DISQUS

Because it's relevant to his argument that he's taking issue with a means of expressing support, not questioning the worthiness of the goal supported. As would have been screamingly obvious if you'd thought about your own question for five seconds before posting it in a silly attempt at a "gotcha."

Have you done a survey? Folks love to claim that atheism somehow entails some kind of apodictic certainty, whereas the attitude of most nonbelievers I know (which is most people I know) seems a lot closer to: "There's no good reason to think this is true, and it seems pretty improbable."

Which is to say, I agree that in practice there's no significant difference between atheists and agnostics. The latter are functional atheists who are trying to sound polite.

Actually, the historical existence of Jesus is pretty dubious, and if there was any single such individual, the one thing that's absolutely certain is that he was *not* born 2008 years ago.

Uh, can we reconsider that name? Nobody actually wants to repeal FISA -- least of all civil libertarians, given that it was a huge improvement over the status quo in 1978. Actually, I take that back: There are people who want to repeal FISA, and they're the nuts who think the president's powers should be totally unrestricted the instant he whispers the words "national security". It's punchy, but I think you want to look for a different clarion call.

Well, look, the Internet makes it easy for you to satisfy your curiosity. Pick a handful of eminent legal scholars at top law schools—especially ones who work in the areas were Lessig is frequently cited. Maybe Akhil Amar, Larry Tribe, Richard Epstein, hell, just go to the faculty directories at the top schools and choose some familiar names. Then send them an e-mail politely asking if they can reply, in a quick sentence or two, whether they think it's fair to say that Lessig is regarded as an important, original, and serious legal academic -- regardless of whether they personally agree with his views.

This is profoundly ridiculous. See also, for instance, "Fidelity in Translation," which should pop up if you Google it. To question, with a straight face, whether Lessig is widely recognized by his peers (whether they agree with him or not) as an important and influential legal scholar, apart from any of his popular work, is just to reveal that you don't know anything about contemporary legal scholarship. Seriously, stop digging.

First, what Tim said. I see how you *can* parse that introductory section as praise for communism, but it seems to me that you really need to go in with the intention of finding it. I think a normal person's reading is that this is meant to illustrate the idea that the amount of effective control a state can exert over (say) a small business owner is as much a function of the available institutions and infrastructures of control as official state ideology. I have no idea whether the example is aptly chosen, but it does not seem crazy to suggest that a weak, putatively "absolute" state might not be able, in practice, to enforce certain sorts of regulations.

As for Fisher, I think it's sort of a testament to how far you're stretching here that I'm in the position of "defending" what sounds to me like a terrible idea. This "Orwellian" stuff is just grossly distorting of both Fisher's original proposal and, a fortiori, of Lessig's rather milder modification. Here, for interested third parties, is what Fisher actually proposes:

"To sum up, the most plausible way of estimating the relative values to consumers of downloaded registered recordings would be to use a large-scale sampling system that automatically detects and records what persons willing to participate in such a regime are actually watching and listening to, and that aggregates such reports to prevent government officials from learning the consumption choices made by specific participants."

In other words, per Nielsen, the proposal is to rely on volunteers to allow their consumption to be measured without personally identifying information and then aggregated, so what the Copyright Office ultimately gets is a list to the effect that X number of people listened to song Y approximately Z times last year.

You can certainly make the point—and indeed, it's the sort of point Lessig likes to make—that this is the kind of architecture of surveillance that's dangerous to build even if it is *supposed* to be both voluntary and anonymous. I might even agree. But if you expect people to regard you as an honest critic arguing in good faith, you can't just *ignore* these elements of the proposal and start slinging loose talk of a "spying and invasive Net" where the government will "monitor everything that you watch, hear, read or do," as though they're suggesting the government keep track of each individual's personal viewing and listening habits.

Additionally, it's quite stunning to me, given that a fair portion of Lessig's very brief discussion of the Fisher plan is devoted to points of his points of departure from Fisher, there's not even a nod to these differences. Fisher is indeed talking about "replacing" copyright with his scheme—and even here "nationalizing" production seems like a deliberately misleading description. But Lessig is manifestly proposing nothing of the sort: His proposal is to preserve something like the familiar copyright structure, and use something like the Fisher plan to compensate firms for demonstrable losses (from displaced sales) attributable to downloading (presumably as opposed to regulating networks to block file sharing or having companies go after individual downloaders, which I notice seems to involve a certain amount of intrusive, individualized spying on consumption).

Again, I have a lot of problems with this proposal—not least that it seems manifestly unfair to network users who don't download a lot of material, whether or not it deters their consumption of broadband service. Discussion of those problems is not aided by preposterous hand-wringing about Telescreens and Thought Police.

The "bland communism" thing appears to really stick in Mr Sydnor's craw. And while this is a slightly more ambiguous instance than some of the other cases where quotations are ripped from context, but it still looks to me like an unfair reading:

"A modern if plodding anarchy replaced the bland communism of the previous three generations: Neon lights flashed advertisements for Nike; pensioners were swindled out of their life savings by fraudulent stock deals; bankers were murdered in broad daylight on Moscow streets."

To the extent that this can be read to imply an equivalence between the situation in late-90s Russia and the butchery of the Stalin era, that would, of course, be both glib and grotesque. Probably we're justified in faulting Lessig for not clearly disavowing any such suggestion. But the fundamental point seems sound enough: A healthy market society will not automatically spring up in the vacuum created by a despot's ouster; you need some affirmative notion of what sort of rules and institutions will create functioning markets.

But as for "bland" communism, I thought that the reference in the succeeding clause to neon billboards left it relatively clear that this was supposed to present a contrast between the drab Soviet aesthetic and a flashier market economy. In other words, you may have the lively appearance of a market society, but gangsters are still in charge. If you go in determined to find evidence of Lessig's Stalinist sympathies, I suppose I can see how you might parse that as a minimization of the horrors of the old regime, but it doesn't seem like the only available reading, and certainly not the most charitable one.

Will-
I think you're off on two claims here. First, the chicken case is pretty parallel: My private abstention has no perceptible effect on the aggregate demand for chicken, but the abstention of many people concerned about animal suffering might.

Second, I think you're reading Parfit sort of backwards here: He explicitly wants to argue that each "torturer" acts wrongly even if we think the notion of "imperceptible pain" is a sort of nonsense, and even stipulating that an individual torturer causes nobody any pain at all. Bottom of page 80, if you're following along at home.

While I don't know that I'd suggest abstaining from flying in this particular instance, I don't think the logic here is especially compelling, Will. Instead of droning on, two words: Harmless Torturers.

You probably could have saved yourself a fair amount of time (and perhaps a modicum of embarrassment) by just Googling "national greatness conservatism".

I think this is what the evopsych folk like to call a "spandrel": There are genuine biological reasons why women would tend to be more disposed to specialize in *childcare*, and maybe related reasons why men would be disposed to specialized to venturing out of the home to (literally) bring home the bacon (or at least the boar). And the upshot of that is a division of labor that leaves women specializing in home management, though this is a side effect of other adaptations, rather than an adaptation in itself. That said, we're a ways from the woodland savanna, so it's not clear why any of this should count for a great deal; I don't expect anyone to subsidize my boar hunting.

Yes, yes, just terrible. And how would Net Neutrality legislation have changed all that? Oh, that's right, not at all, because Nat Neutrality has nothing to do with how a company edits its own webcasts.

I think you'll find you take more pleasure in JP's posts if you regard certain passages as the written equivalent of scat.

"Thats fine if you approach patent policy from a natural rights rather from utilitarian perspective, which I believe you do."

Where on earth did that come from? Even leaving aside that I've always taken Tim to be more or less a consequentialist, what "natural rights perspective" yields the view that patents in other arenas are justifiable, though not in software, where there ought to be copyrights? That'd have to be a fairly tortuous deontology.

Fine, look, I don't expect them to spend man hours repairing out-of-warranty items for free. But how about: "Well, try a reset, and if that doesn't work, you can pop it open at your own risk and look for loose connections." I guess what I'm annoyed about is the tendency to discourage simple DIY consumer repairs (it's kind of a pain in the ass to get an ipod open, as you may have noticed) in favor of moving new product. Maybe that's in Apple's short-term economic interest, but it seems like a poor way to build the kind of user loyalty for which the company's so renowned.

Looks like you may have been a touch too subtle Will; you should've called it "A MODEST Natalist Proposal."

It is, incidentally, slightly bemusing to see the once-ubiquitous practice of "kids supporting parents in old age" declared a biological impossibility.

This is still an incredibly silly way to describe the situation. Society requires that X tons of grain be produced annually... how many tons of grain have YOU produced? Who's picking up your slack?

Oliver-
Only using a standard of "prove" that no sane person ever applies to any topic *except* the existence of God when they're trying to sound polite and reasonable and avoid tagging themselves as atheists.

Er, are we supposed to draw any kind of lessons from the fact that relatively undeveloped countries have higher growth rates than developed countries? OF COURSE they do. And 10 year olds grow faster than 40 year olds. Why is this supposed to be surprising or interesting?

I've got to agree with Will and the others here. DI and its fellow travellers have built a movement on the basis of a calculated strategy of creating the illusion of a genuine disagreement among scientists: If one of their flacks is invited to a debate at Harvard, however thoroughly their argument is rebutted, they'll exploit the mere fact that the debate was held to lend a false air of legitimacy to their cause. In this case, I'm afraid the effect is more likely to be damage to TLF's credibility than the augmentation of DI's. TLF's willingness to allow itself to be used in this way strikes me as a grotesque lapse of judgement.

Well, two responses to Mike.

First, I don't recall exactly what I said, but I was trying to avoid getting too technical, so I wouldn't be surprised if I did conflate QoS and bandwidth at some point. But I'm actually pretty sure I *did* explicitly make the distinction between speed and reliability or quality, precisely with respect to voice. In fact, unless I'm misremembering, the only time I really focused on VoIP was to make just that distinction. If I got sloppy somewhere, mea culpa. But I don't think it's fair or accurate to say I entirely neglected it.

Second, the relevance of Akamai is that the way at least some neutrality advocates are presenting their case is in terms of this idea that companies with a lot of money to throw around shouldn't have any advantage vis a vis some small startup in terms of getting their content to users faster. And insofar as that's not actually the case under the status quo, I think it was germane to *that* point, whatever other distinctions one might draw on other grounds. I wasn't invoking Akamai as some kind of all-purpose answer to every issue people have with non-neutrality, only as a small counterexample to this idea that the net in its current form is some kind of utterly level playing field where money doesn't play any important role in determining how fast your content gets to users.

I'm not sure what Alex thinks is usefully clarified by the distinction. Most often, people I encounter describing themselves as either weak atheists or agnostics mean something like: "Well, it's *logically* possible that there's a God, and I can't prove there isn't, so I'll call myself this." I suppose for some people, the God hypothesis is one they might actively employ when thinking about what explains various things in the world, or be something they grapple with regularly, then "agnostic" or "weak atheist" might be a useful distinguishing term. But if we're just talking about someone who concedes that it's logically possible, that nobody can disprove it for certain? By that standard I'm both a God-agnostic and a Santa Claus-agnostic, but I don't see what the distinction adds, since both my practice and my way of thinking about the world remain pretty much the same.

jk-
I don't know, just about everybody I know is an atheist, but I'm pretty sure that very few of them were raised that way. Which means most of them changed their minds at some point, presumably for some set of reasons. Of course, another question is whether it's the result of argument; I do suspect that most people will either figure it out on their own, without the need to be debated into it, so to speak, or they won't, and the latter group won't be as likely to be swayed by debates.