Yes, my wording betrays my bias, and of course the Guardian has their’s and that’s well known as well. We can’t escape that, but we can examine which is the more plausible conspiracy on a case to case basis. I’m just not seeing what the FBI has to gain by making these false stings to demonstrate something that radical Islam is demonstrating perfectly well on it’s own. It doesn’t add up UNLESS you’re in a frame of mine where you’re denying that radical islam is doing what it’s doing, and you need an explanation for all the evidence to the contrary.
Does the Guardian allow a token conservative on their opinion board to maintain appearances? How nice for them, but I don't see what it changes. You could spend 30 second on wikipedia checking out the known political allegiances of The Guardian- As far as I know the Guardian makes no apologies for it's political leanings and has made several public statements affirming them. So I don't know why you'd bother defending them from an allegation they don't deny. So far you've cited a blog who's very existence is based around exposing/undermining intelligence agencies, a left wing newspaper, an Human Rights Watch (funded by left winger George Soros) as sources for this FBI theory, and you've resisted acknowledgment of the left wing paper for what it is. It seems strange to me that after having done all that you are concerned primarily with [i]my bias[/i] as if you hadn't set an exceptionally low bar for it yourself when you created the thread. It seems to me it's the direction of my bias and not the degree of it that you object to.
Yes, that's precisely what I'm doing- proposing an alternate scenario that fits the data we have. Deciding that the FBI is picking on retarded people in order to frame Muslims is [i]another[/i] example of fabricating a scenario to support an ideological bias. You just have to decide which one more likely a match for reality, given what we know about radical muslims, intelligence agencies, and so on. Of course what I really think is that when it comes to intellgence agencies, civilians are helplessly guessing at best (even when there are leaks, usually), and that's the point of my counter-theory, to show how little we know and what else it could mean.
Read this over. The sources you are citing are basically just reciting the case Shahawar’s defense attorney made without bothering to mention the prosecution’s rebuttals. So if you want motivation for fabrication on the other side, there it is. The Guardian , Human Rights Watch and TheIntercept look to me to be repeating what Siraj’s lawyer says as if he’s a journalist.
I do desire that my nation keep to it’s own affairs. But sometimes my nation’s own affairs are best served to the detriment of yours (and vice versa of course), and that’s where things get weird.
The arms race is a good counter example to this. I can’t imagine any form of Government wanting it’s citizens to know how to build the latet weaponry. They need to keep it a secret, and yet, other countries want to find it out, especially if they are lagging behind the arms race. That dynamic alone would probably justify (that is to say, account for) half or more of all the espionage that’s ever been done.
Oh, I’m on board with that, at least the technical wording of what you’ve said. I just think there’s nearly always a good reason, or at least arguably so. If there’s no good reason for one country to be spying on/messing with another, they have probably mutually acknowledged this and signed a treaty including measures that they don’t do such things. That’s why I brought up the US, CAN, AUS, US, NZ thing- these nations have no reason to spy on each other, mutually are aware of this, and so they have a treaty that they don’t, and they even exchange covert intel with each other with a special desgination. The designation used to CANAUSUKUS or something like that, but then NZ got added and I have no idea. My point is that even when what you’re suggesting happens, it’s a product of the specific outcomes of specific relations, not a general good will towards other nations.
I did not claim that The Guardian does not support a bias, but these articles at least purport to be displaying facts, if you wish to debate the facticity of the claims then that is an issue of itself. The Intercept also is surely created for the reason you have stated " exposing/undermining intelligence agencies", but does that make defacto everything it says untrue? Could it also be possible that these are the only sources interested in exposing any government malfeasance?
If we wish to get rid of all bias and discuss this, then we will have to lay down the known facts in this case whether they come from these sources or other, including the FBI’s own mouth, or any right wing newspaper which discusses the issue with facts, or other documentation available. Then we will have to decide on a method by which such information can be judged to tell us something, whether that something is conclusive or inconclusive and we must declare ourselves in a position unable to judge the matter.
I may have chosen ideologically biased papers, but they do at least purport to present facts, I hope that you will admit, and besides that they are troubling to me, I have made this thread to investigate these claims and I have attempted to give the issue a fair reading, though I do admit that I have been tempted to side with the presented interpretation, but I am willing to bring it to the barest possible level and examine only the facts presented here and possibly elsewhere. I am not sure if you saw an edit I made providing another possible interpretation above:
Sure, I will read it over. I think it is also valid and necessary to look at. I think The Intercept and The Guardian both took Human Rights Watch as their source, so if anything the responsibility (if we could call it that) would fall on HRW first and then the others for potentially bad fact checking.
Okay, I have no problem dealing with the reality of the situation. I still hope that the first instinct would be to try to reconcile between the interests between nations before espionage takes place.
I think your example is valid. I would want to investigate further what it means when you say “I can’t imagine any form of Government wanting it’s citizens to know how to build the latet weaponry.” unless you mean a that forms of Government must not be the citizens themselves. Also keep in mind that when I consider a form of Government, what personally comes to my mind as the first and most important thing is education, physical and intellectual, education being done through institutions , by individuals for themselves, families for their own childen, and otherwise. I do not support any kind of enforced equality, but I do think that enough aware and capable people would be able to balance the proclivities of each other.
Okay, my desire is not that everyone go frolicking in candyland, but that at least people should act in good faith until that faith is broken, in which case I also think such “breaking” should be investigated to understand its contours, and even then I hope that nations would attempt reasonable solutions before harming foreign citizens, and of course all of this must be put into context of facts.
Check my most recent edit (I apologize, I rewrote my thing like 10 times). I think your sources are basically taking Siraj’s defense attorney’s case at face value as an account of what happened.
And that’s the problem, is that when it comes to what some nation’s intelligence agency is up to, what you’re left with when just examining the clear facts is…not enough to conclude anything. I mean, if the agency is halfway competant at least. I don’t know how you approach something like this without just throwing up your hands and saying ‘nobody knows’ or allowing your biases to fill in the gaps so you have something coherent to say.
Eldawoody certainly used his credibility as a terrorist to convince Siraj that he could outfit him with weapons for a bomb. It seems the defense and the prosecution agree on that. Who’s idea it was, I don’t know if we could say.
Yeah, I think to do otherwise would just be malice.
That's interesting. When I think of a form of Government, what immediately comes to mind is how the state preserves order while letting it's citizens be themselves as much as possible. The answer to that dilemma is the primary characterstic of a government system to me. Then I'd probably prioritize defense, then an economic plan that promotes wealth, [i]then[/i] education. I think maybe because I envision education as something that will come up on it's own and be at least passable if the State just gets out of the way, and those other things I listed as being roles of any state inevitably.
As far as the state being the citizens themselves, yeah I don't see that as possible. The closest you would get, at least superficially would be a direct democracy where elections are facilitated through the internet, and even then you have two big impediments:
1.) Natural aristocracy of pundits, priests, and etc. who shape public opinion being the real force of the State, and
2.) somebody having to actually DO the work that is voted to be done, and their expertise overriding the electorate. In otherwords, a direct democracy will vote for contradictions and impossibilities, and somebody has to enact their will as best as can be represented.
And then it comes down to the question of defense. Is a nation that votes for all it’s defense measures including tactics, weapon designs and use of military force in a transparent way viewable by all putting itself in a position where it can defend itself from hostiles that don’t do that? If your democracy makes you go extinct, little else matters.
Yeah, I see that. I guess my whole point in bringing up the CIA is to show why it would be a bad thing for the FBI to act like them because the FBI interacts with it's nations own citizens, so everybody hurt by their actions are the very people intended to be protected. When the CIA does something terrible it FOR people they exist to protect, and at the expense of people they don't, so there's a certain justification there. I would see the Siraj situation- even it's most pessimistic formulation as 100% different if it was the CIA doing all those things to a foreign national, because there's a much greater possibility for justification then.
Disclaimer: This post is very long, mainly because I have strived to clearly express the means by which the society could operate differently. I am not sure if it (the description) will be satisfactory for its purpose of answering the questions relevant to the thread. It might help if you consider that I did not strive to give answers in the nature of either/or propositions but instead to develop what I see as possible and viable bases and functions of society. This in particular relates to the latter half of the post.
Yes I saw that edit, I think that is definitely valid and it should be taken into consideration where the information is coming from to determine what can even be considered a fact. I will elaborate a little on the implications of this below.
I agree with you not only about the activity of intelligence agencies but about considering situations in general. These kinds of issues are even found in mainstream history quite often.
I wouldn’t try to say I don’t have an ideological position, that would deceitful (even if I was deceiving myself), but I do at least hope to take a step back from it if it is at all possible for me to bring myself to do so.
I think there is some relevance even in coming to a conclusion that we don’t know or can’t know, because that conclusion (particularly the latter “can’t know”) is itself a piece of information, or a fact if you will, which should be considered in its own light, asking questions like, “What does it mean for me as (in this case) a member of a ‘democracy’ that I cannot know the activities of (in this case) the FBI?” Maybe we can entertain "what if?"s, while acknowledging that they are simply that, possibilities or conjecture. I think these kinds of reasoning processes are also valid, and of course the way we answer them would hopefully be proportional to what is at hand (for example a what if should be dealt with as a what if, but all the same that doesn’t mean it should be disregarded, because very often we take precaution for things that might happen, but we would hopefully not drive ourselves to the point of insanity over things that also might never happen.)
I think that is also a difference between what is called “conspiracy theory” and healthy thinking. I don’t think it is unusual or wrong to be suspicious, but if suspicion is taken to the point of obsession or a willful disregard of facts then it has gone too far, at least if we understand “too far” as in this case being the creation of behaviours which are proportionally ineffective to the reality dealt with, and effectiveness would be determined by a predetermined or chosen outcome for and by the acting individual.
This is going slightly off topic and mainly applies to the moments when facts and implications of a situation are known (including such a situation as cannot be known), but the latter paragraph has further implications because the outcomes I mentioned are no doubt differing and often conflicting for various individuals and so what even seems reasonable, or in the above terminology “effective” might be different for the one making the decision and an outside observer.
I am mentioning this because it is at least part of what I am understanding in the discussion of education, that I think these considerations should be made conscious and practicable for individuals in situations where things like time constraints do not apply. It is not to put forward a model of humans which insists that humans are reasonable creatures, it is an attempt to create a model where effective behaviour can be maximized for individuals who would have the ability to use it. Which is not to say it is at this point a complete or perfect model, but I hope it would be a step in clarifying what I am talking about in terms of the education process.
I don’t think our understanding of the purposes of government are far off, if they differ at all. I will give a brief description from my own point of view for the sake of clarification.
I understand government is an instrument for the maintenance and promotion of as good of a standard of life for individuals as is possible (I will explain this further below). Which individuals I am referring to would depend on the case of the government itself, and, even within a state, on the particular situations at hand.
A government “maintains” life by enacting functions that individuals would be incapable of performing alone and which is in the interest of the people bound together (by some means) to form and/or support the government. (I am attempting to deliniate this in a realist method where the countours of any given government would be specified on a case-by-case basis). By enacting functions I have in mind things like building roads, sanitation, etc. even defense (also to be considered on a case by case basis and presumably under the decision making process of particular governments.)
This maintenance and “promotion of the standard of life” also takes place on the level of mediation, either between individuals who are in conflict, or among groups, whether they be within the bounds of the governmental jurisdiction (and it depends what form that “jurisdiction” would take, because I am taking government here to be also applicable to the management of human organizations other than state apparati), or between different governmental units whether in the case of conflict, trade, or for the sake of some kind of mutual undertaking.
The reason I hold education in prominence is because after human existence (coming into existence and being existent), then action, it is through the transmission of knowledge by which modes of action and developed and maintained over time among people and across generations. This can be something as simple as a man hitting two stones together and creating fire (action) then showing the same action to another human so that they can both create fire, and the information continuing to be passed on. It is only through this transmission of knowledge that institituions can continue to exist (and arguably by which they can be build up from simple actions and abilities (such as meaning creating — words)). So it is only through the awareness, development, and transmission of information (education) by which effective actions and culture (including institutional apparati) can be created and mantained.
So in reality I take existence and action itself to precede education, but I don’t think these things even need to be said.
I think it has to be taken into consideration first how we are conceptualizing the state. I don’t have any problem with (what I understand to be) what you are calling a “natural aristocracy”. I am not advocated a kind of forced equaltiy of ability or power. In many ways what I am advocating is the opposite of that, I am advocating that people educate themselves and each other in such a way as to become individuals of ability and power, which is not to say that everyone will obtain that ideal or even on the same level, I am just advocating that the educational apparatus of states be made open to people for the attainment of these ideals.
I wanted to add it to an earlier post but I decided not to because I wasn’t sure how far the discussion would go, but what I am saying is also dependent on whether state education is mandatory or not. If state education is mandatory (as it is in many countries at present), then I personally think it is more important to support the ideal I am promoting. If state education is optional, then it is less important, but perhaps I would still advocate it. This is not to say that those who would chose not to attend state education would attain the ideals I have provided (power and ability) but that if they failed to do so they could have failure on their own terms, whereas if education is mandatory and certain important facts about the workings of states and human behaviour is not brought to the attention to developing children, I believe the state itself should be held responsible for these gaps, at least I think if a child or their family would hold the state responsible for such gaps they would be justified in doing so.
What the “consequences” of such a justification would be remains to be seen, and I will make it clear that I do not think it would necessarily be the case that a state would care about such “condemnation”…
The reason I bring it up at all is because I think this, among other things, is one reason for such “condemnations” or criticisms to arise, and besides any moral implications which may seem to lie behind the word “justified”, I think that in a realist sense this is at least important for understanding why someone might criticize, for example, a government.
So to be clear, my goal is not to seek the means for the creation of a utopia, but to make clear why unrest and discord would arise in otherwise prosperous nations and to suggest possible solutions for them, it is an ongoing process, not one which expects to make a series of claims to the enactment of which our political woes will be ended.
I simply think that the education process is (as explained above) the thirdmost important process for individuals to guide and maintain their own existence.
I would also suggest things like citizen parlaiments maintained by voluntary attendance and of a perhaps lesser power, and still I think that a more sensitively developed education system (and a higher educational consciousness for individuals who would educate themselves and their families and neighbours) would aid that process.
As for defense, I hope you will accept when I say that military is an institution within the higher government institution. To understand my position on this you have to understand that I would not call for a disorganization of the military apparatus under a homogenous glob of people I am now calling the state. As I understand it, even if for a moment the government allowed an anarchy to exist by relinquishing all its powers, some new form of government would arise either by a natural aristocracy taking the preexistence positions of government or else creating new positions for themselves.
I am calling for a reorganization of the military apparatus wherein education takes prominence (keep in mind my statement about the obligatory nature of education, and also that I would personally desire education to not be obligatory, but still possess the standard of education I am suggesting, but I also think it is important for individuals and families to be conscious of these considerations so that they can determine effective behaviour).
In this call for education, please keep in mind, I think that relaying facts and keeping opinions out of them as much as is possible (and possibility here being dictated by consciousness of the presence of opinion clouding fact, not desire for a certain opinion to be in place) as well as for students to be able to direct their own area of studies as much as possible, with the help and guidance of instructors (so that education plans are not “determined” for them, where a selection process of what is important is not made, at least so far as is possible under the same stipulation as above. The only time I would consider directed education to be desirable is when the child is so small that they have not even learned the basics which would enable them to direct their own studies (reading, writing, at least elementary math, etc.) and perhaps at the beginning of lessons an overview could be given about which subjects exist, and this would be done categorically to explain which subjects there are, what they are, and what their significance is — so you could go over the sciences, the humanities, social studies, and at least to begin with you’d probably refrain from sub-sections and perhaps as education commenced deeper indications could be made apparent, though a “student” could very well discover these beforehand of their own initiative.) For this purpose, ideally computers could be used, but if for some unforseen reason computers were unavailable, ideally as part of the education system there would be developed some method developed by which areas of research could be easily brought up, for example of the kind used in large catalogues and libraries.
To return to the subject of defense:
In practice, the operations of military institutions take place on a case by case basis. Members of the military are educated, and much of the contents of this education is in the public domain (in the sense that it is accessible by civilians), in this sense it would remain so and be optional for “students” to make study of as they see fit.
The example you gave was the arms race, I can see two ways of discussing this which aren’t as mutually exclusive as they might at first appear. The first way is if we accept my paradigm of a new form of government for dicussion and we attempt to hammer out its relative faults and merits, or the second way is that we discuss the implications of the current state paradigm for the arms race and try to hammer out its relative faults and merits. The reason I say I don’t think they are mutually exclusive is because even for discussing in the second way given it might be helpful to understand where I am coming from in the positions I am taking. Also, I would like to make it clear beforehand that when I engage in these discussions I am engaging in my own dialectical method (the faults and merits of which are another issue) and so I will make it clear to you now that I do not always speak straight at the point, and I don’t mean that I digress, but that I dredge up scenarios for the sake of consideration because I consider them revealing for the sake of understanding our present circumstances and our current options in these circumstances, and this would be the case more than usual in presenting hypothetical possibilities which could be adopted, because I am not recruiting.
With that stipulation in mind, let me continue. Understand first that I have not expressed that private individuals could not or should not keep their actions hidden, only that public institutions representing a people should not keep their actions hidden from those they are representing.
Allow me to explain, my reasoning behind the latter is that every individual must act in order to maintain and promote the prosperty of his/her person. While maintenance and promotion of propserity is a function of a government apparatus, it is also, and foremost, the function and responsibility of themselves and the things of importance to them. We can call this personal soveriegnty or self-ownership, which entails not only the right to, but also the responsibility for one’s own person.
In the case when an individual does not know the actions of another (be it government or private person) or when such an individual encounters push back from such an agency which blocks that individual’s “effective behaviour” directed to some predetermined goal, personal soveriegnty is jeopardized. In the case where an individual is blocked from information, it may conflict with his/her (for the sake of brevity I will use the designation his if any such case arise) ability to act in such a way as maintains his person and promotes his personal prosperity, because the individual does not “know” (as in cannot be certain) about the reality of the situation, and so must either act blindly at the risk of his well being, or else entrust his soveriegnty to the privileged party (privileged as in possessing the missing information) so that the sovereignty of the individual becomes dependent on the other party (in this case the state).
In the situation where effective action directed towards the acheivement of a predetermined goal is blocked, then personal soveriegnty is again in jeopardy. That individual must find a different mode of action or route to the attainment of said goal than would otherwise have been the case. If the necessary mode of action is dictated by an outside party (for example a government) then personal sovereignty is in jeopardy, because the right to self-determine is either acceded to the other, or else given up along with the previously determined goal. This is, by the way, a situation of social control in the non-conspiratorial sense and the merits of specific instances are for debate in terms of their merits.
The purpose of this exercise of discussing what I have called personal soveriegnty is to make clear the situation of individuals in their social capacity and make it clear that it is frequently the case that personal sovereignty is jeopardized. In case it is unclear how this relates, I will point out that this is the main issue around which this whole discussion revolves, and the impetus which in my mind necessitates the discussion.
What I maintain is that as personal sovereignty is diminished, that being the right of an individual to his self-determination, so too is his responsibility to it. I am not saying that when an individual is blocked from committing an action they lose all responsibility for their person, but that the responsibility of an individual is inherent in their choice, their ability to choose, and for diminishment of personal sovereignty which is not absolute, so is the diminishment of responsibility not absolute, but an absolute diminishment of personal sovereignty (wherein a person for example was tied up and their limbs contorted by force to perform an action) so too would responsibility be diminished absolutely.
This must be considered in instances even where legal responsibility is not under consideration. In such instances where personal sovereignty is diminished, even in a situation wherein information is withheld, it is natural (though not necessary) for an individual to be frustrated by the diminishment of his knowledge used for actions which maintain and promote his prosperity in the present or the future, and it is natural for such frustration to be expressed as criticism or resentment against the withholding party, and in such proportion as his sovereignty is diminished so too is his responsibility, the first responsibility being to his kind thoughts (and not first his deeds).
In such proportion as a government (whether of stately apparatus or otherwise) proclaims right over the sovereignty of individuals, so too do they possess responsibility over the well being of those individuals, else those individuals, bereft of the determination of their actions and the maintenance which their actions would afford, would bear grudge against the agency which has diminished their sovereignty.
Because it is the nature of states to not have access to the content of what amounts the well being and prosperity of diverse individuals in their own estimation, yet be in such a relation to individuals that it jeopardizes their sovereignty regularly by its laws and institutions, it must be acknowledged that the state does not provide maintenance for the well being for those individuals in whose estimation well being and prosperity are not met.
For this reason, what I propose is that those individuals whose estimation of well being and prosperity are satisfied by the state remain loyal to its apparati, and those dissatisfied be relinquished from relations of all mutual responsibility to the state.
To be understood, what I am after here is not to proclaim that being a man alone would be better than life in any state. In fact, I think it could be highly foolish (although there are circumstances where certain individuals or groups might be able to make such a situation work), but because what I desire is for a clear relationship between individuals and the state to be drawn in relation to personal sovereignty.
To clarify some things:
As for the direct relation to this and the arms race, of course those who have relinquished mutual responsibility with a state would be free of state obligations to bear and develop arms (which is not to say an “outside” state would not stop this behaviour, but again the purpose I am after here is the deliniation of clear relationships) and as far as my concerns for life within a state, the discussion of education covers this — and to be clear it is also my belief that an education system of the kind I described would make it abundantly clear what an individual’s relation to the state is.
Also, when I said
what I meany by the government being the citizens themselves I meant this, personal sovereignty, and I wanted to know if you meant that government “must not” be thought of in this way, as in couldn’t or shouldn’t be.
And finally, it is my belief that if a society, even the ones we find today, was to be developed under these ideas of personal sovereignty and education, all of the relations of the society would gradually change, for one because people would begin to think of themselves in relation to their own actions and outside influences differently (in terms of their personal responsibilities and self-determination), and for the reason given above about education, because education is primary for the development and spread of human knowledge and culture (which would include social instutitions and effective actions).
Yeah, conspiracy theories are the result of going too far in the direction of filling in gaps with ideology I think. I dont know if there's a rule to answer that situation of if it's just a matter of degree. I think one difference between intelligence agencies and matters of normal history is that with history, saying 'you don't know' really means 'you don't know yet' a lot of the time, and applying ideology to it is something that's easier to tell when you should and shouldn't; if a person is reading history in the light of Marxism and they want to focus on economic history then that's not even so much a matter of gaps as interpretation. But with intelligence agencies, since [i]when working properly[/i] we don't know what they are doing, reading ideology into what we don't know seems less...rational somehow. It's hard to put into words what I'm thinking here but it's something along the lines of, since them being secretive is them working as intended, I am more likely to give the benefit of the doubt or just let it remain a mystery. A matter of history which is unresolved simply because not enough documentation survived is quite a bit different to me.
In other words, when people say “Isn’t it mysterious that we don’t know what happened here” with regards to the FBI or the CIA and are inspired to suspect their motives, my instinct is to think “This isn’t mysterious at all, an intelligence agency hiding their motives isn’t something to provoke speculation, it’s business as usual,” and so my instinct is to defend them.
I agree with all this so far. I would add a negative clarification to the above if it were me, stressing that the Government ought not enact functions that the people are capable of performing alone. It is not just a good thing that the State provides the above, it is a bad thing if they try to provide more; assuming of course that everything they provide is charged in taxes or otherwise comes from the wealth of the people.
Yep, so far I think we’re both just echoing Locke here.
I don’t disagree with anything in that paragraph. I also don’t see anything in there that leads me to think that education falls into the “People can’t provide it for themselves” category.
I don’t have a problem with natural aristocracy either, as I see it as inevitable in any government system. I suppose would have a problem with a government system that fails to take it into account adequately.
I skipped a bit here because I was tired of just saying “Yes I agree,” and I wanted to say more about personal sovereignty.
So, I agree with you that the power of a person’s vote and their ability to make decisions about their lives is reduced the less they know about the State that governs them. Yes, having intelligence agencies diminishes personal sovereignty. But I’m seeing that as a tradeoff for security and collective power. To my way of thinking, all systems are a series of trade off’s- you give up something to get something, and if you sacifice military intelligence secrecy to give people back some personal sovereignty, you’re paying a price for it. As you said, you aren’t looking for a utopia, so there is no ideal state from which the present state is a deviation. There’s merely a question of what do we value, and when will we pay the price of something we value to get something else we value. There’s also a measure of real politik here too; a state that doesn’t have intelligence secrecy has a massive disadvantage on the world stage vs. one that does, period. So while it’s true that through military secrecy we are giving up personal sovereignty in exchange for collective power (something a libertarian or conservative should frown on), ultimately if you don’t have enough collective power you lose your personal sovereignty anyway at the hands of invaders who may value your personal sovereignty much less than the degree you were willing to compromise it. So you have a ‘giving up some personal sovereignty ultimately to preserve it’ thing going on here which makes it a more appealing trade, at least to a point.
Yep, this all sounds right to me. And I think the equation runs both ways as well- as people are freed from the responsibility of their actions, they lose personal sovereignty as well. If a person doesn’t suffer consequences for their mistakes, that is a form of reducing the information they need to make good decisions, and thus reducing their sovereignty as well.
That sounds good, but what do you do with such people? They can say they are relinquished from all relations of mutual responsibility (taxation, military service) but if they are still benefiting from defended borders and using infrastructure as is going to be the case anywhere in the first world, that severing didn't really occur. The only real way to effect that break in relationship is deportation, and then of course the question becomes[i] to where[/i]? A modern state can't sustain within it's borders a population that isn't using the infrastructure, isn't protected by it's laws, doesn't pay taxes, and so on. Or at the very least, can't sustain it without causing massive problems to the rest. The best example I can think of would be gypsies, who seem to be a plague on everybody they settle near from what I've heard.
Reading through your response here, I’ve realized my own position as regards all these things revolves around the core idea of personal sovereignty (which I think is an ideological offshoot of liberalism initiated by Locke). I will try to make my response as brief and clear as I can.
Intelligence agencies are designed to be secretive, yes. In that sense we should understand it as part of their nature.
As I see it, criticism of the government (and/or its agencies) arises (and is legitimate) when one or more of a given individual’s needs or ideals (I do think that these should be expanded upon but I will refrain for the sake of brevity) is not met in conjuction with their activity being blocked, even though the behaviour does not interfere with the personal sovereignty of others. (The “blocking” I have in mind here is in particular bureaurocracy.)
I think that the criticism would first arise against the bureaucracy, but because bureaucracy often plays a role in keeping the power structure of the government solid, if only by extraction of fees, a government is very often disinclined to remove the bureaucracy. The criticism then extends to the government as a whole, and not infrequently to its most conspicuous branches of power (which includes ‘defensive’ apparati).
This may sound highly strange, but I think that such an option (extending personal sovereignty and breaking of mutual obligations with the state) would still be worthwhile even if the state enacted a policy such as that these individuals should then not remain within the borders of the country, and if they were not accepted by another country or able to find some neutral piece of ground (given the world’s current borders) they would be (though technically diplomats of their own sovereignty) considered in breach of the laws of their country of residence for residing there, in the same manner that a foreign individual is in breach of the law for residing in a country he does not possess a permit to be in. I do think in such a case it would be fair to give them a reasonable amount of time to leave (though they may have nowhere to go).
The reason I think this is because it is less important for me that individuals be able to break away and form their own nations, than that the terms of their relations to the countries of which they are citizens become clear.
It should maybe be considered that this may only be important to an ideology which understands people as having a right and responsibility to their own person. In this case I think it would be important to understand what is voluntary and what is involuntary, and it is my contention that our relations to the state is in great part involuntary.
I would also defend this position by saying that our understanding of the world comes from our outlook as individuals within the world, so it is only from that core that we can make coherent relations between beings in the world. So this is again about education and understanding our place in the world and our abilities and our constraints to action.
I also think that a proper education is open to people to make for themselves. The main reason I call for an educational reform is because education where I live is mandatory and the contents of education specified by the state beyond the point of imbuing individuals with the skills needed to continue their own education. The mandatory nature is significant because the large amount of time spent in educational facilities could obstruct one from pursuing one’s own potentially more profitable education.
Besides this I have concerns with some of the content. From my own experience, much of my time in public schooling was spent starting at an overhead and coping it out in my own notebook with little teacher participation, I also learned highly useless facts like what soldiers called canned meat in the trenches, and I hold these to be evidence of the highly dubious nature of my studies and use of my time which could have been spent much more profitably otherwise.
There is also issues about ideological education. I think children are far too sheltered to form an accurate representation of the world early on. Unless we can discover an objective teleology for humans, I think that protection of personal sovereignties (that is, against each other, and where the standard is physicality, and not mental or ideational impedance, besides abuse — which should also be further developed and clarified as a concept, and what constitutes “mental or ideational abuse” should be limited when there is no physical restraint or threat to bodily harm involved except perhaps when it involves psychological abuse of an adult towards a child maybe under 14 years old) should suffice for a code of conduct which is not formed by the enactment and completion of particular tasks.
Giving somebody X amount of time to leave, even if they have nowhere to go means a couple of things-
1.) You have to punish them if they don’t leave, which doesn’t result in anything too terribly different from what we have now. The ‘You are free to declare you aren’t under the authority or protection of the state’ part sort of becomes in name only.
2.) You create a situation where any criminal is free to simply walk out of the country if they decide they don’t want to be punished by the laws of that country thus becoming somebody else’s problem if they make it out. And they wouldn’t even be sneaking. You’d have a scenario in which shipping your prisoners to some other country becomes a cheaper legal solution to imprisonment, which will lead to huge diplomatic issues, nevermind the moral implications.
In short, doesn’t a nation have an obligation to keep and deal with it’s own lawbreakers, and doesn’t that obligation run afoul of what you’re saying here?
In the U.S. (in case you missed it,) politics have become pretty heavily left-right polarized by our standards. One side has a stranglehold on the education system and decides what is taught there without input from the otherside- a few rural communities notwithstanding. So I can relate to a need for education reform, though I think privatization has a large role to play.
If a nation decided it was necessary to criminalize those who do not want to be citizens any longer under a title like “illegal immigrant”, then I have no problem with that either, it serves the same purpose I gave in my previous post for allowing citizens to break mutual obligations with the state.
Also, if someone was in any given country and committed a crime within that country I see no reason why they wouldn’t be held liable to the laws of that country. Being a citizen of a country doesn’t change one’s obligations to observe the laws of a state in which one finds oneself, and that would be the same in this case.
EDIT: Although, I’m not sure if you were implying this by your 1), but I realized it is not necessary to enshrine what I am saying in law, because someone could technically do it in protest, it only might become necessary to do it openly and stop using the country’s facilities thus criminilizing themselves in protest, in the manner of civil disobedience… it might be slightly more complicated that way, but anyway I appreciate you putting the idea in to my head either intentionally or indirectly.
Hey Artful, I think you and I have basically run out of fun things for me to disagree with you on in this thread, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on my semi-challenge to your notion of personal soveriengty- that is, that while intelligence agencies and other secretive organizations do strip us of some measure of it, everything in society-building is a trade off, and giving up some of our soveriengty for the sake of communal power may be required to preserve the bulk of that same sovereignty. Any disagreement there?
Disclaimer: This post is maddeningly long, I have attempted to answer your question thoroughly, but still at the end I left a third part as yet unanswered along with an explanation and possible direction for future discussion if it is desired.
To answer this I have to go the long route, which is to say I don’t have an immediate answer but it is something I think is well worth considering. The problem here is in a way historically new and is a product of the post-cold war political environment. I don’t even think this problem has been very well addressed, but I think the general assumption follows the lines you proposed (“giving up some of our soveriengty for the sake of communal power may be required to preserve the bulk of that same sovereignty”) pretty much universally.
Admittedly this is a problem that I am not able to overcome with overzealous enthusiasm, but I think it is very significant and deserves consideration. So as not to totally cop out I can say that the only alternative that readily comes to my mind would be something like decentralized government with citizen armies that would be prepared for defense against invasion. That would entail an entirely new form of governance (I at least cannot think of any historical examples of such a thing, except perhaps something like ancient and late medieval city states) and would have to be clarified (which is not the course I am going to take in this post).
I did attempt to approach the issue without giving a solution in one of my latest posts. To begin to have anything worthwhile to say about it I think I would need to move from the ground up, rather than top down giving a solution and examining its flaws and merits.
Here is the part of the post when I gave something of a rationale for why I think there might be a conflict of interests. Because you’ve no doubt already read it you might just want to see it to know which part of my previous post I am referring to:
I might also be inclined to just examine this concept in itself. I don’t immediately agree with this, but rather than making an absolute judgement on the matter I would rather examine the goals and implications of what we desire from personal sovereignty, safety, and ‘communal power’.
I think we have to examine what the value of personal sovereignty is to different people, there may be another way of going at this particular issue but allow me to explain my rationale here. America’s Declaration of Indepedence is probably one of the foundational documents to codify this ideal, and I think we can consider Thomas Jefferson a philosopher worth some attention on this issue:
While I don’t necessarily agree that humans are created equal by nature at their birth, I think that a government should be accepted and appreciated based on its function of aiding and maintaining its citizens in the three final ideals, else it should be considered more a hindrance than a good. (I might also make one more change and swap the final wording “pursuit of happiness” for something like “pursuit of his conception of the good”, though that phrase is admittedly clunkier.)
That image of government is an ideal, it does not necessarily specify a reality. A government could in theory or practice not fulfill those goals or set about other, even opposing, ones. Because the government is an ideal, its character and maintenance must be realized by those who hold that ideal. In other words, one cannot expect that others will hold the same ideal and fulfill it for them. That is where personal sovereignty comes in, one has the right to and responsibility for ones own person, and those qualities are inseparable in practicality.
(I add that practically because we could say something like, an individual is deficient who is incapable of taking or enacting certain responsibilities for his/herself. We might hold an ideal wherein that individual still has right to his/her person. I might agree with this ideal (and in a sense I do) but there is a practical reality wherein that such an individual has been afflicted by nature in such a way that he might find himself for example incapable of defending his sovereignty or in fact pursuing his conception of the good.)
This poses great consequences for examining any society and its possible mode of functioning. I might even be inclined to think that “equality” was a myth (whether believed by its original theorists or not) which rendered an accurate conception of the workings of a polity impossible without disregarding the myth of the natural equality of capacities for theorizing.
The outcome is not only what we mentioned, a natural aristocracy, but also a breakdown in the entire ideal of “life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness [or one’s conception of the good]” in practice, unless those most capable (or able, or excellent in ability) freely choose to pursue and maintain that ideal for all (the thought here is if those individuals of greatest ability pursue their conceptions of the good at the expense (that is, when it comes in conflict with either the sovereignty or even the conception of the good) of others, then the ideal “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [or conception of the good]” is compromised as an idealfor the society as a whole. In other words, you have a society divided and at odds. I would also add that this division can occur not only when certain individuals are of greater ability in their individual person, but also (that is, even when they may be of lesser ability relative to another individual) when their ability is interpolated into a collective (for example an organization or an institution) whose collective power outweighs that of individuals, or even other conglomerations of individuals.
**Note, at this point I have not made any claims about what should happen, but have only made an attempt to describe the situation as it is likely to occur in practice.
Allow me to take a moment and explain why I am going this long route to answering your question so that you don’t think I am merely trying to waste time because I have no answer. The problem you posed to me was:
In order to give a sufficient answer, it must be clear what personal sovereignty entails, what its purpose is and what its possibilities are, and the same goes for what you call communal power, so that we can measure the benefits of each against the other and know what we are giving up and why.
I hope I have adequately demonstrated above (or at least begun to give a conception) how personal sovereignty has different meanings and different consequences for different individuals.
(This is also a criticism of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’.)
Because of the division and conflict of the interest of individuals, the question you asked, whether it is required (and I would like to change the term from required to desirable if you will allow it) that sovereignty be given up for communal power, must necessarily be answered differently by different people who are fully aware of their interests.
That is my answer to whether it is desirable. If I had to answer whether it is required, I would have to give a much more ‘realpolitikal’ answer and say it is required if those individuals who are not interested in giving up their sovereignty for communal power are without choice in the matter.
I realize also after writing this that the conundrum you posed could also be understood to mean something like “Is it be better or worse to give some part of our sovereignty which is lost by the presence of secretive agencies established with the intention of protecting that part of our sovereignty which remains from threats — and (potentially) increasing the reach of our abilities by acting as an instrument in our collective hand to accomplish deliberative actions, or procure resources, which are greater than our abilities as individuals would allow?”
Right off the bat I will say, for some individuals it is indeed better, and perhaps far better, to make this trade. This would of course depend on what stake they have in the status quo of the society — if ones conception of the good is to a sufficient or greater degree fulfilled by ones society after the trade off, then it would be foolish to risk that fulfillment of the good unless an even greater fulfillment of one’s conception of the good could be had with a risk proportional to the increase in that good —
— making an allowance for a hypothesis that it might be in human nature to not risk even a merely sufficient fulfillment of one’s conception of the good for the sake of a greater good if the risk entails a complete loss of that good should failure ensue, while still allowing that the risk may be taken if the degree of perceived goodness is to be gained is of an extreme nature, despite the risk of losing all (an example might be someone with a good job, stable assets, high life satisfaction, risking everything to obtain unimaginable wealth) provided that their belief in their capacity to obtain that extreme object of goodness makes the undertaking appear (merely) possible but not highly improbable.
So much is my opinion of whether the trade off is better or worse for those whose conception of the good is sufficiently or to a greater degree fulfilled by the status quo.
Because I am using “the status quo” as my measure, there also has to be another variable, which is whether these individuals (either those discussed immediately above or those about to be discussed below) are able to alter the status quo sufficiently in their favor without breaking off the relationship between the community of which they are a part and the agencies which provide for the protection (and possibly other services) under question. If individuals are able to alter the status quo in their favor, then the system is more flexible and it could increase the satisfaction of certain individuals, thus potentially rendering it more desire to maintain that new status quo. The problem which arises here is that as various individuals alter the system in their favor, consequences could arise such that the interest of other individuals become sacrificed. The effect of this would be like a seesaw of various individuals experiencing greater degrees of satisfaction while others experience lesser degrees of satisfaction. It would be an entirely new question of whether such a ‘balancing mechanism’ could acheive an equillibrium of satisfied individuals.
It might also be the case that a sufficiently large number of individuals are satisfied by the status quo that the remained who are dissatisfied possess an insufficient amount of power to either alter the system against the weight of the greater number, or else act outside of the system to obtain their satisfaction by other means. What is possible is that some outside entity may attempt to co-opt those dissatisfied individuals and interpolate their weight into its own sphere to be used against the original society which did not satisfy those individuals’ conceptions of the good sufficiently, or even attract the dissatisfied individuals by means of deceit for some other entirely selfish purpose, but this is outside of the realm of the discussion so I will leave it.
In the case for those whose conception of the good is insufficiently or to a lesser degree fulfilled, the situation bears resemblance to that desribed above, particularly with consideration to their ability to affect the status quo within the current relations of the state.
It of course is relevant to what degree an individual’s conception of the good is not satisfied by the status quo. This is a subjective experience, so for the sake of theory we must imagine that the individuals in question’s conceptions of the good are chronically unsatisfied to a degree which jeopardizes their perceived meaning and worth of the political arrangement and/or life (an allowance could also be made that the individual’s perception of his/her ability to affect the status quo would be equally important provided it jeopardized their perception of the meaning and worth of the political arrangement and/or life).
If the individual’s perception of the worth of the status quo, and their ability to alter it, was sufficiently low as to endanger all valuation of the worth of the political arrangement, it would be worthwhile to attempt to break relations with that arrangement for the sake of an ideal, even if the accomplishment of that ideal was unlikely, and sometimes, if the distress of the individual is to a suffiently high degree, the attempt to break current relations and make some new effort might be impulsive and ill conceived, or may even become manifest as random and destructive behaviour without consideration for any constructive program whatsoever.
Now, after writing the above, I realize there is yet a third way of reading the conundrum, which is: “Is there a better way of ensuring the safety and providing for the power of the community to reach its collective conception of the good wherein personal sovereignty is either not at all, or to a lesser degree than in the present state of intelligence agencies, sacrificed to that endeavour?” (If the “collective conception of the good” is the one laid out by Thomas Jefferson and modified slightly by myself is taken as that conception then it will influence how this question is answered, I think that should be clear.)
This is by far the most difficult question to answer. I am wondering if you will allow that I leave it for the moment because I have written so much here already, though I fear it may be what you desired to get at most of all. Rest assured that if you ask me to I will do my best to provide an answer to that as well, but I would have to warn you that it is also something I think would have to be approached as much as possible from the ground up — though I may be tempted to explore the solution I proposed at the beginning of this post of a decentralized government with a citizen army prepared for defense (and of course considering not only whether the loss of sovereignty would be of a greater or lesser degree, but also whether there might be some way of measuring whether the benefit to an individual’s pursuit of the good is of a greater or lesser extent satisfied under such circumstances.)
That would be very difficult as well because it would take not only a consideration of that system but a consideration of those aspects which are considered important to our current discussion being weighed against situation of the current system, which in itself would necessitate that we understood the “current system” in some fixed manner and not as a changing historical entity which it is in reality.
If you can think of a different way that your question could be better addressed then you may propose it and I will do my best to move along those lines.
I also realized I didn’t make a few other potentially important analyses.
One is the utility of intelligence agencies — though this does require an enormous amount of data about potential threats as well as the operations of those organizations which we admit are impossible for us to know in detail.
Another is an analysis of whether the risk of providing a largely unaccountable agency with large degrees of power (access to intelligence, weaponry, manpower, even indoctrination and mind war techniques (search Noopolitik, Psychological Operations, and the book Mindwar by former Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino) outweighs the benefits of their presence, even for those who are well served by the status quo. (I might say that for certain individuals it would still be worthwhile to maintain the status quo for example if they were in a position to hold the institution accountable, for example if they held a high ranking position in the agency).
Echos of Rousseau, where he concedes that the State has to be small and broken up in order to be democratic. I think what you described would be fair for its citizens, but probably not able to defend itself on the world stage.
As I'm seeing it, you've said that the primary purpose of the State is to provide what the people can't provide for themselves,so things get complicated when the need not being met is one that only the State can provide, and they can only provide it by blocking the activity of it's citizens. Defense being a prime example of this. That's not to say I disagree with your principle, only that I think all such principles become compromised (corrupted?) when put into the practice of politics.
Yeah, I didn’t see anything in there I disagree with.
Not necessarily. It may be that even though each of us defines personal sovereignty differently, there is nevertheless some threat out there (not the same threat for each of us) that puts them each at risk, such that communal power protects from them all. So for example, if some State cannot adequately protect themselves from a takeover by radical Muslims, there may be some people in the State who would not be adversely affected by this- perhaps some that would welcome it. But a State that cannot adequately protect itself also cannot protect itself from the Chi-coms, or Western Imperialism, or genocide, or perhaps immigration-born disease, or any number of things, such at everybody’s sovereignty is threatened by at least one of them. So that’s my explicit disagreement. My implicit disagreement from the above is that a society composed of people with all various ideas of what their personal sovereignty means to them is a bad idea not the least of which because they won’t know what to apply their communal power to. The Founders thought they were endorsing indivdual ideas of sovereignty, but the statements they were making were in the context of a universally Protestant culture in which it was unthinkabe (and I’d argue undesirable) that it would ever be anything else. In other words, “Let us white male Protestant land owners agree to persue our individual ideas of the good” is not the sort of inclusive statement we read it forward to be today, nor would it have functioned much at all well if it was.
Yes, that makes sense to me, with the caveat as I pointed out above that no particular undermining of the status quo is guarenteed to be preferable to any particular person who isn’t well served by it.
Which is as good an argument as any for not actually attempting to create a society in which such diverse conceptions of the good are encouraged to thrive. Or at least that’s my take away from it.
As long as the smaller states kept good relations with its neighbors, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to unite against larger threats in the same way the Greek city states did against Persia, yet kept their own constitutions.
This problem in truth is based on a lot of individual factors about what exactly the role of a state is and holds a lot of historical baggage.
I want to say, hypothetically we can say the state might refrain from interfering in the relations between citizens except in extreme cases of violence, aggression and theft.
But even still this wouldn’t be that easy because we have to take into many historical factors, like for example who owns the land. There may be those who own significant portions of land and those who own none at all, and those who own none are at the whims of all those who own land, and it would be similar in relation to a government if the government had something like crown land or public property I suppose but which could not be put into use by individuals to secure their survival. In this case the personal sovereignty of those individuals who are completely without resources is already comprimised because they must look to the desires and demands of others to secure merely their life (and we are taking this partly in relation to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (which I said should be conception of the good, I will respond to your critique of that below)).
So there is already a contradiction between life and pursuit of happiness. I won’t even make a statement to say what should be done, but suffice it to say that even if the government plays no involvement and is without possibility of corruption in this sense, conflict will not be avoided.
I think one of our differences (and this is relevant to what I will say below) is that you see most threats coming from outside of the community, whereas I see most threats as being internal. This would not be completely different for the idea that I gave above about small city states, the one potential difference is that if the state was small enough and the individuals had familiarity with each other there might be a common bond of interest greater than large anonymous states where everyone appears as strangers and competition to each other.
Because we are currently working with different ideas about what might be (or should be?) the ends of purposes of personal sovereignty I would still disagree with this on the grounds that certain of the citizens might be radical Muslims or wish to embrace the Chinese brand of communism, which if was accomplished wholeheartedly they could be under protection of a new state which they felt their conception of the good was met (if in truth they felt so).
Another instance might be if any given individuals felt that their livelihood and conceptions of happiness were in conflict with the current state, while its true that external threats might arise, there still might be those who would no longer care because they weren’t losing anything from it and had even grown feelings of animosity towards the state.
I did make the stipulation in my last post that these individuals could be in such a significant minority that their desires would not matter in any weighing of power. That is — their exclusion or threat against a state would be virtually none, but still they might exist.
I think this is really the more important factor because the individuals I attempted to describe above are probably in a significant minority in any state except under drastic times. In common times even those discontent generally soldier on with thier way of life and obligations, and will even defend the state both in speech and in deed.
I do not even want to take the approach here of a disagreement with what you’re saying, instead I will ask some questions and make some observations (which you may disagree with if you find them unreasonable) and we will see where we go from there.
As I see it, the situation you indicated here:
"a society composed of people with all various ideas of what their personal sovereignty means to them is a bad idea not the least of which because they won’t know what to apply their communal power to. "
is in many ways the current situation, but has also been the situation historically (perhaps to a greater degree at certain points). I think this problem is altogether more prevailent in a democracy (I think we can agree that what occurs today isn’t a democracy in the strict sense but could probably be described as a mixed government). Because it is a mixed government the problem of applying communal power is not as overt because the citizenry does not in fact choose the direction of its application — we might say through elections, which I suppose would have to be in one sense fair, but in another I hope you will agree that the ruling portion of society has always been fairly certain of their ability to persuade the majority of the population to go along with their plans of action. Some quotes to illustrate this:
I would say that the allocation of communal power in fact, and even the makeup of the government and its duties, is in very little measure driven by the demos — an exception I would make is that even to gain the support of opinion certain practices and institutions must be in place which keeps the community from total unrest.
For this reason, I think a conversation about personal sovereignty should be narrowed to the actions and allocations of energy of each individual’s own energy, and so far as the actions of individuals influence the state, and so far as the operations of the state is in contact with the lives of individuals, the state will be considered.
For this reason I feel only able to address the first part of your problem here:
“a society composed of people with all various ideas of what their personal sovereignty means to them is a bad idea”
and not the second part:
“not the least of which because they won’t know what to apply their communal power to.”
You further develop the problem you’re raising with:
“The Founders thought they were endorsing indivdual ideas of sovereignty, but the statements they were making were in the context of a universally Protestant culture in which it was unthinkabe (and I’d argue undesirable) that it would ever be anything else. In other words, “Let us white male Protestant land owners agree to persue our individual ideas of the good” is not the sort of inclusive statement we read it forward to be today, nor would it have functioned much at all well if it was.”
Which, in the context of personal sovereignty which I am raising (with the goal of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ (or one’s conception of the good)), would need to be related to the actual actions of individuals within a state, and not of the state itself. I am not sure if you would like to see the implication of the above codified in some way so that “Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” would instead be in some way more specified to indicate what the ideals of as you put it “white male Protestant land owners” held as a conception of a good and as a teleology of the society. I suppose I will have to await your opinion on that.
The discussion being developed here is in particular with regard to intelligence agencies which are in place to secure the power of the state.
If the contours of liberty in a state are specified and not to be deviated from, the state would no longer warrant the name “free”, unless you would consider any totalitarian state free in the sense that you are free to pursue the actions condoned by the state but not otherwise.
The example I used above about conflicting interests of individuals outside of state interference was land — the ability to access land to secure survival (shelter, food…). If a teleology of a state becomes fixed (that is, liberty is exactly defined and not left open), especially in regards to the actions and goals of individuals within the state, then the state is effectively supporting the interest of some particular segment of the population against that of the other, and besides limiting the concept of what defines freedom, hence taking the path towards an unfree state, unless again we would define a state as free so long as one is free to pursue the actions condoned by a state but not otherwise, however limited those condoned actions may be.
I think the only direction for this part of the conversation is to outline what constitutes liberty. I hold that the interests of individuals are frequently in conflict and so the only way to ensure liberty is to allow for perpetual conflict of interests without state interference and if domination arises (either from the state or among individuals) then let that domination stand forward under its true name but not take the name of liberty.
If the goal is to set a teleology for the state under a conception of the good, then I think that what must be discussed is what constitutes the good with awareness of how the conception of the good relates to diverse individuals so that a clear conception of its working order can be formed.
What I have written above has been an attempt to show that liberty inevitably breeds conflict and, not only does domination of some party by the other result inevitably, to take a different course would in effect result in a state which is not free, and I think this has always been the case — that states have never been free for all individuals, only a myth of freedom has been propagated in society, most likely for the sake of calming public opinion of whichever segment of the society is currently disenfranchized.
None of that is to say I don’t value freedom, only that I consider freedom in practice untenable (that is, true freedom on a communal level does not exist in practice) and as a common conception of the good must be supported by a myth.
I would have liked to post the study referred to in this article (The article is in the Washtington Times, which is a conservative newspaper by the way):
I don’t know that that’s still viable with the resources required to fund a modern army.
I don’t know that I see most threats as coming from outside the community. I’m just focusing on those ones because I’m talking about national defense. I think national defense is interesting because it breaks a lot of libertarian assumptions- the idea that you pointed out of a State only intervening to protect its citizens from each other in cases of murder and theft and so on loses a lot of it’s appeal for me primarily when considering that a state first and foremost has to continue existing despite other states.
I addressed that, or at least I think I did. Yes, an indiviual citizen might be a radical Muslim or a Communist, but they are very unlikely to be both, and a poorly defended nation is vulnerable to both. My point is that it is not necessarily true that if people aren’t invested in the status quo, then they aren’t invested in the protection of the state, because there is no guarentee of what will replace it in a world like ours in which there are any number of possible threats to a weak state. A citizen who thinks “I don’t need to be invested in the communal power of my State because it is good for me if the Muslims take over” isn’t accounting for all the other things that could happen instead of that.
I don't know that democracy is connected so much as immigration and education, though democracy may exacerbate it. It's easy for me to imagine a democratic state in which virtually everybody is Buddhist, or socalist, or Catholic, or what have you. In fact, it appears to me that the United States was more democratic when it was more unified in in that regard- though I'm not asserting causation there, merely that the two do seem able to coexist.
There’s always a ruling class, especially in a pure democracy. The goal in a constitutional republic would be to exert some sort of control over who they are and how much they can get away with.
Mostly. I had in mind your idea that a State protecting itself from radical Muslims as good isn’t a given because there may be radical Muslims in the State that would welcome a takeover as I said this. But yes, most of the problems that come up with that disunity are going to be internal, for sure.
No, that would be to turn into a legal matter what should be handled by the community. I believe as you do that for the most part the State should be leaving its citizens alone except in grave matters. I just also think that's impossible if the citizens can't largely police themselves according to a shared notion of the common good. The price of diversity is that the State must adjudicate matters where once the family or the neighborhood or the Church was sufficient.
I have a slight brain fog today, so I apologize if my posts seem less coherent than usual. I’ve also tried to make my tone more moderate than this morning — I had woken up as a crotchety old scrooge.
Ah okay, in that case I agree with you on the foremost importance for considering defense. I wouldn’t consider myself a libertarian exactly, it is mainly that I see an internal contradiction in liberalism which I am trying to work through, I tried to explain it in the last post (particularly towards the end) — I don’t think there is such a thing as freedom, from the state or even for the individual in a state of anarchy, or at least freedom cannot be an absolute ideal because it is always contradicted. I think it is mainly a myth (though not entirely) — that would be a pretty odd position for a libertarian. I still do think liberal politics are the best thing we currently have, though on the other hand I feel its internal contradiction is becoming greater and so it is partly for the sake of liberalism that I wish to criticize it (if that makes sense)…
I am rambling on a bit.
I know that there are a number of smaller countries without large armies that keep themselves secure (countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Czech Republic, New Zealand come to mind) I am pretty sure through military alliances. So it would be something along these lines I might consider viable, particularly if the alliance was intended for external threats and did not involve itself in internal affairs. I would also probably think it best to provide checks against even these types of organizations — that alliance could be staffed in the case of an emergency by the armies of each region, like a kind of communal feudalism, with perhaps a smaller core organization made up of all the members that would possess certain larger equipment.
Okay, I think this morning my head was so lost I was on the wrong track with what you were getting at. I concede to you on the point you’re making, though I still think the particular individuals (or potentially groups) could be something like rogues within the nation and so use it parasitically while still planning or hoping for the chance to carry out some subversive deed. These individuals are not really my interest, though I do think they are one of the issues for liberal politics to consider without compromising itself (that is, without becoming illiberal), but it’s not of utmost importance to me because I am more interested in how people can live together, and live together well — the reason I bring up conflict is because I am inclined to think it inevitable, particularly in liberal politics, which is again one of the internal contradictions I feel it would be well to work out. I argue against these groups just as much as anyone else…
You are probably that pointing to democracy is probably too narrow to grasp the entire issue, so I should watch out for that. I really do think I was a bit too foggy this morning, but it occurs to me now that an even more important reason would for diviseness would be a shortage of resources, whether it be land or any moveable good — which of course is no one’s fault… I suppose the reason that might have led me to think democracy is because people tend to look to the system to correct the issues, which might exacerbate power struggles and move them to a national level, and also spread the repercussions (for example by proliferating legislation).
I suppose the reason that internal conflict is important to me is because in the absence of internal conflict I don’t see intelligence agencies or defense as a problem. I also see something like invasion (in a worst case scenario) as becoming an internal conflict — that is, once an outside invader has breached the border and occupied the country to impose rules, the problem is internal. So in this way I feel like if internal conflict could be sorted out — even if there had to be some kind of “managed conflict” (I am not necessarily advocating this), then I feel that communal power could be allocated without contradiction.
Well you make a good point here, but I might also try to selfishly use it to again advocate smaller communities. I know that in the US you have the state system, because I am not an expert in your politics I can’t say how well they work, and I’m not even completely sure how they work, but another possibility would be if each country worked on a smaller level than states so that there was more involvement and interaction among individuals and their communities.
In other words, perhaps something like mixing the government further so that let’s just say we kept something like the current governmental system with the only change being that small cities (or neighborhoods depending how large the city was) would work along the lines of participatory democracy (nor direct democracy), but still have parliaments (in other words just a revision of the mayoral system).
In this way there could be a replacement for the neighborhood and it would encourage involvement in calm debate. This would also be something like what I meant by “managed conflict”… so that individuals could express and even have a platform for their own point of view without the risk of absolutism that untamed democracy might be subject to. Of course the countours of that would also need to be worked out with reference to constitutional powers.
Well it took me a week to respond to you for no reason other than responding to you actually requires effort. So don’t feel like you’re obligated to write back when you aren’t feeling up to it.
I’m basically a traditionalist conservative, reacting to libertarianism in the way that you are reacting to liberalism. I see a lot I like about libertarianism, but I see an internal contradiction in it as well- left-libertarians seek to liberate people not just from the State, but from each other, where as the other sort seeks to liberate people from the state to enslave them to corporatism. In either case the end result is a society that’s not worth living freely in.
Yes, miliary alliances [i]with the United States.[/i] Which is a little like saying those little birds in Africa are protected by a military alliance with the hippos they sit upon. More accurate still if the little birds sat up there continally chiding the hippo for eating too much and spending too much energy on making sure his tusks are sharp and the wallow secure. Perhaps those birds do do that, in their little birdy way.
That aside, I don't actually disagree with this point of yours very much. My overarching point here is that there is no ideal solution and no ideal state- only passable ones and disastrous ones. I think you may well be right that one possible solution to the problem of State would be to have a collection of basically free city-states that govern themselves, coming together only for matters of defense. I think they would sacrifice some security by doing things that way, but everything is a give and take, and perhaps the risk of security is worth the gain in liberty to them. Some other State may solve the problem with a single, unified power that is difficult to oppose, but sacrifices some internal liberty for that power.
Do you mean to say that you’d be more inclined to accept a powerful defense and robust intelligence service in a country that had fewer internal conflicts? That’s an interesting idea for me, I hadnt thought much about the connection before.
I don’t think I can agree with that first bit. A foreign invader that cross your border is still a foreign invader, and an external influence. I’d need a lot more explanation to justify that. It sounds like we’re saying the same thing in the rest though, if I read you correctly. I am viewing a society (and only a society) with a shared noton of the common good as being a society with fewer internal problems, and thus a society that can more accurately allocate it’s communal power. If everybody (or everybody who matters) is a Catholic, that goes a long way in determining agreeable ways to spend national resources, including what threats to protect from. Reduces the need to spy on one’s own citizens and all that other stuff nobody wants to see, too.
I have no objection to that except, as noted above, I think a collection of smaller communities is paying a premium for the extra liberty they enjoy over one larger State. If their ‘grand experiment’ for lack of a better term constitutes that they pay that price and see where it leads, then so be it. Maybe it will work out!
They have changed a great deal over the years. The Civil War basically established that the Federal Government was the true power in any situation that actually matters, and state governance is limited to trivialities. Even things that should be decided on the state level have enormous pressure from the Fed. in the form of ‘matching funds’ - the Federal Government offers to pay huge contributions to roads, or schools, or what-have-you, but only if they are handled in the way that Fed decrees they ought to be.
At this point in my life (I still feel I’m young enough) I don’t have any set conviction on where my political allegiances land, though as I said of the currently available political forms I prefer liberalism, with the stipulation that I find a lot of contradictory trends, mainly because “freedom” is an ideal, not an empirical state.
This and
I guess one of the problems of political philosophy is that it’s only a theory until its put into practice and generally practice will determine the true form. Probably the only way a change will be made is if there is some kind of crisis which either necessitates a change, drives a certain segment into instigating change, or else if some portion of the population believes it to be of such great benefit they embark upon the task. I do personally feel like current politics could use something like what I have suggested (with greater development in regards to the workings of course), but I don’t think it will happen unless there is some kind of crisis, or if more people come to see the world the way I do, the latter I think is unlikely mainly because of the western education system and media, but you never know…
I can’t be sure you will come to agree with me in any case, but I explain it like this:
I am taking internal affairs to be the things which happen within the borders of a given polity which the laws and customs of the country having bearings upon. In this sense, if a country was conquered and brought under new government, the practices that follow the change of leadership would be internal affairs. A polity could also welcome foreigners into their country without resistence (which may be foolish, but not impossible). The reason I have chosen to see it this way is because the form that the polity takes can have a great bearing on the response to an invasion of this sort, whereas if the conflict was entirely external the form of the polity would only be important insofar as they make arrangements for some kind of military deployment or border control. In other words (though it is not necessarily advisable) it is possible for an entire polity to be structured like a military encampment.
I am interested in the workings of the government there and elsewhere, though I have less to say about those particulars. I did read somewhere that one of the reasons given for expanding the power of the Federal government over the states was for the sake of democracy, though I have no idea if that is actually true and honestly I have some doubts.
The suggestion I made about further mixing the government to provide greater democratic involvement on a community level while perhaps keeping things like a senate with longer terms and the electoral college would possible have some effects which would not be looked highly upon by the central governments of countries, mainly because I can imagine if citizens have more involvement in governing they will become to a greater degree aware of the influence of legislation and decisions on their own community to a degree they hadn’t been previously.
I’d go further and say that dramatic political changes not only tend to happen as a result of some crisis, but that’s probably the only time they should happen. The risk of untried theories is simply too high in a system that works well-enough. Of course, as we discussed, whether it works well enough is going to be in the eye of the beholder to some extent.
I don't know. It seems right on paper. But the USA started off as a country where only wealthy land-owners had a say in politics by design. We've already extended suffrage in every plausible direction and the internet gives even poor people access to anything they want to know about any subject, and the Washington Post says the result is we're an oligarchy- which is to say nothing changed. So I'm not sure. Maybe the importance of individual participation is overrrated, or maybe measuring social justice by who has the influence is asking the wrong question, or....something.
Artificial organizations have to create artificial need for their continued existence.
Governments were not supposed to be living entities with a will independent of the people they govern. But once that happens, in order to continue to live, the government must instigate the belief in the need for that government.
You might be right here. As much as I sometimes bemoan the political system, I also feel a deep disappointment with the attitude of many citizens. I suppose I just haven’t shed my last vestige of idealism. I am probably holding onto it to keep myself away from total cynicism, maybe until I have something better to give my idealism up for.
But yeah, it is disappointing how many use their efforts and resources — not universally of course, but in great quantity it does seem like many want little more from life than food, entertainments, and to pump out babies. Is that all there is to life?
Is that all there is to life?