shooter242 --

Out of curiousity

Who are the salonistas rooting for in Lebanon? Hezbollah?

-- shooter242 Sunday, May 11, 2008 07:10 AM

Why do you think it's your business?

shooter242 --

. . . . salonistas love to discuss irrelevancies to death. I can only presume it's a coping mechanism to avoid reality.

-- shooter242 Sunday, May 11, 2008 07:32 AM

Your presumption is, of course, incorrect. The majority discuss issues of which you disapprove, and which you insist on insulting in typical juvenile fashion, because you are in a tiny minority who can't get their agenda accepted without lying about it because the majority consistently rejects it.

It isn't that you're correct, and the majority incorrect, that you persist, but that you are an anti-elitist elitist.

Clue: I'm okay -- You're not okay.

This slim volume (link at sig) was written by my dissertation supervisor and mentor, a guy named Michael Taylor who was well known in some very small circles but invisible outside them. He started out as a math prof at Essex, did another PhD in political philosophy at Yale, and came to the US later (much to my benefit). At Essex, he lived on a commune 20k or so outside of town and ran to and from class every day. Great guy (for a Brit). (Just kidding, Rowan). He had a very strong influence on me, and we had some great conversations about 'nested communities' within hierarchical organizations (like the army).

His previous book, "Anarchy and Cooperation" (later reprinted as "The Possibility of Cooperation"), was a technical and largely game theoretic examination of cooperative collective action. This one has more history and anthropology added in, and its more accessible (though still kind of turgid).

Taylor was also part of the circle of scholars who developed the 'social capital' idea first articulated by Glenn Loury, formalized by James Coleman and then monetized (:>) by Robert Putnam. The crowd included Douglass North and a handful of other notables who gathered under a grant that Putnam facilitated. Coleman died shortly after they started meeting.

I don't think Taylor was a big believer in 'social capital', or even anarchy, by the tail end of his career, but it was another piece of the puzzle (along with transactions costs, for example) that he was trying to wrestle with.

The first book is out of print, but this one is still kicking. Recommend you give it a gander ...

Shooter, we would need scientific notation to write the number of angels that can dance on the top your empty pinhead.

-- L.W.M. Sunday, May 11, 2008 07:38 AM

It would only take one finger on one hand to figure that out.

But no angel would dance on his pinhead; rather, it would put on steel-spiked mountain climbing boots and stomp in effort to wake him from sucking up the lunatic fringe's bathwater.

That was great --- you elaborated this idea a lot better than I could.

I think if we're ever going to learn anything from this debacle (I know, always a dubious proposition), or even just understand what happened, we're going to have to first identify the mechanisms ... as Glenn has done a stupendous job with here ... that exploited the institutional vulnerabilities, and then pull apart the actions of individuals.

When we do, there will be the obvious criminals who pushed the campaign, the enablers and waterbearers in the center and peripheries, and then the ones who failed through inaction, ambiguity, moral failure, as well as those who might have actually tried to do the right thing and not been up to what was in front of them. It's going to have to go beyond, 'But why didn't you quit, then?'

It's easier to just call the whole thing criminal, stop there, and boil everyone in oil. If we even get to that point, we can all feel relieved that justice has been served. But if we ever hope to fix anything, to try to prevent the same things from happening again (and sooner), we need to be willing to examine the institutional gaps that opened when pressure was placed on those on the periphery, and look at their situations just as you did in this comment.

Going back to highlighting Hannah Arendt now ... some lines seem a lot more relevant these days than they used to ...

Rowan Berkeley --

Now as to the goody goody libertarians, I agree completely with Mike Sulzer, who said while I was either asleep or hiding my shame and not visiting the thread, "If libertarianism says that everything would be great if everyone would leave everyone else alone except for voluntary interactions, then the realist would say: but everyone won't. And because of that, and in reaction to that, we have governments," except that I would go further, and say that anyone who claims to believe that in the absence of "government" (and at this point one begins to wonder how they define "government") people would spontaneously revert to being nice to each other, is not just being naive, they are being disingenuous, by which I mean, they are sinister, cynical liars.

You've nailed it. "Libertarians" are just another face of the "small gov't" -- er, money for the wealthy, screw everyone else -- faction of lunatic fringe. It is Bushit criminal enterprise on methedrine -- oops, I mean steroids -- oops, I mean, you get the picture.

They bleat and preach against "regulation" -- that's the immediate big enemy -- but neglect to admit that "regulation" is a form of and synonym for LAW. I.e., they are opposed to the rule of law.

Because law isn't perfect it should all be repealed.

When one gets down to it, one recognizes that their core rationale is that of the common criminal. "The Founders intended that the individual be above society," society being a skein of laws, is the same as, "I am above the law."

Substantiate that to them and they revert to "natural law," or some equivalent euphemism for an individual "divine right". At that point one is dealing (also) with a religionut fanatic.

Charles Manson comes to mind.