From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 14:53:41 MDT
"Corwyn J. Alambar" wrote:
>
> Well, it's fairly clear that the loudest voices on this list are fairly
> rightist, with a few leftist leaning individuals as well. But the fact remains
> that there is still the kind of political fundamentalism that renders any sort
> of meaningful political discourse useless.
>
> Yes, likening the right-wing death squads in Colombia to PPL/J was a little
> disingenious - but I chose the references carefully. Those squads represent
> a group of people who feel that their own military is not doing enough to
> protect them, and have instead pressed for a NGO to come in and take care
> of the peacekeeping that they so desperately want. If there weren't those
> that supported the role of these squads as upholding their particular
> "law and order", they wouldn't exist. Most PPL/J scenarios I have read end
> up eventually boiling down to some sort of coercive tactics, unless and until
> you change the core of human nature.
The question though, if you are going to maintain that the 'death squads' (they
obviously don't call themselves that, its a moniker applied by leftist
propagandists), especially considering the marxists have killed far more private
citizens than the 'right wing death squads' have, yet I don't see the media
complaining about 'left wing death squads', as if the people they kill deserve
it....
If Columbia is in fact an example of a PPL\J system, it is one that is operating
in a crisis situation as a result of a failure in government to provide law and
justice services that were paid for. They are the volunteer firemen, the
volunteer ambulance drivers. They didn't start the fire, but they are being
blamed for it because they are on the scene when the TV cameras show up, and are
being called 'vigilantes' by the arsonists and the arsonists sympathyzers, as
well as by the city government that is bribed by arsonists and the city
firemen's union that refuses to do its job. Excuse me while I puke.
>
> This is, however, aside from the point. The old political spectrum, right vs.
> left, is crumbling, at least in the US. The arguements between right and left
> are falling apart, and none too soon, I think. Quite frankly, I'm glad the
> Republicans managed to keep most of their bigots and small-minded people - it's
> a good counter to the race supremacists and radical feminists on the Democratic
> side. And it shows the Republican stance to be as morally bankrupt as the
> Democratic one.
>
The ease with which leftist bigots and rightist bigots find alliances on
specific issues does show your point.
> The issue hereis that political systems as we understand them do not scale.
> Whatever your governmental system is, they do not scale well enough to our
> current geopolitical reality. This holds true for anarchism, libertarianism,
> fascism, stalinism, socialism, communism, democracy, republic - the combination
> of population and land area has outstripped the ability of our technology to
> continue. Who herehonestly believes that any of our existing (or recently
> existing) governments would be capable of administrating a thriving extra-
> terrestrial colony? The distances are too vast for our current technology to
> "glue" together.
Oh, you mean act as an ET colonial power? Thats easy, it depends on FTL travel
and communications. Empires become unweildy when it takes more than a few months
to travel or communicate from the edge of the realm to the center. At our
current level of technology, interplanetary empires are difficult, but not
impossible. Interstellar ones are impossible.
>
> So all this talk about right vs. left, socialism vs. libertarianism, is simply
> rearranging the deck chairs. Government does best what it is SIZED to do -
> the federal governent f the US does not get in the business of marriage
> licenses, hunting licenses, traffic violations, etc. except in the grossest
> possible way, because it is not sized to deal with these issues. Conversely,
> the failure of the Cofederacy involved the inability of the central government
> at the time to collect the taxes necssary for the meager few services it DID
> provide (i.e. military and diplomatic roles).
Actually most all military units in the CSA were state raised, trained, funded
and operated units (as were many units on the union side). At the time, the
federal government did not allow a large standing army for constitutional
reasons.
>
> I am going to commit what I have come to believe is a heresy amongst this
> group - I am an environmentalist.
Happy joy. So am I. Surprised?
> Not one of these luddite neolith
> philosophers who would give back fire if they could. But quite honestly, I
> do NOT think that corporate or personal interest trumps all. It's the Tragedy
> of the Commons - one company (DuPont) can go a little lax on safety mechanisms
> and kill tens of thousands of people (Bhopal, India, 1984) and those people
> never had a chance to protect themselves.
Except they voted for the government that taxed capital investments by 50%, and
which counted safety systems as capital investments....
> I get headaches from being behind
> poorly tuned diesel vehicles - this is NOT healthy! But there is nothing I
> as one person can do without some sor tof advocacy group with enough teeth to
> make sure that I can breathe clean air and drink clean water.
Actually, write down the license plate number of the truck. Rear end it. Claim
you were incapacitated by the exhaust fumes, sue and collect. Legal market
pressures can do their jobs...
> And simply
> joining a group like the Sierra Club won't guarantee that - they have no
> enfrcement power.
On the contrary, a large amount of the environmental and safety improvements of
the last few decades are a direct result of class action lawsuits againt
perpetrators of externalities like this.
> My life is continually jeopardized, in small amounts, by
> peopel who operate vehicles without meeting smog regulations, who dump small
> amounts of contaminants in aquefers, who spray known cancer-causing pesticides
> on their crops because its cheap. Free markets will never provide this
> sort of environmental protection. It is always a race to the bottom - because
> even though _I_ may elect to buy organic produce, or produce grown without the
> use of DDT, the cheaper produce grabs the greatest market share. If you think
> I'm lying, conside this: Produce from Mexico can be grown using DDT, then
> imported into the US. This produce, despite crossing national boundaries,
> is about 5-10% cheaper than stuff grown here in CA. Regardless of the health
> risks, which produce sells better? The cheaper stuff.
Under GATT and NAFTA, there are provisions for this. Dolphin unsafe tuna from
mexico is not sold here, and such restrictions survive challenges at the WTO.
> Many things can be decided by the free market - I will not argue this. But it
> is NOT and should never be considered a panacea, let alone an infallible
> deity. Anythign in excess is a vice, including moderation. (pardon the poor
> paraphrase and lack of attribution - I don't have my Bartlett's handy)
The market is completely dependent upon the initiative of its participants. If
you are a passivist, who prefer that you be waited on hand and foot, and that
other people pay for that, you do not belong in a free market. If you have a
problem, 'you are the change you wish to see in the world'. If you think its a
problem then you are the person to solve it.
>
> The point I'm making is simply this: Government is pretty much a necessary
> evil, by moderating the worst excesses of the market, as well as by moderating
> the paternal/maternal instincts of the citizenry and the more demanding and
> radical elements of personal philosophy. Local government does best when its
> dealing with individual issues - property boundary disputes, petty crime,
> traffic enforcement. Regional government does best with regional-level
> issues - such things as general licensing requirements, health and education
> services over broad regions. So-called "national" governments do very well at
> diplomacy, military service, and certain high-level functions that affect and
> require a larger geographic base than any administrative region could
> reasonably run. But at the increasingly high levels of abstraction, there
> should be less and less direct influence on the individual, save in specialized
> and/or rare circumstances (an army is invading - of course the national
> government will have an effect on its poeple - especially those in the warzone)
Congratulations. You are a libertarian. ;)
>
> No governance is anarchy. Anything else is some form of totalitarianism. Yes,
> even libertarianism. I cannot be truly "free" in a libertarian society, and
> actually I feel in the end I woul dbe less free than I would be in the American
> constitutional system as it was practiced prior to the Civil War, though this
> is a discussionf or a later time, another place, since it SHOULD have no
> bearing on this list.
>
> What DOES have bearing here is the notion of what form of governance would
> work best for an extropian world? I have my reasons for believing that a
> libertarian "government" (if it could be even called that - what would it do?)
> is not the most effctive nor efficient way to accomplish this end. Some sort
> of scalable representation, with ever more diffuse power structures at the
> outer layers, would make more sense to me at least - let the government at the
> local level work with the people at the local level, reflecting their
> particular desires. Let the regional government deal with the issues affecting
> the region, the nationalg overnment with issues of national scale, planetary
> governance dealing withthse broad, diffuse, truly global issues.
I don't think that that is a real point being debated. The point being debated
is what degree of participation and consensus is required at each level? Global
problems should not be decided on simple majorities.
> How we
> arrive at these points I can't tell you - I can't even tell you what the
> mechanics would look like. i have my own ideas, but they are untested and
> unresearched.
>
> But I ask this: What form of governance that we have available to us today
> would be able to construct and maintain an arcology-style structure, and
> accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time?
Why? Arcologies are in actuality highly wasteful structures, demanding more
resources per occupant than a more diffuse community.
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