Ahahahahaah! That's the same as not having laws! And even then, what you're saying is they believe someone should bring this guy to justice...and then do nothing to him. Then it's not justice. You're killing me my friends. Just killing me here.
While I personally like law and order, when the choice is mob justice or a police state, there are some definite advantages to mob justice.
I agree, the American government (on all levels) seems to be particularly dysfunctional, so it makes sense that many Americans would look at it and conclude that government writ large is bad. Combined with the American propensity for introspection and self-criticism, the very real observation that American government is bad leads to the (imho erroneous) conclusion that all government is bad, ignoring the fact that most western governments, while flawed, are nowhere near as flawed as yours is.
I think that is because your provinces have actual positive jurisdictions of sovereignty, as opposed to the very weak protections our states have.
> For all its warts, our government mostly works: healthcare is pretty good, education is pretty good, regulations are generally not onerous, taxes are pretty low, crime is pretty low, etc.
For example, there is no "Canadian Health Care System." Rather there is some federal money that goes to provinces as long as they don't do anything horribly out of line, and the provinces get to set up their own systems.
Just my two commie copeikas...
> The use of the word libertarian to describe a new set of political positions has been traced to the French cognate, libertaire, coined in a scathing letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857, castigating him for his sexist political views.
Consequently, the ones who are left out of the resulting parties are nearly by definition outliers. If one studies statistics, one of the things you'll learn is that in anything that has even a faint resemblance to a Gaussian distribution, the outliers are always more diverse than the main body. So on those fringes, you can always find some real nutcakes, along with a group of people whom you may merely find eccentric but forever bear the burden of being tarred by association with the loonies.
(It isn't necessarily the best plan to judge a fringe belief by an even more fringe set of loonies; for every stone you might be inclined to toss at the "other side", it's worth bearing in mind you've got a matched loonie on your side. Naturally, the loonies are the loudest, everywhere.)
I claim to be libertarian, but probably even more accurate would be call me a Classical Liberal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism (Albeit not every bit of that; 18th century Classical Liberalism can not be simply blindly applied today, but I think it's closer than later philosophies, or, perhaps, ironically more appropriate for the 21st century than the philosophies of the 20th, which I think were too greatly influenced by the accidents of the Industrial Revolution, which fade as we continue through the Information Revolution.) Anyways, following through that on Wikipedia would probably give a helpful perspective on the general ideas, moreso than a loud loonie. There is an actual respectable intellectual tradition here, even if it is not the one currently in favor.
I'm nearly as far away from libertarian as one can be, but no - it's not the same as not having laws.
Example: Old (American) West-style "frontier justice" where a bunch of townspeople form a posse or a lynch mob or whatever to right some (real or perceived) wrong.
(edit: I do understand that this is only one possible scenario, and not what all or even many libertarians want)
For an illustration of this, check out the very first scene of the TV series Deadwood. There's a lynch mob outside the sheriff's office, and they want to kill the person in the jail. The sheriff fends them off so he can legally hang him instead.
The creator originally wanted to do a series on ancient Rome, about the birthplace of civilization. The studio wanted a Western. He said, oh, perfect, that works, too.
Edit (since I cannot reply directly, apparently): why is it not credible?
Can I start citing the X-Files or Star Trek? How about a broadcast of the Nancy Grace show?
If the result is the same (the prisoner dies), does it matter whether a legal authority performs the killing, or whether a mob does? I think it does.
You may not agree with the legal authority's process or laws, but at the very least it is written down.
HN hides these links to prevent very quick back-and-forth. Either wait a few minutes or click the 'link' link.
If multiple such groups have the "right" then you have either a coalition state or tribes with warlords, but even that only really changes the level of jurisdiction.
It seems to me that some libertarians try to claim theoretical victory by defining their legal enforcement to be a private contractor or somesuch, but as soon as they do that they've simply re-defined the government to be that private contractor (or whoever is controlling them) instead. There's still a state and still governance, whatever you happen to call that particular rose.
You can make the same argument without being an ass about it.
Politics is a rather uninteresting tangent here, brought up really only to start a flamewar.
Seriously, who gives a shit about the political opinions of drug dealers? I don't know where my dealer stands on economics, taxation, or civil rights, and I don't have any reason to care.
Not sure if that makes it right but people will be people.
If you rip off drug dealers, you should expect them to call for heads. Using this as the basis for a political flamewar is just straight-up trolling.
But a guy who has actually lost people's money, put them at risk of reprisal from drug dealers, helped people (potentially young people) commit major crimes, enabled future addicts, and potentially is lying about the security flaw to steal all this money while spouting hypocritical contradictory statements...is a fucking hero.
Bravo! You win the ultimate hypocrite award of the century!
My tone is simply a reaction to the tone of arrogance and superiority most objectivists and commenters take. If you don't want to be ridiculed, then don't write like a arrogant douchebag with zero self-awareness. Those kinds of people are due a large dose of insulting and "tone".
> You can make the same argument without being an ass about it.
Your reply:
> It's funny how me pointing out the stupidity and bullshit of a group of criminals makes me an asshole...
You completely missed their point, how you can't see that is beyond me.
Try defending against the accusation itself instead of taking the stance that the accusation is always automatically invalid.
I was attempting to show that his response was a strawman.
After further reading I'm guessing his entire online personality is an act though so the topic seems to be worthless discussing.
No, being an asshole while calling something bullshit is being an asshole. A ^ B |- A. You can say something's bullshit without ridiculing people. Zed's problem isn't that he says unpopular things, it's that he seems to try to be as rude as possible in saying them.
Saying something's bullshit isn't necessarily rude. Saying something's bullshit and anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot|hypocrite|moron|asshole is.
The truth of that statement still depends on what the issue is. There are some beliefs you really do have to be stupid or disingenuous to espouse.
BTW - Love your L?THW books. Thanks
Zed, I want to make myself clear, here: I have absolutely nothing to say whatsoever about whatever substantive claims you might be making. I'm just telling you to stop being a asshole about it.
But fuck it, I told you pretty much the exact same thing[1] almost 3 years ago, and you haven't changed since then. It's not your message that turns people off, it's your delivery. I still suspect it's a calculated ploy for pageviews and name recognition.
For what it's worth, this is Responding to Tone, or DH2[#]
FTA: So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much. Is the author flippant, but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. And if the author is incorrect somewhere, say where.
> I'm just calling him out for being a jackass.
This is actually DH0, Name Calling.
I'm criticizing the behaviour, not the person. If you can't call out poor behaviour, you can't expect civil communication.
What you're doing is kidding yourself. You already know that zed shaw, being zed shaw, could care less about what the fun police has to say about the way he expresses himself.
> If you can't call out poor behaviour, you can't expect civil communication.
This news forum provides a mechanism that allows users to collectively rank posts by voting on them. Zed's comment on this article happens to be the top ranked one. Respectfully, I would submit that the majority of people who have seen it value the information content of his post more than they are offended by the way that he delivered it.
Could he have expressed himself in a more PG13 fashion? Sure he could have. Could he have made his point more politely? I don't think anyone would argue against that. But that's not Zed.
Frankly, I think it's a bit presumptuous of you to appoint yourself the civility police and harass people for the way they say things without actually engaging with what they are trying to say. Luckily for us, Zed doesn't actually care what you think. But I don't believe that it is either constructive or in the spirit of this venue to encourage an environment that attacks people for how they say things, rather than what they say. I think that the losses from such an overly sensitive environment, given the diverse range of cultures and personalities this board attracts, would far outweigh the gains.
>I think it's a bit presumptuous of you to appoint yourself the civility police
I've done no such thing. By claiming I'm not allowed to criticize someone's behaviour, you're doing the exact same thing you're condemning me for.
>and harass people for the way they say things
Telling someone to stop being an asshole when they're being an asshole isn't harassment by any reasonable definition of the word.
>without actually engaging with what they are trying to say.
I don't care what he's trying to say, and I'm explicitly not engaging in that facet of the discussion. If somebody was standing on the street corner grabbing passerby and shaking them while shouting, "don't take on more debt than you can pay!", I'd tell them to stop being an asshole, too.
> I don't believe that it is either constructive or in the spirit of this venue to encourage an environment that attacks people for how they say things, rather than what they say.
You're quite simply wrong. Look at any of the low-value, one-line comments that get downvoted to oblivion for saying something along the lines of, "this sucks". You can say, "this sucks" in a way that adds value, and you can say it in a way that detracts value. Saying, "this sucks because of xyz" is simply more valuable than saying "this sucks because of xyz and you're all a bunch of morons for disagreeing".
What I am criticizing you for is failing to understand that, at least in this specific case, your sensitivities do not in fact align with those of the community. And also for name calling someone who has contributed more to the hacker community in this past year than you have in your life.
Zed Shaw's comment is at the top of this thread. That is data, that you cannot continue to ignore while still claiming to speak for the community. Hacker News has a very effective system for burying comments that the community deems offensive and inappropriate. If the community was truly offended, then this post would be buried, or dead, not at the top.
> Telling someone to stop being an asshole when they're being an asshole isn't harassment by any reasonable definition of the word.
You mentioned upthread that this is not the first time you have had this discussion with Zed. And you continue to emphasize that you are not interested in what he says, but just criticizing him for how he says it. How many times do you have to repeat the same conversation for it to constitute harassment? How many self-righteously morally outraged people like you do you following him around and littering his threads with meaningless ad hominem criticism think it will take before he decides it's not worth it and just leaves? Do you really think Hacker News would be a better place without Zed Shaw?
> If somebody was standing on the street corner grabbing passerby and shaking them while shouting, "don't take on more debt than you can pay!", I'd tell them to stop being an asshole, too.
What I'm trying to explain to you is that, in this case, you're the person on the street corner, Zed is the passerby, and I still think it would be rude to call you an asshole, though I will continue to point out that if your attempts are genuinely in an effort to better our community, it would be worth carefully considering whether they are in fact in the community's best interest.
The 'monopoly of laws' to which the parent refers are the ones like those against home distillers -- such that you're allowed to buy a distillation device, you're allowed to buy corn, you're allowed to buy sugar, yeast, etc., but you're not allowed to put them altogether to make whiskey, despite that you're allowed to buy whiskey.
Another example is the Lacey act, which, if construed narrowly enough, might make it illegal to eat a steak, or to fish, or to hike through the woods.
Even the most staunch of minarchists wouldn't generally repeal the 'base' laws, which are those laws that, if violated, infringe upon the rights of others. Libertarians do not, for example, suggest that murder should be legal -- everyone has the right to life.
Gun control is the nearest example I can think of, so pardon me if it doesn't fit the archetype 100%, but there are literally more than 20,000 laws on the books pertaining to guns, despite the fact that each of those are just derivatives of laws already on the books. Using a gun to steal is expressly against the law, and may carry a different penalty in many jurisdictions than just 'stealing'. Why? Stealing is already illegal, and the manner in which it's done carrying a different penalty likely is just a scheme to enforce mandatory minimums to fill the prisons.
Alternately, laws which are predicated upon arbitrary distinctions, such that a person with 9 ounces of pot gets away scot free, while a guy with 10 ounces of pot must serve an obligatory 5 year prison term.
You're of course welcome to hate libertarianism as much as you like, but if you're original post was sincere, you're woefully ill-informed on the subject.
Edit: Re-reading, I completely misinterpreted the OP's use of 'monopoly of force', and ended up making an altogether unrelated argument. That said, I consider my point both salient and well-researched, so I'll let it stand.
The set of laws is not really the problem then. Literally everyone agrees that "government should be as small as possible", the problem is that no one ever agrees as to how small that can possibly be.
As soon as you're accepted the state, the "men with guns" whom the libertarians trot out as their boogeyman, the existence of a judicial system and police, etc. then the libertarians are suddenly not that far different in practice from many other parties and are even closer in theory (since apparently everyone agrees that courts and police are OK now...)
How close or far away Libertarianism is from more statist methodologies is outside the scope of the point I was trying to make, but if I were making a point, it's that yes, they are closer together than his lawless society (which couldn't be further apart) suggests.
It's getting to the point that when one says they're a libertarian I'm not even sure what that means at first. :-/
As for the 'strong property rights' comment, you clearly haven't yet met a libertarian socialist[1]. ;-)
A way to look at this from a European perspective might be the role of the European Union: should the EU government be as powerful as possible? Or should virtually all of the lawmaking power reside with the member states?
That there are legal concepts/ideas/etc. that would allow government to regulate something is usually a given, especially in our globalized world where you might buy something online made 3 states away (so that the Federal government is clearly in the lead).
The conceit is that just because government can get involved doesn't mean it's a good idea for government to get involved. In fact it's practically axiomatic here that the 'proper' level of government involvement in laws, regulation, etc. is the minimum needed to do the job and that government interaction beyond that level is actively harmful. Even the Democrats tend to toe this line, their disagreement generally comes at the level of "minimum needed" (e.g. there was a push for single-payer option before ObamaCare was finalized as that was felt to be the only way to really meet the goals intended).
You know, even if you were/are/will become right, laughing at someone else's ideals benefits no one. It just deepens the abyss that separates logic from political differences.
Anyway, I guess the point is that Libertarianism has some different views but the main takeaway is about having more choices and a more lightweight state.
But even so, you certainly saw it in recorded history when government was weaker. "Highwayman" used to connote a very scary idea, something that is most relevant in modern history to those driving in convoys in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Another very good example was the actions of the FLN in French-run Algeria starting in the 1950s, where they actually more or less incited that "war of all against all", and did so from an organization that was not very centralized at all.
Is there any evidence that humans ever weren't large enough to worry about common property? I mean populations evolve, not individuals, right? And even families have common property within the household, right? If humans are social creatures, then it seems to me that this view of history can't be right because humans have always formed governments as required by our social nature.
> But even so, you certainly saw it in recorded history when government was weaker. "Highwayman" used to connote a very scary idea, something that is most relevant in modern history to those driving in convoys in Afghanistan or Iraq.
But bandits have almost always been a reaction to the formation (often by distinct government policies) of a destitute class. You see a major increase in banditry following the confiscation of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, for example, because this was instrumental in creating the destitute masses that would power the English Industrial Revolution.
The FLN is a good example of the use of a war of all against all as a tactic to weaken governments. I don't think it is a good example of what happens without strong government though. A much better example would be blood feuds in medieval Iceland, or in weak government areas today.
Blood feuds though are complex institutions. They don't really form a war of all against all. Rather they form a way for bad behavior to be punished. If a man in Papua feels that his wife has dishonored him and kills her, her brothers will likely do the same to him. This will spin around until everyone gets tired of it and decides to reconcile with some sort of settlement.
As Jesse Byock has pointed out, one can see significant evidence that in medieval Iceland, the blood feud was an institution which provided a similar form of social control and stabilization to what we might think of as law and order. In short, blood feuds are law and order by a different means.
Well, yes, as long as you keep going back in the geological record (I won't say historical record since written language would seem to have required a dense-enough population).
> If humans are social creatures, then it seems to me that this view of history can't be right because humans have always formed governments as required by our social nature.
Well even at the family unit level you mention, there would be government (by head-of-household, whoever that was). In areas with multiple families you'd likely have common property which would need it's own form of government (warlord, popular tribal chief, what-have-you). But that's getting back to my original argument.
I think we might actually be in agreement; the key to me seems to be that the Hobbesian nightmare doesn't occur when a populace and its government are organically grown. There's no reason you'd see all-vs.-all in history simply because there was always some form of government.
Hobbes's nightmare seems to come from the collapse of government among a mass of people, and its subsequent power vacuum, which results in subsequent in-fighting (or invasion from abroad). There are multiple examples of this in recorded history as well.
> But bandits have almost always been a reaction to the formation (often by distinct government policies) of a destitute class.
I don't think anyone would argue that destitution increases crime and violence against the weak. It's easier to have morals when you don't have to die of hunger due to your principles.
Likewise I think your point about blood feuds is spot on, but then we need to recognize that it has become government (as you say, law and order by a different means).
The idea that the "war of all vs. all" would be transient (until some form of stable governance sets up) is probably the thing which keeps Hobbes from being as much of a nightmare. But it also wouldn't really make those who live through the transient feel any better about it.
Watching Bitcoin from a detached and neutral position is absolutely pure entertainment.
"Hey y'all, let's make a web page for transferring money and drugs!"
"But I'm not very good at programming."
"No worries, there's CRYPTO!!!!!"
"Oh excellent, we'll sure screw over our oppressive government now! Down with the rule of law!!"
<time passes>
"Uh boss, someone just untraceably and anonymously stole all of our untraceable and anonymous money!"
If you're not rolling on the floor laughing, you're missing out on life.
Being a a__h___ and being right aren't mutually exclusive. :)
Sidenote: BTW, now that we're talking, if you have a coworker at Google who can get this comment[1] removed from my channel, I'd appreciate it. I reported it as hate-speech like a month ago or something.
1. https://www.youtube.com/user/SMTDDR/discussion
For posterity's sake - http://i.imgur.com/6kpYvcM.png
I'm sure Google gets like a million of these a day. I'm probably in some queue somewhere.... and I've never dated a white girl. ;-)
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802268
It seems like you should be able to just delete the comment and block that asshole. If you've tried that and it doesn't work, I'll escalate.
For some reason, I'm only allowed to report it. =/
EDIT: I was able to block the user, but the comment remains it seems.
Being right and/or smart and/or recognized doesn't, and shouldn't, give one an excuse to be a dick.
It's not being an asshole to tell someone they're being stupid when they do something stupid. These guys just lost several million dollars via their illicit drug-trading website. They don't need a pat on the back from zedshaw.
I'd agree if he limited his mockery to those people, but his comments are full of broad generalizations and target also honest people with ideas different than zed's.
I don't even say I agree with those ideas, though I find the concept of crowdsourcing law worth serious exploring instead of dismissing outright (there are some serious people, like Robin Hanson, discussing this [0]). It's easy to laugh off things you don't understand.
To be honest, I'm yet to see a single case of a person who truly understands an idea and then proceeds to sneer. For me, seeing one laughing at other peoples' ideas is a clear sign that the person doesn't know shit.
Not that there aren't multitudes of other problems in their schemes.
I'm yet to see a person who truly understands an idea and then proceeds to laugh it off just like that. For me, it's a good indicator that the person laughing doesn't know shit, and doesn't even try. It's easier to make people you disagree with feel bad about themselves than to actually engage with their arguments.
(note I'm not referring to the drug dealers who lost money, but to the off-hand dismissal of ideas many honest people hold)
+
Wealth of the networks (instead of monopolistic centralism base upon territory, population and gov 300years old model Wealth of the Nations/States).
Move forward. Even it is not possible eventually to have a complete monopoly of the law, except in the case of a dystopian totalitarism.
for those that do not know the story..
Frank Zappa disarmed someone that tried to shoot him and than refused to call the cops