| | Riggenbach writes:
>Robert, you're much too intelligent and much too widely read to be stooping to such pathetic straw men. Why don't you address what the anarchists actually say?
I think Bidinotto is claiming that anarchist theory, to be consistent with its own axiomatic presumptions, cannot provide for the "outlawing" of competition among competing conceptions of justice, rights and the like, even when the competing conceptions are blatantly thuggish. So the mob or al Qaeda would have to be entitled to have their "protection agencies" based on the versions they're selling too. It's an objection to anarchism that suggests that anarchist theology must founder in self-contradiction or else smuggle government in through the back door. If all defense agencies within a geographical area were subject to the same set of at least very broad rules banning obvious violations of rights, they would be subject to a government.
I note the hit-and-run nature of this gratuitously condescending jab ("you're much too intelligent to...")--treating a quotation as if it were the whole of what is being quoted from. In any case, what is that anarchists say that avoids the quandaries posed by their viewpoint? Generally, they concoct pie-in-the-sky fantasies about what protection agencies "would" do, ignoring what they in fact do as per the daily papers. Meanwhile, anarchists tend to equate all governments, ignoring actual differences among them and the causes of those differences in the ideas, practices and history of various societies. If Riggenbach thinks there are anarchists who resolve the dilemma, or if he has a form of anarchism of his own that resolves it, could he not explain it to us?
(Edited by David M. Brown on 6/27, 8:08pm)
(Edited by David M. Brown on 6/27, 8:09pm)
|
|
... you can't allow "market competition" over the very definitions and meanings of such basic legal principles as "justice," "rights," "aggression," "self-defense," etc.
