Comment Hell with Intense Debate

Intense Debate has b0rked and is phasing in and out of existence. Needless to say, this is fucking up all conversations.

The Rocket Breaks Down album cover
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For the last month, Intense Debate has been behaving extremely badly. It’s been hiding comments from everyone, on seemingly random rates and times. Basically, at various occassions, replies to particular threads would disappear. Sometimes it would be just one or two replies, at others it would be the whole thread past the first reply.

And while this started out mild, as the month passed, it has grown progressively more intense, to the point where now there’s always at least some replies missing, and at worse, hundreds of them. This is even more annoying since those comments still exist in the system (ie, I can see them in the dashboard) but appear sporadically. So in one refresh I will see 90/100, and the next refresh I will see only 15.

Unfortunately, the developers have really dropped the ball on this. Even though this seemed from the start as a quite important problem, and even though this was reported early on, there was initially no response, then there was some non-functioning workarounds, and finally the problem was acknowledged just last week after me and other started screaming bloody murder. Incidentally, it was at this point where this was becoming unbrearable which I assume meant some of their big name clients started complaining as well.

So now, this is creating a comment hell situation for me, especially for the long discussions I’ve opened with Lockeanists and the like. Not only do many people get confused about their disappearing replies, but they also get the impression that I’m secretly deleting comments. And this just too much.

So for now, I’m going to stop replying to comments until this fucking issue is resolved. This is not say that I will leave your replies unanswered, but that I will only start a conversation, when a conversation can be maintained. Of course, this assumes that IDC will get their act together and fix this annoying bug ASAP. If this does not happen, I may have to do the unthinkable and remove it altogether in order to be able to discuss again.

Needless to say, this whole situation is seriously pissing me off, especially since I’ve been a devout proponent of IDC for a while now.

I’ll be updating this post with the status of this comment hell in the future.

UPDATE1: It seems that the IDC folks have finally located the code causing this and have produced a fix to stop this from happening in the future. Now all that’s left is fixing the problem as it already exists and they plan to push an update for this once they know the fix worked.

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Distinctions of Ownership

Some claim that Private Property and Possession differ only in their degree. But this is not the case, they differ structurally and the systems that rise out of each will be therefore much different.

ADAMS COUNTY, CO - FEBRUARY 02:  Chris Smith c...
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Quite large  discussions seem to have been sparked by my recent article counter posing Private Property to Possession, both in the comments of my own blog, and on the Austro-Athenian Empire. In both cases it’s an argument mostly between me and my generally communist views and Lockeanists who argue for the homesteading principle as defended by Murray Rothbard.

The discussion has already unfortunately grown impossible to manage through the comments of the AAE and as several questions have been put to me lately, I thought I might answer then in a new post. This might also give an opportunity of other Anarchists/Communists to engage or state their opinion on this, plus it will hopefully allow the discussion to flow better in my comment system which is built for it 😉 .

RE: Private Property and Possession have only differences of detail and degree.

Mostly based on Kevin Carson’s article, is the idea that Possession and Private Property are simply parts on a scale of Ownership rights ((Mutualists generally call all ownership rights ‘Property’, but this is different from my use of ‘Property’ by which I generally mean the Lockeanist take.)), from less “sticky” to more, that is for Lockeanists, property rights, once claimed remain even if the original owner does not use them anymore or rents them out, while for Socialists, property rights remain only as long as use is maintained (with a grace period of unuse based on common sense of course)

But while this on first view seems like a small difference of degree, in functional terms, the difference is immense. To put it simply, for Socialists, wage labour and rent would be impossible as one cannot be said to own something that someone else uses.

While Lockeanists tend to concentrate on terms of unused land and claim something like “oh, the difference wouldn’t be so big between our systems. Why are we fighting then?” they miss the really fucking big difference it would make on the kind of society which would be formed on it. This is because without wage labour you cannot have Capitalism, as it is the most crucial gear by which accumulation (and thus investment) can occur. The difference does not lie in the original distribution of land, of which in the Lockeanist system will look benign, but in the results of this “sticky” possession.

This is why claims by Rothbard that all previous claims to property are null ring so hollow, since Rothbard ignores that along with the state enclosing on the commons or creating a buying monopoly (which he acknowledges), the Capitalist backed state also imposed the mentality of “sticky” property that most people did not hold, and which was of course for the benefit of the Capitalist. Thus to nullify the claims of the land but to insist that people retain a Lockeanist concept of property is as invalid as not wishing to nullify property claims at all. The result in any case would be similar. Property would start accumulating again and a system of inequality and authority would be built on top of it.

On the other hand, anarchists insist that you cannot make any difference unless, along with the state  and the unjust distribution it enforced, you also utilize possessive ownership which will allow the egalitarian system (for which people undoubtedly revolted for) to remain in place.

RE: Wouldn’t lending undermine the concept of Possession?

The question put by Roderick seems to be this: Even in a possessive system, lending would still happen, that is, people would still allow others to borrow their cars, or use their lawnmowers. If this is possible without having to change ownership in between, then this would mean that the difference between possession and PP is a matter of degree.

Certainly lending would still be possible under a possessive system, but it wouldn’t be based on rent. A rent for any item, can be seen to mean that the other person is paying towards ownership of it. As such, if I borrow your car for a day or a week, by common sense most people would recognise that it’s not my car now as it was based on a favour. People would have to throw their senses out of the window to recognise either result (It goes against all people’s interests basically). However in order for you to somehow convince me that I would have to pay you an amount to borrow your car, but then your car would still be yours, would require something more. It would require inequality.

Think of it this way. Such acts of renting do not happen between friends even now, even though such acts would be perfectly legal and in the self-interest of those involved. Even under dire circumstances, a friend would not ask another for money to help (quite the contrary in fact). This is because friendships, at the core, are about equal individuals wanting to relate to each other. This equality and most importantly, the recognition of it in the minds of those involved, is what instinctively prevents them from asking for rent. Likewise, in an egalitarian society, such as those based on possession, any lending would happen based on needs, and not for profit. Were one to ask for such a profit from the other, it would immediately sour their relationship, as well as most likely the relationship they have with the rest of society. Just think of how would you react if you suddenly needed a friend’s car to head for a week vacation and he asked you for rent (obviously, over any maintenance that may happen). You’re most likely to decline the offer and go rent from a shop, even if it’s more expensive.

So in short, while lending would still happen with a possessive ownership, it wouldn’t undermine it, nor would it put it on the same scale as Lockeanism. It would simply be based on common sense and maintaining the egalitarianism that exists.

That’s it for now. There’s more question posted over at the AAE but I think this post has already grown quite long. I urge you to check it and give you perspective as the contributors seem an amiable bunch 🙂

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Selective Skepticism

How can some people claim to be skeptics but support entirely unfounded theories? Ideology trumps science.

Ron Paul being told Cory is in his house.
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Through my friendfeed channel I was surprised to find (an author of) the skeptic blog 2 days ago post an article promoting (right-)Libertarianism, of the Rothbardian type. That is, what the US Americans now call simply “libertarianism” ((For the rest of the article, whenever I mention “libertarianism” I will mean the right-side one for brevity) ((I then spend the last 2 days arguing with the Rothbardians in there. Take a look and laugh)).

This is becoming a trend recently it seems to me. From Penn & Teller to Bill Maher, many self proclaimed skepticists seem to also take a second role of promoting right-libertarianism. Similar to how this “libertarian” movement has taken over the freedom-promoting words of Anarchism, they seem to be eager to strongly associate skepticism with themselves.

It is also weirdly ironic that many (most?) of them also are eager to claim themselves as “Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) skeptics” or that the 9/11 truther movement is primarily of the Ron Paul libertarian school, or the Fed conspiracist theorists generally tend to also be Austrian-economic school anti-central-bank.

But in truth, there is a very particular common denominator in all of these skeptics. While they seem skeptical of all the usual stuff (ie anything contradicting science, or having very little empirical evidence) They also tend to be skeptical of whatever is not compatible with what neoclassical economics would suggest.

This explains why so  many of these skeptics are very eager to jump to evidence against AGW, or even if they accept it, they wish to downplay its severity significantly in order to suggest that it would be solvable through “free-market solutions”. The reason for this is that neoclassical economics suggests that the role of the state should be reduced to simply to protector of private property. As such, request for the state to implement environmental solution or to jump-start the private market, go totally against the edicts of “free market knows best” and trigger an automatic denial instinct for all the skeptics espousing them.

But why does this particular bias emerge? After all Anarchists don’t seem to have (at least from my experience) any such blinds. And similar applies to Social Democrats (“Liberals” in the US). The reason why this is of course is because libertarians have absolute faith in economics, a faith so powerful that the bias it created is enough to overwhelm even empirical science.

Libertarians of course will wish to defend this by claiming that Economics is a form of science, and as consistent skeptics, they have to side with that. But the sad truth is that Economics are not scientific. Quite the contrary actually, with its insistence on theories that are empirically disproven it is rather the opposite and resembles a religion. Unfortunately, unlike normal science which is actually empowered by skepticism (which prunes false theories), Economics’ flimsy basis makes them particularly vulnerable to it.

Now it is actually possible to have skeptic theists. It is inconsistent on their part, since they are quite capable of rational skepticism over most concepts but as soon as a topic reaches close to their religion of choice, all skepticism flies out of the window. As such, a Christian might be skeptical of ghosts, UFOs, Muslims miracles etc, but will quite happily accept some basic absurd articles, such as resurrections, existence of demons, afterlife etc. This may in turn spill over to other matters that although generally rational, might skew their perspective. So for example they may be extremely “skeptical” of evolutionary theory or abiogenesis etc. This is selective skepticism at work.

And this is unsurprisingly very similar to the libertarian brand of skepticism. A skepticism that avoids looking at a whole school of thought (economics) with the same critical eye that it directs to theism and woo-woo and rather acts like apologist to various wrong practices, even in the face of scientific evidence.

Private Property VS Possession

The distinction between Private Property and Possession is a very important one for people wanting to understand the socialist system. This post explains what it is.

Discussion (Property)
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One of the most sticky points in explaining Communism to people is the concept of property. This is especially tricky because all socialists renounce the concept of Private Property as wrong and something to be abolished, which in turn created vast confusion to those not familiar with the theory. This is even more accentuated by deliberate (ie propaganda)  or accidental misunderstanding of Communism as it espousing that people won’t own stuff.

But it is an obvious truth that people like to own items for various reasons. From the most simple of not wanting to share a toothbrush, to the more complex of feeling psychological attachments to various items that we would like to consider ours (say a car or a toy). This is understandable and it is obvious that it would be unnatural if any social theory proposed that this is undesirable.

Which is why Socialism doesn’t demand it either.

Now this might seem contradicting but it is only because we are missing part of the puzzle. The fact that one can define two different types of ownership.

The first type of ownership is the common one that everyone is familiar in our current society. It is the type of ownership based on a legal claim to something, ie it is based simply on what the law will recognise based on previous contracts. In this system of ownership, one can consider to own anything and it will remain his until he trades it away. Private Property (PP).

Precicely because this ownership is legally constructed is why it requires to be defined through contracts of some sort that will be recognised by the state. Which is incidentally why any social system based on Private Property will require the existence of a state of some sort and extensive laws to clarify and settle disputes.

But this is not the only system of ownership that can exist. There is another one that not only comes naturally to humans but it also avoids all the pitfalls of PP. Possession or ownership based on use. To put it simply, one can only ever lay claim to things that they use personally. This is fundamentally different from PP in that it does not demand an extensive legal system to enforce it (although it can benefit from it) and it prevents accumulation of wealth.

Now there is an immediate straw man that people who hear of this system immediately jump to. It goes something like this:

“Under Possession, as soon as you left your car unattended, someone could take it legally. Or someone could get in your house and lay claim to it.”

If this sounds as an absurdity, it’s because it is. Of course socialists do not mean something like this when we talk about Possession. Of course the claim to anything is more solid than this. The basic difference from PP is that it is anchored on the use of the item in question rather than an arbitrary claim that goes back to the original forceful appropriation of land.

So under the rules of any society, the possession of any item can be defined socially or legally. Socially for example, it would be unacceptable for someone to lay claim to a car that someone else left in the parking lot. People doing so would be prevented with all the coercive measures any socialist society makes use of (peer pressure etc). However, as this is defined socially, it’s the acceptance of society that would make act of appropriation act acceptable or not. So for example, a car that has been left in a parking lot for years and is going to rust, could be taken on by someone else. Common sense would say that this would be acceptable. Of course these are not hard and fast rules, but up to each community to define to their own culture and experience. But I hope to give you an idea of how this works.

Why is the difference between private property ((Note: Some elements of the Anarchist tradition, such as Mutualism, use the term Private Property to refer to ownership of all sorts. They still make the functional distinction between them, but call them somewhat differently. So Possession becomes “occupancy and use”. Of course they support possession as natural.)) and possession so important? First it is because it explains what socialists mean by the abolition of the former and avoids straw man arguments about the “unnaturality” of communism. The second is that it provides a link to pre-civilization human societies, or to be more precise, those which had a hunter/gatherer lifestyle which were egalitarian precisely because the concept of PP did not exist. The third is that it draws attention to the severe drawbacks of PP and by extension it shows how the introduction of it directly led to inequality and relations of authority.

The main characteristic private property is that it allows accumulation of wealth. As each persons claim of ownership is simply based on the law, one can keep massing up as many such claims as they can. As society expands and as people are born without a claim to property, this in turn becomes a leverage for exploitation and, by extension, inequality. Simply put. Someone who does not own land, must sell the only thing he can, his labour (and by extention freedom), and he must sell it at a price that is less than what he would make if he did own land. The excess result of this labour, profit, of course goes to the employer who then uses it to expand his PP. And the cycle of exploitation continues.

Contradict this with Possession, where any one person can only ever own as much as they personally use. As such the scarcity of the land is automatically reduced, as there’s not a few people controlling vast tracts or land and preventing its use until those desperate enough “volunteer” to their terms. There is of course always the possibility that the amount of humans would eventually become so great as to create a situation of scarcity where people would be landless again. But if anything human ingenuity has shown that we can always find more places to live in (From multi storey buildings to space stations).

As such, inequality would not be possible without the ability of people to accumulate. Without this incentive people in turn have no reason to exploit and emiserate their fellow humans for it would not bring them any social benefit. As such, people would realize that their interest lies in spreading the surplus value they create and cooperating with others to collectively improve their life standard rather than competing with each other for diminishing returns (as excessive wealth does not bring excessive happiness).

One would ask, how would Possession deal with items that are too big for one person to use, such as a factory? This is of course has a very easy solution: Collective ownership. Each person who works in a factory is considered to own an equal share of it and as such, any surplus value it creates. And this cannot be run in any other way other than a democratic one. For in a collection of equals, there’s no room for bosses giving orders.

One can then imagine a society based on Possession rather than Private Property would be the exact opposite of what we have now. A society where people would actually not have an incentive to be evil. It is from this society that the necessary mind-frame would spring, of cooperation, voluntarism and freedom.

And as much as the above is true, so is it delusional to expect a society based on private property, an ownership system that promotes the mentality of greed and short term interest, to somehow transform into a libertarian society, where people actually act charitably and do not seek to exploit their inequality for personal gain.

Quote of the Day: Pattern of revolution

A quote about the fate of previous revolutions

Quoth Anderson Warm-Folk

What tends to happen in their [Non-anarchist] revolutions[…]? A certain pattern tends to recur: lots and lots of people are active, from a variety of classes and perspectives, then once the main blow has been struck, there’s an internal power-struggle and some bunch of motherfuckers shoot all the radicals and inform everyone else that the most revolutionary thing in the world is Discipline

I like the sentiment in it 🙂

Is Anarchism Utopian?

Anarchism is more often than not accused of being a utopian ideology with no basis in the real world, but if anything, it’s the only non-utopian system. Here’s why.

Collectivist anarchist Mikhail Bakunin opposed...
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It’s amusing when Anarchists are accused of being too ideological or outright Utopian, it is especially so when such an accusation comes from liberals or state socialists (i.e. mainstream Marxists). Why is it amusing? Because of all political perspectives, Anarchism (i.e. Libertarian Socialism) is the only one whose theories have not been refuted by history itself!

This “Utopian” accusation generally comes from two general sources. First there are those who support the current Capitalist system as is (in the 1st world countries of course) and only propose mild changes, such as more or less regulation of the economy. These would generally be the Social Democrats (or “Liberals” in US politics) or Conservatives in most political systems.

They would argue from the perspective that the Capitalist/State combination is not only “the way things are” but also the only way things can be. They would then raise such arguments as the common appeal to human nature, that Capitalism is the “end of history” – in that its superiority has been proven from an societal evolutionary perspective, that the state is necessary to ensure control from the people (i.e. representative democracy), that Capitalism provides the best benefit for all etc.

But one has to ask: who is really the ideologue here? Who is assuming an expertise of human nature in order to have some kind of unshakable base? Who is ignoring the historical forms of human societies (hint: communal) and the considerable amount of coercion required by the state in order to jump-start Capitalism? Who is absolutely oblivious the true role of the state and the real impotence of elections and government to change life for the better through normal channels, even when there is considerable popular request for social reform?

Worst of all, it’s the more than ironic result of this superior system, Capitalism, that the vast majority of people live in worse situations than they lived in pre-capitalist societies. One only has to look at the situation in the lost continent, Africa, and compare it with the pre-capitalist tribal societies, which while not great by any measure of the word, were never as bad as today. One only has to look at the current environmental obliteration, the sheer scale of unending conflict and even the relative worsening conditions of people in all nations to ask: Who is really the ideologue here?

The other great accuser of utopianism is none other than the mainstream Marxist movements of Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism and the like. The younger (who somehow think itself more mature) and patronizing cousin of Anarchism.

As revolutionary anti-capitalist movements, they at least share some of the correct critical perspective on the current Capitalist system but they lose the ball when they turn around and accuse libertarian socialists of being naive for not promoting centralization, hierarchy structures and movements from above, that is, leadership from a minority of enlightened few.

The saddest thing is not that they have to misrepresent the arguments of Anarchism in order to attack their favorite straw-men (“Anarchists will not defend the revolution” being a crowd favorite), nor that they ignore what some of their own have written that basically parrots the libertarian perspective, but that they dare claim historical proof, when empirical facts have shown that their theories put in practice failed in exactly the manner that Anarchists had predicted!

Is the federalist libertarian perspective Utopian, or is the centralized authoritarian one when it fails both in theory (power corrupts, requires inhuman knowledge, leads to bureaucracy etc) and in practice? Is a bottom-up democratic society Utopian or the top-down hierarchical one who expects leaders to be practically flawless and that “real power” will somehow still remain at the hands of the people? Is the “similar means as the ends” anarchist position Utopian or is the Leninist “ends justify the means” which expects a revolution where people just passively followed orders from the enlightened few can somehow lead to a society or politically active and empowered individuals?

In the end, who is the ideologue? The one who looks at how humans currently and historically acted and interacted and makes a revolutionary theory to describe and lead to something better, or one who makes a theory which proves to be a failure in practice and then refuse to discard it? Oh, the authoritarian socialists will say that “Of course we will learn from the mistakes our historical leaders made, we of course don’t want to repeat them. Terrible tragedy” and all that, but that is no more different than the Liberals who after every Capitalist crisis declared that they will learn from the mistakes of the past and ensure a future with no Crises and depressions. And when the next disaster comes, they are always oh so surprised.

This convinces few for it’s the theory’s core of hierarchy and authority that is flawed and by refusing to review that they only doom themselves to similar results and suffering of scale.

And finally, there’s also the right-“libertarian”, pro-capitalist, free market “anarchist” camp. But those don’t generally accuse others of utopianism for they’ve probably learned that those living in glass houses don’t throw ideological stone around.

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"To all those people promoting our game for free: Fuck you!"

Stardocks CEO believes all Pirates are thieves, even though they practically help him. I (not-so kindly) disagree.

This is basically what the latest post from Stardock’s CEO comes down to when he says the following:

But…but…what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates? Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off.  If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.

Emphasis mine.

So what exactly is pissing Frogboy off? That Piracy helped make his game stunningly famous even before it hit the stores? That file-sharing did free advertisement for Demigod to the scale that it catapulted it to the 3rd place in sales (possibly higher if you count online sales). That Pirates urged each other to actually support Stardock if they can, to promote this kind of initiative?

Frogboy should be on his fucking knees praising Pirates at this point for all the free publicity they gave the title, not simply by the fact that they gave the game to each other to try before it officially hit the stores, but also for the controversy this raised on popular news sources which brought further spotlight to the game.

And this is, in short, the reply: “Fuck you, you’re goddamn thieves! You piss me off!”

So how exactly are pirates thieves Frogboy? Do you subscribe that every downloaded copy is a lost sale? Do you not consider for a second that the people downloading games maybe can’t afford them (so they wouldn’t buy it anyway) but they still do free word-of-mouth publicity for you? Do you consider that perhaps for others the quality of the game does not validate the price but they may still buy it just because they are pirates?

I used to think that Stardock was enlightened enough to figure out that file-sharing is caring, that pirates are, as gamers, on their side. But this latest post makes me reconsider. I’ve become a big supporter of Stardock just because of what (I assumed) their take on Piracy was and as a result I’ve bought every game I wanted to play from them. I will reconsider that as well.

The Tragedy of Boxes

An analogy meant to show how the crises of capitalism are based on structural failings of the system, rather than external meddling (ie state)

The Whitlams performing at the 2007 Australia ...
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Lets take a Rock concert where there’s a considerable amount of people who wish to have a better look at the stage. Lets also assume that people are absolutely respectful of the negative freedom of others and thus will not take physical action to restrict it in any way, unless it is physical action against someone in itself.

Now a perfectly reasonable action on the part of any of these people will be to bring a box with him in order to stand on it and thus get a better view of the stage. Of course others will be inconvenienced by the sudden worsening of their line of sight, while others will become envious of this better position instead.

Again, for both of these cases, a perfectly rational response would be to get their own box to stand on. Eventually most people will have acquired their own and thus the end result would be the same as in the original case.

Now consider that it is possible to stack these boxes on each other and increase one’s height once more. You immediately have a height race where people are trying to outstack each other in order to get a better view.

However, there are two catches:

  • The person using these boxes needs to carry them himself and they can get quite heavy eventually.
  • The higher one’s stack, the more precarious it becomes, increasing the risk that one might fall and more than likely take others with them.

So now we have a situation where through perfectly rational individual actions, we’ve reached the following situation:

First of all, the strongest will be able to carry more boxes and thus oligopolize the view. Eventually the people below and behind will be fed up and leave the concert. Once enough people do this, the general fun of the concert decreases (a concert with 20 people is not much fun I’ll tell you – unless it’s planned that way)  and new people find it impossible to join since they have to bring a large stack of boxes from the start.

Second, as people start carrying more boxes, you end up in a very delicate situation where one person slipping might trigger a chain reaction of catastrophic proportions, both because of the height of the fall but also because it’s easier to fall. Once of course you have most people on the ground screaming in pain, the concert will stop and the new one will have to wait until most have recovered from their injuries.

So we have a classic game theory situation, where individual rational actions for the short term gain have an irrational collective result. This all starts of course from the ideological position that no physical action must be taken against people who start this height race.

This example of course is not random. Specifically it is made to provide an analogy for the capitalist crises. Consider that the concert as a whole represents the economy. The people are the individual companies and the boxes represent investments in capital.

The more and faster a company invests, the bigger the short-term advantage it has until the rest invariably catch up. The rising investment in turn creates the possibility for a crisis of overproduction as eventually there is so much supply that it cannot be matches by demand (especially if wages stay low, but even if not). Once this happens the whole system grinds to a halt, totters and collapses under its own weight once the profits cannot be realized anymore.

In our analogy this is the phase where a few people finally lose their balance. Depending on the precariousness of the concert area, this might mean that a whole section collapses, or that the entire thing does. And once that happens a few people can get some extra boxes on the cheap from those who will no be using them anymore.

The first situation on the other hand is simply the tendency of the system to end up in oligopoly, from which it’s almost impossible to get out of, as new players need to start with a lot of boxes instead of slowly building up. This again exaberates the situation as it takes fewer people to fall and initiate a collapse (They’ve become now “too big to fail”).

What is this analogy meant to show? Nothing more than the structural problem of any system based entirely on rational individualistic self-interest (ie greed).

It is also meant to give an example of why crises of capitalism are systematic and not caused by external factors such as the state modifying the money or credit supply. As you can see, in the analogy these is no need for an external party (a state) in order to have a disaster, but even if we were to add one, the result would be the same.

Lets assume for the sake of this exercise that the state (or in our case, the concert organizers) controls how fast or slow people can get new boxes (eg, they help you carry them).
Would this make any difference overall? Of course not.The drive to the top would still be the same but it would proceed at a faster or slower pace. However neoclassical economists would have you believe that because it is not “natural”, some people overextend, causing them to lose their balance.

But this is not the case of the fall, although it might allow it to come sooner. You simply cannot keep building an edifice indefinitely, no matter how slowly, especially since the same tendency is the one that shrinks its base (as people would  leave disappointed in our example). In the same sense, Capitalism is impossible to be in a perpetual boom situation. Not only does it eventually have to collapse, but it will do so with a ferocity that will be analogous to the intensity and length of the previous boom period.

Of course anyone can see that there is another solution to this problem, one that avoids and endless series of builds and crashes, boom and busts. it is the simple solution of not allowing any individual person to start bringing boxes to the concert due to the long-term repercursions. Doing so would avoid an irrational collective decision.

Needless to say that this would require (the threat of) physical force against the ones who ignore the collective will in favour of their own self-interest. While this is obviously for the best, some ideologues will cry bloody murder and claim that such actions either restrict negative freedom (which they should do. Because.)  or that they will necessarily lead to authoritarianism. But of course this is an absurd proposition for there is nothing authoritarian about not wanting one or two greedy bastards to ruin it for everyone. Concerts everywhere seem to back this up.

Neither would this mean that everyone would have to suffer an inferior concert experience. Rather the solution would lie in rational collective interest, where instead of each person acting alone, all cooperate (ie pool their resources) and democratically decide on what the best thing would be, to benefit all equally.

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A resource wiki just for the Atheosphere

Unveiling the Atheist Resources, a project which hopes to provide a valuable centralized resource to the Atheosphere. By Freethinkers, for Freethinkers.

AR logoWould you like to have a place where all information relevant to Atheist Blogging would be gathered and constantly updated for your benefit? Well for the last few months ((Well, more like days of actual work, as the whole thing stayed basically idle for most of its existence)) me and Larro have been working exactly on such project to provide some help for Atheists, especially the bloggers but not excluding those who take a more passive look.

I conceived the idea once I noticed the large number of resources, ideas and tips that existed and the many ways that bloggers had put them to user. For example, the simple concept of a blogroll had allowed the Atheist Blogroll to exist, from which many other stuff could be based on such as a search engine in atheist blogs or optimized reading lists. Furthermore, many atheists were blogging about ways to use the various tools online, such as Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the like.

But all this information was dispersed and difficult to find, especially for people who were just joinging the game. So it would be a great idea to have a centralized place where all such information would be gathered and through crowdsourcing improved over time to be as comprehensive as possible.

Thus, the Atheist Resources project was born.

At the moment, this project is still in very early infancy and up to now it’s been mostly me and Larro who’ve been adding to it. I’ve been concentrating on the Toolkit while Larro on the Blog Directory (and the site layout). The former is to allow people to discover useful stuff for their sites while the later is to add a bit of self-management to the Atheist Blogroll and easy updating.

The project is based on the excellent DocuWiki software with a theme that approximates the Wikipedia one (I guess to make the whole thing more familiar. The wiki format should allow us to easily add, remove and update information without fear of losing it and without having to go through a difficult approval process. Everyone is welcome to join.

Of course, this won’t go anywhere fast with only just 2 people on it, so I think it’s about time that I put out the word on the Atheosphere and invite y’all to join. Strangely I’m not the first to mention this as the Jewmanist somehow discovered its existence early and blogged about it already. Unfortunately this didn’t elicit much of a response.

So what is the current functionality? Well of course it’s a wiki so you’ll be able to quickly add and edit anything. I’ve also enabled pingback functionality which means that when the AR links to a blog, it will appear (if this functionality exists – yes, I’m looking at you Blogspot) and when a blog links tot he AR, this will appear on the site as well. This way if someone writes on a topic, say, Technorati, and links to the AR, theit entry will show on the Technorati page for people looking for this information to follow.

Then there’s tags, which is something I’m hoping might become useful for sites listed on the Blogroll. Through them, one should be able to see which Atheist Blogs write about a particular subject and visit them. Along with all the information that should be present on each Blog’s listing, this should enable people to find Atheist bloggers with similar interests easily.

And that’s just the begginging. I’m hoping that with all these brillliant Freethinkers out there, we can make this something unique and useful. So I hope to see you all there.

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Quote of the Day: Anarcho-Capitalist "Freedom"

Ludvig von Mises defends Freedom the best way he knows. By backing Fascism.

Quoth Ludwig von Mises (H/t to An Anarchist FAQ)

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilisation. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live eternally in history.” [Liberalism, p. 51]

Yes, Fascism has really saved civilization. Why? Because it didn’t let Capitalism go down of course. Thus we see the classic example of “Anarcho”-Capitalist where Anarchism is meant to imply Anti-Statism but only when it’s in the interests of the Plutocracy.

And yet, many people still promote these ruling-class apologetics as the only true “Freedom”.