Edward Feser on why democracies gives rise to a higher proportion of bull-shit:

“…. as any reader of Plato’s critique of democracy in The Republic knows, the democratic ethos — with its pretence that all the views and ways of life prevalent in a pluralistic society be regarded as worthy of equal respect — inevitably tends toward bullshit.  A politician who spoke with complete frankness — who said exactly what he thought about those views and ways of life among his fellow citizens that he didn’t share, which is bound to be most of them — would never get elected, and would no doubt tick off most of those people who claim they want politicians to speak frankly. Frankfurt calls attention himself to one way in which democracy breeds bullshit:

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.”

The Judean People’s Front delivers an ultimatum

The People’s Front of Judea.

(oops, forgot to h/t the originator of this analogy – Jeffrey Tucker, editor of Agora Inc. owned Laissez Faire Books. The h/t is not an endorsement of any views expressed on that site, or of the owners of the site. Quite the contrary.  In fact, I thought I came up with the above on my own.  However, I try to be as scrupulous as possible, and this morning, I suddenly recalled reading an essay in which Tucker expressly made this joke.  We’ll give the devil his due..

Note 2: And Bryan Caplan at Econlib seems to have  noticed the similarity to Life of Brian before Tucker)

Oh dear.

So much fun and me with no time to bone up on my synthetic a priori judgments …or I’d join in.

Some people like their libertarianism (or, in my case, classical liberalism) ala Rothbard.

Other people don’t.  Intellectual tastes differ. Why is that a problem?

Word to the wise.

Tempting as they are, these kinds of intellectual food-fights are better left to what Bruce Charlton calls “clever sillies.”

“Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain, this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost exclusively with others of similar intelligence generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong.” [1]

AND

“Yet, whatever else, to be a clever silly is a somewhat tragic state; because it entails being cognitively trapped by compulsive abstraction; unable to engage directly and spontaneously with what most humans have traditionally regarded as psycho-social reality; disbarred from the common experience of humankind and instead cut-adrift on the surface of a glittering but shallow ocean of novelties: none of which can ever truly convince or satisfy. It is to be alienated from the world; and to find no stable meaning of life that is solidly underpinned by emotional conviction. Little wonder, perhaps, that clever sillies choose sub-replacement reproduction.” [2]

AND

“If some humility could be taught to the clever silly before he begins to form an idea about a matter of widespread social and political importance, perhaps then he could be persuaded to bear in mind a paraphrase of a line by Groucho Marx: Any idiot could understand this matter; fetch me an idiot!”

[2] Ibid., pp.3-4. David Stove was also good on clever sillies. See, for instance, his “Righting Wrongs”, in On Enlightenment, ed. A. Irvine (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003), and “The Oracles and Their Cessation: a Tribute to Julian Jaynes”, in Cricket versus Republicanism, and Other Essays (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995).

This post originally used a comment at a blog that I then had a chance to check out and found unpalatable, so I’ve deleted it and just retained FBI statistics below:

Lila: Let’s check the FBI statistics for “hate crimes” (its own pet index) as a rough short-hand for the existence of hatred for minorities (with the caveat that what’s reported is not equal to what might exist):

FBI.gov hate crimes for 2011 by state:

Total no. of incidents: 6,222

No. 1 California: 1040

Thereby disproving the sexual libertinism=racial paradise thesis

spun by the Hollywood-CIA mind-control factory

No. 2  New York: 542

Home of Wall-Street-govt stock mafia

No. 3  New Jersey:  508

Bedroom state for NY financial mafia and HQ of Democrat political machinery

No. 4 Massachussetts:  367

HQ of government-academic complex and PC factory

Lila: Of course, statistics can be massaged any which way: correlations are not causations, absolute numbers are not relative numbers and a whole bunch of other things, but as far as narratives go, it looks like there’s evidence enough to spin things counter to the official PC story of racism.

Edward Feser, one of the best Catholic thinkers in the blogosphere, delivers the Hayek memorial lecture at the Austrian Scholars Conference in Auburn, 2005:

“Three things would seem to follow from this.  The first is that the only freedom of action we can have an absolute natural right to is whatever level of freedom is required for us to be able to make truly voluntary moral choices and thus develop genuinely virtuous character.  The second is that this would seem to entail that to some significant degree, determining the specific amount of freedom we ought to have from outside interference with our moral choices must be a matter of prudential judgment and contingent circumstances rather than a clear-cut appeal to self-ownership rights.  The third is that this is bound to entail that it is at least in principle legitimate for government to outlaw actions that are, from the point of view of natural law, intrinsically immoral, such as prostitution, the sale of illicit drugs and pornography, and so forth.

I want to emphasize that none of this is meant by itself to prove that there ought at the end of the day to be laws against every behavior considered vicious from a natural law point of view.  It is rather to say that the Catholic natural law tradition holds that to a significant degree the question of whether there ought to be such laws is a matter of prudence, not a matter of respecting rights.  Rothbardian arguments to the effect that certain specific drug laws, for example, are draconian and entail a dangerous increase in government power, or that the cost in some circumstances of outlawing vicious behavior might outweigh any benefits to be gained, lose none of their force.  But the Rothbardian view that such laws against intrinsically immoral behavior are always inherently unjust, always violations of natural rights of self-ownership, is incompatible with the Catholic conception of natural law. “

Comment:

And that is roughly where my thinking on the matter is, although of course I’m on the opposite side of Feser’s positions on the Iraq war ….and on several other issues, I imagine.

But that is for prudential reasons.

I think one can with ease call oneself a Christian and a libertarian…..

I think it’s self-delusion to claim to be a traditional Catholic and a consistent Rothbardian.

That doesn’t make me part of any anti-Rothbard cult.

In fact, it’s a busy day when I see anything other than a gecko or a squirrel…let alone so sophisticated a mammal as an anti- Rothbardian.

And I’ve no wish to change that.

Not that I’m a Catholic, traditional or otherwise, either. And I don’t subscribe to Feser’s assertion that  the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition alone establishes the dignity of man.

That sounds like reaching.

It’s just that when it comes to furnishing my mind, I’ll take the quality and style that’s stood up to all weather for some twenty centuries before I’ll spend good time and energy on inventory assembled in the  shadow of the Cold War.

Anthony Wile at the Daily Bell points out more alarming evidence linking Mark Zuckerberg’s sinister venture to the intelligence agencies:

“In Facebook’s case, there is clear monetary evidence linking Facebook to the CIA and other Intel outfits.

Here, from the New Zealand Herald, circa 2007:

There is a dark side to the success story that’s been spreading across the blogosphere. A complex but riveting Big Brother-type conspiracy theory which links Facebook to the CIA and the US Department of Defence.

The CIA is …using a Facebook group to recruit staff for its very sexy sounding National Clandestine Service.

Checking out the job ads does require a Facebook login, so if you haven’t joined the site – or are worried that CIA spooks will start following you home from work -check them out on the agency’s own site.

The story starts once Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had launched … Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.

Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.

Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.

She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.

… Wikipedia’s IAO page says: “the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.”.

Not surprisingly, the backlash from civil libertarians led to a Congressional investigation into DARPA’s activity, the Information Awareness Office lost its funding.

Now the internet conspiracy theorists are citing Facebook as the IAO’s new mask.

Facebook’s own Terms of use state: “by posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.

Nothing has really changed with Facebook. It’s still the same odd business, pilfering information from its users to resell or trade with others. When company officials were making public statements about 800 million users, SEC filings revealed 400 million users, and even that number was probably exaggerated.

And recently we read this about Facebook, posted at Wired and entitled “Facebook Is Trying to Buy Its Way Into the Developing World” …

Facebook just plunked down a reported $100 million to $200 million to buy a company that trims smartphone bills. And there’s a good reason for that: The social network needs new users, and those users are increasingly cash strapped.

At a time when new U.S. users are drying up and saturation in other developed markets is on the horizon, Facebook is increasingly prioritizing emerging markets to fuel growth. It’s a tricky gambit, given the paucity of online and commercial infrastructure in such markets, and one that could take years to pay off. But Facebook could reap the spoils of being a pioneer, among the first to tackle a challenge that other large internet companies, Twitter foremost among them, will soon be grappling with themselves.

Israel-based Onavo said it is being acquired by Facebook, giving Facebook a suite of apps for reducing mobile data usage via com. Trimming smartphone bills is particularly important for users in developing countries, and Onavo is Facebook’s second big play for such users in as many months, the other being its Internet.org initiative to wire the developing world.

“We … hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals — using data more efficiently so that more people around the world can connect and share,” Onavo CEO Guy Rosen says in a blog post.

Such a goal may sound generous, but Facebook’s motives are hardly altruistic: The company needs the developing world in order to grow.

Revenue grew 88 percent in emerging markets versus just 43 percent in the U.S. Monthly users in the second quarter grew 32 percent in Asia and 29 percent in Africa, South America, and other emerging markets — compared to just 6 percent in the U.S.”

From Aletho News:

“Everyday communications of Italians are also on the watch list of the US National Security Agency, a new report has revealed. While an Italian parliamentary committee seeks clarification of NSA activities, local security sources defend the snooping.

Italy’s spy watchdog COPASIR has recently learned details of large-scale monitoring of Italians by the US intelligence agency NSA, according to a report published by Corriere della Sera.

COPASIR stands for Parliamentary Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services and for State Secret Control, and is tasked with overseeing the activities of Italy’s own spy agencies. The body has free access to intelligence agencies’ offices and documents and has the authority to overcome judicial and banking secrecy.

In order to confirm the snooping on Italians, the committee members had to go to the United States and meet with US intelligence agency directors, as well as with congressional committee chairs.

A delegation of parliamentarians from the COPASIR confirmed their concerns regarding the extent of the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program during an official visit to the US three weeks ago, the media said. As part of the program, phone calls and computer communications of “millions of Italians” are reportedly being gathered.

Moreover, Corriere della Sera added that the implications extended to “a monitoring network that started years ago and is still active,” of which the Italian government and spy agencies might have been well aware of.

Such discoveries have prompted uneasy questions to officials, with leading members of COPASIR now seeking clarification from the government, and reportedly awaiting the junior minister for the intelligence services, Marco Minniti, to visit the committee’s offices on Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Italian intelligence sources quoted in the report rushed to justify the surveillance activities of their partners.

The acquisition of the sensitive private information “has as its sole aim the fight against terrorism,” one source was quoted as saying, while another denied that the NSA’s spying ever breached Italy’s sovereignty.

“We have never had any evidence that this kind of monitoring might have involved political spying on Italian public figures. All our investigations into any such eventuality have proved negative,” the source maintained.

However, such explanations did not satisfy COPASIR, nor did the NSA deputy director’s promise of “a complete overview of communications to and from the United States.”

According to the Italian media, the committee member Claudio Fava from Left Ecology Freedom (SEL) party, was “openly perplexed” as he commented on such statements.

“It’s a data trawling system based on various sensors. US intelligence experts explained that their main concern was to comply with American data protection laws and intervene to safeguard national security. Whether this conflicts with other countries’ laws is of no concern to them but it should be to us,” Fava was quoted as saying.

Another COPASIR member, Felice Casson of the Democratic Party (PD), said that the replies the committee received from top Italian intelligence officials were “far from reassuring.”

“It is clear that the United States has acquired information on individuals and institutions across Europe. What concrete elements exist to rule out that this has happened to politicians and institutions in Italy?” Casson questioned.

Leading Democratic Party (PD) politician Ettore Rosato also demanded an explanation from the government, saying that “a few months ago, when the first [NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s] revelations emerged, both the prime minister, Enrico Letta, and the foreign minister, Emma Bonino, professed astonishment at what came out.”

So far, the documents obtained by various world media from the former NSA contractor Snowden have revealed that the Italian embassy in Washington was subject to spying along with the diplomatic missions of other countries. Italian intelligence sources have been careful to deny the claims only “off the record,” Corriere della Sera says.

Right before the NSA scandal emerged, the collaboration between Italian and American intelligence services was “at its peak,” and, according to the media, included sharing of communications through the SIGINT interception system. However, such cooperation appeared to have been justified by the ongoing allied wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the search for western hostages there, the media adds.

But in the wake of recent revelations on the US spying activities in France, which triggered a media frenzy and public outrage, the media speculates Italy may find it difficult to maintain the same “stance” towards the NSA programs.”