wing" mindsets. The right-winger is concerned with abstract principles and rational ideas. The left-winger is concerned with actual people and how they fare in the world. Of course, nobody in their right mind would suggest that neocons have any kind of principles or that liberals actually care about the poor - this distinction is more of an archetypal one. It is worth noting, however, that the beliefs of statists are more often than not rooted in some kind of mental fantasy - "a world without the poor" "a world without terrorism" "it's for the children" etc. While libertarians has often been accused of looking only at abstract principles and utopian ideas, it is the statists themselves who are most often guilty of it. Hopefully liberts will be able to free themselves from this preconception and the MLL is a good step on the way.

It sure as hell takes a village to raise a child. But there are those who sow the seeds of aggression and fear in our midst. Let us get rid of them and make sure they don't threaten our village - our Agora - again.

[Technorati: agorism, libertarianism]

First Thing's First // Two Paradoxes Choice

First of all, I welcome You warmly, visitor, to my humble corner of the Innernets. Now, let's get down to business.



Watching Roderick Long's "Foundations of Libertarian Ethics" lectures has been taking me some time, mostly because it's pretty thought-provoking and requires pondering the issues at hand a bit. So now, months after the lectures were made available, I'm still at the third one, dealing with two cute lil' paradoxes. I'm not really satisfied with the explanations that Mr. Long gives, so I'll throw in my own thoughts on this.

Being the staunch determinist that I am, I'm inclined to disagree with Mr. Long's disproving of causal determinism. The logic behind the proof goes as follows:
a) One can't aim at a certain past situation that is settled
b) Causation implies that the present/future state of events covaries with the past state of events
c) One can aim at a certain present/future state of events
d) Therefore, one can aim at a certain present/future state of events which implies a certain past state of events
e) d) and a) lead to a contradiction


The problem that I have with this reasoning is that although it is true that it makes no sense to aim at bringing about a certain past, the actor does not know that. The actor operates on his belief that he can bring about a certain future through a certain action, that is, on his belief in free will. The actor thinks that his actions are independent of the past, so if the actor also happens to believe in causation, which is also the assumption here (otherwise the actor couldn't aim at something in the past, because he would not think it covaried with his actions in the present), it should be to no one's surprise that the actor's reasoning is contradictory.

Now what if we were to drop the free-will assumption of our little hero's? Since the definition of 'aiming' is based on free will, we run into a problem - if free will doesn't exist, does the concept of 'aiming at a future' become meaningless? Not nessecarily.
I think it is safe to say that the actor is ignorant of certain elements of the past and certain elements of the future. Therefore, though the actor knows that there is only one possible future, he does not know what the future will be and can have certain preferences concerning it. So he may wish that the future that will come about is the one he prefers. Only then can he make a decision concerning his present actions, and, consequently, the future that he wishes to bring about. Now 'decision' certainly sounds free-willish, but we should note that the 'decision' is based on:
1) preferences concerning the future, which had been settled in the past;
2) analysis of the possible futures given the information about the past and present that Joe Sixpack has access to - also made in the past;
and 3) the biological determination to make decicions according to preferences, which directly precedes the decision itself in the chain of causation, and so must also precede the decision in time
In fact, therefore, though the decision that Joe makes aims at bringing about a certain future, it is determined by events in the past, none of which requires any semblance of free will. Therefore, we can think about decisions and goals in a fully deterministic framework and not run into a contradiction.

I do realise that this is a rather convoluted way of thinking about decision-making and, apparently, nature also thought so. That's why, I believe, denial of the existence of free will seems counterintuitive - because in some weird evolutionary process, humans have been ingrained with the belief in their free will - which certainly makes things easier, but also leads to all sorts of paradoxes, like the ones Mr. Long presents. Of course, this is but a conjecture of mine, but it certainly seems more plausible to me than assuming that human beings are somehow 'special' compared to the rest of surrounding reality, which certainly seems causal.

In the same way, the paradox with the two boxes that Mr. Long presents at the beginning of his lecture can be easily resolved when we drop the implicit assumption of free will. Now, again, Mr. Long assumes that the person making the choice (let's call him 'the decider') can indeed make both choices. But if determinism is true, then, though it may sound counterintuitive and weird, the person's choice is determined by what is in the boxes. Or, more accurately, the situation in a point in time where the infallible predictor predicts the future can lead to only two possible outcomes: one where the decider chooses the opaque box and it contains a million dollars and one in which the decider chooses both boxes and gets only a thousand. One can theoretically make the claim that one 'should' or 'shouldn't' pick one box or the other but the problem is that whether the decider chooses to follow either advice is already determined.
One beef that I have with the example above is the notion of the 'infallible predictor'. I think that it could be proven that even in a perfectrly deterministic framework such a concept is meaningless, but suffice to say, I don't feel up to the task right now and it has little bearing on the example itself.

The second example is a bit more straightforward. I've no qualms with Mr. Long's treatment of it, up to the point, of course, when he adresses determinism once again. This time the reason he presents for determinism's falsehood is that the desire to act is an element of action itself and need not predate it. I fail to understand how Mr. Long came to the conclusion that desire or preference does not predate action, as to me it seems blatantly false. If desire and action occur at the same time then the action one takes is completely baseless and completely random.

Now Mr. Long takes up quantum physics next and here I have to admit I have no way answering to this objection to determinism. Suffice to say that it still doesn't convince me as even though there might be some kind of indeterministic element in reality, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on it - still, virtually all human experiences are perfectly causal. Secondly, this kind of randomness does not prove free will in any way, as free will is applied, by definition, to certain objects that are knwon/assumed to have will. I'm not aware, however, of human brains being built of some kind of quantum particles to a far greater extent than anything else in the world. If we should adopt free will on this basis, we would have to assume that every conceivable object has free will, which would make any coherent perception of the world nigh impossible.

Maybe my musings don't do much as far as formal philosophy goes but it's just a thought.


[Technorati: free will, philosophy]