China trains army of messenger pigeons

and

North Korea Nears Completion of Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb

My cross post at Harry’s Place about the exclusion of fascists from the free expression rally I organised in 2006 generated some debate in the comments: why not also exclude communists? Coincidentally, there was this Instapundit post on the same subject, which includes this entertaining quote from Moe Lane:

Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.

I don’t think that’s true, personally. There are plainly some very intelligent Marxists. I think they’re more like medieval theologians, constructing complicated and highly reasoned edifices of thought, full of citations of other scholars, based firmly on a foundation of absolute fatuity. Having said that, it is kind of dumb to advocate a system that has never resulted in anything other than stagnation and suffering.

There’s also a tendency in both cases (medieval thinkers and modern Marxists) to work entirely from theory rather than observation of the world, except where a corner of a subset of real-world observation happens to back up whatever idea they’re trying to stand up. That’s why the Blank Slate is such an issue, for Marxists. But denying physical reality is, again, kind of dumb.

There are even similarities between Marxists and creationist conservatives (and Marxism really is a small-c conservative movement): neither seem able properly to understand the reality of the sort of self-adjusting, evolving complexes that reality is actually comprised of, and seek therefore to impose onto the world an order founded in the narrow confines of limited human imagination.

Unfortunately, this conceptual inability extends to a failure to realise that reality will be a self-adjusting, evolving complex governed by the sum of actions of individual entities, whatever you do politically. That is, people will game the system. As Glen Reynolds says in the post linked to above:

It’s not even tyranny of the mass over the few. That’s the slogan, but it always ends up in the hands of the nomenklatura. In fact, the more any group talks about equality, the more certain it is to end up with an entirely different set of rules for the few at the top.

So why did I ban fascists and not commies?

First, because that’s the only practical way to achieve sympathetic press coverage. That’s because, as Reynolds put it:

The difference between Communists and Nazis is mostly PR, and the PR is better because more journalists and academics were communists than Nazis.

The operative word there is “mostly”, though. There’s a bit more to it. Maryam Namazie was a speaker in 2006 and she’s a communist. But she is a fearless fighter for oppressed women and men in Iran. I can’t think of a Nazi of whom anything of the sort could be said. Commies can be altruistic, fascists never are.

There’s an irony in this, of course. Marxists killed many more people than did fascists in the twentieth century.

And that’s another point of comparison with religion: there are in both cases deeply altruistic individuals, and both systems of thought can be held to justify the forced suppression of ineradicable human nature and the massacre of millions.

I won’t try to pass judgement on the degree of evil in fascism and communism; evil is a religious concept. They are, though, equally repugnant.

It’s not just the other associations of ‘radical’ and its derivatives: people who wanted to fight injustice, make a better world. Amongst them, Marx: ‘To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.’ Yes, I know: by their own lights, so do Islamist terrorists want to fight injustice and make a better world. However, apart from the fact that their would-be better world would be, in fact, worse, their chosen means include murder of the innocent and that is not a means for justice.

The last sentence applies equally to Marxism; wibble about “democratic socialism” cannot disguise the reality we have seen every time this particular experiment has been attempted.

Williams is among a small cadre of scholars from across the world pushing the rather contentious idea that some suicide bombers may in fact be suicidal. At the forefront is the University of Alabama’s Adam Lankford, who recently published an analysis of suicide terrorism in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. Lankford cites Israeli scholars who interviewed would-be Palestinian suicide bombers. These scholars found that 40 percent of the terrorists showed suicidal tendencies; 13 percent had made previous suicide attempts, unrelated to terrorism. Lankford finds Palestinian and Chechen terrorists who are financially insolvent, recently divorced, or in debilitating health in the months prior to their attacks. A 9/11 hijacker, in his final note to his wife, describing how ashamed he is to have never lived up to her expectations. Terrorist recruiters admitting they look for the “sad guys” for martyrdom.

Interesting. Via.

Now, Priyamvada Gopal, on the other hand, bidding fair to become one of the Guardian and Comment is Free’smore active yes-butters hoping to distract attention from practices of which others are, with good reason, critical, has a different idea. For her, violence is just everything, more or less, that she politically opposes.Gopal ‘teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge’.

Second, from across the political divide, David Thompson on the same subject:

Violence. A word Ms Gopal uses no fewer than nine times. Fiscal responsibility, albeit belated, is violence, see? Reducing the national debt is violence. Extending credit for tuition fees is violence. Attempting to contain the growth of the state –  enlarged by around 30% under New Labour – that’s violence too. Audacious, isn’t it? Ms Gopal, who “teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge,” has casually redefined violence to include practically anything to which she takes political exception.

Also un-depraved, and remarkably similar in sentiment to Norm. Maybe they have something in common despite political differences?

Now Paul Sagar:

Whilst it is true that I may not support particular instances of the use of non-peaceful force – say against Labour HQ, or in the name of bigotry – this simply means precisely that in those instances I would oppose the use of direct non-peaceful action. This does nothing to undercut my general position that sometimes non-peaceful action is justified, nor my case-specific judgement that on Wednesday, in relation to the policies of this Government, non-peaceful direct action was indeed probably justified as a reaction to harm-about-to-be-incurred.

Again similar, but this time depraved. And Chris Dillow:

Paul Sagar welcomes this week’s riots as “a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful”.
I in turn welcome his analysis as a breath of fresh air against the fetid hypocrisy of the sanctimonious moralizers who condemn violence.
The fact is that politics is founded upon violence, and the threat thereof, as it is this that underpins the very existence of the state. Sometimes – World War II or the American revolution – this violence is justified, and sometimes not.
The question of when violence should be used is merely an empirical matter – as Trotsky said, a question of expediency. What matters is what works.

And that’s depraved.

Yes, the justification for violence is an empirical matter. But the last two gentlemen are not the fucking suffragettes. There is the most staggering narcissism involved in thinking that whinges about how much of other people’s money you’re getting compare with, say, a regime that imports rapists to sodomise, to the point of death, students who were arrested protesting about the rigging of an election by theocratic dictators, or one that forces all women to be workless submissives and accommodates the enslavement of domestic servants. But neither of the last two have seemed particularly moved by the horror of the Iranian or Saudi regimes.

Chris quoted Trotsky – a man who revelled in the murder of innocents, introduced decimation into the armies he commanded and planned, as a theoretical good, the use of show trials. This is utter, utter depravity.

Paul Sagar stated that the purpose of democracy is:

that it leads to and secures (amongst other things) the respect and protection of citizens.

That’s complete balls. It serves two purposes: it stops us fighting and dilutes autocracy with some element of consensus, even if it’s consensus that operates over time with the swing of the pendulum. It’s imperfect, like every human institution that has existed, or ever will. But the whole point is that it prevents political violence. It’s the best system we have, imperfect though it is. And it’s a system under which, from time to time, people you disagree with will be in power.

Conservatives and liberals have lived through more than a decade of increasingly authoritarian, interfering, financially rapacious socialism without resorting to violence.

Those on the other side have a basic duty to suck it up and campaign for what they believe in. Just like we did for the past thirteen years. The narcissism that believes that one’s own opinions, but not those of others, warrant violence is a form of political depravity. It only ever leads to one place:  the very might-is-right world we have evolved away from, so painfully.

UPDATE: Norm’s at it again. Being un-depraved, that is.

To say, as some libertarians do, that taxation is slavery is silly. It’s equally silly to say that the proposed requirement that unemployed people do some work in return for their benefits, aka workfare, is slavery.

Or is it?  Are they silly? And, either way, are they equally silly?

Slavery was rarely, if ever, a matter of working for nothing. Slaves who were not fed or housed had a rapidly diminishing usefulness to their owners. Clothing, food and shelter were sometimes supplemented by the ability to acquire property, sometimes enough to lead to wealth, some even exercised social influence. But at minimum, slaves were, like human cattle, given hay and a barn.

The analogy comes from P.J. O’Rourke:

the “right” to education, the “right” to health care, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

This doesn’t fit the pattern but, according to that particular libertarian, being a benefits claimant is in itself comparable to slavery.

That claimants might have to take part in work that is not of their choosing does not hurt the comparison; having to do work that is not one’s choice is a characteristic of slavery.

A lack of choice in housing is another characteristic, one that also applies to most benefits claimants. In general what was lost in slavery was, at minimum, choice. Conditions were sometimes comfortable, often they were brutal. In no case could slaves could make important choices for themselves. P.J.’s Law is, if nothing else, the antithesis of slavery: “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.”

According to this argument, being on benefits without Workfare is like being a slave with no work; with Workfare, it’s like being a slave with some work – nobody is suggesting a sixty hour week, they’re not even suggesting there’s work every week.

For different reasons, Paul Sagar reached a conclusion that agreed with 50% of the above:

[Workfare] work becomes – for those who would prefer not to starve in the gutter – enforced labour extracted by the power of the state. Accordingly, that now starts to look rather like a form of state-enforced slavery in the context of societies that have developed legal structures and norms that previously provided for the unconditional protection of the most vulnerable.

Sagar finds context important:

the libertarian response is defective insofar as it refuses to engage withthe reality of a preceding practical context against which to understand the state-citizen relationship in something like “workfare” reforms.It is just not good enough to attempt to analyse political interactions and changes in vacuo … Changes and power structures happen in concrete political and historical contexts…

… libertarianism is astoundingly historically ignorant, insofar as it does not pay attention to why systems of benefit support have evolved in our societies. And in turn libertarianism is naive, insofar as no attention is paid to the empirical evidence that when people are left to the capricious mercies of the market they do not sit around picking their noses, but agitate for (often violent) forms of political extremism to address social and economic short-comings.

Thank goodness today’s benefits claimants never engage in political violence.

But he’s right that context is important. Part of the context here is the perception that the benefits system is failing in some respects. It’s succeeding in stopping people from starving. On the whole, it stops people dying of hypothermia in the winter. These are self-evidently important achievements. But there’s a widespread view that the benefits system institutionalises people into dependency. There’s also an idea that welfare can be unfair, taking money from struggling, hard-working middle-income taxpayers and handing it to the workshy. If you’re going to argue against Workfare, there are the bits you have to engage with.

(Incidentally, part of Sagar’s argument is that the benefits system shouldn’t change because it hasn’t previously done the new things it might do if it changes. No shit?)

Chris Dillow took a quantative approach to the question of the workshy and, he suggested, exposed a common trick employed by the right:

The vast majority of unemployment – over 9-10ths on this reckoning – has nothing to do with people not wanting to work, and everything to do with a lack of demand for labour.
And this is where that rightist trick (or error) enters. They mistake small truths for large ones, and use the small truth to obfuscate the big one. So, the truth – that a few of the unemployed don’t want to work – is exaggerated and used to hide the bigger truth, that the vast majority of unemployment has other causes.

I think he misunderstands the right. This isn’t a trick, it’s a question of emphasis and, perhaps, relentlessness. But then, we choose our relentlessness but most of us have it. With Chris, it’s egalitarianism, hence this non-sequitur:

“The poor benefit from living in wealthy capitalist societies.” This trivial truth hides a trickier question: does free market capitalism benefit them more than egalitarian alternatives?

The poor, of course, do benefit from living in societies with higher than average levels of economic freedom (which is what he means by “capitalism”). The question of whether freedom is better than egalitarianism (or rather, the mechanisms you would need to introduce into society in order to ensure egalitarian outcomes) is a completely separate matter, it isn’t either/or as a juxtaposition like this suggests. Nor would it be a tricky question: from what we’ve seen so far, the answer is “yes”.

The relentlessness of the right is fine-grained, atomic. There’s a focus on individuals in every respect, and a corresponding reluctance to view things in terms of collectives, communities, victim groups. This is fairly consistent, it informs most policy areas, and it’s why it doesn’t matter what the percentage of lead-swingers is, to the right. It isn’t a trick, it’s a difference of emphasis.

Libertarians sometimes argue that hard choices, even though they are hard, are still choices. Thus someone subject to Workfare could choose to stop claiming benefits. So Workfare isn’t slavery. But how much choice does a person really have between a hated regime and starvation? Effectively none, says Paul Sagar in the post linked to above.

I’m not sure he noticed, though, that this argument applies equally to tax payers. Do you really have the option of not working if you don’t want to pay tax? Then you’d be on benefits, and a full-time slave instead of a part-time slave, and skint to boot. How are you going to build a life for your family like that*?

So it goes – the trap of tax-serfdom is deepest for the most conscientious. And nobody has much of a choice: the benefits claimant will have to do work if Workfare comes along, the tax payer who pays those benefits has to work anyway. Although they do get to choose the work they do, which is more than the Workfare bods will be able to boast.

The right does have an edge in this argument, though. There’s a common factor to all these actual and metaphorical instances of slavery: individuals subordinated to authority. In every case where this happens, the individual loses choice.

Slavery was a spectrum that went from iron-collared, radically castrated, African slaves in Arabia, to obese Eunuch Viziers of the Ottoman Empire; from 90% mortality and inhuman brutality to silk-clad, farting opulence.

The only thing the different forms of slavery had in common is the subjugation of the individual by another entity. Workfare has that in common with slavery. So does the coercive state, from the viewpoint of a taxpayer. Bear in mind, there’s a security in cradle-to-grave slavery that comforts millions. Never choice, but always a roof; never choice, but always food; never choice, but always clothing. Never choice, but always healthcare and education. Slavery isn’t necessarily unpopular.

But when, exactly, did it become a left-wing cause?

Oh, and do I win a modified Godwin Award?

*Yes, this does also apply to benefits claimants: how can they build a life for their families on benefits? The difference of view between right and left is again a matter of emphasis: the right congratulate the tax-payer for keeping the wolf from the claimants’ doors, which they do; the left mourns the poverty of the claimant, who might be unemployed through no personal fault, which is also valid. This does, though, suggest that a two-tier system might be more just. One tier for those who really can’t work though they’d love to; a different, subsistence level, tier for those who could but don’t. How you’d tell the difference is another matter.

Hirst campaigned, and won, so it’s not surprising he celebrated. Lighting a spliff on video while on licence might have been a mistake, but he is presumeably calculating that nobody can prove there was cannabis in it. Bravado, I expect he’s planning to call it.

Dale is worried that prisoners’ votes could sway results in marginal Parliamentary seats. Maybe. If so, it’ll be likely that the sway will be in the direction of Dale’s Conservatives; prisoners are a reactionary bunch.

I’m glad this has happened. I’d like the franchise to be genuinely universal. Lunatics, prisoners – even members of the House of Lords – should all have the vote. This is for two reasons.

First, the principle that the only reason the state can claim any kind of jurisdiction over any individual is that they have a vote. It’s extraordinary that libertarian and liberal conservatives can miss that point.

Secondly, and more practically, we need constitutional structures for when things go wrong as much as when they go right. Totalitarian states around the world make a practice of imprisoning dissidents, or of declaring them to be mad. A universal franchise would be some small innocculation against the ability of the state to make the inconvenient invisible.

Becker, who after leaving prison trained as an alternative practitioner and now lives in a lakeside district in the most expensive quarter of Berlin and is dependent on state support, is expected to use her right to remain silent throughout the trial.

I’ll add a fourth case, that of the neds in Gateshead who were arrested for burning a Koran in a pub car park and YouTubing it.

In all these cases, individuals are relegated to second place behind institutions, on whose behalf the police are prepared to act against individuals. The principle involved in the first three cases is identical – stolen property ending up in the hands of people who (might have) paid innocently for the dog/rent/car – yet the police acted differently according to who was the victim of the original crime. The fourth is one of a group of young men against an institutionalised religious bloc.

The fourth case might be the worst, though. The neds are now at risk, entirely because of the action of the police, of being the subjects of lethal attack. And remind me: who was arrested for burning The Satanic Verses? Who has been arrested for incitement to hatred in a sermon in a mosque?

When the police act as the servant of vested interests and institutions against individuals, you have a police state. Or perhaps that should be, we have a police state.

Saying that seems over-excited hyperbole. But in what way, exactly, is it incorrect?