The Probability Broach: You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore

A novelty watch with Richard Nixon's face and the text 'Nixon says: I'm not a crook'

The Probability Broach, chapter 15

Ed and Win Bear are committing crimes in the name of justice. They’ve broken into the house of their archenemy John Jay Madison to find proof of his schemes. They’re both sweating bullets as they move through the darkened mansion, because what they’re doing is completely illegal in this anarcho-capitalist society. If Madison returns and catches them in the act, he has every right to shoot them on the spot.

They split up to search the place. Win’s first discovery is a room where the bad guys have built their own Probability Broach, using the plans Deejay gave to Vaughn Meiss that the villains stole when they killed him:

I drew my revolver, lifted the hook with its muzzle, and opened the door carefully. Nobody home, but it seemed very familiar: same cabinets, same tangles of wire, a replica of Deejay’s cluttered lab, and of the infernal machinery that had propelled me here.

…The sight, surrounded as I was with dormant Broach machinery, made me uneasy. If I went through a hole in this world, where would I end up?

This isn’t a surprise to him, since he saw some old foes palling around with Madison during their stakeout. It’s confirmation of what he suspected: the government thugs from his world and the Hamiltonian wannabe dictators from this one have joined forces to conquer the North American Confederacy.

After taking pictures of everything, he heads upstairs. In Madison’s private office, he meets Ed, who’s found some damning evidence:

“In the lecture-hall closet, carefully tucked into a pile of table linens – these…” Three canned reels of sixteen millimeter film lay on the desk, half concealed in a fancy napkin. I struck another match:

TF 53-9354
CLASSIFIED
MOPPING UP IN THE ATOMIC AGE
POST-STRIKE TACTICAL DEPLOYMENT
PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT

Win recognizes them as military training films from his world. One is about how hydrogen bombs work. Another concerns “anti-guerrilla counter-insurgency”.

They’re running short on time, but there was a room off the kitchen that Madison conspicuously avoided showing them when he gave them a tour of his house. Naturally, Ed and Win both want to see what he was hiding:

Huddled on the floor between two hanging beef carcasses was a body, frozen stiff. Oddly, it didn’t seem cold in the tiny room. “What is this place?”

“Paratronic freezer. Something like a microwave oven, only the other way around. Shuts down when the door opens.”

…Ed rotated the body onto its face. Clothing and flesh were tattered at the back, as if blasted with a shotgun – nothing fatal, just messy and painful. Some of those gleaming particles wouldn’t be ice, but glass from my bedroom window. We’d found our intruder.

It’s the frozen corpse of the hitman who broke into Ed’s house at night and almost slit Win’s throat. Whether as punishment for his failure, or just to keep him from talking, Madison locked him in the freezer until he froze to death.

This is standard Hollywood-villain stuff, but what tips this scene into black comedy is the identity of the dead man:

“Tricky Dick Milhous,” Ed said, “a third-rate second-story man. He’s no assassin, just a petty crook. Nice way they paid him off. Couldn’t have been pleasant, freezing in the dark.”

Okay, that’s pretty funny.

In our world, Richard Nixon is best known for plotting to burglarize and illegally wiretap his political rivals, then when he got caught, resigning the presidency in disgrace rather than face impeachment. (Those were the days when Republicans at least pretended to believe in the law, as opposed to now, when they’ve enthusiastically embraced crime as long as it’s their guy doing it.)

L. Neil Smith pays tribute to Nixon’s rotten legacy of lawbreaking by making him a petty criminal for hire. I have to admit it’s fitting.

Ed and Win have run out of time. The discovery of Nixon’s body delayed them for too long. Ed’s defeater is no longer able to suppress Madison’s burglar alarms, which start blaring.

They make a beeline for the exit. But by the time they get outside, Madison’s private security has shown up and has the place surrounded. Rather than try to run or fight, Win pulls a Bavarian Fire Drill:

I turned the corner, strode deliberately down the sidewalk, Ed dithering along behind me for once, and right up to the front door of the Alexander Hamilton Society. Guards were milling in and out.

“Bear Brothers, consulting detectives,” I rapped. “We’re staking out a burglar. Find him yet?”

The patrol boss looked us over with a grudging smile. “Ed! Might’ve known you’d show up. Didn’t know you had a brother…”

Ed opened his mouth, I barged ahead with “Win Bear, Captain, just in from, uh, Tlingit. It’s Tricky Dick Milhous we’re looking for. Busted into a place we’re… responsible for the other night, and damn near killed a resident.”

Since these guards are on Madison’s payroll, they have a right to search his house. Ed and Win wait tensely, with Madison’s stolen training films stashed under their coats. After forty-five minutes, the guards find Nixon’s body. Madison’s alarm system locks all the doors in the house automatically when it goes off, so they assume he got trapped in the freezer after breaking in.

All in all, Ed and Win’s burglary was a success. They found the proof they needed and got away clean. They know Madison’s guards will report everything to him, including the fact that Ed and Win were at the scene. But even if Madison discovers what they took, he won’t be able to contradict their story without tipping his hand. (Win imagines the conversation: “And if it isn’t a burglar, Mr. Madison, what’s he doing here?”)

But when they get in the car, they get unwelcome news:

The Telecom lit up, Lucy’s worried face crammed in the focus beside Forsyth’s. “Get back here quick, boys! While you were doin’ it to them, they’ve gone an’ done it to Clarissa!”

The villains weren’t idle, as Ed and Win assumed. While they were stealing from Madison, he sent his thugs after their friend Clarissa Olson, the doctor who treated Win. It’s enough to make you think there might be some advantage to having dedicated law enforcement, instead of having to guess which of your friends might get attacked next and then hiring private security to protect them!

Image credit: Joe Haupt, released under CC BY 2.0 license

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New on OnlySky: The Bible is too woke

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the arrival of a day you always knew was coming: evangelical Christians have swung so far right, the Bible is now too liberal for them to tolerate.

This isn’t satire or the punchline of a joke. When John Piper, a staunchly conservative Baptist theologian with a decades-long reputation for orthodoxy, quoted a biblical verse about welcoming immigrants, his fellow evangelicals instantly turned on him and attacked him in a wave of berserk fury. Does this show that MAGA Christians are on the verge of abandoning the Bible entirely to push their white supremacist theology?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

In all fairness, the teachings of Jesus as depicted by the New Testament gospels were never popular among Christians. With a tiny handful of exceptions, they never followed his commands to refrain from violence, to pray in private, to give away all their wealth to the poor, or to abandon their families and live as wandering mendicant preachers.

But most theologians, however conservative, at least paid them lip service. This is the first instance I’m aware of where a Christian faced a barrage of attacks and hostility from his peers, not for making an interpretation that others found tendentious, but merely for quoting the Bible. This feels like a crossing-the-Rubicon moment, one where Christians explicitly reject a biblical moral because they dislike it.

Conservative theology erodes this verse away to meaninglessness. In the tortured ouroboros of their interpretation, immigrants are only welcome as long as they obey all of the host country’s laws—including the laws being wielded to say they’re not allowed. It’s a perfect catch-22 of absurdity.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Crime is everywhere, crime, crime

A bag of burglar's tools

The Probability Broach, chapter 15

(If you don’t know where the title is from, allow me to introduce you to the Lyttle Lytton Contest.)

Let’s review what The Probability Broach has told us about how its world works.

L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy is an anarcho-capitalist society with no police, no laws and no justice system. Furthermore, everyone is armed and ready to kill at a moment’s notice.

According to its author, what makes this society function—as opposed to collapsing into an endless war of all against all—is that there are unwritten rules which everyone respects.

People in the NAC have free speech; no one will blow your head off because they don’t like something you said. If someone attacks you and you shoot them in self-defense, that’s allowable; but if you disarm them, you can’t execute them in cold blood, you have to turn them over to a neutral third party for a trial. Everyone has private property rights; you can’t break into someone’s house and take it over just because you like it better than yours.

Got it? Good. Now let’s look at some passages in the text which show that this is all a dirty lie.

As we saw last week, our heroes know that the villain, John Jay Madison, is plotting to take over the world. But they have no proof. They’re sure that the evidence is in Madison’s house, but there’s no such thing as a search warrant here. So they resolve to do the only thing they can do, which is to illegally break into his house and retrieve it themselves.

Ed and Win Bear are parked outside Madison’s house, engaged in the time-honored ritual of the stakeout:

“Look out!” Ed whispered. We slumped farther down as a pair of enormous black hovercars—the Frontenac, lately repaired, and its twin brother—came around a corner and pulled up in front of the house.

This is the car that fired on Win and almost killed him. The fact that Madison owns it still doesn’t help them, because there’s no law enforcement to which they can report this incriminating fact.

Ed offered me a set of goggles with half-inch slabs for lenses. I started to strap them on, thought better of it, and simply held them before my eyes. “Infrared?” I asked. The images were in color, the hues wildly distorted. The Frontenacs were still black, but the landscaping was sickly shades of red-violet.

“Paratronic. Convert almost anything to visible wavelengths, with pretty strange results sometimes, depending on the—quiet!”

A gang of people have emerged from Madison’s front door. Two of them are Madison and his butler. The other two are people Win recognizes all too well, because they’re from his world.

One is Otis Bealls, former boss of the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss. The other is Oscar Burgess, the scarred secret-police thug who tried to shut down Win’s investigation.

None of this comes as a surprise to Win, but he wonders just how deep this plot goes:

The gears in my head were grinding. I wasn’t surprised that SecPol had been on my trail, but Burgess himself? Unless they had their own Broach working, he must have followed me to Fort Collins, into the lab, and out through Meiss’s machine. How many others had made it through before the one we’d found got buried in the collapsed excavation?

Fortunately, the villains are leaving. They pile into their car and drive off. Once they’re gone, Ed and Win circle around to the back side of Madison’s mansion.

They crouch by the door, and Ed pulls out an unfamiliar device. Pay close attention to this part:

Ed produced a device, slid out an antenna, and unfolded a sharp-pointed ground stake.

“This is my defeater—like the one our burglar used.”

“I hope it works better than his did.”

As you may remember, in an earlier chapter, Win was almost murdered by an assassin who broke into Ed’s home. The hitman got in with the help of a defeater, a piece of tech that disables someone else’s burglar alarms.

As I pointed out at the time, there’s no non-criminal use for such a device. The fact that you can go out and buy one—apparently there are businesses that manufacture them—has unsavory implications for the NAC. Why would that business even exist, if everyone here is so unfailingly respectful of everyone else’s private property?

And now we find out that Ed Bear, one of the heroes, owns one too!

Ed explains that his defeater works on a different principle: it connects to his computer at home, and if they trip any sensors, his computer will “start arguing” with Madison’s computer and delay the alarm from going off. Once that happens, they’ll have a few extra minutes to make their getaway.

My hands shook as I accepted another gadget. “S-sorry. I’m used to working the other side of the burglary game!”

“Calm down! You don’t hear my teeth chattering, and I’m not used to it, either.”

This is an outright lie. It has to be. If Ed isn’t used to burglarizing other people’s houses, why would he own a device whose only purpose is to help him do that?

But wait, you say. Maybe Ed is an honest man who never usually stoops so low. Maybe he bought the defeater just for this job.

Nope—because as the next paragraph shows, he owns other burglary tools too, and he has experience with them:

The back porch wasn’t locked, but the floorboards were real groaners. By the time Ed was doing things to the back door with tiny tools, I was surprised my pants were still dry. He taped the latch to keep it from springing shut.

Lockpicking isn’t something you just pick up! It takes lots and lots of practice to be good at it. (People like Lockpicking Lawyer just make it look easy.) There’s no way Ed would be able to do this on his first try. He’s clearly done it before.

Based on this chapter, all the NAC’s rhetoric about the sanctity of private property rights is so much lip service. They all say it, but no one believes it. Everyone in this world owns crime stuff and has practice in using it.

This tracks with other evidence from the text. It’s supposed to be illegal to torture or threaten a captive, but Win did just that, and his friends all overlooked it. They were a little upset, but they didn’t cast him out or shun him, the way people in the NAC are supposed to do to wrongdoers.

The conclusion to draw from this, even if the author didn’t intend it, is that these unwritten “rights” are worthless. People in the NAC hypocritically claim to respect them, but flagrantly violate them whenever it serves their interests. I’d argue that that’s unintentionally realistic, and exactly what we should expect in a society like this.

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The Probability Broach: Search and seizure

An official (handwritten) court order

The Probability Broach, chapter 15

This chapter opens with another of Smith’s fictional quotes put in the mouths of real historical figures. This one is attributed to Sequoyah (who in real life was the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, but wasn’t an anarchist political theorist as Smith labels him).

“Are two people healthier than one person? Are two wiser? Then why believe they have more rights? History’s sadness is that sanity, wisdom, justice—the very qualities that make us human—are not additive, while one’s brute animal ability to do another injury, is. Two people are, tragically, stronger than one. Stripped to naked truth, that is the basis for all government, dictatorial or democratic. Can we not do better?”

—Sequoyah Guess
Anarchism Understood

Can two people be wiser than one? Yes! Was that even controversial?

It can go either way, to be fair. There’s such a thing as mob mentality, but there’s also such a thing as the wisdom of crowds. As a libertarian, you’d think Smith would be in favor of that: it’s always been proposed as an explanation for why free markets work, how it can be true that individual ignorance combines to produce a collectively rational result.

The wisdom of crowds is also why nations are governed by legislative bodies rather than kings, and criminal trials have a jury rather than leaving the verdict in the hands of a single random individual. There’s always a risk that one person will make a bad decision because of bias, ignorance or some other idiosyncratic reason. With a larger group, it’s more likely that individual prejudices and whims cancel each other out to produce a reliable result.

Back to the plot: Ed, Win and Lucy have assembled at Lucy’s house (“I’d counted eight cats so far, one sleeping in Lucy’s bony lap, another making his way up the difficult north face of Ed’s shoulder. I was trying to keep a kitten from perching on my head”) to discuss their meeting with John Jay Madison, a.k.a. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. It turns out Lucy remembers him from the Prussian war—they fought on opposite sides:

“The Red Knight of Prussia himself,” Lucy declared. “‘Twas his Flying Circus put me afoot back in thirty-eight. Never forget it—there we were: The Pensacola an’ the Boise flankin’ my Fresno Lady, bearin’ northeast outa Cologne. They—”

“But that’d make him at least—”

“Ninety-six,” Ed said.

(Lucy, meanwhile, is 136. The North American Confederacy has life-extension technology, so no one finds this odd.)

Win wants to know why Madison was addressing Lucy as “Your Honor”. She admits that she helps mediate an argument now and then for “catfood money”:

“Pay attention,” Ed warned, “she’s being modest. Lucy’s a highly respected adjudicator and member of the Continental Congress.”

… “A distinction,” Lucy intoned, “utterly without distinction. Congress hasn’t met in thirty years, and I’m hopin’ like crazy it won’t ever have to again.”

Ed and Win are hatching a plan to break into Madison’s place and search for concrete proof of his world-domination scheme. Since Lucy holds an official position with the NAC, Win asks if she could get them a search warrant, so they can do this in an above-board way. But, of course, she can’t:

“Winnie, I got no official capacity. Nobody does, not even the president of the Confederacy. She only rides herd on the Continental Congress, if and when… What you and Ed are planning is unethical, immoral, and—”

“Fattening?”

“I was about to say, illegal—if we were the legislatin’ kind, which we ain’t. You two get shot up in there, nobody’s gonna say a thing. Madison’ll be within his rights. Or, he could sue you right down to your bellybutton lint.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do while he’s taking over the planet?”

“Son, we gave up preventive law enforcement long before we gave up law.”

What Lucy is saying is that in the NAC, even if you have knowledge that someone is plotting a crime, there’s nothing you can do but stand by and watch until they actually commit it. Attempted murder isn’t an offense; only murder is. (This world runs on Sideshow Bob logic.)

In our world, if you’re shot and narrowly survive, there’d be a police report. You could describe the vehicle that the shots were fired from, testify that one of the attackers named someone named Madison as the ringleader. Detectives would collect forensic evidence from the scene. All of this would provide probable cause for a judge to grant a search warrant, which could either turn up further evidence or clear the suspect’s name.

Also, if the police find evidence that someone is planning a serious crime—let’s say, holding secret meetings where they discuss a plot to kidnap and kill a sitting governor—they can be arrested for that. (That’s called criminal conspiracy.)

You don’t have to sit on your hands and wait for a would-be criminal to actually hurt someone before anyone takes any action. Smith denigrates this as “preventive law enforcement”, but isn’t that what we should want? Police who prevent crime from happening, rather than just punishing the perpetrators after the fact?

Meanwhile, in the NAC, the protagonists can’t legally do anything at all. A criminal can plot their crime in exacting detail without having to fear any consequences. Even to investigate a serious crime that’s already occurred, you have to break the law by trespassing in the suspect’s home. (When police are outlawed, only outlaws will be police!)

Their only chance, as Ed explains, is to break in to Madison’s house and find something that retroactively justifies their doing so. He can sue them for burglary, but they can countersue for a bigger crime. He’ll end up owing them way more money, and potentially getting exiled if he can’t pay. Win describes this as, “The end justifies the means”—all things considered, a frightening attitude for a cop to hold.

This goes to show that “total freedom” isn’t a political position that benefits everyone equally. It’s a much bigger advantage for those with evil intentions.

The way that L. Neil Smith writes his anarcho-capitalist world, it’s not just that they don’t have police or law enforcement; it’s that the legal system actively forbids these activities, even if carried out by private parties. The ordinary evidence-gathering and investigating that law enforcement would normally engage in are against the law here. Anyone who attempts them is risking death or a punishing lawsuit.

Meanwhile, activities that would be serious felonies in our world are perfectly legal and allowable. You can recruit conspirators, plot crimes, threaten people, stockpile weapons—and nobody can do anything to stop you.

This is a good argument for the importance of the Hobbesian social contract. We all agree to surrender some freedoms, in exchange for the protection of a state that’s supposed to keep us safe from those who’d do us harm. Ironically, the plot Smith wrote furnishes a good illustration of why this bargain of civilization is worth making.

Image credit: Library of Congress

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New on OnlySky: American brain drain

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the scientific brain drain that’s overtaking America.

There’s an exodus of educated people currently taking place in the United States. Policy advisors and researchers with STEM degrees are leaving federal government jobs en masse, whether because of layoffs, budget cuts, or voluntarily quitting in protest of anti-scientific policies. Research scientists and professors are leaving the country entirely, heading for safer harbors like the EU, Canada or even China where they perceive they’ll find more stability and greater freedom for their work.

The consequences of this self-destructive politics will linger for a long time to come. Our policymaking will suffer for it, as the government loses its most qualified advisors. Scientific and technological progress won’t grind to a halt, but the U.S. will no longer be the place where it happens. Increasingly, we’ll be in the position of paying for discoveries made elsewhere, rather than being the ones to originate and profit from them.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Whatever may happen in the future, the second Trump administration has done massive, long-lasting damage to the cause of science and technology in America. The federal government was once an ally to scientific research, but Trump and his cronies have turned it into an enemy.

They’ve turned anti-science wreckers loose at once-respectable institutions like the CDC, demolishing decades of evidence-based policy and rewriting scientific guidelines on a whim. They put a drug-addled sociopathic billionaire in charge of the federal workforce, firing thousands of workers according to his erratic whims. They’ve decimated budgets for basic research to give tax cuts to the rich and withheld federal grants to punish universities that don’t toe the line.

Last but certainly not least, Trump and his thuggish ICE stormtroopers are harassing and persecuting immigrants, and that includes immigrant scientists. Faced with the prospect of brutal arrests, violence and arbitrary detention, legal residents are making the rational choice to depart the country for safer harbors elsewhere.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Who cares about the Bill of Rights?

A close-up of the founders' signatures on the Constitution

The Probability Broach, chapter 14

Win, Ed and Lucy are face-to-face with John Jay Madison, the mastermind who’s responsible for the repeated assassination attempts that Win has been dodging ever since he arrived in this world.

And Madison doesn’t care whether they know it or not. Although he offers rote denials that he had anything to do with the attacks, he leers at them with superficial politeness that disguises barely concealed malice. He relishes the chance to taunt them, knowing they have no proof:

He rose, thrust his hands in his pockets, and paced, almost talking to himself, his eyes intent on some other place, some other time. “Inevitably, your investigations will reveal that my real name isn’t John Jay Madison. I was born Manfred, Landgraf von Richthofen. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? It was, at one time, a name and family of some influence in Prussia, and of not inconsiderable wealth. The War changed that, of course. So, with perhaps a false start or two, I came to America to repair my fortunes.”

He spread his arms. “As you can see, I have, to a certain extent, accomplished that. I changed my name because John Jay and James Madison were, in my view, men of merit, of historical importance to both my homeland and this organization—certainly very American, something I was determined to become and rather easier to pronounce.”

He remarks that he almost named himself after Alexander Hamilton, but decided against it:

“I should have adopted his name, had I dared. I assure you it is held in the esteem it deserves, elsewhere in the System—still, I must be able to buy groceries without arousing counterproductive passions…

Though you may disagree with what I believe, nevertheless I insist on being allowed to believe it, unmolested.”

There’s a tension here which Smith alludes to, but doesn’t resolve.

On the one hand, he’s insistent that in the North American Confederacy, people have total freedom. Everyone can believe, speak and act as they see fit, so long as they don’t harm others. No one is harassed or oppressed because of their opinions. The vast majority of NAC citizens respect these implicit rights, even though there’s no law forcing them to do so.

On the other hand, in this passage, he admits (reluctantly?) that you can be so unlikable that people will ostracize you and refuse to do business with you. And as he said earlier, that’s effectively a death sentence in a society with no safety nets of any kind.

This shows that, even if the author doesn’t want to admit it, an anarcho-capitalist world wouldn’t be a haven of unfettered free speech. It would have a strong drive toward conformity. Everyone would have a natural incentive to fall in line with the dominant opinions of their community, their landlord, or their employer. Whoever you’re dependent on to supply you with the stuff of life, that person would have immense power over you. Why risk pissing them off by being a gadfly?

Arguably, a world with a comprehensive state safety net is more free for this reason. People can say what they wish, safe in the knowledge that their survival doesn’t depend on pleasing the nearest rich guy. No one can snap their fingers and deprive you of food, housing or health care. If there’s a mob at your door, there are (at least theoretically) police you can call who will come and protect you, even if they dislike you.

Some countries, though not the U.S., go even farther in the pursuit of individual rights by instituting employment contracts which guarantee that an employer can only dismiss you for good cause. You can’t be fired just because your boss doesn’t like your face.

Ostensibly to prove he has nothing to hide, Madison gives them a tour of his house—an enormous, rambling mansion that’s more like a museum. There are artifacts from wars and other political events through the decades that the Hamiltonians played a part in. Win notices one especially significant exhibit:

In a sort of chapel, spread like a Bible in a helium-filled glass altar, lay the Constitution of the United States. “We, the People, in order to form a more perfect Union…”

There wasn’t any Bill of Rights.

This is a peculiar line for L. Neil Smith to include.

Obviously, readers are supposed to take this as further proof of Madison’s evil. He wants to conquer the world and impose centralized government, and he venerates the Constitution as symbolic of this. His (presumably deliberate) exclusion of the Bill of Rights shows that his hunger for power isn’t counterbalanced by any concern for people’s rights and freedoms.

But why does Smith think it makes any difference whether it’s there or not?

Lest we forget, Smith described the Constitution as a villainous conspiracy foisted upon an unconsenting nation. He denounced it as an intolerable infringement on freedom, so thoroughly corrupt that it couldn’t be reformed; it had to be scrapped and the country started over from scratch. Those who were responsible for writing it fared little better: George Washington was executed by firing squad, and Alexander Hamilton fled into disgraceful exile.

When you start from that perspective, why does it matter if there’s a Bill of Rights? He’s argued throughout this book that government is evil, full stop. But the fact that Madison, the actual villain of this novel, dislikes the Bill of Rights… doesn’t that imply that maybe the Constitution wasn’t as all-around bad as Smith wants us to think?

This is something he otherwise never concedes: that there can be degrees of government. Maybe, just maybe, it’s possible to have a government which actually values and protects its citizens’ rights, and this is preferable to a government which makes no such guarantees.

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New on OnlySky: Protecting secularism in religious enclaves

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how we can protect church-state separation in areas dominated by one particular sect of believers.

As religion declines all around the world, the most determined faith groups are retreating into their own isolated enclaves where they try to live apart from everyone else. This isn’t inherently a problem if it’s truly voluntary, but when a particular sect is the majority in one place, they very often try to punish outsiders and dissenters and write their beliefs into law.

Two such cases are playing out in America right now. In one town, an orthodox sect is trying to dismantle the public school system and force taxpayers to pick up the tab, creating a legal nightmare that could take years to untangle. But progress is possible, as seen in another pair of towns where democracy has triumphed and formerly oppressed cult members are emerging from theocratic darkness into the light.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

The idea of the Benedict Option is that Christians should (metaphorically or literally) retreat into the wilderness. They should pull back from a secular culture that they’ve failed to conquer, and isolate themselves in their own enclaves where they can live and raise their children as they see fit.

They frame this as keeping their morals and values intact. But the none-too-subtle implication is that they want to control everything their children see and hear. They want to ensure they don’t have to compete with pesky differing viewpoints. In that sense, it’s an admission that fundamentalist views can’t survive contact with diversity.

Obviously, the Benedict Option was proposed in a particular Christian context. Not everyone is taking their cues from this idea. But conservative religious communities of all kinds are independently following similar lines of thinking.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Meet the big bad

The "all seeing eye on the pyramid" from US dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 14

Win’s investigation of the people trying to kill him has hit one dead end after another. The only remaining clue, extracted under torture from one of the hitmen, is that the ringleader is someone named Madison. He grumbles about this with his friends:

“Well,” I answered glumly, “how do we find this Madison character, put an ad in the paper?”

Deejay looked up from her steak. “That wouldn’t be John Jay Madison?”

“Dunno, honey,” Lucy replied. “All we know is he’s the brains behind Hamiltonianism here in Laporte. You know a Madison?”

“Not really, but there’s one giving weekly lectures in the History and Moral Philosophy Department. My engineers were talking about it—something about the War in Europe from the Prussian point of view.”

It turns out Madison isn’t only not hiding, he’s in the phone book. His name and address are listed there, cross-referenced with the name of his group, the Alexander Hamilton Society (which we know is the evil organization behind the attacks on Win, because the assassins wore jewelry with the eye-in-the-pyramid logo). Somehow, not one but two detectives overlooked that incredibly obvious lead.

Win, Ed and Lucy go to pay Madison a visit:

So it happened that we glided up to the front gate of a mansion that made even Ed’s place look seedy, a Georgian monstrosity with a dozen sequoia-size columns and twice that number of marble steps leading to the door. We were greeted by a huge uniformed servant with close-cropped steel-gray hair and the accent of a comic psychiatrist. “Herr Madizon vill meed you in d’Ogtagon Hroom. Bleaze vollow me.”

You’d think Madison’s unpopular views would make him a pariah (naming your group the “Alexander Hamilton Society” in this anarchist society is like naming your group the “Adolf Hitler Society” in our world), but that’s not the case. Somehow, he owns a mansion even larger and more extravagant than the ones Win has already seen, and he has actual servants.

Maybe Smith thought that it would risk making his villain sympathetic if he lived alone in a small, decrepit shack. Are we supposed to infer that the way he flaunts his riches is a sign of moral depravity, even in an uber-capitalist world like this?

Madison is a huge man, tall and muscular, with a nasty scar down one side of his face. Despite himself, Win finds him charming: “it was impossible to hate this man” despite the “blood on his charming, well-manicured hands”.

He greets them politely and asks what he can do for them, to which Ed bluntly replies: “We’re more interested in discussing what you’ve already done. Two of your people were killed attacking my house night before last, and another killed himself yesterday morning.”

Madison seems amused, saying that even if it happened, it had nothing to do with him or with the Alexander Hamilton Society: “We’re simply an institution for the discussion and debate of political philosophy.”

Lucy rejoins that if that’s true, it’d be the first time Hamiltonians confined themselves to debate. Madison is offended:

“My dear Judge Kropotkin. You’re remembering, perhaps, our brief tenure in the Kingdom of Hawaii—brought to an untimely end by the Antarctican unpleasantness? Or the savagery with which our proposed reforms were met on the Moon, afterward?” He looked at her more closely. “Or, if I’m not being indiscreet, perhaps even the Prussian War? Your Honor, all of that was long ago, and your concerns now are unjustified on several counts.”

Madison says that it’s true the Hamiltonians have waged war in the past, but they’ve learned their lesson from their defeats and now only seek to bring about peaceful change. He laments that there’s so much prejudice against them:

“[A]t various times in history, demagogues have required scapegoats. Unfortunately, we Hamiltonians have been handy on such occasions. It’s easy to condemn unworldly philosophers who have no ready means of reply. Since the Whiskey Rebellion, my fellows have been among the most unpopular in the world. What could we possibly say that would make people listen? How could we counter accusations graven in conventionally accepted history? Our views on economics and politics severely oppose the popular wisdom. Tell me, is that proof that we are wrong? To the contrary, it’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?”

“Very clever,” Ed said.

“And also very true. We believe that the good of society—in fact, the good of the individual—rests with recognizing and imposing an obligation to the state. We take what measures we can to transmit our views, hence this educational organization, my guest lectures at the university. But it goes very slowly: prejudice has such inertia.”

That’s true, of course. Conventional wisdom is often faulty and stubbornly resistant to change. Most people are set in their ways and refuse to be swayed by rational argument. While society as a whole does tend toward moral progress, it takes generations for new ideas to win out over old prejudices.

That makes it all the more bizarre that L. Neil Smith expects us to believe that Thomas Jefferson single-handedly talked the entire country into freeing the slaves, or that racism and sexism disappeared overnight when the federal government was abolished.

It seems that, in this book, prejudice only has inertia when it’s convenient for plot purposes. Whenever it would make his utopia look bad (say, for slavery to persist in an anarcho-capitalist paradise), people happily discard their bad beliefs as soon as they’re asked.

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, slavery is legal—not in the sense of “a written law says I can do this”, but in the sense of “if I’m powerful enough to do this, no one’s going to stop me”.

What if humans could be bought and sold in this world, just like any other commodity, and it was the Hamiltonians who were making the case to abolish it? What if they argued that we needed a centralized government to make and enforce laws protecting common people’s rights from the depredations of the extremely wealthy? (Which, needless to say, is exactly how abolition happened in the real world.)

That would be a genuinely interesting political debate for a novel set in an anarchist society. But it would create a level of moral complexity that Smith and other libertarians could never abide. Like Ayn Rand, he can only have a black-and-white political parable, where one side is solely made up of good guys who believe in freedom, and the other side is all mustache-twirling villains who want to create a brutal dictatorship.

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New on OnlySky: American autocracy

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the war that the U.S. government is waging on its own people, and what we can do about it.

Trump’s second term is every bit as bad as progressives warned it would be. He’s flouting the law, trashing the Constitution, terrorizing and brutalizing immigrants and citizens alike, trying to subjugate cities under a reign of terror from masked Gestapo. It’s real and genuine authoritarianism, and it’s arrived in the United States.

How did we get here, and what should we do about it?

We’re not the first nation to go through this. Other countries, like South Korea and Brazil, have suffered through periods of dictatorship and eventually triumphed and restored democracy. Their experience gives us a guide on what to do next.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

It’s important to know that Trumpism didn’t come out of nowhere. Although a few conservative politicians have offered feeble protests, for the most part, Trump’s rise to power and subsequent abuse and subversion of democracy has happened with the full consent and approval of the Republican party.

There’s a reason for this, as Professor Steven Levitsky says. Republicans willingly acquiesced to authoritarian rule because they were facing what, for them, was an existential threat: a future where rich white Christian men no longer wield sole power.

Conservatives were terrified by this. They saw it not as the realization of a long-deferred promise, but as a zero-sum game they were losing. They tried to stop it by any means necessary.

They engaged in systematic gerrymandering, drawing jigsaw-puzzle-like congressional districts to thwart the will of the voters. In Congress, they abused the filibuster to stymie progressive legislation that had majority support. A conservative Supreme Court has repeatedly issued decisions that weakened unions, struck down civil rights-era voter protections, and removed restrictions on corporate funding of elections. Red-state legislatures have tried to ban books, outlaw DEI programs, and put a stop to anything else that promotes equality or diverse viewpoints.

When all their other power-grabs failed, Republican voters and politicians proved willing to junk democracy and install an autocrat rather than share power. This was always coming; if it hadn’t been Trump, it would have been someone like him.

Continue reading on OnlySky…