The jVerse

Apropos of yet another jkpodcast, Plastic Bags and the Foundational Principle of Government. I stumbled across the Youtube clip embedded below. To sum up, the podcast is how people think anarchists are joking when they contend that the law is ultimately backed up by the ability of the state to kill you. The fact that something so obviously true and vitally important has never occurred to most people is telling; even the simplest statue, such as banning the retail use of plastic bags, or mandating an appropriate height for grass, is premised on the claimed legitimacy of people calling themselves "government" to rob, cage or kill the people around them. Police barge into home to make arrest over the length of grass caught on video - YouTube. Historically, the nature of the relationship between "the people" and "the government" has been occluded behind polite notes, "reasonable" fines, proposed payment plans, and lots of additional non-threatening warnings and helpful opportunities to submit and obey served up by a polite and courteous constabulary. This, and state "education", explains why most middle-class people haven't conceived of the notion that the institution of government is predicated on violence. Inevitably, as the cancer of government reaches its terminal stage, the "gloves come off" and we all see the violence inherent in the system. I doubt very many warrant were being served by squads of officers in the 1970s. Now we see this kind of thuggery every day. Here's the jkpodcast linked to above:

Apropos of Kevin's and my recent podcast, an article on the limits of science. In the podcast, we discuss logic as an essential tool in determining how one's beliefs track reality. However, perfect Aristotelian logic can generate perfectly crafted non-sense given incorrect premises. Similarly, science is the best means of testing hypothesis and incrementally bringing beliefs about reality in line with the natural universe (a.k.a., the universe). Regardless of how rigorously one pursues knowledge with the correct application of the methods of science, and regardless of how large the body of scientific understanding becomes, it can never answer the questions it is so frequently purported to answer: “Is this new drug safe?” “Is that amount of pollution too high?” “Are wages for those workers too low?” “What's the minimum number of days of paid vacation that workers should get annually?” Read more These questions are not, exclusively, about the objective world. They incorporate the subjective; they can't be answered except by each individual for her own circumstances. Appeals to evidence can be made to persuade someone to take action, but there is no amount of evidence that legitimizes coercion in these matters. Any appeal to science in the name of politics, or any other form of violence, is an appeal made on false premises and an indication of intellectual, if not moral, corruption. Update: I just figured out that I could do this, here's an embed to Kevin's and my podcast on the limitations of logic.