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Even if we accept that as true Sheldon, the question remains:
For a libertarian, esp. a libertarian anarchist, what is the appropriate response when rockets are raining down on innocent people, especially when those people's government has, at least more recently, left Gaza etc.?
I'm willing to apportion a significant degree of blame to the Israeli government for the origins of the situation and for all kinds of mistakes since then. But the residents of Sderot are not to blame here and they are the ones living in fear of rocket attacks even as the Israelis withdrew from Gaza.
Serious question: what, as libertarians, do we think the appropriate response is? Aeon's point is that *in the world of the second best*, even an anarchist can argue that the state has a responsibility to protect its citizens against such attacks. Whether the Israeli response is overkill is well worth debating, but I cannot, even as an anarchist, deny that the Israeli government can and should defend its citizens in some fashion, given that the state exists and has monopolized the coercive power necessary to do so. Is the libertarian position to be that Israel should just "take it" because they started it?
Furthermore, the contrast between Hamas indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilians and the Israels' attempts to avoid civilian casualities even as Hamas uses them as human shields, should count for something from a libertarian perspective in the world of the second best. If agents of the state wish to go to war, then the side that does the most to leave innocents out of it would seem to have the least dirty hands, from a libertarian perspective. (For example, in the case where two states go to war where all conditions are the same except one side uses draftees, I think libertarians can rightly say the draftee-using state is morally "worse" than the other.)
Israel is hardly a bastion of purity and goodness here, and by no means can I possibly defend everything it does, but I will still maintain that in a full accounting, they are less morally egregious from a libertarian standpoint.
I didn't say his *post* advocated anything. Are you unable to read? I also explained what the current fighting between Hamas and the Israeli State has to do with Barnett's so-called anarchism. This time your evasion of the point isn't even clever.
JR
Barnett aside, I don't think we can properly judge the situation without taking the full context into account. There would be no Hamas had Israeli/Zionist policy toward the Palestinians been different from the beginning. They were always regarded as less than full persons. In fact, the Israeli government promoted the formation of Hamas as a Muslim rival to the secular Arafat-PLO. Sounds like blowback.
His post did nothing of the sort. It was a link to two other blogs, without any comment. You are bringing in Iraq, not him and not me. So I'll leave it at reiterating my earlier contention: the current fighting between Hamas and Israel has nothing to do with Barnett's theories on anarchism.
Meanwhile, by carefully confining your comments only to the analogy, and by speaking carefully in terms of *use* of state programs, you manage to evade my central point - the fact that Barnett doesn't just advocate *use* of state programs people have to pay for; he advocates that those state programs (in the case of the Iraq War, for example) be used to do things no one has any right to do.
Neat trick! Do you teach it to your philosophy students?
JR
I realize you intend the school analogy as a reductio ad absurdum, but actually that's correct: it can be true simultaneously that (a) the state ought not to be in the business of running schools and (b) at the moment, I'm entitled to send my kids to those schools if I choose. The fact of the matter is that the state _does_ run schools, and taxes me to pay for them, regardless of what my philosophical arguments might demonstrate. Here's a better example: I drive to work on roads owned and operated by the state, all the while thinking about how they ought to be privatized. But while I'm waiting for the rest of the world to listen to me, should I stay home? No. I am perfectly entitled to drive around on the state's roads, even if it's true that the state shouldn't be in the road business.
"It's not 'making war' to retaliate against rocket attacks. Whether or not states have any right to exist, the people in them have a right to defend themselves and retaliate, and at the moment, it's their government's job to do that on their behalf."
If your "retaliation" is of a kind that must inevitably rain death and destruction down on people who fired no rockets at you, you are *not* "defending yourself"; you are "making war" - that is, engaging in mass murder and mayhem.
"That's not contradictory to a Barnettian theory on which all such services were privatized."
Whether or not states have any right to exist, the people in them have a right to educate themselves, and at the moment, it's their government's job to do that on their behalf. Therefore, supporting the "public schools" is not contradictory to a Barnettian theory on which all such services were privatized. QED
JR
Hamas is the aggressor. It's not "making war" to retaliate against rocket attacks. Whether or not states have any right to exist, the people in them have a right to defend themselves and retaliate, and at the moment, it's their government's job to do that on their behalf. That's not contradictory to a Barnettian theory on which all such services were privatized.
All Barnett does is link to two posts--does that imply endorsement?
On the other hand, "um," there would seem to be a kind of disconnect between arguing that states shouldn't exist and simultaneously arguing that, as long as they do exist, they should get busy and make war.
Is this rocket science or something?
Sheesh!
JR
Um, how is this relevant to his views on anarchism? Arguing that the state is illegitimate or unjustified doesn't make states go away. You guys seem to be making a mistake about the superficial similarity of "atheism" and "anarchism": the former denies that its subject exists; the latter does not. States exist. Anarchism presents arguments that it shouldn't, but it does. There's no incosistency between saying that (a) states shouldn't exist, and that (b) the people who live in them have a right to defend themselves against rocket attacks.
Not at all anarcho and thoroughly interventionist!
Randy seems to be set in his anarcho-interventionist ways.