Freedom is Slavery

For awhile, I was dividing libertarians into two kinds. The first class were those that seemed basically much stupider than me, as evidenced by their reliance on rote recitation of stale arguments, an unwillingness to question their assumptions, and (in the extreme case) devotion to the cult of Ayn Rand. Most of the random libertarian flamers on the net fell into this categeory. Then there were the others, who actually seemed pretty smart, and certainly smarter than me at least in the area of economics. This category included a number of actual professors, cryptoanarchists, visionaries, and crackpot geniuses.

Sometimes these categories blurred a bit. For instance, I'm sure Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame is smarter than I am, and has the credentials to prove it. On the other hand, on the rare occasions I read the Freakonomics blog I find the exact sort of simpleminded market reductionism I used to hear from the cheeto-stained fingers of dorky computer geek libertarians. So. Also, this classification doesn't seem very useful to other people, who may rank above or below me in the smartness scale.

So I have a new dichotomization: there are the libertarians who actually seem interested in liberty, and those who seem more interested in something else. I'm not sure what that something else is, but it seems to lead them directly from libertarianism to being a Bush cheerleader, despite the manifest unlibertarianism of the current regime, or to something altogether more surprising, namely a fondness for unabashed authoritarianism in its theoretical form.

In blogland, the first category is represented by people like Jim Henley of Unqualifed Offerings and Radley Balko. These gentlemen are concerned with fighting for freedom in the current political reality, which means generally in opposition to the Bush regime. They might well be card-carrying ACLU members despite that organization's leftist tint.

On the other hand, we have people like the odious Glenn Reynolds, most prominent political blogger around, a self-described libertarian and in actuality a cheerleader for whatever moronic, dangerous, or illegal act the Bushies are up to. We also have Mencius Moldbug, who has thoughtso far beyond the usual libertarian platitudes that he's arrived at some mix of monarchism, colonialism, and the sort of quasi-capitalist authoritarianism practiced in Singapore and China, two nations which win his approval. We've also got a free-marketeer economics prof (not sure if he's actually a libertarian, but close enough) who blandly advocates for torture as a cost-effective means of punishment. The dean of loud-mouthed stupid libertarians has been an equally loud-mouthed supporter of the criminal and criminally stupid invasion of Iraq. Apparently libertarianism is perfectly compatible with imperialism:

Witness the fact that I, a radical libertarian anarchist for more than twenty years, find myself arguing for a position not all that easy to distinguish from reactionary military expansionism.

Uh-huh. Raymond blusters over his contradictions, whereas Moldbug at least seizes the bull by the horns and honestly embraces authoritarianism.

I am, or used to be, interested in the psychology of libertarianism. It seemed to be a deeply geeky ideology, fueled by a desire to replace the complex and scary real world with a simple distributed algorithm. From that perspective, a slide from libertarianism to authoritarianism makes sense, because a strong authority is another way of making the complex conflicts of the real world go away.

[Update: oddly enough, this posting has been linked to by one of its victims, resulting in an influx of readers far past the usual single digits. If I knew that would happen, I probably would have written it more carefully. In particular, a lot of people I label "libertarians" wouldn't call themselves that. But they are market-oriented thinkers, which puts them in roughly the same basket as far as I'm concerned.]

Hitlery

Great. On a day in which the Bush administration succeeds in convicting a man they've held incommunicado and tortured for years, on a day in which government restrictions on domestic satellite surveillance are being lifted, on a day when a group linked to the Bush administration has been found to have been promoting the idea that Bush should be named president-for-life -- what better task does a leading libertarian intellectual (Nick Szabo) have to do than to suggest that Hillary Clinton's I-care-for-you-deeply routine makes her the equivalent of Kim Jong Il?

I am continually amazed by the way in which so many libertarians combine a generally high intelligence with political acumen that would disgrace a retarded chimp. What the hell is wrong with these people?

I'm no fan of Hillary's, but every time I see one of these lame-brained attacks from the right (and in this case the libertarians are just mining the same psycho paranoia as the mainstream right) her stock goes up a notch.

[BTW, this was originally a comment on the blog post. But, in a true proprietarian libertarian fashion, Szabo hasn't seen fit to let my comment get past moderation, I am interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it.]

The Moldbug Variations

My recent fascination with the work of Mencius Moldbug has drawn me into the world of right-wing intellectuals. Not the shameless neoconservative Bush shills, but people with actual ideas, albeit scary ones. Dark thinkers, who are not afraid to dig up and poke at the weak foundations of the Enlightenment. Where they want to go with this, I'm not sure. They seem to have a fondness for The Old Days, including colonialism (much more well-ordered than the current third-world mess), monarchy, and empire. They verge close to racism and the dark proto-facism of de Maistre.

Still, it's a fascinating world. I've learned about interesting people like Australian philosopher David Stove, who wrote a great piece demolishing most of philosophy but doesn't believe in evolution. I suppose he exemplifies, in a somewhat different way, the mixture of deep insight and utter wrongheadedness of this new world. Then the right-wing blogs of course have a way of finding and publicizing the worst of the "left", including the wonderful Stalin Society.

I'm in heaven, because at my age I don't find anything new to interest me very often.

And I thought I had a bad reaction to libertarians

Here's Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

When I recently had drinks and cheese with Stephen Dubner (I ate 100% of the cheese), he asked me why economics bothers me so much as a discipline, to the point of causing allergic reactions when I encounter some academic economists. Indeed, my allergy can be physical: recently, on a British Airways flight place between London and Zurich, I found myself seated across the aisle from an Ivy League international economist dressed in a blue blazer and reading the Financial Times. I asked to be moved and preferred a downgrade, just to breathe the unpolluted air of economy class. My destination was a retreat in the Swiss mountains, in a setting similar to that of Mann’s Magic Mountain, and I wanted nothing to offend my sensibility.

I'll have to read the guy's book now...sounds like my kind of elitist snob.

Note: for my purposes, libertarian == "computer geek who fancies himself an amateur economist who spends his time playing World of Warcraft and posting to newsgroups". Somewhat more honorable than the blue-blazered first-class flying type, actually.

Führerprinzip

From the World's Stupidest Editorial Page comes this argument that we should all just shut up and line up behind Dear Leader:

But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."

They can because this isn't communist Romania, you pompous twit.

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook...Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community ... This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels.

No, it's regarded as fucking moronic.

For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies.

So -- in time of war, we aren't allowed to criticize the president who is the veritable incarnation of America's strength. To do so is tantamount to treason. We are at war against "terror", that is, we're in a war that can never end, so basically we aren't allowed any criticism of the president ever.

Mr. Pacepa should have stayed in Romania, he's obviously learned his lessons well there. "The communists got it right", indeed.

This is related, loosely, to the dynamics of conflict, forcing side-choosing, hardending of the boundaries. There is not a good term for this, which is a pity, since it seems to be at the root of war and many other social dynamics.

I recently had a long chat with Mencius Moldbug, an interestingly crazy libertarian whose goal is (roughly), to eliminate politics (because it leads to violence and war) and replace it with contracts, ownership, and law. I think this is largely misguided, but I'm partly sympathetic. Politics is unpleasant, it kills the mind, it forces people to conform to group norms so is hostile to the individual, it leads to violence. But I don't think you can get rid of it.

H-T, IOZ

Scenes from Modernity

Trying to explain to an eight-year-old that his aunt is going to have twin babies, but despite the fact that she's near 45 the eggs were only 22 years old, because the doctor takes eggs from a donor mommy and puts them and the daddy's sperm in a glass dish, then puts the embryos into the mommy a few days later, so the babies will have two different mommies as well as a daddy.

Come to think of it, IVF does bypass the traditional embarrassing moment of explaining this stuff to children. Yet another benefit of advanced technology.

Birds, frogs, pasta, and the ultimate nature of reality

Things I'm reading instead of what I should be reading: Max Tegmark's new paper, The Mathematical Universe, which expands on his earlier work that I've mentioned before.

The External Reality Hypothesis: There exists an external physical realitycompletely independent of us humans.

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: Our external physical reality is an abstract mathematical structure.

This is one of those "so crazy it might be true" theories. And for me, it seems to talk about some of the more abstruse issues in theoretical physics from the math up, in a way that makes them almost comprehensible.

When considering such examples, we need to distinguish between two different ways of viewing the external physical reality: the outside view or bird perspective of a mathematician studying the mathematical structure and the inside view or frog perspective of an observer living in it.

...If history were a movie,the structure would therefore correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider the first example above, a world made up of classical point particles moving around in three-dimensional Euclidean space under the influence of Newtonian gravity. In the four-dimensional spacetime of the bird perspective, these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti...To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta, obeying the mathematical relations corresponding to minimizing the Newtonian action.

[under Quantum Field Theory]...If the bird sees such deterministic frog branching, the frog perceives apparent randomness.

I like those bird and frog terms and will adopt them for my own scruffy thoughts on the nature of subjective and objective views of the universe (I may leave out the pasta though).

Science is the process whereby frogs laboriously attempt to take the perspective of birds.