Eskrima, RPGs, And Other Things

[citrakayah]

Recently, I’d been part of a party of adventurers in a Dungeons and Dragons game that met every Saturday (though we were moving to Wednesdays and Fridays). Note the past tense.

Last night, I was taken aside and informed that group dynamics were “not working out.” Given that my character was straight-laced chaotic good and over half the part was chaotic/neutral/lawful evil (though I really think the chaotic evil character wasn’t that evil, since he was merely a sociopath who killed evil people), I can buy that. Or maybe I somehow managed to piss everyone else off and not notice it, and no one explicitly told me. And the GM is open to, perhaps later in the year, doing another campaign that I can participate in.

I’ll acknowledge that I was a bit upset due to the fact that I hadn’t noticed any such undercurrents, but I guess that’s the price one pays for being autistic and having few social skills. I’m a lot less elegant offline than online. Would have been nice for them to tell me what it was, though. On the other hand maybe it wasn’t anything specific.

In any event. This does give me more time to participate in things like the Wildlife Society (whose last meeting I missed), eskrima (last few meetings missed in part due to being unable to find the location), and various other things. But still, kind of unfortunate.

Would be nice to join another campaign, whether face-to-face, play-by-post, or IRC.

In other news:

1. My echocardiogram was rather bizarre, at least in terms of my experience, though my heart was apparently normal. Also they won’t send me images of my echocardiogram, which is unfortunate because the video was kind of cool.
2. I started a speculative evolution forum called Saecula Novae because the mod on Speculative Evolution did several things I disagreed with, including but not limited to: closing and deleting threads without formal notice, unevenly enforcing rules, and not creating forums for community projects like promised.
3. Fuck anarchocapitalists. (Trigger warning: Sheer, mindblowing insensitivity to rape, which is used to score political points for a stupid ideology.)

Comments

[davv]

I find it interesting that the socialist anarchist side is not nearly as visible, comparably speaking, as they used to be. Either this is because they have become more quiet, or because the anarcho-capitalists have become louder; I suspect it is a little of both, but more the latter. But somehow, anarcho-capitalism has become the "default anarchism" for a lot more people than was previously the case. Why? Power of communication? Fragmentation of society? Did capitalism "win" and redefine the debate through Reagan and Thatcher, or did liberalism "win" and it is now the thing those who rebel rebel against? Or is it something else? I don't know. It feels like something is amplifying the libertarian voice somehow, but I can't get at whatever "it" is.

The natural-rights approach also provides some other very bizarre results. If I collude with everybody who owns property surrounding yours, I could form a "cartel" (so to speak) and demand that you pay exorbitant rates for anything you transport through our property. Essentially a siege, but with the twist that the one breaking the siege would be initiating force. As you said, they have an odd distinction of what force is. I imagine it follows from the intuitive idea that "if we could stop brute force" (i.e. the "make me" variety), "then society would be much better"; but the people who would use brute force for unpleasant ends here would use other forms of coercion if they couldn't use brute force. So the assumption of "everything else equal" fails.

[citrakayah]

I would argue that the thing amplifying the libertarian voice is money. I kind of view libertarianism as an offshoot of Randian "philosophy"--basically, the ideology that anybody who can't do well without some sort of assistance is unworthy. Libertarian ideology is basically Randian "philosophy," in my view, with the addition of the belief that nothing will go wrong. It's the kind of self-satisfied pontificating that bears absolutely no connection to reality... which is not surprising. I've heard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain that the scientific method is a "statist" methodology. They prefer "praexology" or whatever it's called, which is of course bullshit and basically an attempt to say that humans act the way you think they should.

In any event, I got sidetracked. My point is that the anarcho-capitalist view wouldn't exist without Randian "philosophy." As far as why the Randian view became popular, I would characterize it as a reactionary ideology, born in opposition to the Soviet Union, which gained power for the same reason social Darwinism did: It reinforced existence power structures. Anarcho-capitalism is a spinoff that purports to solve problems with existing power structures, but would in reality only reinforce them.


Which is why I honestly think that for a lot of the biggest supporters of anarcho-capitalism, the scenario you describe is not a bug. It is a feature. Anarcho-capitalism favors groups and/or individuals with large resources that can be applied to force people to buy their products, and anarcho-capitalism brushes off forces such as the inability to not buy something that is necessary for survival as insignificant.

Worse, anarcho-capitalism is paradoxical: If contracts are binding, period... well, what do you call it when the government sells you land with the understanding that, so long as you and your progeny use the land, you will obey certain laws?

[davv]

But if you talk about social Darwinism today, people will call you a racist. The reaction to the Randian view is not nearly so negative.

So I could guess the corporations (or whoever) think that anarcho-capitalism is useful while social Darwinism is not. But I don't think that's the whole story. It feels like it's also related to how many poor people in the US tend to vote against their interests (or so I've heard). That is, the idea of "I will be the one to win the capitalist lottery by skill alone" has become very effectively part of the culture... and from there, I imagine it's not so long a jump to say "but I don't have a chance, whereas I should have... something must be wrong, it's the state!".

But that doesn't entirely work either. It's not the poor who are proposing anarcho-capitalism - it's the Austrians, technologists, etc., who are comparably well off. If I were to construct a story there, I think it'd be something like "see all the good capitalism has done to us" ("I've never been poor so I see only the benefits"), "if we did away with the state entirely, we would have outrageous progress only heard of in science fiction". I.e. that the "success" of capitalism sells the radicalization in that direction. Then money would come into the picture in two ways: first, from the corporate support of the think tanks, and second, that money of the people who talk about anarcho-capitalism (since they aren't poor themselves).

I've heard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain that the scientific method is a "statist" methodology.

It appears you can find Lysenkos on the right, too :)

Worse, anarcho-capitalism is paradoxical: If contracts are binding, period... well, what do you call it when the government sells you land with the understanding that, so long as you and your progeny use the land, you will obey certain laws?

That's an amusing thought: that in some prior day, perhaps there was a natural right - and then the people gathered together in groups and made laws for themselves, collectively owning the property. That would just mean the anarcho-capitalists were late to the party: every group has agreed to subordinate its property to a state and so there's no free property left (absent the high seas, of course). The thought is made all the more amusing by that if the state legitimately owns the property, then an anarcho-capitalist revolution would be the very essence of imposition of force, the very thing they claim to be against.

I know it doesn't quite work like that: nobody would claim that the North Koreans voluntarily gave their property to Kim Il-sung. But it does show that states could easily reappear, and when I think about it, the megacorporations usually depicted in cyberpunk (with their private armies and so on) do quite resemble (plutocratically oligarchical) states. One might draw a comparison to the fall of Rome: a greater state crumbles, smaller "states" appear (the fiefdoms or megacorporations), each with their own defense apparatus. Again, the comparison is not perfect (the lords of the feudal realms did use the kind of force anarcho-capitalists abhor to control their people), but it's interesting.

It reminds me of something I read not long ago, where the author claimed free-market proponents misinterpret Coase (considered to be of "externalities can be handled by the market" fame). What he's saying is rather that a perfect market would produce the same pollution-handling outcome as a perfect regulator. But that goes both ways. If it's too hard for people to deal with the polluters one-on-one, they may use the equivalence in the opposite direction. I.e., states provide lower transaction cost compared to the alternative. There's no reason to automatically expect that markets would minimize transaction cost (the existence of corporations themselves suggest otherwise, since they are internally planned economies); and if the markets don't, then there's a perfectly good chance that states would just reappear.

[citrakayah]

I'd argue that that's only the case if you call it social Darwinism. If you say "People who are poor are poor because they are lazy" you get half the country agreeing with you, it seems. And that is social Darwinism... just not the kind that is explicitly racist (it's racist in that it refuses to recognize that the legacy of discrimination affects racial minorities).

It's true that it's generally the elite who talk about anarcho-capitalism, so the trend is for people who only see the good side to advocate it, but to some degree, wasn't that same trend present in social Darwinism? "I only see how well I'm doing, I think I've earned it, people earn their place in society?"

Technically, that's not essential for anarcho-capitalism, and I've seen anarcho-capitalists (okay, anarcho-capitalist) who accepted that the whole social Darwinism thing is wrong--something to their credit, I suppose.


Yeah. Then you have the anarcho-capitalists saying that psychology and sociology are bunk, and presumably that praexology is anything but worthless crap.


Exactly! And most anarcho-capitalists I've seen seem to think that so long as you were not coerced by a gun to your head to be part of a contract, then everything is fine and dandy.

I mean, I've heard anarcho-capitalists defend slavery so long as one sells themselves into slavery (never mind the potential for fraud, of course or coercion, of course, since their belief in absolute rights of that sort demand that the possibility be legal no matter how prone to abuse it is). So clearly they don't have a problem with someone being forced to maintain a contract that they desperately, desperately do not want to maintain.

As far as the Coase issue, that's an interesting piece. There's also one other thing that people citing Coase miss out on, and that's that if I'm polluting, it's in my rational interest to make sure that no one knows about it. And in the absence of a government authorized to use force to conduct surprise inspections, it's going to be harder to find out who is polluting.