View source for How to make a pretzel

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[[Category:Eli]]
[[Category:Initiation of Force]]
[[Category:Non-Aggression]]
[[Category:Coercion]]
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{{DES | des = Just ask a libertarian what they really mean when they talk about the initiation of force.  "According to libertarian hack David D'Amato, in some cases you can aggressively use force without using force at all (e.g. by engaging in fraud), while in other cases you can use force aggressively without "really" being the aggressor. Impressive, no?" | show=}}
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Just ask a libertarian what they really mean when they talk about the initiation of force.
"I want to offer, with qualifications, a defense of the distinction between what [Matt] Bruenig calls 'Actual Initiation' ["defined as 'who touched who first'"] and 'Ideological Initiation' ["defined as 'who did the thing we thought was illegitimate first'"] a distinction that—whether they realize it or not—non-libertarians actually accept and defend all the time. For example, few would object to the claim that a third party onlooker ought to have the right to use force to defend someone else, even if the attacker hasn't yet successfully made violent contact with his target (that is, we don't yet have Bruenig's Actual Initiation). Similarly, most of us regard fraud as a kind of coercion, despite the fact that, once again, we haven't fulfilled the requirements of Actual Initiation. If, for example, a shoe salesperson presents her product as '100% leather,' and we later learn, after buying the product, that the shoes are in fact 100% vinyl, then we can quite properly regard this crime as a kind of aggression, though we weren't physically assaulted in any way. The shoe salesperson's fraudulent misrepresentation acts as a substitute for force...

As I said previously, if one is 'initiating force' in the defense of her own justly acquired property, then we can't really say that she's 'initiating' force at all."
Got all that? According to libertarian hack David D'Amato, in some cases you can aggressively use force without using force at all (e.g. by engaging in fraud), while in other cases you can use force aggressively without "really" being the aggressor. Impressive, no?

Now, D'Amato tries to distract from the idiocy of these claims by alleging that other people do it, too, but that misses the point altogether.* Aside from libertarians and pacifists, nobody talks as though Actual Initiation and Ideological Initiation are the same thing. Everybody else acts as if they're different, sure - but everybody else also talks and reasons as if they're different, which is what sets everyone else apart from people like D'Amato. Garden-variety conservatives and liberals do not, after all, center their entire political or moral philosophy around something called the non-aggression principle. Instead, we have principles like "American exceptionalism" and "racial equality" and so on, which, whatever their flaws, at least avoid conflating Actual Initiation and Ideological Initiation. The rest of us aren't fixated on the idea of "freedom," defined as the absence of "direct physical compulsion" or the "threat" thereof. We don't go around spouting off about destroying or minimizing the government because we're against the initiation of violence and we (mistakenly) believe that the government has a monopoly on such initiation. Those sorts of behaviors are reserved for libertarians (and, again, some tiny sliver of pacifists).

In fact, the rest of us aren't libertarians in large part because we recognize the difference between Actual Initiation and Ideological Initiation - that is, because we're able (1) to think about actual force and substitutes for force on their own terms instead of moronically lumping them together and (2) to deemphasize the often-irrelevant question of who initiated the use of coercive methods in favor of other questions (about, say, the consequences of that coercion). For a theocrat, say, to oppose certain completely non-aggressive actions (e.g. same-sex intercourse) is perfectly logical** because theocratic rules don't center on the idea of aggression. For similar reasons, the same goes for a progressive liberal, a natural-law theorist, a socialist, and so on and so forth: all of those political archetypes can explain their support for prohibitions on false advertising without having to dishonestly and idiotically compare fraud to violence. Libertarianism is the only theory among the major political competitors that has to undergo such contortions, and D'Amato's tu quoque argument does nothing to change that.

Still don't believe me? Just look at that last sentence up there in the blockquote. If it wasn't required by libertarianism to conflate Ideological and Actual Initiation, why doesn't D'Amato simply say that, "if one is 'initiating force' in the defense of her own justly acquired property, then that act of initiating force is justified"? Why, in other words, doesn't he just come right out and admit that there are some situations in which initiating force is the legitimate, morally acceptable thing to do (i.e., in which Actual Initiation and Ideological Initiation are different)? The only plausible explanation is that (to borrow Bruenig's phrasing) D'Amato has "severe difficulties with distinguishing between what we might call Actual Initiation (defined as 'who touched who first') and Ideological Initiation (defined as 'who did the thing we thought was illegitimate first')": whenever he (D'Amato) sees something as falling outside the realm of Ideological Initiation, he immediately and reflexively concludes that that thing also falls outside the realm of Actual Initiation, even when he himself admitted earlier in the very same sentence that it was an instance of Actual Initiation. In other words, D'Amato is so flustered by this whole thing that he ends up proving Bruenig's point in the exact argument that's designed to disprove Bruenig's point.

So that, dear friends, is how to make a pretzel.

*For those who are interested in the backstory but not interested enough to click on the link back to Bruenig's article, Bruenig's point is that there is a distinction between the two kinds of initiation and that libertarians misunderstand or deny that distinction. That is to say that Bruenig openly and explicitly embraces the distinction between Actual and Ideological Initiation. Accusing him of unwittingly relying on that distinction is, therefore, the height of stupidity.
**NB: not rational, just logical.
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