From an email to a friend

Me: ...And yes, I have come accross agorism and mutualism before. I am to the left of agorism and both to the right and to the left of mutualism.

Him: You mean, to the right of some aspects of mutualism, and to the left of others?

Me: I guess so. From what I've seen, most mutualists (or at least the most popular contemporary mutualist writer, Kevin Carson) see primitive accumulation as a problem that can be caused only by government intervention into the economy. I personally believe that primitive accumulation in land can very much be a problem on its own, and I don't think it needs a government to cause and sustain it. So in this sense I'm to the left of mutualism. I think there should be an "upward limit" on how much contiguous land people can legitimately be allowed to accumulte and keep. I should actually phrase it this way - I think there IS an upward limit on how much contiguous land some individual or entitiy can legitimately own - any landholding bigger than a certain size is a state, and states are illegitimate in my book.

I'm also to the right of mutualism in that I'm okay with rent, interest, and profit. I don't see them as dependent on the state, and I don't see them as violations of individual freedom.

Freedom of Religion is Freedom to Offend

People who support using the government to prevent the building of the Cordoba House, also known as the Ground Zero Mosque, speak as if all of Islam now is some special category where the freedom to peacefully gather and worship on one's own property is now qualified by sensitivity to mainstream America. As if freedom of religion is merely the freedom to choose between the little white church on the green grassy hill and the megachurch in the suburbs. Freedom of religion is not just for the wholesome, the familiar, and the unoffensive. Freedom of religion is for the ones who feel called to be different. It's for the peculiar people. It's for the ones who think everyone else is going to hell. It's for the ones who go door to door asking people how they know they're not going to hell. It's for the ones who won't entrust broader society with the education of their children, and who teach their kids at home or in private schools where they assign them weird science books with unorthodox slants on natural history. It's for the girls who insist on wearing long skirts and maybe even bonnets in public. And it's for the girls who want to wear veils too. It's not just for people who want to burn candles or refrain from burning candles; it's also for the ones who want to grow long black beards and bow down and touch their faces to the ground. Freedom of religion is not for the followers of familiar and unoffensive paths. Those people have social nostalgia on their side. Freedom of religion is for the weird, the awkward, and the offensive. If the freedom of religion you believe in is to make any sense, then you have to be willing to be offended. And if you're unwilling to be offended by a religious practice that violates no one's rights, then you don't deserve to be called a patriot, or even an American.

While we're on Youtube...

The Insight tab on the youtube account is just amazing. It lets me know so much about the kind of audience I get.

For instance, I now know that 86% of my viewership is male, while only 14% is female - going along with the idea that libertarianism today is a man's ideology. (I also talk about philosophy of religion and sociolgy of religion on my youtube channel, so this might not represent the popularity of just libertarianism.)

A little more than 40% of my viewers are between 25 and 35 yrs. old, and almost 40% are between 18 and 25. This might have more to do with who uses what medium, than with what age groups are attracted to which viewpoints. But there is the idea that libertarianim appeals to younger people, and this does correlate with it. What strikes me, though, is that I have more viewers who are older than me than I do who are my age or younger than me. Of course, I would be just as puzzled (and maybe disappointed) if most of my viewers were younger than me.

My videos are being most viewed in the United States. Canada comes in at a close second, and the United Kingdom takes third place. This might have a bit to do with language - I think only two of my videos have ever been viewed in Mexico, and that was a while back. It might also be explained by the idea that libertarianism is very much an American ideology. Of course, I'm not a hub of libertarian mingling, so I wouldn't know. I think I could say, though, that of all the English speaking regions, I have regular viewers in only North America and the UK. I have no regular viewers in Australasia or South Africa. Again, I'm not the hub of libertarian mingling, but is it safe for me to suppose that there are no left-leaning market anarchists Down Under? (Watch, by tomorrow morning I'm going to learn about some Australian cooperative village with its own alternative currency, or something like that...)

I also seem to have a bit of a viewership in Argentina. This has a bit to do with my Falklands video, but my Falklands video isn't the only one of my videos being viewed in Argentina - which is curious, and encouraging.

Marketable Aggression

I'm making a rambling and (I hope) constructive critique of market anarchism. Right now it's two little videos where I argue that free markets depend on "religious" presumptions of individual freedom. On my last entry, a youtube user left a comment asking how I think people in a market anarchist society would be able to respond to violent invasion if "we exclude the possibility of selective market-based violation of individual autonomy". I responded that I do believe that some violent retaliation can be legitimate (and thus shouldn't be called a "violation"), but that that retaliation must be proportional and discriminate, and that non-discriminate or non-proportional retaliation is illegitimate regardless of the market demand for it. I thought it was a fairly tight response. But maybe it was too focused.

I didn't have to concentrate on proportionality. I could have just mentioned what a lot of people today think should count as crimes. Most people I know think pedophiles should be thrown behind bars - even the non-violent pedophiles. Most people I know think the producers, sellers, and users of heavy drugs should be thrown in prison. Most people I know think the practice of keeping more than one spouse at a time is an affront to the natural order of things, and that it is within the "public interest" to legally forbid such abominations.

The policies mentioned above are all violent actions that many people would willingly demand in order to get what they believe would be a more secure environment. And all these marketable uses of violence are initiations of violence, which should go against any libertarian's code.

Then there's other kinds of marketable violence. Most people I know think it's okay to force kids to go to school - that is, to confine a non-aggressing child in a particular place regardless of his or her saying "no". Most people I know think it's okay to give kids shots against their will. Most people I know aren't disturbed in the least bit by infant genitle mutilation. Most people I know think spanking is as good and right as little league baseball.

It's easy to imagine that, if we were to get competition in governance today, our legal systems would not be libertarian (it might be better in some regards than the statist system we have now, but it wouldn't be libertarian). A market "anarchist" society without widely-shared and firmly-held beliefs about the sovereignty of the individual, and without widely-shared and firmly-held condemnations of encroachment onto the individual, would be little more than a bundle of all the worst things about democracy tightly wrapped together with all the worst things about capitalism. The political rules of a society are deeply intertwined with the prevailing sentiments of it. If we wish to ever see a world where we are free to choose otherwise, then the freedom to choose has to be something like a dogma.

"We only oppose *illegal* immigration"

I'm getting sick of hearing this. If your only problem with illegal immigration is that it's illegal, then you should be okay with all immigration if the government adopts an open-border policy. All immigration would then be legal, and you wouldn't have any illegal immigration to worry about.

But no, if the government were to adopt an open-border policy, the anti-"illegal" immigration activists would probably be very pissed off.

How about this: rather than immediately abolishing all borders, let's just remove all immigration quotas. Give a visa (for FREE! or at least a very very small fee) to anyone who requests it and turns out to not be a violent criminal. That way, anyone who wants to come here and work can come and work, and there wouldn't be any excuse for not coming the "right" way. And as an alternative to deporting people who overstay their visas, allow people to renew their visas after expiration by paying a goodly fine.

Again, the anti-"illegal" immigration activists would still oppose this. What they fear isn't people coming and staying here without the government's authorization. What they fear is a lot of foreigners being here.

Voting Rights and Immigration

When I was an elections officer in the November 2008 election (yes, I was already an anarchist, and yes, I recognize there's a bit of disonance there, but hey at least I declined to work in the Census), everyone on my team was instructed to not ask the voters for their I.D. Since it's a citizen's almost unqualified right to vote, possession of an I.D. should not be a requisite for voting - so we were told. When someone came up to my table and showed me their driver's license, I'd say "Put that away, I don't need your I.D."

So when we looked at our list of registered voters in our precinct, we would basically be taking their word for it that they were who they claimed to be. You could imagine a problem arising there, but thankfully that problem didn't happen at our polling place.

(Do keep in mind, this is the San Francisco Bay Area we're talking about. I don't know what it's like in other parts of California, let alone other states.)

But our open-door policy went a bit further than declining to check people's I.D. Again, voting is a right, so showing up at the wrong polling place to vote shouldn't prevent you from voting. If you show up at the polling place and your name isn't on their list, and you don't have the time, energy, or willpower to go find the place where you should vote, the election officers just hand you a ballot with a special envelope, have you fill out your information on the envelope, and you can vote. Your ballot would be counted last, but it would probably still be counted, if the election results are too close to call without counting your vote, and the counters check your information and find you to be registered.

In other words, we - the election officers - were letting people vote with absolutely no proof that they were legally permitted to vote. If they were voting illegally, that was their problem, not ours.

We used a good number of special envelopes that day. Some special voters looked like they really were registered but just couldn't go to their real polling place. But there was at least one voter who I was quite confident had no legal business voting.

She looked like she came from Iran, or north India, or one of those places in between. She was ushered in by her family, most of whom had already voted earlier in the day. Her name wasn't on our list. She explained that she just arrived "here" a couple weeks ago (whether by "here" she meant the U.S. or the Silicon Valley I don't know), and it looked like she was enthusiastic to exercise her newly acquired right to vote. I did something I wasn't supposed to - I asked her if she was registered. She said she wasn't. I looked at our supervisor. Our supervisor nodded gracefully, with a "let's accomodate her anyway" look on her face, so I gave the voter a special envelope and showed her how to fill it out.

At the time I thought it was just an excersize in civic duty. When they find she's not registered, they'll just not count the ballot. But the consequences of voting when you're not supposed to can be much more severe than not getting your ballot counted.

If the woman was not a citizen (which I'm almost sure she wasn't), then her act of voting can count as a false claim to U.S. citizenship, which is a grounds of inadmissibility. Voting in a U.S. election before becoming a U.S. citizen can get in the way of you ever becoming a citizen. It can also get you deported.

Granted, the government has to show that the person actually meant to lie about their status. But the hassle of having to show up at court and defend yourself is a hassle that no one wants.

People have to be really careful about this. I heard a story about a Civics teacher who gave out voter registration forms and had his class fill them out. Nice little civics lesson. Now his students know how to register. He then went and submitted their forms for them, and at least one of his non-USC students got in trouble for registering to vote when they weren't supposed to.

You might think you're being graceful and accomodating. You might think you're acting in line with fundamental democratic principles of openness and free participation. You might think you're doing somebody else a favor; but you might also be hurting their position before the law. And the whole burden of your misinformation is going to be born by them - not you. So you're probably not doing one bit of a favor.

I hope to all the gods that that woman was already a U.S. citizen. If she wasn't, then she's gonna get in deep trouble for just following directions from somebody who was uninformed about the law. And what'll happen to the guy whose directions may have ruined her chances of becoming a full member of our society? Well, I'm going off to law school.

Mother Earth can still be a God Concept

Church this past Sunday was a tiny bit dreadful. The week before it was amazing. The theme then was on humanist spirituality. This week the theme was earth-centered spirituality. To be fair, it was still refreshing in the sense that these folks openly admitted that their environmentalism is a religion. But some aspects about it showed that their version of it (or at least, the version presented by the lady who conducted the service) is a religion more on the level of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, than on the level of, say, Taoism or Jainism.

The lady conducting the service read a creation story that was written by a Unitarian Universalist. It was about the Goddess who decided to take care of her loneliness by curling up into a ball and spinning around really fast, forming mountains with the ridges of her spine and lakes with her breasts, and giving birth to all manner of plants and creeping things from her womb, and making 8 humans, 4 male and 4 female, a white male and female, a yellow male and female, a brown male and female, and a black male and female created she them, and she called them good, and they called her Mother.

I've always been perfectly comfortable accepting the common theory that white people are a genetic accident. I've known since I was a very small kid that the paintings of a white Adam and Eve were a bit fanciful. A brown Adam and Eve made much more sense to me. I know that the writer of this Mother Earth creation story wanted to be inclusive - to show that every phenotype is within the Divine plan - but it really looks like it's suggesting that racial categories are Divine constructs and not social constructs. (There's a very thin line between saying that everyone should be allowed a place and saying that everyone has their place.)

But the predestination of race isn't my main beef. My main beef against this creation story is that it has the very same problem that almost every theistic religion has. It ascribes onto humans a raison d'etre that they did not choose. According to this story, we are essentially bi-pedal pets that are supposed to keep someone else company.

I think a lot of theistic creation stories have the same problem - they point at some relationship in some purported origin and say that that relationship is the rightful one. Connected to this is the Divine Command problem. In these stories, the rightful relationship is the one that was determined by whoever the Divine entity is.

Theism can be used to prop up all sorts of hegemonic pyramids. Most of us know that associating the Divine with monarchy (calling God a King, painting Him sitting on a thrown, etc.) is a justification for all sorts of domination that occurs within monarchical political structures. I think the same thing happens when the Divine is associated with Nature. I'm speaking, of course, about religious justifications for the hegemonic system of animal predation.

The lady leading the service did some readings from a book that came out just recently. One of the scenes in this book was the author's observations of a leatherback turtle swimming along with jellyfish tentacles dangling from its mouth like noodles. She kept referring to its prey as "its lunch", as if killing another sentient being to eat it is just another one of those simple pleasures we're all entitled to.

Animals killing and eating other animals is something you have to smile on if you worship Nature. I think this is a problem for people who believe that the inherent worth and dignity of every being implies that the sentient ones are entitled to be left to enjoy their own lives.

People who worship Nature and oppose unjust domination seem to ignore that there is such a thing as Sin Nature. They seem oblivious to the fact that cruel domination is written into the very mechanisms that the ecosystem runs on.

Those who do recognize that cruelty is programmed into the natural order say that they themselves wouldn't engage in the predation of animals. But the predation of animals by other animals? Well that's the will of Our Mother.