----- Original Message ----- From: "Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>
>
> I was only reciting liberal theory above, because the
> concept of rights, as the term is usually used in the
> contexts I find myself in, is a liberal concept. In
> fact I believe that rights are an artifice whose actual
> function is to restrict freedom
========
Well yeah, how could it be any other way? See Jon Elster and Robert
Hale amongst others on this one. Who protects the weak when the rights
structure is absent? The 'good will' of the stronger? What are the
optimal levels of self-restraint in world of 6billion, how do we
codify that to the satisfaction of all given our cognitive and
emotional foibles and aspirations? It's not *necessarily* a matter of
states, but it is a matter of institutional design.
-- it is not an accident
> that the word derives from one meaning "to rule". This
> would be quite plain if states indeed granted one another
> rights -- that is, if the ruling classes of the states
> agreed to recognize the powers of one another's political
> structures and authority; the state's sovereign license to
> kill would be replaced by a universal license to kill, a
> hyperstate, in which the formerly sovereign states now took
> their place as subordinate constituents in order to more
> securely dominate and subjugate their captive populations.
> In would be, in fact, what appears to be actually taking
> place under the name of globalization, or as conspirato-
> logists call it, the New World Order.
===========
Well let's analogize it to how federalism works [and fails to work] in
the US. Imagine Florida taking on Minnesota over gay rights or labor
contracts or environmental torts. Or in an anarchist world, when
citizens in one bioregion want to build a pulp mill that trashes a
lake they share with worker owned plant in another adjacent bioregion
that needs clean water for it's aquaculture and they simply can't
agree on dealing with the externalities problems?
>
> So if the nation-state is our instrument for defending or
> obtaining human freedom, we're in a bad way...
> I'm sure you're aware that _anarchy_ is not equivalent to
> _disorder_. Let's anarchically and self-organizedly
> maintain some standards of rhetoric and logic here. And
> I'm pretty sure that Chuck0 would anarchistically allow
> you to wave or wear almost any flag you wanted.
>
> -- Gordon
=========
The rub comes when he doesn't allow it. Who gets to do the forbidding
is *the* issue of politics, anarchic, liberal, socialist or
other..................
Ian