Dear Paul,
The purpose of this letter is to clarify the nature of your relationship with the Libertarian Alliance Blog. Before you consider answering it, I urge you to read it more than once, and perhaps also to show it to a trusted friend.
At the end of last year, we made an agreement. You would be welcomed as a commenter on this Blog. In return, you would behave on it like a gentleman. You have, in the past week, broken this agreement. You have begun, once again, to treat any failure to agree with you as both a sign of moral depravity and a personal insult. I am also aware of your Facebook conversation with Tom Burroughs and Tim Starr, in which you speak most contemptuously of the Libertarian Alliance, and claim that you gave us a “second chance” and that we have let you down.
For the avoidance of doubt, let me explain your true position. This Blog is private property. It is owned by David Davis and by me. We allow you to leave comments on it, and choose not to edit or reject any of your comments. It is exactly as if either of us were to let you into a physical property, to join in a discussion round the kitchen table. You might be welcomed in. You might be invited to speak your mind with great freedom. You might have a quiet audience as you set out your own opinions and insisted that only you knew the complete truth on any matter. There would, even so, be implied rules of debate. One of these would be not continually to insult your host and the other guests. Another would be not generally to exhaust their patience. Break these rules, and you would be reprimanded. Ignore the reprimand, and you would be asked to leave. Refuse to leave, and you would be expelled by whatever means were most convenient.
Do not take this letter as a threat of expulsion. But it is a reprimand. If necessary, it will be followed by a request for you to stop posting comments. David and I hope the reprimand will be sufficient. If not, we have no doubt you will obey our request to leave. This Blog is private property, and you have spent a lifetime proclaiming your devotion to the principle of private property. You would surely not wish to find yourself in the anomalous position of writing in defence of property rights while violating them. We will add that you have put a lot of effort into this Blog, and are able to reach a wider readership than you can in any other forum where you contribute. You would not wish to commit a trespass by ignoring a request to leave, and you would not wish to be asked to leave.
We therefore ask you from this moment to conduct yourself on this Blog in a gentlemanly manner. You may sometimes find it useful to consult David and me on the specific meaning of our request. Sometimes, we may volunteer guidance. But here are some general rules of behaviour:
1. Do not denounce failure to agree with you as evidence of moral depravity;
2. Do not take failure to agree with you as a personal insult;
3. Do not insist that anyone who disagrees with you is a Communist at war with all private property, or an anti-semite and holocaust revisionist, or a clown whose main ambition is to raise your blood pressure;
4. Before deciding that someone has disagreed with you, read his posting with greater attention than has been your habit so far on this Blog;
5. Do not leave long and rambling comments on posts where you have nothing meaningful to say;
6. Do not leave long and rambling comments one after the other, until what you have written is longer than the original post.
These first three rules are absolute requirements. Keep breaking them, and we will ask you to leave. The last three are more for guidance.
All David and I ask is that you should accept these rules or leave at once. We are not interested in debate on any of the above. We will accept no compromise. Do not ask whether or how the rules will apply to anyone else. David and I own this Blog. We do not have to answer to anyone for how we use our property. If you think we are treating you unfairly, that is unfortunate, but you have always insisted that property owners have no obligation to behave fairly.
As said, this letter is a reprimand. It would be most regrettable if we had to follow it with a request for you to stop posting comments.
Regards,
Sean
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Well, the lengthy rambling posts and the constant insinuation of nazism in posts with no connection to the subject are indeed tiresome. PVM, you have been treated with great kindness – I suggest you adapt in line with Sean’s guidance.
I heartily agree with points one and two. For, as we all know, I am the person with whom disagreement constitutes moral depravity and personal insult (not to mention obvious error).
The reprimand is well put.
In Paul’s defence, I will say that he has come a long way in the decade or so I have known him. And that, to my knowledge, he has never insulted me personally.
On the other side, I must say that at present, when I see “Paul Marks” at the head of a comment on any post other than one which I myself authored, I skip it.
Tolerance of difference – in particular, of difference of opinion – is one of the cornerstones of liberty. Paul, I hope you are listening.
Sorry to disagree, but I look forward to reading Paul Marks’ comments on any article I read on this site. I don’t know the details of what has caused this reprimand, and perhaps it is justified, but I think his absence would be a loss to the comments section. Maybe, people need to have thicker skins.
Paul is, as we said here, welcome to write things on this blog. Indeed, i, by myself, have up-flagged many of his comments in the last year or so. Paul thinks deeply, and has time to write well, when he can.
But since – not being an intellectual myself – I’d never even heard of “Harry Elmer Barnes” (whoever that might be,) until Paul flagged him as an alleged Nazi apologist and a kind of opposite of an Anglo-American patriot, and suggested on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/paul.marks.733/posts/10206153787704784?pnref=story) that I’d known this all along and insinuated that I hadn’t the courage to say anything about “certain posts on here” (but about what, I really can’t fathom since I’d not heard of the bloke)) I was frankly mystified.
I decided not to get further embroiled in the discussion thread on Paul’s facebook which referred to me as some sort of HarryElmerBarnes apologist. This was since it seemed likely that the talkers over there were busy disappearing up their own and each others’ arses anyway, and I could not add anything “concrete”…(sorry for that one…)
But I have no problem with Paul writing on here. Next time he comes across a writer of whom he disapproves, all he has to do in refrain from suggesting that I and Sean know about that bloke and are keeping quiet about him, suggesting our approval of his position.
Sorry to disagree, but I look forward to reading Paul Marks’ comments on any article I read on this site.
Lots of people don’t. But people who don’t like the LA must be happy to see him posting so copiously and discursively.
Sean when you, or one of your associates, makes false statements about history, politics, or economics I point it out.
If you do not like me pointing out false statements, I would advice you (and your associates) to stop making false statements.
Not good enough, and irrelevant to the posting I made. Please do as I have asked or leave. The choice is yours.
Sean, you heathen! Your problem is you don’t believe Jon Huntsman, Sr. is the son without sin of the spotless virgin Mary Wedgewood!
Sean when you, or one of your associates, makes false statements about history, politics, or economics I point it out.
It must be good to have an infallible means of detecting falsehood. As I’ve pointed out before: it’s fortunate that Paul is not better able to conceal his true nature or he might be high in the government, judiciary or civil service by now. How fortunate we are that his egomania and authoritarianism are not common among his fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I’d like to join with “And” above and say that I, too, consider Paul Marks an asset to the forums where he posts or comments.
His information on history and economics is interesting and enlightening.
If people are unaware of Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes (or anyone else of note) there are always the search engines. As a matter of fact the late historian is, or at least was, pretty well-known over here; his An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, in three volumes, was originally published by The University of Chicago Press, if my memory serves (but my copy is packed away, and Amazon shows only Dover and Heron as publishers).
According to Wikipedia’s informative article, his work has been somewhat discredited because of his denial that the Holocaust existed; but in my experience, back in the ’60’s at least he was still spoken of with reverence. And we can certainly see how Barnes’s historical views are at the least consonant with the unfortunate opinions of so many libertarians today, which is not too surprising given the strong influence he had on Rothbard.
Persons might wish to see what Wikipedia has to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Elmer_Barnes
How did your sensible comment get 20 thumbs-down? Something strange going on.
Dunno. I left it alone, since I at least agree that Paul is often informative about stuff, now and then.
This Blog is private property, and you have spent a lifetime proclaiming your devotion to the principle of private property.
Just as Denis Macshane has spent his life proclaiming his devotion to freedom of speech:
And his opposition to male abuse of power:
Denis has also chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism:
And he was of course the MP for Rotherham until he became a little too lax in his work for the Jehovah’s Witness community and fiddled his expenses:
Last week, Denis MacShane, the former MP for Rotherham, admitted he might have not done enough about child sexual exploitation by Asian men in his constituency because he was a “Guardian-reading liberal leftie”. MacShane, who resigned as an MP in 2012 over expenses fraud for which he was later jailed for six months, told the BBC he was never directly approached by anyone with allegations of child abuse during his 18 years as an MP.
Yet he “probably” didn’t do as much as he could have done and should have “burrowed into” the issue, he said. “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.” Last week, he said Cryer did what others should have had the courage to do. “If you read my prison diaries, I praise a lady, an MP called Ann Cryer, who did raise the problem of cousin marriage and patriarchy, of the oppression of women within bits of the Muslim community in Britain.”
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/30/rotherham-girls-could-have-been-spared-ann-cryer
Denis and Paul seem to be birds of a feather.
Yawn. Anti-Semitism doesn’t come into this matter. You are introducing a most unwelcome layer of confusion into a debate over individual characteristics – characteristics not shared by actual Jews who contribute to this Blog. Your comments will not be removed, but are formally deprecated by the Blog administration.
Yawn. Anti-Semitism doesn’t come into this matter. You are introducing a most unwelcome layer of confusion into a debate over individual characteristics – characteristics not shared by actual Jews who contribute to this Blog. Your comments will not be removed, but are formally deprecated by the Blog administration.
You’re right to deprecate them, because I was hypocritically doing what Paul does: pursue a private obsession at length using the excuse of making a comment. So I apologize for that. However, I disagree that human biology is irrelevant here. Paul’s psychology is not typically English.
characteristics not shared by actual Jews who contribute to this Blog.
Such as Paul? You still haven’t said whether your friend Paul Gottfriend — an actual Jew, ducky — is right in what he says here:
What does Paul do when he sees “dissent”? “…insist that anyone who disagrees with him is a Communist at war with all private property, or an anti-semite and holocaust revisionist, or a clown whose main ambition is to raise your blood pressure”…
Paul is not an ethnic anomaly.
your friend Paul Gottfriend
Lapsus keyboardi. Gottfried.
Your main problem in attempting to debate with libertarians is that many of our best people are Jewish. Libertarianism is an ideology, or perhaps an impulse, with deep roots in our civilisation. It cannot reasonably be called a Jewish construct in the same way as certain kinds of socialism can. It has been adapted to changing circumstances, since about 1920, by Jews – von Mises, Rand, Rothbard, Friedman, et al. But its fundamental characteristics have not been altered by them. At the same time, these Jews have not been fringe dissidents, to be written off as anomalies like the Jews who spied for Nazi Germany or whatever. Von Mises won a Nobel Prize, and many of his key ideas have entered the mainstream. Rand was a cultural force in her own right. Friedman differed from the other Jews in our movement largely in that he was more English and empirical in his outlook; and he also won a Nobel Prize, and has had considerable, if not always beneficial, influence on economic policy since the 1970s.
This makes us strongly disinclined to give any time to anti-semitic theories like your own. We accept that there are Jews who are opposed to freedom of speech, and who have demanded and obtained authoritarian laws. But there are many other Jews who have not. When you look at people like Greville Janner, you see a problem that can be solved only by creating some degree of separation between Jews and Gentiles. All we see is a duty to argue with Jews that their proper interest lies in switching their support from people like him to people like Paul Gottfried and Walter Block and our own Ilana Mercer. Indeed, I will even put in a word for Leon Brittan. He allowed the crazies in the Conservative Party to get the Video Recordings Act 1984, for which he is to be much condemned. In the 1990s, however, when he was a European Commissioner, he was strongly and perhaps decisively opposed to laws to criminalise holocaust revision.
I accept that Jews are, on the whole, a cohesive and rather sensitive group. Partly for that reason, I have no wish to antagonise them. In part, though, I just see no reason to antagonise them as a group. I do not accept your view that they are in any meaningful sense working, as a group, for the overthrow of our civilisation. They have contributed much to our civilisation in the past few centuries, and I am sure they will contribute much more. I am inclined to believe that even Karl Marx thought he was doing us a favour with his economic and political theories, however little real benefit they were to the human race. When I look at the work of men like von Mises and Israel Kirzner, among many others, I see only unadulterated benefit.
We tolerate you on this Blog because your comments so far have not broken its fundamental rules. But do not suppose you will be able to make converts of us. Too many libertarians are Jewish. Too many of us have Jewish friends. Too many of us are able to form a more balanced opinion of Jews than you have. I will add that my original post was largely in response to what I considered untoward comments by a half-Jew on a full-Jew. The reality is more complex than you seem able to appreciate.
I do not wish to debate this matter further, and, now that its main purpose has been served, I will unstick this whole discussion from the top of the Blog.
The Jewish influence on libertarianism goes much further back than Rand and Rothbard. At least as far as Spinoza, arguably all the way to Hillel the Elder, and perhaps even to Samuel, who conveyed God’s anarchist sentiments to his chosen people (although they rejected that sentiment and continued to beg for a king).
The difficulty with such worldviews as those of “Enoch’s Eyebrow” is that they are ultimately Marxist grand theory writ large. As such, they deduce causation from correlation until everything is ultimately seen through their particular prism.
Here is Paul Gottfried, an actual Jew and friend of Mr Gabb:
This brings me to the heart of my Politically Incorrect argument. Jews in public life and in academe have trouble living in an intellectually open society, because it would allow those whom they fear and/or loathe to be heard in open forums. This is something that Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectuals seek to avoid at all costs, through “Hate Speech” laws, academic speech codes, and associating dissent with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/a-jewish-conservative-wonders-is-free-speech-really-a-jewish-tradition
I don’t see much resemblance to Marxist grand theory there. I do see that what he says applies very well to the so-called libertarian Paul Marks.
Von Mises did not win a Nobel Prize.
Too many libertarians are Jewish.
Yes, like Paul Marks and Ayn Rand. And what would you expect a world governed by Paul Marks to look like? Rather like a world governed by Ayn Rand. Libertarianism is a harmful ideology. It encourages individualism in a group under collectivist attack.
Too many of us have Jewish friends.
So what? I’ve had Muslim and black friends, but I’m still an “Islamophobe” and melanophobe. My proposition isn’t that all members of group X are baby-sacrificing devil-worshippers who cackle madly as they destroy Western civilization but that, as a group, they have a negative effect. That is clearly true in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims and melanoderms.
Too many of us are able to form a more balanced opinion of Jews than you have.
Presumably, then, your good friend Paul Gottfried has an unbalanced opinion too:
As does Ezra Levant:
I will add that my original post was largely in response to what I considered untoward comments by a half-Jew on a full-Jew. The reality is more complex than you seem able to appreciate.
Then your good friend Paul Gottfried is also unable to grasp the complexity of the “reality”.
I do not accept your view that they are in any meaningful sense working, as a group, for the overthrow of our civilisation.
I do not think there is any conscious conspiracy. But Jehovah’s Witnesses have clearly been a necessary (but not sufficient) factor in mass immigration, laws against crime-think and the closing down of debate about race. All three are extremely harmful to the West. Meanwhile, Israel puts up huge fences to keep “vulnerable” migrants out.
It’s interesting, isn’t it.
You know what, people? We should learn something from the fascist statist left.
They only go about slaughtering each others’ factions _after_ they have gained hegemonic power. We libertarians get right on and do it even well-before anyone is even thinking of bothering to listen to us.
Well, that’s because power is the statist left’s (and the statist right’s) raison d’etre. Principle is just a glittering bauble they deign amuse themselves with once they’ve accomplished it.
Where, for libertarians, being correct is more important than, and therefore must precede, being in charge.
It’s the “Boromir Problem” then, isn’t it Thomas. I’ve been maundering on about it, inarticulately, for about five decades.
How do you get power to do good, without getting (first) -the power to_ extinguish evil – whose only objective is to negate good?
Or will evil always win, and a civilisation comes up, and then “goes down without trace”?….which is perhaps “why we don’t seem to observe any space-aliens”…?
You see, at any one time in a cosmological sense, there can only be a finite number of people for whom it is more important to be “right and dead”, or “right and vanquished fully”, and then agree to be happy and resigned to that scenario….
Without “power” to extinguish evil by force, in order to do good instead unhindered, I suggest that “good” cannot ever be victorious. I agree that this is a bad problem. But it is not a problem for me, for I know that there is objective good and objective wickedness.
David,
I wish I knew!
I suppose it’s possible that there’s a rare occurrence of the venal acquiring power, after which the bauble of principle turns out to be shiny enough to move them to actually use it.
And good does sometimes win, ref: Wilberforce.
Scrolling past PM comments is a bit tedious but it’s amusing in the watching a crazy asshole make cock of himself kind of way.
Bearing in mind the tone of his comments of today left elsewhere on this Blog, I don’t think I shall need to invite Paul to leave. I will even continue to answer some of his comments.
I will be clear, for anyone who is unsure, that I have no objection to being told I am wrong. I have no objection to being told I am wrong even with some sharpness. I have been wrong in the past on certain things, and it is possible that I am wrong now. What I dislike is the attendant circumstances that I mentioned in my letter. They devalue the Blog as a forum for debate. Let these be absent, and Paul can remain a welcome guest among us.
I hope this matter can now be regarded as closed. Tomorrow, I will unstick this post and it can sink into the vast swamp of all the other posts.
I will be clear, for anyone who is unsure, that I have no objection to being told I am wrong. I have no objection to being told I am wrong even with some sharpness.
I suspect this is because you are a north-western European male like Milton, Thomas Jefferson, J.S. Mill and George Orwell. That’s the only group that genuinely accepts free speech and the only group that actually instituted it. Unfortunately, the ability to accept criticism is susceptible to exploitation by other groups: Jehovah’s Witnesses and women, for example. Neither of them accept criticism when they have power.
How about giving me a column instead? you have my e-mail address 😉
I generally like Paul Marks’ posts, but also agree with Sean – impugning the moral character of those with whom one disagrees is both unseemly and unwelcome.
I had meant to not dignify this, rather patronising, Declaration of War, with no further comment.
However, as I have mentioned Dr Gabb in a comment to my post “What is a Libertarian?” on the Counting Cats blog, it is only fair to alert Sean to the fact – so that he has the opportunity to reply.
What Paul says or does not say, or what he impugns about what he thinks Sean is saying or not saying about anything whatever, or what he thinks Sean is hiding about his opinios about dead American philosophers I have never heard of like Harry Elmer Barnes, is mere phytodust; mere pollen in the wind. This is not the battle, let alone the War.
As I keep saying….
With the sheer and astonishing intellectual power that libertarians (me excepted, I’m just a techie who can type a bit) can and do deploy, _you lot_ could (actually) _utterly cream the Ethnic Western fascist leftoNazis in about three seconds, if _you_ all agreed to agree with each other _while getting power_ . We can go to town on each other’s angel-number-seating-pinheads afterwards over a barbecue. If we could do this, all other existential threats to Western Civilisation would collapse like a popped balloon. And then Liberalism would triumph…until more “modern universities” are founded and funded and staffed by Ethnic White Caucasian Leftists…but that’s another story. (I’m not saying really, that “we might have to _take care of these foul people who’ll never give up and never say sorry and will keep buggering on for ever_ “, but we might….we might.)
The getting of power is what the LeftoNazis understand, and have perhaps always done. It’s their job, and they have not always been as cheerfully-frank about this as they might have been, but you have to admire their persistence. And now they are unafraid to come into the open for they see their end-game coming soon.
Unlike that awfully drab leftist PC film “Chariots of Fire” about some sportsman or other, I say the opposite: it is to me that _”It’s not the taking part that counts, it’s the winning.”_ They realised that all along. We do not; we are keener to be right and defeated, than right and victorious…or even (slightly intellectually-robustly-wrong and) victorious. This will be fatal to liberalism and to the Human Race ultimately.
As somebody on the outside of libertarianism and looking in, I do see some similarities with what has been my own cause of ‘nationalism’.
We have no or very few friends on the ‘inside’ of the political or media establishments. We are largely disjointed from each other and argue over small differences. We do not really know how to break the monopoly in order to even get our messages out to a wider society where it matters.
We tend to be reactionary to the daily or weekly news, endlessly, instead of driving forth our own newsworthy items and successes.
So we end up talking to ourselves and stating what we would like to do……
Like with nationalism in a more serious form, where is the visible and notable libertarian presence in society at large? How and where do people find out about its existence? What clubs do they join? What is there to be practically done – and where?
Like the ‘alternative right’, I think libertarianism is largely confined to the internet and is a bit of an echo chamber that attracts waves of passers by, some of whom who will agree and some who won’t, some who stay in for a while and some who drift away.
When it comes to Mr Marks, I have to admit he could be very exasperating. I don’t know how Sean has kept the patience for so long when his name and reputation were being always put into question and otherwise accused of being this-or-that because he disagrees on some aspects of history or the role of American politics.
But what used to really get tiresome was the so-called “intellectualism” that spewed forth random quotes from 150 years ago, obscure names of who may have done this or that in the past, and an almost impenetrable block of this kind of thing that I felt did nothing to explain libertarianism or engage with wider society outside of this circle of niche quotes and insight.
I am sure we can all do it, Mr Marks is not alone. The point I am trying to make is that I do not feel that libertarianism is making itself understood nor relevant to the “modern age” – not least because the opposition has done so much damage to society.
This is where concepts of liberty and freedom have been kind of eroded to the point that arguing against a smoking ban (or whatever) would seem incredibly stupid, or that removing “hate speech” regulations would just be seen as a licence for “racists” to “bully” and “abuse” other races. This is the road things have gone down, and I don’t see how it is currently being challenged.
When it comes to liberty, it tends to fall to the selectively-deaf Shami Chakabarti to be the mouthpiece. I say selectively deaf, because when “right wingers” of any sort are being put through the mincer, she and her organisation are usually nowhere to be seen.
As I have suggested before, the doors of this country have been open to those who in the main would not subscribe to libertarianism, either through faith, culture, or an attachment to a large state that “looks after them”. Whatever Libertarians may have gained in numbers, I sadly see it being quashed multiple times over by new arrivals and their offspring.
Given this, as a ‘nationalist’, I share your pains in knowing that there are many people out there who are somewhat approachable with our concerns, that in the online world we have a sub-culture and large following in the wings, but that when it comes to things “going on” out there in the real world, really bringing about change, really making milestones and being “present” – it just isn’t quite working.
You are completely right, and frankly I don’t now know any more, what solution can be suggested.
Dear Paul,
I have just read your various comments of today, on this posting and on one by Ilana Mercer.
Since I thought this matter had been amicably settled yesterday, I find them astonishing. However, they have been made, and I will now do what I must.
We made an agreement after Christmas. You broke it last Monday. I gave you a reprimand on Tuesday. You have thrown it back at me. I must therefore ask you to leave this Blog immediately. You will be allowed back if you make it clear that you have accepted the terms stated in my post of last Tuesday. Any comment you post without such acceptance will be a trespass, and will show the nature of your claimed devotion to the principle of private property.
I write these words more in sorrow than in anger. But you have left me with no reasonable choice. There have been times in the past nine years when your contributions to debate on this Blog were useful and perhaps enlightening. You stand within a valid and respectable area of the libertarian movement. But, while I have no objection to being told I am wrong, and even very sharply told, and while I expect other contributors to this Blog to face severe criticism without complaint, we cannot tolerate your continual accusations of bad faith, or your settled insistence that anyone who does not share every detail of your opinions is morally depraved.
I hope that you will eventually see the reasonableness of my position. Until then, however, you must regard yourself as forbidden from posting any further comments here.
Yours sincerely,
Sean
How about giving me a column instead? you have my e-mail address 😉