Blog surfing

OK, so Billy Beck got into a tiff with Og over at Roberta X's place, about political ideas such as anarchy, and I've mostly stayed on the sidelines watching people gabber at each other while I just read and observed and thought about what everyone had to say. But there was one comment that just made me shake my head enough to post about on this thread at Roberta's place. The comment is almost at the end, if you feel like checking it out yourself:

Mr. Nikoley would seem to fall into that category."

"Seem."

One immediate detectable difference between us is that I have no idea whether I would "wish [you] would stop claiming to be on [my] side."

Same goes for Roberta.

For one, I am an individualist, but that's a philosophical (and biological) distinction for another day, perhaps.

In any case, as I reserve judgment on such matters until such time as I've attained certainty in accordance with my own values, meaning: not the "side's" values -- whatever they are (feel free to tell me, though) -- I won't say one way or another what may or may not "seem" to me to speculatively be.

I think I learned this lesson back in around '91, in snail-mail correspondence with old friends, a year or so after concluding that rational anarchism was the only possible political position fully consistent with individualism, a principal grounded both in evolutionary biology and the rational nature of man.

Look, all of these individualists claiming to be for rational anarchy have managed to read probably a whole lot more philosophy than I have, and sat in their houses thinking and thinking and thinking until they figure that they've come up with the greatest political philosophy since man ever banged two rocks together. "Rational Anarchy"! Yay! And it totally and completely goes off the road from there.

But not in a good way.

I don't have a whole bunch of time this morning, but I can at least say this - The moment you bet your life that your fellow man will be civilized, you're going to lose your life. In anarchy, only the Strong rule. I didn't say the Just, or the Decent, only the Strong. "The rational nature of man"? Since when? SOME men are rational. Some men have so failed to rise above animal status that they don't deserve to be called human. I have dealt with both in my lifetime. And while I'm one of the most anti-government people you'll meet, I was still damned glad that there was a government around to drag the animal off to jail.

Humanity is a broad-ranging species. You've got your good ones, but you've also got the animals on two legs. Failing to take that into consideration only leads to failure. If you don't have a control for the bottom 10%, then the top 10% won't amount to a hill of beans.

And as for the proponents of Rational Anarchy, one of them has managed to get himself banned from a blog that lets just about anyone comment, and the others have managed to piss off quite a few people all on their own. If these are the people trying to convince others to give Rational Anarchy a try, they're doing a piss poor job.