From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 18:14:27 MDT
> (dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu <dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu>):
> Politics isn't ethics, neither is it aesthetics.
I disagree; politics is nothing /but/ ethics, in the context of
larger groups of people.
> It is absolutely possible to be committed to an ethical project
> which you hope one day will sweep the world, to be committed to an
> aesthetic project that assimilates the totality of your individual
> experience and affirms it as beautiful, *and* to be committed to political
> projects that negotiate compromises that make the world relatively better
> than worse, even if they do not perfectly reflect your most cherished
> ideals, all at the same time. This isn't cowardice, confusion, or
> relativism (at least it *needn't* be), but a recognition that values and
> practices unfold in different domains with different consequences and with
> standards.
Where force is concerned, one must certainly make compromises with those
who exert force against you to stay out of jail long enough to achieve
your ends. That kind of compromise is perfectly rational, and I have no
problem with Libertarians who do things like pay taxes and register for
the draft and register their firearms. But voting is different: voting
is an act of actually controlling those who exert force; it is an overt
act of consent, and as such I think it has to be done honestly. If there
were some way to register of a vote of "I select candidate Y, though I
actually prefer candidate Z", then I might approve of such a vote. But
there isn't; there's only the one chance the government gives you to
express your views on the use of force, and there's nothing more useless
than totally throwing away any value that vote might have by voting for
the winner, or wasting its power by voting for the major-party loser.
> I know that this seems to be singling out Lee Daniel Crocker, and
> I don't mean it to at all -- it's just that along with Damien Broderick
> and Anders Sandberg, Harvey Newstrom has seemed to me lately to be
> fighting indefatiguably to keep this list culture reasonable and relevant
> against a rising tide of noise and barbarism and his (their) efforts
> should be rewarded -- I am very much mostly a lurker here, by temperament
> and due to the tangential relevance of my skillset, so my endorsement can
> only count for so much. Still, it seems like it needs to be said.
I know you're not singling me out, just as you should know I wasn't
singling out Harvey. I know Harvey; I've spoken with him, I admire him.
But the view he expressed in that message was one I find repugnant, for
reasons I think are important to extropian thought, and it would be
dishonest of me to say otherwise. Silence, of course, would have been
neither dishonest nor impolite; but if a misguided sense of civility
causes important ideas not to be expressed just because they might be
misinterpreted as personal, then civility be damned.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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