From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 8:19 AM
To: 'Minarchists@yahoogroups.com'
Cc: 'marketliberal@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: RE: Reasonable POV, Yes?
Allan Hacker wrote:
 
> The map is not the territory, and we can never
> know that reality is what we think it is.
 
Knowledge is justified true belief, and we can indeed have justified true beliefs about reality.
 
>  So it does not behoove us to fight about it.
 
This is only true if you're talking about absolutely certain knowledge, which (again) is the wrong epistemic standard here.
 
> Rather, we should respect each others' intentions and
> discount each others' errors, so that we may cooperate on the vast common
> ground we all share rather than contest over the odd square foot here and
> there.
My political activism is all about cooperating with anyone who is pulling northward on the Nolan chart, be they Christian, Druid, anarchist, RLC, ACLU, etc.  I won't censor myself in the name of that cooperation, but I don't mind being selective in how I express my disagreements with fellow advocates for liberty. For example, I'm taking the rest of our religion discussion off this forum, and have replied at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/552.
 
> Because if my time expires with the job unfinished, and if I do come back,
> it will more likely be into a world that requires a revolution
 
I think things will get better, not worse. Just look at the last half-century's progress regarding racism, civil rights, divorce rights, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, gay rights, criminal procedure, political association, privacy from government surveillance, free expression, gambling, and even society's attitude towards substance use. Similarly, the trend on the economic side has been a plateau in the growth of the nanny state since the late 1970s, as evidenced by deregulation, privatization, sounder currency, free trade, and lower marginal taxes. The major threat to liberty in twenty-first century America will not be from right-wingers legislating morality or invoking foreign enemies. It will be from left-wingers invoking economic inequality, and (especially) from neophobes invoking fear of the changes that progress inevitably requires.
 
Right-wingers will consistently fail because people are fundamentally decent. Left-wingers will ultimately fail because history demonstrates that they are wrong. But neophobes will be an indefinite threat, because they can always claim that the End Is Near, and no track record of failed doomsaying can shake their conviction that this time they're finally right.

Brian Holtz
2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley)
http://marketliberal.org