back street boy backs off

Luke Weiger lweiger at umich.edu
Mon Sep 24 18:10:34 PDT 2001



> I don't get this reasoning at all. If there's no "cause," then it
> would make good sense, if security were your goal, to cut back civil
> liberties. If you identify a cause, then there's some hope for civil
> liberties.

Nathan said that there's essentially no point in endlessly curtailing civil liberties because those committed enough to circumvent the system will find a way. Whether or not that's an empirically valid observation is questionable; it's coherence isn't.


> Besides, if there's no "cause," then why did it happen? Human evil?
>
> Doug

I seriously doubt Nathan was suggesting some form of hard indeterminism... perhaps he was just trying to say that their certainly aren't immediately discernable causes and that further speculation is likely to meet with little success.

-- Luke



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list