In comments here and at Catallarchy I’ve pointed out that in the absence of objective morality the optimum strategy for the individual is that of the Prudent Predator - the optimum strategy is to profit yourself at the expense of others by whatever means you can get away with.

Will Wilkinson offers an objection:

There’s a story by John Gardner called “Vlemk the Box Painter” or something like that. In it there’s this character who hides an axe under his coat, waiting to commit the perfect murder. However, his aesthetic standards for perfection are so stringent that he never actually kills anyone, although murder is his passion. The idea of a prudent predator reminds me of this. In order to go undetected as a predator, you prudently develop behavioral dispositions that engender trust and dispose other to enter into cooperative agreements. However, once you’re developed these dispositions, you turn out actually to be trustworthy and cooperative, and end up never actually predating.

This objection relies on the misconception that the Prudent Predator needs to avoid detection. But I’ve just watched a nationally televised convention of predators nominate their candidate for Predator-In-Chief and the guy isn’t in any particular danger, even though he and his henchmen spent the whole time explaining how he was going to engage in predatory behavior on behalf of his constituents.

The blogosphere is covering the campaign to elect the next Predator-In-Chief wall to wall, and roughly zero percent of those commenting make a principled objection to predatory behavior.

Why on earth would Prudent Predators need to avoid detection?

(From STALIN’S LAST CRIME: The Plot Against The Jewish Doctors 1948-1953 by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov)

Stalin is Godot, absent from an empty landscape. We wait, we guess, we attribute motives, but in the end he will not reveal himself, and there is no direct way toward understanding him as a “person.” When asked whether Stalin ever appeared in his dreams, Molotov answered, “Sometimes. In extraordinary situations…In a destroyed city…I can’t find a way out and I meet him. In a word, very strange, confusing dreams.”
It is in a destroyed city of man from which no one can find an exit that Stalin appears.

(From a friend’s correspondence, with minor formatting adjustments)

I feel the need for mellowness, having not mastered all aspects of this dancing yet, so I break out what’s left of a bottle of Myer’s Platinum White Rum, purchased in Seattle and used in a fridge-mounting exercise by Mechanique and Iron John, who didn’t think that I could be taunted into drinking myself to a belligerent, abusive stupor

(4:00 a.m., Summer Solstice Sunday morning)

Mechanique: “If you don’t finish this third quadruple-shot of straight rum, Virtue, then you are a total fucking pussy.”

Virtue Incarnate: (after a long pause, with venom and disgust, hissed through clenched teeth) “I see.”

Mechanique: “So do you want it?” (extends the glass towards me, then pulls it back some) “Because if you want to be a pussy about this, I can just pour it back in the bottle.”

Iron John: (dismissively) “Let’s not pressure him. I’m sure if he could finish it, he’d say so.” (chortling) “Virtue only shows weakness when he has to.”

Virtue Incarnate: (with unnecessary firmness) “NO.”
(another hateful pause)
“I’ll drink it…” (climbs onto the countertop above the mini-fridge in the Geisha Inn, braces himself, then reaches for the plastic tumbler).

Let us draw a veil over the rest of this sordid scene.

…according to a Kerry daughter, tonight at the Democratic convention, after describing John Kerry performing CPR on a hamster. She insists that this really happened, and I have no reason to doubt her.

I took her point:

John Kerry is ready to perform CPR on America.

Moral subjectivists hold that there are no oughts, that there is nothing which men ought or ought not do. Moral objectivists hold that there are oughts indispensible to any man.

Here’s an example of an indiispensible ought: You ought to reject nonsense.

There is no coherent argument that can be offered aginst this ought, it is implied in every coherent human argument.

LaPlace said of God: “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

And that is sound. But Laplace did have need of oughts, every argument he ever offered relies on an indispensible ought.

Who needs objective oughts? You do.

I’m sure everyone’s gonna drop a few bucks into the Lynndie England Defense Fund.

From Antiwar.com.

What do these two men have in common?

They know the value of time and how not to waste it. They’re the high cog, high achieving better halves of their respective tickets in Campaign 2004 and, historically, they’ve found better things to do on election days than wank themselves in a voting booth. Both Cheney and Edwards have only recently acquired the bad habit of voting. And why do you suppose that is?

The soft sinister paw of the Mouthless One ( heavenly, terrestrial and infernal Hello Kitty, Sanrio character of a thousand forms, thirsty for the blood and terror of mortal men) can be briefly seen behind the shabby threadbare veil we call “reality”. in this interview[/i] with the late highly embittered Italian splatter film director Lucio Fulci:

ML: About DOOR TO SILENCE, I heard that Joe D’Amato has reedited it.

LF: (angry) Bullshit. He hasn’t the right to talk, he hasn’t even paid me! He changed the music score, making a big mistake. It was perfect for my movie. Recently I was invited to a Fest in London where they screened the print with the original soundtrack. It has been an incredible success. It’s an extraordinary movie.

ML: Maybe. But it isn’t a commercial movie.

LF: I don’t care about the audience. I told Aristide (Massaccesi) not to do it, but he insisted. It’s shot in real time, ninety minutes. I wanted to insert a chronometer in order to visualize the passing of time, but Aristide took it off.

ML: Weren’t you pissed off from the ridiculous pseudonym printed on the poster?

LF: Let me explain. It was the fault of a woman with shitty breath, a despicable being called Lucaroni. She told Aristide that “in this moment Fulci isn’t fashionable… let’s call him Simon Kittay”. Even the Japanese asked me to explain about this matter. She isn’t working for Massaccesi anymore, hah!

H. Simon Kittay is the full “pseudonym” in question. H. Simon Kittay….H. Simon Kittay…Hello S. Kitty! “Even the Japanese asked me to explain.” As well they might!

It all makes sense now. This mysterious ill-omened female known as “Lucaroni” - obviously she “isn’t working for Massaccesi anymore” because she was merely a resurrected soulless walking corpse (thus the breath problem - no matter how much Lysol she secretly gargled) and was returned to the shadowy Kingdom of the Dead when she had played her role in manifesting the Kitty’s will on this mortal plane.

And what was Hello Kitty’s purpose in this working? Was it not to demonstrate to hapless mortal men that Austrian economics (indeed, all economics) is vanity, when at any moment unseen forces can arbitrarily warp events in surreal, meaningless ways. Of course it makes no economic sense to force Lucio Fulci (who was and still is very popular among devotees of Eurosplatter) to work under the name of “H. Simon Kittay” .

But the transparant symbolism of the name was a clear sign to seekers after esoteric knowledge that H. Kitty was asserting that all things are really held in Her cute grasp, and men must exalt Her dark name even if they are unaware of what they are really doing. Thus Austrian economics is disproved, made meaningless - we are in the paws of those who toy with us as we toy with licensed plush collectable merchandise.

There are strange and terrible things loose in the world, things not dreamt of in the Catellarctic philosophy, and most terrible of all is that enigmatic, ubiquitous presence men call Hello Kitty.

“Imagination is much stronger pressed by the terrors of Hell” - Lucio Fulci

Another day, another heartening story from Iraq:

DRAGNET: Officers impose gun control one house at a time, take each family’s AK-47

That’s the short of it: government gun confiscation in lovely, liberated Iraq. Not that I’m shocked, or anything - if you’re willing to drop “precision bombs” into crowded city neighborhoods, helping the local thugs rough up a few locals and take their stuff probably isn’t going to bother you too much.

These sorts of tidbits have been appearing since the opening of The War Against Terror, and there’s been one thing in common throughout the continuing reports of thefts and assaults: the deafening silence from folks who are supposedly against gun control. Oh, there’s plenty of talk-talk about Schumer, or Feinstein, or Boxer, or Kerry. Heck, there’s even occasional mention of weapons confiscation in Britain or Canada or some other socialist paradise. But Iraq? Afghanistan?

Nothing. Or worse:

Peshawar, Pakistan, located only a few miles from Afghanistan`s busiest border crossing, is one of the world`s most notorious cash-and-carry gun markets. Machine guns are common. One can send a 12-year-old boy with a few $20 bills to the bazaar to buy an AK-47 as easily as an American mom sends her child out for a loaf of bread.

…

Unlike U.S. gun shows–where licensed dealers must do the same background checks and fill out the same federal forms as they do when selling a gun in a store–Asia`s gun markets are infamous for cash-and-carry transactions. Anyone of any age who has the money can buy, no questions asked.

“Notorious”! “Infamous”! “Cash-and-carry”! The horror! The horror!

People have a right to keep and bear arms, and it’s an absolute right, for everyone, everywhere. Unless they’re funny-looking foreigners in a country the US government doesn’t like. Then they better shut their dirty wog mouths about it before they get their feelings hurt, see. People have a right to be secure in their homes and property, unless American troops really, really want to kick down their doors and have a look around. And no one ought to go shopping at a free-market gun bazaar, where they sell machineguns and stuff and don’t even do a background check.

And the “blogosphere”? Pardon me while I snort in disgust at what I’ve seen offered up from conservatives here. Most of it’s mush-brained cheerleading for “our boys”, the rest sneers at the evil brown-skinned natives.

And what, in the end, is all of this utter repudiation of principle going to gain them? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all, except perhaps the ability to pretend not to see the knives waiting in the shadows. Knives that they’re helping to sharpen, right now.

Contemptible, every last one of them.

At Two–Four, a slice of life less painful. From the Beck family archives, a moment in time when transportation security consisted of a 14″ sign telling you, essentially, that Federal law prohibits unlawful behavior and have a nice day.

[Co-editor’s Note: STOP THE PRESSES!!! Check out the convention coverage from the Knockdown News Network. Watching this I felt as I did watching Ian McShane as Al Swearengen for the first time - a stunning debut from KNN. -jtk]

RKN writes in my recent terrorism/economy thread:

Besides, there’s already an ethical/political framework for “net utility impact on all the people…” — it’s called Utilitarianism. Seems pointless to me to coin yet another -ism.

But Cism is substantially different from Uism, so why shouldn’t I use a different word? A Uian wants “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This is quite different than Cism. I want my happiness - that’s my goal. And when I’m just doing actions on my own, I don’t worry about net societal utility (since I’m not a Utilitarian), just about my own happiness.

But when it comes to cooperative activities with others, I can’t just do that. Strangely enough, other people don’t seem to want to make me happy, they want to make themselves happy instead. I want them to agree to plans / policies / actions /institutions that benefit me. But they won’t agree unless these things benefit them. Hence in my selfish desire to be happy, I must search for things which benefit all of us.

Things which benefit society on net[1] are likely, on average, to benefit me. Furthermore everyone else is likely to feel the same way, and so agree to them. Hence such things are selfishly good *and* practical.

A Uian (claims to[2]) constantly search for net utility maximization because its a moral imperative. I consider net utility as a factor in discussing group policies as a form of practical selfishness. Big difference.

[1] Yes, yes, I know this makes some of you reach for your guns.
[2] But we know its bullshit because humans are wired to be selfish.

A Fox News anchor just said: “President Clinton doesn’t want to upstage Senator Kerry tonight”.

Unfortunately I was drinking coffee.