Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Islam watch: Triumphant surrender?

Yesterday's theme repeated, this time with greater bellicosity, from Jihad Unspun:

Clearly, in the current reality, the Muslim Ummah remains as lambs to the slaughter. The current shepherds are ineffective in protecting our lives, lands and resources--not to mention our dignity and Islamic belief. Yet growing awareness of this reality is producing change, radical change. Muslims throughout the Islamic world are realising that their unity and cohesion as one body is through their Islamic belief only. However, the current "nationalist" makeup of the Islamic world is not suitable at all to facilitate this. Hence the Ummah is shedding its nationalistic and patriotic ideas and feelings, and replacing them with Islamic ones.

The situation in Iraq has shown the brave Muslims defending Iraq as Muslim land, against the non-Muslim invaders. The people are heard shouting "Allahu Akbar" not "long live Iraq" or "long live Saddam". Many from the disputing factions - the leadership, the Shia, and the Kurds--are calling for Jihad, and urging the people to rally against the Crusaders, just as Muslims in the past rallied against the Mongols.

The Muslims of Iran ignore their leaderships "neutral" position. Though they fought a war for eight years against Iraq, they march in the streets of Tehran siding with their brothers in Iraq. In Pakistan the demonstrations grow larger everyday. Though the secular elite have tried to shape Pakistan in the image of the secular west, the Muslims have rejected these attempts.

From Indonesia to Nigeria Muslims are demanding the implementation of Islam and the rejection of western laws and western beliefs. There is tremendous pressure on the treacherous rulers, and many of them are having trouble coping. This week King Abdullah, expressed his anger over the war and called for it to be stopped. Even though he was the first to give up hope of avoiding war previous to the conflict starting. He claimed he was a Muslim before he mentioned he was an Arab and a Hashemite, though the latter have been his pivotal credentials for ruling over the Muslims of Jordan for some time.

The situation in the Muslim countries is surely changing towards Islam. It is only a matter of time now before we see the rule of Islam return to this world, uniting the entire Muslim Ummah as they should be united, and empowering them as they should be empowered, to regain their number one place on this earth.

It seems now an inevitability, by the will of Allah (swt). The mighty Khilafah State is returning.

I think it comes to the same thing: How can Islam turn its back on the world and make it look like an act of triumphant defiance?
posted by Greg Swann at 7:41 AM

 
Islam watch: Forward! Into the past!

From Khilafah.com, a call to invigorated mindlessness:

The chants on the streets of the Islamic lands are showing signs that the Muslims are beginning to break out of the cages the rulers have built around them. They are turning away from the pre-prepared anti-US slogans and turning their indignation against the true culprits--the rulers. What needs to occur is that this feeling is intensified and that it is safeguarded against the attempts to hijack it. Pressure needs to be applied upon the armies. They yearn to act but require the motivation and the kick to act to remove these rulers. Thus liberating every land that has been polluted by the colonialists.

How do those vicious 'colonialists' keep the mighty Muslims down? Among other means, by "the enslavement to institutions like the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the various agencies of the United Nations." The Arab states export nothing of significance besides crude oil. They produce none of the weapons their armies are yearning to use.

On the one hand, there is the temptation to say, "Bring it on." But on the other there is the realization that this is not a call to arms, but rather a blueprint for belligerent surrender. For this writer, and for 500 years of pre-Qutb Islamic theorists, the glorious Islamic Caliphate persists enduringly only as a Caliphate of The Mind. The anti-colonialist jihad called for here is not a struggle against The West, it is a struggle against awareness of The West. I said:

If all goes as planned--as I surmise it to be planned--Wahabi/Qutbist Islam will be discredited and Islam will return to a self-satisfied navel-contemplation.

This article heralds not the end of that process, but it could be the beginning.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:52 AM

 
Cain's world: A safer world...

This from the Raleigh News & Observer:

There have been no credible threats of domestic terrorist attacks since the war began, but federal law enforcement officials said Thursday there are no plans to reduce the terror alert status.

The nation will probably remain on high alert for the duration of hostilities with Iraq even if no evidence surfaces of an impending terrorist attack, said law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Authorities are convinced there exists a "hidden network of cold-blooded killers," as Attorney General John Ashcroft recently put it. But they acknowledge being pleasantly surprised that the war has not so far triggered a response by terror groups or so-called "lone wolf" extremists.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but the quietude of the postulated sleeper cells raises questions. Were they ever there at all? If so, how independent of state control are they? If Islamist terrorism is more state-sponsored than we had thought--state-controlled, not just state-funded, then extra-territorial terrorism may be over altogether. Only time will tell, but this is an auspicious sign, I think.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:03 PM

 
BurqaLib: Behind every rich economy is an educated woman

This article from The Globalist strikes but one note. For example, Japan's economic troubles are caused not by central banking, nor by ossified management systems, but because the Japanese keep their mothers at home. Even so, that one note resonates:

Whatever the results of this war, the emancipation of the women of the region would amount to a great Arab victory. If this does not occur, no intervention from the rest of the world -- from regime change to aid -- will make a long-term difference to the people of the region as would educating the women of the Middle East.

Alas, I'm coming to think this won't happen. The primary objectives of The Cain Doctrine will be realized, but I'm afraid the Bush Administration will seek to placate the worst aspects of Islam, as a Devil's Bargain for containment. I predicted as much, sadly:

The tragedy of this war is not the war itself. It will probably be all but bloodless on our side, and could well be bloodless on theirs--"A rational army would run away." The tragedy is that the 'regime changes' of the years to come, and there are likely to be more than a few, will result in governments that are called democracies, but will have precious little real freedom. 'Democracy' has come to mean the sacred right to vote for your ruthless oppressors.

After World War II, know-it-all American regime-changers gifted Europe, Asia and Africa with the parliament, a machine with two oscillating extremes of tyranny and no center of liberty. The current crop of know-it-alls like to set up Rotarian Kleptocracies just like the one we have back home. If you're wired with the right clique, some part of the state treasury is yours by right. If not, too bad.

This is a real mistake, one that is actually worthy of protest--thoughtful, reasoned, and, one would hope, clothed. The best state is no-state, but the next-best state is next-to-no-state, and it doesn't really matter how a next-to-no-state is constructed. It can be a democracy, a monarchy or a monkey-archy, provided it cannot change or grow in power. This is what the United States should be instilling and installing around the globe, if it presumes to change other people's regimes.

Why? To rid the world of terrorism, of course. The more shriveled the state, the larger the tree of commerce, and the deeper its roots. In a Rotarian Kleptocracy the tax and regulatory burdens upon entrepreneurs are virtually insuperable for the poor and unconnected. In a next-to-no-state, ideally ruled by a benevolent--and naked--monkey, anyone can go into business, and virtually everyone will. Group identity--the true 'root cause' of terrorism--prospers where self-interest is restricted. And while psychological-self-interest is paramount, not bodily- or pecuniary-self-interest, it remains that no one can discover the treasures of psychological-self-interest without having first reveled in bodily- and pecuniary-self-interest. Don't believe me? Ask a seven-year-old. What we should want, if we had brains enough to want wisely, is a world peopled by rationalists, egoists, individualists. A slow but certain way to achieve that is to give the world capitalism, which can be effected simply by dismantling the barriers to it. The world--left unmolested--runs by itself.

Tragically, this will not happen. And tragically, there will be a war. And tragically, young people from all over the world will die or be injured in that war. And tragically, America will be accused of building an empire, even though she isn't. And tragically, the countries she liberates will be afflicted with Rotarian Kleptocracy, which everyone will pretend is 'democracy.' And tragically, the incremental enslavement of the American people will proceed apace, in order to spread the doctrine of Rotarian Kleptocracy, code-named 'democracy.'

We have to stop the state sponsorship of terrorism. And we have to contain Theocratic Islamism, the sworn enemy of the human mind. But having let slip these dogs of war, there is so much more that could be done, but won't.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:44 AM

 
Islam watch: Muslims in Memphis

"Sameh Suboh, a native of Kuwait, a U.S. citizen since 1976 and father of two American sons," quoted at a Muslim-American street festival in Memphis:

"We have to get Muslims in America to realize what I realized when I stepped onto the tarmac in New York back in 1965," said Suboh, an information technology specialist for FedEx. "I had more rights at that moment than I'd had my whole life."

posted by Greg Swann at 1:19 PM

 
Kennedarchy Part II.V.IV: If there is no 'right to punish'...?

Continuing, this is an Usenet exchange that took place in response to the essays I wrote in 1996. While this deals with a fairly bright-line issue, it is vital to remember that many disputes are not so clear cut. Should I welcome your armed thugs into my home when you are mistaken about my culpability? When we disagree about the severity of the injury? Is there any plausible claim that people would voluntarily live among people who behave just like cops?

> O.K. Example: some people assaulted me. Multiple witnesses.
> The accused declined to participate in any proceedings,
> except to comment that they would be back, to 'discuss' it with
> me, at a time convenient to themselves.

> What to do?

What are you asking me? Are you asking what normal anarcho-capitalists would argue? My understanding (and I do not presume to speak for them) is that their response would be almost identical to yours, except that it would be effected by a free-market business that could not in justice prohibit the market entry of alternatives to itself. My understanding is that the issue of whether or not a retributive justice system can or cannot be a coercive monopoly is the 'iota' of difference that separates libertarian minarchists from libertarian anarchists. Surely there are additional individual differences among theorists, but they are even more trivial.

I am coming at the problem from an entirely different direction, and so my conclusion is radically different. In a moment I'm going to give you a short answer, but I promise you in advance it's going to make no sense to you, because you won't have an understanding of the context upon which the argument depends. That context is what I call an agora, a community of volunteers, all of whom are approximately the same flavor of egoist, and all of whom, at a minimum, consent to a fairly detailed convention of conduct. This convention can consist of a formal document such as the Codes, Covenants and Restrictions of a homeowner's association, or it can be a common understanding based on custom and tradition. The point is, we will not attempt to prescribe a method for solving problems that presumes the only manifestation of the cancerous nanny-state that will change is its creeping socialism. In other words, I am describing to you one small slice of the political structure of a brand new culture. Designing a culture is second in hubris only to presuming to graft a political philsophy onto an existing culture that wants no part of it. With that wry comment, please understand that I am saying what I hope people would do when they resolve finally to renounce savagery, not what I predict or would dictate and not what I expect to happen soon.

All that said, the answer to your question is:

In a Janioist agora, you would bring an action against the offenders in the court of your choice. You and the judge would make dilligent efforts to inform them of the date and time of the proceedings. If they elected to pursue other opportuntiies that day and didn't request an alternative date, the case would be heard without them. If you proved your case to the satisfaction of the judge, they would be found against for the amount of your loss plus the court costs. If you failed to prove your case, you would be found against for the court costs. Either way, the judgment would be entered into the credit reporting system, and every trader who cares about justice (and respects the reputation of the judge) would boycott the party found against if the judgment is not made good in 30 days.

In contrast to the present context (and that presumed--I think too hastily--by minarchists and retributive anarchists), we have:

• Trial in absentia
  
• Assumption of involuntarily incurred debts
  
• Refusal to consider moral culpability, only injury and loss
  
• Absence of physical or financial punishment
  
• Absence of inescapable ultimata
  
• etc.

I speak of the response to injury as being non-coercive, but, in fact, there is no dispute-resolution mechanism that is not in some way ultimatim-based. What we are doing is expressing the ultimatim in this form: "The threshhold of acceptable conduct among us is honoring the judgments that are brought against you. If you don't make them good, we will withhold our future concourse." Trade must always be mutally voluntary, so this is not coercive, properly speaking. The choice you are actually left with, if you simply won't pay a judgment, is to bug out or starve. But the choice is left with you, and the dispute resolution system itself is never a party to crime, this in pointed contrast to the endemic crime that is required by all retributive justice systems.

This is not necessarily perfect, and I'm willing to listen to alternatives or suggestions. What I'm listening for, though, are ideas that are even less intrusive than this. Retributive justice, whether monopolistic or competitive, is inherently criminal, and I will not endorse of defend any sort of sanctified crime.

posted by Greg Swann at 9:05 AM

 
Saddam: "I'll bite your legs off!!"

A bit of contemporary news transcribed by Malcolm Dickinson:

(As Arthur and Patsy start to ride past the black knight, he suddenly speaks)

Black Knight: NONE SHALL PASS.

Arthur: (taken aback) What?

Black Knight: NONE SHALL PASS.

Arthur: I have no quarrel with you, good sir knight, but I must cross this bridge.

Black Knight: THEN YOU SHALL DIE.

Arthur: I command you, as king of the Britons, to stand aside.

Black Knight: I MOVE FOR NO MAN.

Arthur: So be it! (draws sword)

(A short battle ensues, where Arthur, relatively unencumbered by armor, easily dodges the slow and heavy strikes by the black knight. Finally, Arthur dodges a strike, steps aside, and cuts the black knight's left arm off with his sword. Blood spurts from the knight's open shoulder.)

Arthur: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.

Black Knight: 'Tis but a scratch.

Arthur: A SCRATCH? Your arm's off!

Black Knight: No it isn't!

Arthur: Well what's that then? (pointing to the arm lying on the ground)

Black Knight: I've had worse.

Arthur: You LIAR!

Black Knight: Come on, you pansy!

(There follows an even shorter foray, at the end of which Arthur easily cuts off the black knight's right arm, causing it and the black knight's sword to drop to the ground. Blood spatters freely from the stump.)

Arthur: Victory is mine! (kneeling, praying) We thank thee Lord, that in thy mercy--

(He is kicked onto his side by the black knight.)

Black Knight: Come on, then! (kicks Arthur again)

Arthur: (on the ground) What?!?

Black Knight: (kicking him again) Have at you!

Arthur: (getting up) You are indeed brave, sir knight, but the fight is mine!

Black Knight: Ohhh, had enough, eh?

Arthur: Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left!

Black Knight: Yes I have!

Arthur: LOOK!!!

Black Knight: Just a flesh wound! (kicking Arthur again)

Arthur: Look, STOP that!

Black Knight: Chicken!! Chicken!!!

Arthur: Look, I'll have your leg!

(The Black Knight continues his kicking)

Arthur: RIGHT! (He chops off the black knight's leg with his sword)

Black Knight: (hopping) Right! I'll do you for that!

Arthur: You'll WHAT?

Black Knight: Come 'ere!

Arthur: (tiring of this) What're you going to do, bleed on me?

Black Knight: I'm INVINCIBLE!!

Arthur: You're a looney...

Black Knight: The Black Knight ALWAYS TRIUMPHS! Have at you!! (hopping around, trying to kick Arthur with his one remaining leg)

(Arthur shrugs his shoulders and, with a mighty swing, removes the Black Knight's last limb. The Knight falls to the ground. He looks about, realizing he can't move.)

Black Knight: Okay, we'll call it a draw.

Arthur: Come, Pasty! (they "ride" away)

Black Knight: (calling after them) Oh! Had enough, eh? Come back and take what's coming to you, you yellow bastards!! Come back here and take what's coming to you!! I'll bite your legs off!!

posted by Greg Swann at 8:29 AM

 
Kennedarchy Part II.V.III: Is it better to injure or to be injured?

Continuing, this is another short essay I wrote in 1996:

What I want to discuss is Socrates' question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It's a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not "out there", apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it's what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.

The Nazarene's answer to Socrates was this: it is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don't believe in an afterlife and I don't believe redemption hinges upon any one event. But I do believe that a "justice" that is itself unjust is vain at best and evil at worst.

We can make a joke by saying, "Political philosophy is the means by which ethical systems betray themselves." There are actually a host of reasons for this, and all of them are amusing to me. For one, a political system has a meta-goal apart from the ethical system in which it is rooted: it must function in the real world.

Moreover, the political system itself has a meta-ethical or even extra-ethical goal in that its proponents will tend to imbue it with what they view are essential survival characteristics even if these betray the ethical system in which the political philosophy is putatively based. Any form of argument that the polity can or should or must do what it would be immoral or criminal for any individual to do is a form of this error. The counter is, but if we don't inflict this injury, the polity won't survive. And the counter to that is that a dispute resolution system that survives by crime is a predator, not a justice system.

Moreover yet again, it is very common for proponents of political philosophies to claim that these essential survival characteristics are in some way manifiestations of nature, rather than expressions of ideas. The usefulness of this approach is beyond doubt: nature is not open to dispute, where ideas always are. The challenge to this, of course, is to carry the claims back to the object. If the manifestations cannot be observed in nature, they are creations of the mind. This doesn't make them necesssarily invalid, but it does make their defense invalid. The general process--man is what my theory needs him to be--is what Janio calls metaphysically creative solipsism. A less polite name would be "conjuring".

Finally we come back to the schoolyard rationalizations that each of us remembers from the hazy days of youth: "You do it, so we can, too!" (the fallacy tu quoque); and, "He hit me first!" (the fallacy two wrongs make a right). Without intending to joke, I think that one way of understanding political philosophy in general is as an attempt to rationalize all of the bad impulses of childhood. By answering in a way opposite that chosen by the Nazarene, the proponent tacitly admits that there is no essential difference, in his mind, between justice and injustice, it's all a matter of whose ox is gored.

And I know I make advocates of forceful dispute resolution apoplectic. The issue is not the essential survival characteristics of a culture or a polity. The issue is not effecting the retribution of a vengeful but seemingly indisposed god. The issue is not "me and mine" or "might makes right" or any other rationalization for doing unto others precisely what your political system attempts to forbid them to do unto you. The issue is justice. What is it, and how do we achieve it?

Now the obvious contrary--defended with hysterical hyperbole, entirely frictionless slippery-slopes and cacophonic brass bands--is this: if your proposed system of dispute resolution forebears to commit crimes in pursuit of its own enduring existence, then how will it survive?

And that is something you need to think about. For on the one hand, the question admits that all of the political philosophies we've talked about so far are defended in "might makes right". And on the other, it asks, by implication, is it possible for a political system to persist without being defended in "might makes right"?

I don't know the answer to that, although I think it's a wrong-headed question. Carried back to an individual person, the question is: Is it better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you?

Boom!

I love working this way.

If predation is the only way your political philosophy can persist, why would you want any part of it? In contrast to that belief, I believe the moral is the practical. But even if it should turn out that morality is bested by criminality, I should not want to be a proponent of criminality. I would choose to be injured rather than to be forevermore an inflicter of injuries.

How about you?

posted by Greg Swann at 7:40 AM

 
Kennedarchy Part II.V.II: There is no 'right to punish'

In his reply to me, one of the opinions John Kennedy offers is quoted here:

it may be reasonable for me to impose some punitive damages to make such offenses manifestly unprofitable

This is the assertion of a 'right to punish.' It is common to Statist arguments of dispute resolution, as well as to Statist-analogue pretend-anarchies such as the one proposed by David Friedman.

It's an invalid argument, of course, invalid with respect to the actual--as opposed to the imagined--nature of free moral agents. It is immoral and unjust, in consequence, but the absurd thing about this idea, with respect to the concept of an anarchy, is this: Somehow Kennedy and Friedman expect volunteers to put up with their abuse and yet remain as voluntary members of their community.

I said: "No one volunteers to be pushed around against his will." A society that asserts a 'right to punish' cannot consist of volunteers. A society that consists of volunteers will not assert a 'right to punish'. Both Friedman and Kennedy are Statists de facto, since both insist they must have what they cannot have among volunteers.

There are other problems with this dumb idea, one of which is addressed here. This is me from a series of essays I wrote in 1996:

Yesterday we established that retributive models of dispute resolution are ineffectual with respect to the interests of the involved parties, the victim and the offender, and therefore are universally invalid. Today we will amend that conclusion with what amounts to a redundancy, albeit a redundancy that is too easily overlooked.

There is no one to whom punishment--as distinct from restitution--is owed. There is no one to whom punishments can be paid. Any dispute resolution agency that assess or exacts a punishment--as distinct from restitution--is comitting a crime.

This is redundant because we have already established that retribution--of which punishment is a form--is invalid. We stress it separately because even some people who comprehend that justice for both the victim and the offender is restitution demand something more than justice. That something more can be vengeance or redemption, as yesterday. Dr. David Friedman weighed in with a desire to use penalties in excess of fair restitution as a means of educating both offenders and potential offenders, as a matter of deterrence. There might be other reasons people could name for seeking penalties in excess of fair restitution. None of that matters, though, because there is no one to whom such penalties could be owed and there is no one to whom they could be paid.

If I am victimized by a crime (or by an unintended injury) my actual interest is to have my previous condition restored, as much as is causally possible. Fair restitution could include compensation for loss of beneficial use or for material damage. While it might arguably be to my benefit to have the inflicter of the injury assessed some sort of punitive damages, or to have him punished by means more medieval, I cannot claim that any such punishment is "owed" to me. What is owed to me is what I lost, nothing more. The motive of any sort of punishment cannot be my restitution, since I am fully restored.

But since I am fully restored, and since any punitive damages assessed cannot be owed to me, to whom can they be owed? We might argue that they are owed to the state, but to do so we would yet again have to endorse the collectivist premise that the state is the real entity and the individuals making it up are mere components. And there is no other uninvolved third party we can name who can claim a property right to a punitive assessment. The only rightful owner of a punitive assessment is the the person assessed against, the offender. The imposition of a punishment in excess of the full restoration of my previous condition could not be just retalition. Instead, it would be an initiation of a new injury, effected by the dispute resolution agency. In other words, punishment--as distinct from restitution--is criminal.

The question before the house is: on what basis could this be justified? Who has the power to "give like for like" by giving more than like for like? Who is it who can instruct the offender and others who might injure in the future by assessing the offender for crimes that he has not committed, but might?

The answer to all of these questions is simply this: no one. There is no one to whom punishments can be justly owed, there is no one to whom punishments can be justly paid, and any agency that exacts from an offender more than the reparation for the damage he has done is not an agency of justice but of criminality.

posted by Greg Swann at 8:01 AM

 
Tony Snow: Thoughts on Idiotic War Coverage

This is Tony Snow's parting commentary from yesterday's Fox News Sunday:

A friend of mine, a comedian, e-mailed last week seeking the stupidest questions being asked by journalists of American military leaders. Two tower above the rest. 

At the top of the "Moron List:" Are we getting bogged down? A variant of the question is: Wasn't this supposed to be over already?

This question is a mark not of wisdom or curiosity, but of boredom. The scribes are tired of getting cooped up in briefing rooms, so they act as if the military were on the verge of failure.

To recap the war so far: More troops have occupied more land more quickly than ever before in human history. We had dropped more bombs on more targets more precisely with fewer civilian casualties than ever before -- and have suffered fewer combat casualties than in any comparable engagement ever. This is not failure.

Idiocy No. 2: Did we underestimate Saddam, the Fedayeen, or any other animate object within the borders of Iraq? The proper question is: Did gullible reporters underestimate all of the above?

Saddam Hussein and his armies are fighting harder than ever before because they know death awaits them if and when they fail. That wasn't the case in the Gulf war, when they merely had to leave Kuwait.

Our planners probably did underestimate the understandable skepticism of Iraqi citizens, who rose up in revolt a dozen years ago, at our urging, only to have allies abandon them in their times of need.

Wars are incredibly complex things, and reporters probably have less actual military experience on average than, say, florists. This is why journalists ought to get out of the second-guessing business.

Ours is not to reason why, do or die, or vainly declaim our views of what generals ought to do. Our charge is simple: Just the facts. Once those become clear -- so do the conclusions about who was right, who was wrong, and what our mistakes and triumphs teach us.

posted by Greg Swann at 7:29 AM

 
Act Now! Learn how to avoid the bad advice of goofy college professors!

At no-treason.com (no, I am not picking on them!), they cite a means by which David Friedman purports to show how to solve the problem of spam.

Friedman begins with the incorrect idea that spam is target-marketed, then he surmises that recipients can charge a fee for their presumably valuable attention. How? By--get this!--responding to the spam and asking for money!

Economists know everything about business except how to be in it, so I want to tell you this right now: The very worst thing you can do with a piece of spam is to respond to it. Not to buy, not to complain, not to ask to be removed from the list. And not to demand mind-share compensation. Responding to spam confirms that the email address is live, which the spammer cannot know without your cooperation. Email addresses that are confirmed live are a lot more valuable than those of unknown status. Live email addresses get sold and sold and sold, resulting in a lot more spam.

To be fair, Friedman is suggesting that you attend only to spammers who agree to pay you, but each response that you make will come back a thousand fold, and hell will freeze over before any one of them pays you for your attention. Your failed Friedmaniacal spam-deflection policy will be effected by scripts, but your mail server and your scripts will be overwhelmed in due course, as your repeatedly reconfirmed email address is sold and re-sold to more and more spammers.

Before we go on, we need to establish two points:

First, no one will pay you to spam you.

Second, trying to get spammers to pay you will results in massively increased quantities of spam.

Friedman's objective is to maximize his uncompensated time, but his strategy is hugely flawed. His conscious attention may be spared, but his out-of-pocket costs for passive spam deflection will rise exponentially, and there will be zero dollars of revenue generated. Why isn't this already a business? Duh.

Spam works because its net cost per converted prospect is effectively zero. Spam is never target-marketed. Why? Because the conversion rates are so poor that to spend any money on market research is to risk financial disaster. As soon as I resolve to spend money on marketing, I will strive to spend it in such a way that my net profit per converted prospect exceeds the results I could get from spam or from leafletting cars at the shopping center or putting stickers on bus stop signs. People who actually want David Friedman's particular attention will not spend a nickel in the hope that he might attend to their message. They will spend a dollar on a researched and target-marketed advertisement or direct-mail package that will be irresistible to prospects like David Friedman.

If the objective is cheap broadcast conversion, marketers can use tools like pay-per-click search engines. Search terms that cost me a nickel or less routinely convert to three- and four-figure sales commissions. And the prospects are pre-sold, self-selected volunteers, which is the point of target-marketing. Want me to teach you how it's done? It'll cost you more than a Friedmanian Nickel.

With all that said, here is an anti-spam strategy that really works. It won't get you paid--and you cannot imagine how much buying-power you have to control before salespeople are willing to pay you for your time. But it will get the spam out of your Inbox with zero effort. Like this:

Create a rule that queries each piece of incoming mail. If the sender is not in your Address Book, either delete the mail or divert it to a special folder that you can name 'Spam' or something more colorful. I do the latter, sorting by subject and deleting only after review, because I get a lot of mail from strangers. Either way, your time spent on spam runs from five to zero seconds. No aggravation sorting through all that crap. No out-of-pocket expense for stupid software solutions. No massively-increasing quantities of spam resulting from responding to spammers.

So, Act Now! Learn how to avoid the bad advice of goofy college professors! Send no money! Don't send this message to twelve of your closest friends! And whatever you do, do not ever respond to spam!
posted by Greg Swann at 10:22 PM

 
Kennedarchy II.V.I: All retributive models of justice are invalid

This is one of a series of essays I wrote in 1996, dismantling the arguments that undergird Statism, Minarchism and the Friedmaniacal style of pretend-Anarchism.

Here's an interesting question: What if you're wrong? What if you have everything exactly backwards?

It's the kind of question I'm always hungry to have folks entertain. After all, I have the unique distinction of being denounced by both the minarchists and anarchists.

One way of evaluating any sort of jurisprudential engine to to ask what objective it is designed to serve, and then ask if it is actually likely to serve that objective. A less than welcome approach, I have discovered, is to speculate about what objective an existing engine might actually be serving.

As an example of the latter, just lately on an anarcho-capitalist mailing list I was failing to make plain that all retributive justice models are driven by religious goals, vengeance against and redemption of the offender. I gave up when a prominent natural rights theorist insisted that criminals must be made to pay for their sins.

Uh huh.

Now it's possible that you might want to defend either vengeance or redemption as motivating principles behind a theory of dispute resolution. Perhaps I should wait and let you either accept or reject those motives before proceeding. I'll carry on just a little bit farther, divil take the hindmost, just to suggest an alternative objective.

It seems to me that vengeance and redemption are pretty non-objective objectives of a justice system. From the point of view of a king they might makes sense. The king has lost nothing from the offense, and so he has no need for restitution. Moreover, the king's interest is in minimizing his future costs (government expenses) and maximizing his future returns (taxes). A justice system that seeks to terrorize or reform offenders tends to serve those goals.

But from the point of view of the victim, vengeance and redemption are next to useless as goals of dispute resolution. There might be a certain satisfaction to be had from indulging the minor vices of sadism and priggishness, but the victim's actual interest is to have his previous condition restored, as much as is causally possible. Thus we can see that any retributive model of justice--statist, minarchist or anarchist--is defective with respect to the interests of the victim.

The same is true from the point of view of the offender, obviously. The victim is not benefitted when the offender is tormented or patiently instructed in the lesser virtues and the greater, and he is not materially benefitted by the gentle ministrations of the penal authority. We can be religious and argue that the offender is culpable and must be made to suffer for his transgressions, but we can't reasonably expect him to agree with this assessment, and the payment exacted bears no relation at all to undoing any damage that was done.

From the point of view of both the victim and the offender, the agent of retributive justice might as well dance around rubbing blue mud in his navel. Nothing that a retributive justice system does bears any relation to the meaningful interests of either the victim or the offender.

What could be less "objective"?

But wait: We said that retributive justice can serve the interests of a king. The modern nation-state is simply a corporate expression of the supposed rights of monarchy. Can we not say, then, that while anarchists must renounce retributive justice, Objectivist minarchists can retain it if they like? No. The idea of a monarch's rights or a state's rights is predicated in the notion that the monarch or the state is the real entity, of which individual people are nothing more than components. In other words, to assert the rights of a monarch or a state, one must argue for collectivism and against individualism, a course of action Objectivist minarchists, to their credit, forbid themselves to take.

Thus, in evaluating any particular model of justice, we can argue about how well it serves the interests of the victim or the offender, but we cannot rationally argue that a model ought to be upheld because it serves the interests of the monarch, of the state, of the collective or of any uninvolved third party. An objective lens for evaluating systems of dispute resolution can concern itself only with the interests of the victim and the offender.

I'll have more to say about justice in the coming days, but we can make a first cut at a definition today: the justice that is the objective of any candidate dispute resolution system can never be other than justice with respect to the victim and the offender.

Retributive models of justice are completely ineffectual in the pursuit of justice, which is to say, in pursuit of the interests of the victim and the offender. All retributive models of justice are invalid.

posted by Greg Swann at 10:05 AM

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