Without the state

Atheism

A little while ago I tried to explain to someone that I was an atheist - by which I meant I wasn't just someone who didn't go to church but a non-believer by choice. This (elderly) lady had some difficulty in grasping the idea, so I was amused to see Ophelia Benson taking on the same problem at Butterflies and Wheels.

...Hey - I'm an atheist, and I tell you what, I not only don't believe in one god, I also don't believe in two gods, and three, and many, and many many. In fact, there are many one gods I don't believe in. In fact again, there is an infinite number of gods I don't believe in. Monotheistic, polytheistic, all-powerful deity, weak silly deity - I don't care, I'm impartial, I don't subscribe to any of them. I think that probably applies to most atheists. Probably pretty much all of them. In fact some wag (Bertrand Russell? Mencken? Twain? I don't know - some joker) pointed out that Christians are atheists about all gods except their own, and that atheists just add one more to the list.

First impressions?

This came from here, (May 31 2004) but doesn't seem to have a permalink so I have copied it all into this post.

Question 1:

If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion?

Question 2:

It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts.
Here are the facts about the three leading candidates.

Candidate A -

Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists.  He's had two Mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.

Candidate B -

He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

Candidate C -

He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an occasional beer and never cheated on his wife.

Which of these candidates would be your Choice?

----------------------------------------------

Candidate A: is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Candidate B: is Winston Churchill.
Candidate C: is Adolph Hitler.


And, by the way, the answer to the abortion question: If you said yes, you just killed Beethoven.

Pretty interesting isn't it? Makes a person think before judging someone.

and in case you never saw this one..! ...

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 500 employees and has the following statistics:

* 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
* 7 have been arrested for fraud
* 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
* 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
* 3 have done time for assault
* 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
* 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
* 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
* 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?


Give up yet?


It's the 535 members of the United States Congress. The same group of idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Moral logic

If we assume an individual, call him T, decides on a course of action and justifies that action by knowingly referring to wrong or misleading information is the action for that reason alone morally unjustifiable?

If having undertaken that action, it is then proved that a case could have been made, but not the one actually made, how does that affect the validity of the action taken?

If in taking that action T knew of the real facts which post hoc can be used to justify it, but chose to rely instead on misleading or inaccurate information what then?

This seems apposite...

Pay earnest need to that which others say
And seek to enter thou the speaker's mind;
If wrong in thought or deed thyself shalt find
Then gladly change the error of thy way.
Seek only Truth, which shall not bring defeat;
Hurt lies with ignorance and self-deceit.

I've always liked the passage from Marcus Aurelius which is rendered into verse above and after my two earlier posts from the Meditations, I was going to post it anyway. However the events of the past few days make it particularly apposite.

The version above is from a small book of such renderings by John Lyth, published in 1942 as a PEN book, by George Allen and Unwin. It has a preface by Professor Gilbert Murray, from which I presume, Dr Lyth was not a nonentity, but I can find nothing about him, other than a version of the same book for sale on Canadian eBay. Any information would be gratefully received.

The prose version is from Book Eight verse 16 and in my version reads as follows (the link above is to an older translation):

To change your mind and defer to correction is not to sacrifice your independence; for such an act is your own, in pursuance of your own impulse, your own judgement, and your own thinking.

(trans. Maxwell Staniforth)

More on Hayek, greed etc.

In a comment on this, one Dr Troy Camplin says:

I would go so far as to claim that socialism goes completely against human nature, or physis (to use the Greek term). Humans are social animals, it's true, but we are social mammals, which means we have fluid, highly intricate hierarchies. Social insects, on the other hand, have precisely what socialists want: a flat hierarchy, with everyone as worker bees, and one (usually them) as the queen bee.

What is socialist about this? Isn't this the sort of structure that is the current fashion with Management Consultants - or have I missed a trend somewhere? Anyway - I thought the ASI line was that socialism was inherently bureaucratic and overly hierarchical? So who made the mistake of letting this guy comment?

It's strange isn't it though, how all these rabid anti-socialists can define socialism as it suits them, but tend to get a bit snarky if it happens the other way?

To a degree they have a point, since libertarianism probably isn't a consistent ideology, more a view of the world - or more particularly of the role of authority and power in the world. There certainly seem to be as many views and versions of it as there were Trotskyist splinter groups on the left in the 1960s!. Against that the views expressed at Samizdata for instance seem to hold pretty close to a consistent line - although the pamphlets of the Libertarian Alliance show a much greater variety of opinion. ( The latest one comes from Kevin Carson whose site (Mutualist.org) to which I have already linked.

What does it all add up to? How do I know - just thinking aloud!

Filosofy for Fiskees

You may break your heart but men will still go on as before.

Marcus Aurelius, 'Meditations' Book 8.4 trans. Maxwell Staniforth

Filosofy for Fiskers

You can soon become indifferent to the seductions of song or dance or athletic displays if you resolve the melody into its several notes, and ask yourself of each one in turn, 'Is it this that I cannot resist?' You will flinch from admitting it. Do the same for each movement or attitude of the dancers, and similarly with the athletics. In short, save in the case of virtue and its implications, always remember to go straight for the parts themselves, and by dissecting these achieve your disenchantment. And now, transfer this method to life as a whole.

Marcus Aurelius, 'Meditations' Book 11.3 trans. Maxwell Staniforth

Greed is good?

In a rather curious post on Hayek, Dr Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute seems to be interpreting Hayek as saying that while human nature and history leads to an "urge to share everything when value could not be stored", we progressed as a species by repudiating that urge. I have tried as hard as possible to look at this from the principle of charity, but I am still left with the conclusion that Hayek - and by extension therefore Pirie - is arguing that we are predisposed as a species to sharing but we can only grow by repudiating that heritage and cultivating selfishness.

UPDATE: could this be a case of argumentum ad verecundiam? Whatever Hayek's standing an appeal to him as authority is not of itself enough to demonstrate truth. In this case, two of the five tests for a legitimate argument from authority have not been met and the other three are clearly open to argument.

Of course since in the eyes of the ASI Wikis are inherently collectivist and therefore the spawn of the devil (I paraphrase!) I don't suppose they give much weight to anything in Wikipedia.

Mutualist.Org

Mutualist.Org is a fabulous site with hundreds of links, articles and more on Mutualism.

Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S. It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society. It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system. As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."

[via Early Days of a Better Nation (Ken McLeod)

Equality and justice for all...

“I am a convinced advocate of economic and social equality because I know that, without it, liberty, justice, human dignity, morality, and the well-being of individuals, as well as the prosperity of nations, will never amount to more than a pack of lies.”

— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871.

[via a comment on Crooked Timber]