For my final post-Cato University post, I will look at some of the posts by other attendees.#

Michael Williams writes about an alternative conception of the original of natural rights.#

Essentially: natural rights are those liberties which are easier to protect than to take away. For example, it's difficult for government or individuals to control what I think, and it's easy for me to resist or ignore any laws restricting my thoughts; therefore, freedom of thought is a natural right. On the other hand, it's easy for an individual or government to thwart my alleged "right" to have someone else pay for my health care. Thus, the first is a natural right, and the second is not.

Now certainly sufficient force can be applied to create any "right" one may desire, but force is in limited supply and can't be used for everything. Witness the former USSR, and how difficult it was to use force to restrict private property rights. On the contrary, in America very little force is required to protect private property rights.

There are very interesting comments on this post.

My main thought is: Does this mean that technology that makes more things possible degrades our natural rights and that they are dependent on time and technology? Furthermore, is the universality of such rights important? For example, if there a three people (A, B, and C) where A is fantastically powerful, B moderately powerful, and C weak. If A and B band together to take everything from C, because it easy to do so is that okay? Or is it not okay because taking everything from someone is not something easily accessible universally?

Michael Williams posted his letter to the sponsors.#

Andrew Moroz writes about the week:#

The overall theme of the seminar can be summarized by the following anecdote:

Suppose you, an upstanding and honest citizen, find yourself in a back alley. Suddenly, nine thugs appear and notice the fat wallet in your back pocket. Not being criminals, they do not simply rob you. Rather, they tell you the whole group will now have an impromptu vote; the matter for consideration is, naturally, the "excess" money by which you are burdened. As you might expect, this totally democratic process results in a 9-to-1 decision to redistribute your wealth. Since you resist, they proceed to use "reasonable" force (backed by the popular will) to hold you down, take your money, and put it in their own pockets. All of this is democratically supported, naturally.

Implied Dissent writes about it as well.#

Michael Williams comments on the necessity of the struggle for liberty and the impossibility of it being permanently protected by institutions:#

One of the things that bothers me a bit about libertarians is that they're deathly afraid of slippery slopes. I agree that they're something to be wary of, but as Eugene Volokh has argued many times, sliding down a slope isn't inevitable. Libertarians want to create a world in which government is so limited that they'll never have to fight for liberty again, but fighting for liberty is inescapable. I'd rather work for the best good (life, liberty, etc.) now, even if it means we'll have to fight against a slope a little more later on. We can win now, and we can win later, because we're right.

After Cato University, the scholarship students were asked to write a letter to their sponsor, this is what I wrote:#

Dear Cato Sponsor,#

After a week it is clear that Cato University is the program that I had been looking for through the last few years of my life, and I am not an old person. From the time I started college I had been looking for meaning conversation and debate about those issues that I cared about, and a taste of issues that might pique my interest. The Cato University lecturers and the other attendees provided for this desire.#

In my every-day interactions with other intelligent people my debates have primarily revolved around those basic issues that socials and capitalists disagree on, and often became incredibly unproductive after the first few rounds. During the past week, I have had more engaging and productive debates than in the last year aggregated. This is not only because we tend to agree on basic principles (which isn't always true), but because the atmosphere promotes such an assumption and encourages thoughtful devil's advocates.#

To explain, I will first cite something Tom G. Palmer, the director, and some of the other presenters, said about discussing liberty with students, university professors, and others. He said that it is not our job to convert people. People do not like being converted. And why should we want to necessarily? Is it not better for people to come to liberty by the influence of their own liberty? When David Schmidtz spoke about this, he said that he believes in intellectual freedom and does not promote a particular philosophy to his students, but allows them to formulate on their own. A corollary to this guideline is taking on the "opponent" with their most powerful argument, rather than a straw man. This intellectual integrity is described by Susan Chamberlin as one of the missions of the Cato Institute.#

The relation of these two ideas is something that I came to realize at Cato University, and this realization alone would be worthwhile even if I did not have access to the other exciting topics, intelligent new friends, amazing scenery, and fabulous vacation activities. The relation is such: You cannot cultivate your mind without respectful disagreement and discussion. (I found this best expressed in David S. Landes' quotation of David Gans in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: "As David Gans, an early seventeenth-century popularizer of natural science, put it, one knows that magic and diving are not science because their practitioners do not argue with one another. Without controversy, no serious pursuit of knowledge and truth." (p. 203)) But you cannot do this when assuming that the purpose of your discussion is to conquer and convert your "opponent," this outlook cannot foster the needed respect. Like trade, conversation should be a win-win situation with both sides gaining cultivation of mind. As a result, since I agree with the view that the purpose of our life is to "cultivate our gardens" (or make ourselves free to do so,) it is not a responsibility of the libertarian or free-market economist to convert--only engage.#

I am profoundly grateful for this gift and hope to make my return to the favour bank in the future.#

When re-writing this I noticed some stupid mistakes and strange phrasings. I feel like an idiot for not submitting it in better form. C'est la vie.#

Ever since I got back from Cato University I have been meaning to go through and write some notes about what I thought about it. That time has come. These notes are not thorough, mainly I present the general topic and some thoughts I had about it.#

Liberty and Human Progress, by Tom G. Palmer#

This talk focused on how capitalism has progress humanity and how it is grounded in individual liberty.#

Property, Contract, and Free Society, by Marcus Cole#

This talk focused on intellectual property issues of patents and copyrights. Identified a problem with the current regime, (see this search), and proposed that another system could be based not on monopolistic State-sponsored coercion, but just on series of contracts to define acceptable uses of products and property.#

The Economics of Progress and Prosperity, by Richard Stroup#

This talk focused on how individual liberty correlates well with economic growth, but not necessarily democracy, although political freedom is often a result of economic growth. Also mentioned was the historical statistic on the growth of environmental regulation with economic growth.#

The Historical Struggle for Liberty, 2300 BC-1776 AD, by Tom G. Palmer#

A survey of the history of liberty. Very entertaining and pleasing. The universal desire for freedom and its ability to solve problems was apparent. Funny advice: "Don't get conquered by nomads." (In reference to the Mongols.)#

Although, I wonder how this advice applies to getting conquered by people who wish to live like nomads?#

Markets and Morality, by Jane Shaw#

1776: The Revolution that Changed the World, by Robert McDonald#

This talk focused on the philosophic foundation of the American revolution and some interesting details of its operation.#

Law and Order without Coercion, by Marcus Cole#

This talk surveyed some historic examples of when things were provided for privately without coercion that are commonly thought of as the province of government action.#

• A book on reputation, an important factor in law and order without coercion.
• Price Fishback wrote about how coal companies in West Virginia provided better schools for blacks than the government, so good that the whites wanted to get in, but couldn't. The paper.
• George A. Selgin has written about truly free banking systems in history.
• Lisa Bernstein writes about the private court system that the diamond trade uses in the paper, Opting Out of the Legal System: Extralegal Contractual Relations in the Diamond Industry.
• Harry Chase Brearly has written about the private formation of Underwriters' Laboratories. Google it.

The Economics of Waste and Poverty, by Richard Stroup#

Constitutional Law: Enumerated Powers and Unenumerated Rights, by Marcus Cole#

In this talk, Cole described the architecture of the court system today and how it differs from that proposed by the Constitution, highlighting the court decisions where the interpretation was radically changed. And interesting example was when a Supreme Court ruled that a law was constitutional because the Constitution said "necessary" not "absolutely necessary", despite protests from the Framers on the side against this interpretation.#

Later, I asked Cole about whether the Declaration of Independence can be or has been used in court decisions. He said that while it is not officially acknowledged as law, it has been used in interpreting the Constitution, and some Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas, for example) have stated that they see the two as equals. And it is sometimes referred to in dissenting opinions of the Supreme Court, but not in majority decisions.#

(One reference was footnote 4 of the Carolene Products case that advised courts to assume Congress' laws are Constitutional, rather than the reference.)#

Risk and Freedom, by Richard Stroup#

This talk focused on the ways that humans manage risk and gave examples of government trying to manage risk and causing problems in addition to the eroding of liberty. A particular example that sticks out is how many people, on average, die from the delays introduced by the FDA.#

Mayans and Markets: The Universality of Free Enterprise, by Estuardo Zapeta#

Estuardo described an interesting group of native Indians of Central America who engage, and have engaged for quite sometime, in a market based economy very successfully. Much reference was made to Hernando de Soto's work.#

Liberty in Post-Dictatorial Society, by Piotr Kaznacheev#

This talk described the ways that different former Soviet countries have converted from communism and detailed the success stories.#

Utility, Goodness, and Rights, by David Schmidtz#

This talk focused on the philosophical ideas of utility, goodness, and rights. I am going to buy one of his books for deeper understanding.#

Into Africa: How Property Protects Wildlife, by David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott#

In this talk, the presenters discussed the ways in which private property rights on animals and territory in Africa have protected wildlife, while common liberal intervention policies have caused more harm. More information available from The Property and Environmental Research Center.#

Law and Economics of the Regulatory State, by Marcus Cole#

In this talk, Marcus Cole described how the judiciary system of common law is very similar to a market, and used this comparison to suggest that it is often better at harnessing information than a legislature and thus leads to better laws. Better being defined as more inline with the expectations of the people and the constraints of natural rights.#

The American Struggle Against Slavery and for Equal Rights, by Robert McDonald#

In this talk, Robert McDonald dealt with the apparent hypocrisy of slavery during and after the American Revolution. Obviously there is a lot to say about this, but I get the feeling that Tocqueville, and others, describe it best by saying it was recognized as a problem but one that would have to be solved after the bigger problem of a stable republic.#

Liberty and the Ethics of Accomplishment, by Nathaniel Branden#

This talk was focused towards the strange measurement of accomplishment that opponents of capitalism have and alternative measurements. Something that stands out is his comment that the majority of statues and monuments are dedicated to mass murders and dictators, rather than to businessmen and innovators who are the real reason for human progress and prosperity.#

A great comment: "The one good thing about communists and socialists is that the eventually die and kill each other."#

Experimental Economics and Freedom, by David Schmidtz#

This talk dealt with experiments in economic reasoning based on psychological methods. He seemed to think it was most important because it enabled economists to give some of their theories a "chance to fail," rather than taking the ostrich approach.#

The New Deal, the Great Society, and the American Megastate, by Robert McDonald#

In this talk, Robert McDonald talked about the ways in which FDR turned his back on the Constitution and is the root of many of the problems of the modern American "Megastate."#

Legislators, Lobbyists, and Think Tanks, by Susan Chamberlin#

Susan Chamberlin discussed the role of libertarians in Washington, DC. The overall theme was that the system is as bad as you imagine it is, although maybe just a little bit better. For this reason, the audience of most libertarian activism is not usefully focused on politicians, but on helping change the minds of people. I was reminded of Nathaniel Branden's comment. (See above.)#

Libertarian Citizenship, by Deroy Murdock#

Deroy Murdock talked about how to live a good libertarian life based on mutual respect and really supporting the freedom that we espouse.#

Advancing Liberty by Winning Arguments and Making Friends and Allies, by Tom G. Palmer#

This talk dealt with some of the issues of Murdock's talk with an added emphasis on supporting intellectual freedom and carrying oneself well in discussion. It helps no one to insult and batter a socialist in argument, not only will that person hate you, but also your ideas. It takes hard work and patience to be polite and convincing but it should pay off.#

I was reminded of this talk when I told a friend that other day that it would be a lot easier to promote libertarianism by advocating libertarian propaganda, control of schools, and violent revolution. But those things are in opposition to everything liberty stands for. Unfortunately for expediency, you can't force understanding and agreement, but fortunately for the long-term viability, people can't fake that belief.#

Sut Jhally argues in Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse that advertising and capitalism are destroying the world. First, I'd like to point out that Sut is not a lone wacko but a professor of the department of communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the director of the Media Education Foundation which is supported by the standard pantheon of liberal super-heros: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Bell Hooks, Cornel West, Naomi Klein, etc.#

20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent the peoples of the world from achieving true happiness. Simply stated, our survival as a species is dependent upon minimizing the threat from advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned it. I am stating my claims boldly at the outset so there can be no doubt as to what is at stake in our debates about the media and culture as we enter the new millennium.

Some immediate questions:

• Is "propaganda" that is not enforced by the State a problem? What is the problem with a message that you disagree with if you are not forced to watch it? (i.e. if it is not backed up by the coercive force of the State?)
• If this "problem" needs to be "quickly checked," then who will it be checked by? Does Sut advocate State intervention or individual action? From his "democratic" and Communist rhetoric later, he seems to be for State control of the media (to ensure that only the "right" kind of propaganda makes it.)
• What is this "true happiness" that Sut writes of? Does he know what I find to be true happiness or is he suggesting that capitalism cannot make anyone "truly happy"?

Some of the assumptions of the Prof. Jhally are that Marx was correct and prophetic in his description of capitalism. Except, that most people have not emphasized the manner in which Marx described the true horror of capitalism as its focus on objects and commodities. That capitalism turns everything into a product is the true problem.#

The starting point of his own critique therefore is not what he believes is the dominating agent of the society, capital, nor is it what he believes creates the value and wealth, labor -- instead it is the commodity. From this surface appearance Marx then proceeds to peel away the outer skin of the society and to penetrate to the underlying essential structure that lies in the "hidden abode" of production.

As Sut suggests later, I will ask "Is it true?" and "Is it wrong?"

Do Marx and Sut make sense when they argue that everything is not a production of some kind? Poverty and nothingness is the natural state of people, until capitalism and markets create wealth, prosperity, and progress. And if they agree to this, why is it bad if Sut himself says that capitalism is the only way that developing peoples have ever gotten out of poverty?

From here, Sut suggests that people do not really want the things that they are buying. For this reason, the industrialists must manufacture the sale of goods by "solving the problem of consumption." The machinery of this solution is advertising, which apparently is 100% effective against free-will. (Or, Sut does not support the basic existence of that.)#

Seeking this understanding will involve clarifying what we mean by the power and effectiveness of ads, and of being able to pose the right question. For too long debate has been concentrated around the issue of whether ad campaigns create demand for a particular product. If you are Pepsi Cola, or Ford, or Anheuser Busch, then it may be the right question for your interests. But, if you are interested in the social power of advertising - the impact of advertising on society - then that is the wrong question.

The right question would ask about the cultural role of advertising, not its marketing role. Culture is the place and space where a society tells stories about itself, where values are articulated and expressed, where notions of good and evil, of morality and immorality, are defined. In our culture it is the stories of advertising that dominate the spaces that mediate this function. If human beings are essentially a storytelling species, then to study advertising is to examine the central storytelling mechanism of our society. The correct question to ask from this perspective, is not whether particular ads sell the products they are hawking, but what are the consistent stories that advertising spins as a whole about what is important in the world, about how to behave, about what is good and bad. Indeed, it is to ask what values does advertising consistently push.

As you can see, Prof. Jhally assumes that advertising is effective and offers his interpretation of which direction it will be effective at pushing people towards. I reject this assumption, but since this is a critique not a debate, we must continue without Sut's reply.

Sut must now show that the direction advertising pushes, towards material goods, is in fact the opposite direction of true happiness. This will be difficult without a clear definition of true happiness, or proof that this definition is universally shared. Let's see how it works out:#

The social upheavals of eastern Europe were pushed by this vision. As Gloria Steinhem described the East German transformation: "First we have a revolution then we go shopping." (in Ehrenreich 1990 p.46) The attractions of this vision in the Third World are not difficult to discern. When your reality is empty stomachs and empty shelves, no wonder the marketplace appears as the panacea for your problems. When your reality is hunger and despair it should not be surprising that the seductive images of desire and abundance emanating from the advertising system should be so influential in thinking about social and economic policy. Indeed not only happiness but political freedom itself is made possible by access to the immense collection of commodities. These are very powerful stories that equate happiness and freedom with consumption - and advertising is the main propaganda arm of this view.

The question that we need to pose at this stage (that is almost never asked) is, "Is it true?." Does happiness come from material things? Do we get happier as a society as we get richer, as our standard of living increases, as we have more access to the immense collection of objects? Obviously these are complex issues, but the general answer to these questions is "no." (see Leiss et al 1990 Chapter 10 for a fuller discussion of these issues.)

What have the ROMANS ever done for us?

So, we've got the solution to "hunger and despair", "political freedom", "standard of living increases", and "more access to the immense collection of objects." What does Sut Jhally answer...

No!

Since these thing do not give us happiness, one can only assume that Sut proposes we have starving people in despair with low standards of living, living as slaves without political freedom or access to goods.

Sign me up!

Occasionally, however, I like the things that Sut writes: "To reject or criticize advertising as false and manipulative misses the point." I just don't like where he goes with them. For example, I would take this as an indication that advertising cannot be effective mind control because people can reach impossible goals--like a worker's paradise--and thus advertising can't be the cause of reaching them, since they cannot be reached.#

As can be predicted, soon Sut will announce that the problems he sees can only be solved by a massive collective that does not recognize individuals or the self-ness of people.#

A culture dominated by commercial messages that tells individuals that the way to happiness is through consuming objects bought in the marketplace gives a very particular answer to the question of "what is society?" - what is it that binds us together in some kind of collective way, what concerns or interests do we share? In fact, Margaret Thatcher, the former conservative British Prime Minister, gave the most succinct answer to this question from the viewpoint of the market. In perhaps her most (in)famous quote she announced: "There is no such thing as 'society'. There are just individuals and their families." According to Mrs. Thatcher, there is nothing solid we can call society - no group values, no collective interests - society is just a bunch of individuals acting on their own.

Indeed this is precisely how advertising talks to us. It addresses us not as members of society talking about collective issues, but as individuals. It talks about our individual needs and desires. It does not talk about those things we have to negotiate collectively, such as poverty, healthcare, housing and the homeless, the environment, etc..

How horrible. A society in which people do not interfere in each other's affairs and are not routinely robbed by the State. A society without mandatory attendance at "too many committee meetings." Terrible.

Obviously from now on, any standard critique of communism will do just fine, but I will continue with the highlights.

Here is another assumption that humans do not possess free will and advertising controls everything in our lives.#

Partly this is because of advertising's monopolization of cultural life. There is no space left for different types of discussion, no space at the center of the society where alternative values could be expressed. But it is also connected to the failure of those who care about collective issues to create alternative visions that can compete in any way with the commercial vision. The major alternatives offered to date have been a gray and dismal stateism. This occurred not only in the western societies but also in the former so called "socialist" societies of eastern Europe. These repressive societies never found a way to connect to people in any kind of pleasurable way, relegating issues of pleasure and individual expression to the non-essential and distracting aspects of social life. This indeed was the core of the failure of Communism in Eastern Europe. As Ehrenreich reminds us, not only was it unable to deliver the material goods, but it was unable to create a fully human "ideological retort to the powerful seductive messages of the capitalist consumer culture." (Ehrenreich 1990 p.47)

Additionally, notice the failure to understand that monopoly can only be sustained through coercion, i.e. state control, the exact thing that Sut is proposing will solve these problems.

It continues to amaze me how some people think that State control of the media will actually reduce dangerous propaganda however it is defined.

There is, however, a shred of hope for Prof. Jhally. He admits that the individual is occasionally important, but I fear that this paragraph is many included to distance himself from religion rather than from communist totalitarianism.#

I do not want to be too Pollyannaish about the possibilities of social change. It is not just collective values that need to be struggled for, but collective values that recognize individual rights and individual creativity. There are many repressive collective movements already in existence - from our own home-grown Christian fundamentalists to the Islamic zealots of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The task is not easy. It means balancing and integrating different views of the world.

Dave Pollard posted an essay by Glenn Parton titled Love Politics about monogamy and why it is Bad.#

Let's shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the question, Why can't people see the obvious? If people could see what is self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush.

[...]

The old relationship -- namely, monogamy (whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly Capitalism which is destroying this planet.

The Essay#

Fisking this essay would be too hilarious, so I will just highlight some interesting and absurd moments. First, I'll basically describe the gist: The socialist revolution is not moving as quickly as we'd like, so it must be sped up by destroying as much as possible of the liberal world view. Since the end result is a destruction of private property, private relationships are a good place to start.#

Glenn describes the American mind as he sees it:#

Americans have a defensive ego-structure -- a system of self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception of the world -- the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair society. This makes us, "as we are", incapable of forming enduring political communities for social transformation, which is precisely what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy. What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation? Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult task. [My emphasis.]

What makes this social engineering experiment different than others? No answer.

Like other things that Dave Pollard has linked to, this essay is very anti-technology and would like to see a world of hunter-gathering tribes:#

Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn, a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to the conclusion in his book, Ancient Society, that the advanced forms of civilization "will be a repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens."

Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies, can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and solidarity to make a true beginning...

I am reminded of Don Boudreaux's discussion of how poverty is the natural state of people, rather than wealth, and because of this there are not causes of poverty in the same way there are of wealth.

It seems to me that Glenn Parton would like to see a destruction of progress and would to like to ensure that it can never happen again by destroying the ideas of individual achievement and action themself.

The Response#

Richard, last of the Gwai Los, responds to it and points to some of its weaknesses.#

First the weaknesses of the essay, and they are debilitating ones. The last sentence of first paragraph ("That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush.") effectively dates the article, making it a 2004 polemic rather than a timeless critique. This error—and it is my intention not to defend George W. Bush or Americans by supporting the man and people being criticized but rather to dismiss the device of criticizing a contemporary (and temporary) figure to make a larger point—is not the most eggregious, however. If Parton's intention was to engage the people's whose behaviour he wants to change, he could not have picked a worse way to write the following paragraph:

Education is not the primary path for social change because the biggest obstacle we moderns face is not widespread ignorance, but manufactured stupidity, the arresting and distortion of human nature by culture. Americans are arguably the stupidest people on earth, informed and entertained by the infantile and adolescent nonsense of TV and Hollywood. We have forgotten what our tribal ancestors knew, and not (yet?) broken through to high/integral reason that surpasses but also preserves old knowledge. Our knowledge is more and more manipulation of nature and each other, in terms of which we are the very best, the number one country in the world.

Instead of making an excellent point about so-called "education" that treats teaches the same information in the same way over and over, which he does in the first sentence, Parton loses everything he could have gained from pursuing a nuanced argument and calls the people he is trying to convert to his point of view idiots.

Richard curiously writes, "Parton, in short, makes an interesting argument worth considering seriously. He just does it badly." It seems to me that the argument about loving multiple people is a good argument, or at least an interesting thought. But not Parton's vision of communist world order he thinks it will make possible.

I deeply enjoyed Dave Pollard's thoughts on the essay, minus points three through five.#

Several respondents have complained about the essay, with the loudest criticism being about his overromanticizing of the 'free love' movement of the 1960s (which Glenn and I both grew up during), his apparent misogynism and homophobia, and his preoccupation with the sexual aspects of relationships over the emotional ones. I will confess that I share readers' concerns on all these scores. At the same time, I believe the underlying message of Glenn's essay is fundamentally valid, and extremely important. Rather than debate the concerns, I'd prefer to try to restate what I learned from the essay, hopefully in a less provocative way than Glenn's, and focus the debate on the core ideas and their implications:

1. Our society, our civilization, morally permits each of us to love, passionately and without limit, only one other person. If we violate this moral rule, we are called 'unfaithful', and this is considered a sin, fully justifying jealousy by the first person we loved. If this love manifests itself sexually, it is called 'adultery' and is illegal as well as immoral. People who do love more than one person, passionately and without limit, are demonized and shunned in our society.

And this is very apt:

I don't believe we need this kind of emotional liberation to save the world, but I don't think it would hurt.

If you didn't get this from Glenn's essay, this may be due more to my imagining of what he meant than your misunderstanding. As Daniel Dennett says "On any important topic, we tend to have a rough idea of what we believe to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments." And I expect that Glenn will weigh in himself on what he really meant. But now that I've delineated what I got out of his essay, and why I think his basic idea is very sensible and very important, I'd be interested in your thoughts. Naive? Idealistic? Wrong-headed? Insensitive? Or is there something here that bears closer scrutiny, and maybe a real-world trial?

My Response#

The thing that I am primarily opposed to in this essay is the statement that there is something wrong in essence with private property or monogamy, and the implication that everyone should (be made) to live in Glenn's Love Politics.#

I think that a liberal society should permit its members to live their lives in any means they choose, provided natural rights are protected and contracts are enforced. For this reason, I do not think that monogamy is a central part of a liberal society and fully support efforts to free up access to the marriage contract. However, monogamy is central part of my life and I surprised at the intellect that reduces all these problems ("anger, violence, hatred, neglect of others, depression, withdrawal, lack of emotional resilience, self-loathing", "passivity", etc) to monogamy.#

So, go for it brothers! But don't force me to or force my future children to have to be indoctrinated in your system if I don't want them to.#

Col. John A. Warden III, USAF, writes about a new style of warfare in Air Theory for the Twenty-first Century.#

War in the twenty-first century will be significantly different for the United States from anything encountered before the Gulf War. American wars will be increasingly precise; imprecision will be too expensive physically and politically to condone. Our political leaders and our citizenry will insist that we hit only what we are shooting at and that we shoot the right thing. Increased use of precision weapons will mean far less dependence on the multitudes of people or machines needed in the past to make up for inaccuracy in weapons. Precision will come to suggest not only that a weapon strike exactly where it is aimed, but also that the weapons be precise in destroying or affecting only what is supposed to be affected. Standoff and indirect-fire precision weapons will become available to many others, which will make massing of large numbers in the open suicidal and the safety of deploying sea-based or land-based aircraft close to a combat area problematic.

This comment and question about nuclear capability is very intriguing:#

The United States can achieve virtually all military objectives without recourse to weapons of mass destruction. Conversely, other states, unable to afford the hyperwar arsenal now the exclusive property of the United States, will at least experiment with them. The challenge for America is to decide if it wants to negate these weapons without replying or preempting in kind. Accompanying this question is the question of nuclear deterrence in a significantly changed world. Although deterrence will certainly be greatly different from our cold war conception of it, does it lose its utility in all situations? How should US nuclear forces be maintained? This entire matter deserves serious thought, soon.

On the nature of war:#

Remember: war is not quintessentially about fighting and killing; rather, it is about getting something that the opponent is not inclined to hand over. Still another way to express this idea is this: war is all about making your enemy do something you want him to do when he doesn't want to do it—and then preventing him from taking an alternative approach which you would also find unacceptable.

There are a variety of ways to make an enemy do what you want him to do. In simple terms, however, there are but three: make it too expensive for the enemy to resist, with "expensive" understood in political, economic, and military terms; physically prevent an enemy from doing something by imposing strategic or operational paralysis on him; or destroy him absolutely.

He develops a model of organizations that can be used to decide what challenges must be beaten before your will will be had. The model is based on five-rings of interdependence and control.#

Let us review key concepts discussed to this point. First, the object of war is to induce the enemy to do your bidding. Second, it is the leadership of the enemy that decides to ac- commodate you. Third, engagement of the enemy military may be a means to an end, but the engagement is never an end in itself and should be avoided under most circumstances. Fourth, every life-form-based system is organized similarly: a leadership function to direct it, a system-essential function to convert energy from one form to another, an infrastructure to tie it all together, a population to make it function, and a defense system to protect it from attack. Fifth, the enemy is a system, not an independent mass of tanks, aircraft, or dope pushers. And sixth, the five rings provide a good method for categorizing information and identifying centers of gravity.

An interesting concept he discusses is the requirement that enemy leadership understand their losses accurately. One example he uses is that within the first minutes of the first Gulf War Iraqi communications were so disrupted it was nearly impossible for Saddam Hussein to understand what damages were being made. For this reason, he says, you must "educate and inform" your enemy properly and "accurately [...] on the extent of his losses--and the long-term and short-term effects likely to flow from them." It a bit non-intuitive.#

The next piece of advice in air war: "Do it fast." Iraq, again, is the example.#

Our best example of parallel war to date is the strategic attack on Iraq in the Gulf War. Within a matter of minutes the coalition, attacked over a hundred key targets across Iraq's entire strategic depth. In an instant, important functions in all of Iraq stopped working very well. Phone service fell precipitously, lights went out, air defense centers stopped controlling subordinate units, and key leadership offices and personnel were destroyed. To put Iraq's dilemma in perspective, the coalition struck three times as many targets in Iraq in the first 24 hours as Eighth Air Force hit in Germany in all of 1943!

One thing that I found missing from the essay was how a defense against this tactic would be constructed. I suppose, however, that it is not something that is generally designed for this journal.#

François-René Rideau writes in Design Ideas for a Future Computer Virus... and for a Future Security Architecture about a next-generation virus in a world of free-software, studying how sophisticated it would have to be as opposed to the simple viruses of the proprietary world.#

His description of how a virus detector can be made useless is very scary. Basically, because each virus detector is based on pattern matching, if the form/code of the virus can be very random it can be incredibly expensive to detect. This strategy is named Polymorphism.#

This is a particularly hilarious strategy:#

Before to enter a more malicious mode that will incur a much higher risk of getting caught, try to find a scapegoat that can be blamed for the damage. For instance, in a multi-user system, you can pick an innocent user, and only have externally observable malicious effects when this user is logged in, run malicious processes under his name, etc. Or in a server, you can trigger malicious behaviour right after some upgrade or maintenance operation, etc., and produce a binary and/or source containing the code for the malicious behaviour without any reference to the rest of the virus infrastructure. The idea is that by blaming the wrong person or binary, some silly administrators won't tackle the real problem, and may even restore already infected binaries. A successful scapegoat tactic of course depends on careful selection of the scapegoat, hence on a very good understanding of the way system administrators think and react, and on the events that they think about.

The conclusion is, of course, fabulous:#

For a virus to be successful in surviving and doing malicious things in current and future free software operating systems, it would require quite an amount of proficiency, work, tenacity. Making a virus that can robustly scale to a large range of situations, is really a particularly hard instance of the problem of making a robust and adaptative piece of software, with the additional constraint that it is hardly possible if at all to upgrade, fix or patch the software after it was originally let loose, whereas those who will attack the virus, though they start without much information, will be able to disassemble it, test it in laboratory conditions, exchange information, grow new intrusion-detection techniques, learn better habits, etc.

With a fraction of the work invested in building a really robust virus, the person or group of developers able to build it could get rich and famous at developing actually useful software: writing compilers or decompilers, doing security consultancy, developing copy-protection schemes, growing expert systems, engineering large projects, teaching software design, building systems that automate tasks currently done by human administrators. In contrast, as far as infecting proprietary systems goes, viruses need be neither robust nor scalable, neither stealthy nor architected around multiple layers: a dedicated teenager can write one that will spread all over the world. Meanwhile, the overhead cost of entry before one can do useful, worthwhile work is very low in free software communities, whereas it is very high in proprietary software communities. These economic considerations again explain why viruses are such a constant nuisance with proprietary systems, whereas it is unlikely that they will ever be much of a danger with free software systems.