Clearly, in times of emergency, the internet, in order to be protected, must be destroyed.
Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.
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June 2010
From Wired.com comes news of the US Army’s latest spy mobile — a high altitude, long-duration flight, combat airship, ominously nicknamed “The Unblinking Eye.” This sweet ride and its two sister blimps will cost taxpayers upwards of half a billion dollars. The 5-year contract calls for mere $517 million, and we all know military contractors never experience cost overruns.
I love Noah Shachtman’s analysis of the propagandistic publicity poster by Northrop Grumman, the maker of the Army’s latest war toy:
God smiles when the Army spends a half-billion dollars on spy blimps the size of a football field. I believe that’s the message Northrop Grumman is trying to convey in this illustration. . .
The first airship is supposed to be inflated around 10 months from now. Eight months later, the Army hopes to have the first LEMV flying over Afghanistan. On that day, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and the cherubs will sing as the unblinking eye begins looking for Taliban.
God bless America indeed.
The Unblinking Eyes of Sauron are intended for use over foreign soil. But with the increasing militarization of US borders and police, I wonder how long until they or their successors are deployed over our own heads? looking for brown-skinned interlopers, pot growers, and terrorists under every rock.
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It is a common mistake, made even by some libertarians and former libertarians, that libertarians reject the idea of unchosen obligations. Gene Callahan, apparently a former libertarian turned communitarian, is the latest to make this mistake. He says:
Obligation . . . is the crucial idea denied by libertarian political theory.
Well, this is just patently absurd. Libertarians, of course, do not deny that individuals can have obligations to others, including non-humans.
Fortunately, Callahan goes on to clarify what he means:
We can have obligations that we did not agree to take upon ourselves.
But this is something that not all libertarians deny, as a wide and deep enough perusal of libertarian literature will demonstrate.
At the very least, libertarians recognize the unchosen obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force against other rational beings (i.e., to refrain from what we call aggression).
Libertarians generally make two important sets of distinctions regarding obligation: that between negative and positive obligations and that between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. One can go further and recognize that obligations can have different weightings relative to one another such that one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.
Rights, at least as I define the term, are legitimately enforceable moral claims against another’s prior obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force. The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) and corresponding rights are unchosen, enforceable negative obligations.
Can we have unchosen positive obligations? Libertarians need not deny this, and not all do. It should be easily recognized that unchosen, unenforceable positive obligations are strictly compatible with the NAP/rights.
What about unchosen, enforceable positive obligations? Provided they are compatible with the NAP/rights, if there are any that meet this description, then libertarians need not deny unchosen, enforceable positive obligations outright. I’ll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to come up with possible examples of unchosen, enforceable positive obligations that are compatible with the NAP/rights. If you take the challenge, bear in mind what I wrote about how one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.
Suffice to say that it is a myth that libertarians (need to) deny unchosen, even positive, obligations. Callahan is attacking a straw man.
To criticize libertarians in general for denying unchosen, enforceable positive obligations, or just certain of them, would be more accurate. But to do so would be to take the position that the threat or use of initiatory physical force (i.e., aggression) is at least sometimes justified — that, for example, what is usually thought of commonsensically as theft or trespass or murder in everyday life, is not theft or trespass or murder in the “political” sphere, i.e., when the state or the “community” does it.
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A couple of days ago David mentioned on The Libertarian Standard that the Mises Institute providing its entire online media and literature library as a set of free torrents can be seen as part of a distributed or grassroots intellectual guerrilla resistance against the state.
This is just one aspect of the Mises Institute’s effort to be completely open source. All of the intellectual eggs of the Austro-Libertarian movement are no longer being kept in one basket. The more people who seed those torrents, the easier the burden on the Mises Institute.
But more importantly, should statist or natural disaster strike, the world won’t lose the vast wealth of information hosted by the Mises Institute. Indeed, not only will the information not be lost, but there will be no downtime in its worldwide online distribution. Should states decide to actively move against us, they’ll be in for one hell of a game of ‘whack-a-mole’. They’ll face the same problems the RIAA, Hollywood, and others are facing in their War on Piracy Copying.
Austro-Libertarianism has gone viral, folks.
All this is to set the context for another example of open source anti-state resistance that I recently discovered. WordPress is an open source website and blogging platform. It’s an easy to use, yet powerful, tool for getting our ideas online where people around the world can access them. It’s free, as in speech and beer. This site is powered by it. The Libertarian Standard is powered by it. The Mises Institute’s site is powered by it.
But some countries like China and Australia censor the internet, blocking access to unapproved sites like YouTube and Twitter, filtering or blocking or shutting down or otherwise regulating websites and blogs.
There are ways to get around this censorship, however. Here’s one: The good folks at Global Voices Advocacy, an organization defending free speech online, have heroically created a guide to mirroring a censored WordPress blog. It’s covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, just like this site and The Libertarian Standard. Get it. Share it. Even if you don’t need it yet, someday you might. Others already do.
In the spirit of the Mises Institute’s torrented online library, I’m hosting the guide here as well.
Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.
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Political Science PhD
