The Probability Broach: Nuke the moon

A planet exploding from within

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Now that the Continental Congress has gotten past the preliminaries, they call Win Bear to the stand. But before he can do that, he comes face to face with the bad guys and their henchmen:

A bit nervous, I got up and walked slowly to the dais, detouring to approach the Hamiltonians. Sure enough, there was Oscar Burgess, sneering at me. I glanced at the SecPol agent. “Stay out of this, slime! Madison, I want my friends back, quick, in good condition—Hold it, Kleingunther, or you won’t leave this room attached to your nuts!” I shoved Burgess back, gave Kleingunther an elbow in the eye, and snatched their leader’s lower lip, digging in with my thumb. “And Madison,” I warned, watching blood seep up around my thumbnail, “I’ve got no more scruples about initiated force than you do, So think about it, while you’ve got a chance!”

I let go, wiped my hand on Burgess’s shirt, and pointedly turned my back on them (not without a nervous qualm or two), continuing on in a widening circle of shocked silence.

This gross scene would make more sense if the Hamiltonians tried to obstruct Win from getting up to testify, and he had to shove and fight past them.

As it is, Smith is going out of his way to show his hero starting a fight, violently attacking people who’d done nothing to him. That’s supposed to be a massive no-no in this world. Logically, it should discredit his testimony in the eyes of everyone present. Imagine a prosecution witness called to testify at a trial, and just before he takes the stand, he punches the defendant!

Like many libertarians, Smith has the same hypocritical attitude as Ayn Rand. They both say initiating violence is always bad, but what they show is that it’s okay when the good guys do it.

Win tells his story: how he was a police officer on his Earth, how he discovered the Probability Broach and stumbled through it into this world, and how he’s been dodging assassination attempts ever since at the hands of the Hamiltonians. Madison gets a chance to cross-examine him, deriding his testimony as the ravings of a lunatic:

Madison came charging down the aisle. “Isn’t it true you’re a charlatan? An ordinary, third-rate commercial peeper, covering up thefts from a client whose trust you’ve also rewarded by implicating him in this fantasy of yours? Speak up! The nation must understand the depths of your depravity!”

…I struggled not to get angrier. “Mr. Vice President, in the place I come from—in my history, George Washington defeated the Whiskey Rebellion. Just as there were two George Washingtons, in your world where he was executed, and in mine where he died in bed, there are two Edward William Bears—and Madison’s perfectly aware of it. The Edward Bear in your world, a man I’ve come to regard as a brother, is a detective in Laporte. I met him—”

“Just a moment,” Madison interrupted. “If there are two of you, why not simply produce this superfluous Edward Bear for us?”

“Because, you son of a bitch, he’s one of the people you kidnapped aboard the San Francisco Palace!”

Denying Win’s story as a madman’s delusions would be a clever move, except the scientists have already presented proof that the Probability Broach exists.

It would have worked better, story-wise, if the bad guys had been able to suppress the scientists’ testimony. That way, it would just be Win’s word against Madison’s. The delegates would have been justifiably skeptical of Win’s wild story about parallel universes, and it would have made sense when the Continental Congress voted to do nothing about the Hamiltonian threat, which is what’s shortly going to happen.

For their piece de resistance, the good guys show the military films Win and Ed stole from Madison’s house:

Past midnight, when I was beyond feeling tired, they showed more film—sixteen millimeter, this time. Before Madison could finish screaming protestations, the Seventh Continental Congress sat, stricken by a horror they’d never imagined possible.

The old films were grainy, scratched with age and many reproductions: over a large industrial city, a single B-29, a steel cylinder dropping from its belly. A flash, smoke billowing 50,000 feet, forming the poisonous mushroom of death. Then Nagasaki.

Then bigger, better bombs, fission giving way to fusion, kilotons to megadeaths. Years passed: Japanese cities, Pacific islands, Nevada, the Sahara, the Negev. Finally that hideous night in my world when the Soviets delivered their ultimatum to China, a last “humane” demonstration: a searing flash in the dark that left a jagged crack from pole to pole, visible across the surface of the moon. The Chinese surrendered the next morning.

With this scene, we’ve taken a swerve into alternate history.

Until now, we’ve been led to believe that the world Win Bear comes from is our world, either in the present (of the book) or the very near future. L. Neil Smith’s argument is that Win’s reality—an oppressive, bureaucracy-choked dystopia with arbitrary laws enforced by ruthless secret police—is where we’re headed if we don’t embrace his vision of anarcho-capitalism.

But now, late in the book, we get conclusive proof that Win’s world isn’t our world at all, and never was. Needless to say, in our timeline, the Soviets never nuked the Moon.

There are grains of historical truth in this. It’s true that the Soviet Union and China didn’t always get along; at one point, they fought a violent border clash that escalated to nuclear saber-rattling.

It’s also true that detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon was something the Soviet Union contemplated as a show of scientific and military prowess, but they never attempted it, fearing the risk of the missile failing and crashing back to earth. (In fact, the U.S. also studied the feasibility of doing it, but chose not to for the same reason. One of the scientists who did some calculations for the project was a young Carl Sagan.)

Smith depicts the Continental Congress as horror-stricken, shocked into speechlessness at this revelation. For a place that hands out guns to toddlers, the North American Confederacy seems awfully squeamish about violence.

Throughout this book, Smith has told us that he loves weapons, of all kinds and varieties. He was insistent that everyone should carry means of dealing death at all times. He says it’s essential to a free society. In fact, on his archived personal webpage, he says it’s the one issue that supersedes all others:

Make no mistake: all politicians—even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership—hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it’s an X-ray machine. It’s a Vulcan mind-meld. It’s the ultimate test to which any politician—or political philosophy—can be put.

If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash—for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.

So why is this where he draws the line? Why should politicians gasp and flinch at “the average constituent” having access to nuclear weapons, but not at anything else? Why is this the one weapon he disapproves of, when all the rest are totally fine and even good in his eyes?

It can’t be that nukes have an unacceptable death toll. While nuclear war may be especially scary to contemplate, if you compare the number of people killed by nukes to the number of people killed by plain ordinary bullets, there’s no contest. Are people killed by guns less dead than people killed by nuclear bombs?

Perhaps his argument would be that guns can be used for self-defense, but nuclear weapons can’t. The crushing irony is that the defenders of nuclear weapons make the same argument!

The cold logic of deterrence is that a country armed with nukes has nothing to fear from its neighbors, because they know that any attack would invite their own annihilation. That’s the same argument Smith makes—that being armed makes us all safer, because no rational criminal would dare to molest an armed victim. Somehow, he accepts that logic in one case, but not the other.

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New on OnlySky: Factory resetting the immune system

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how genetic engineering is giving us the power to “factory reset” the immune system.

The human immune system is a marvelously complex product of evolution, adapted to target and destroy harmful viruses and bacteria, even kinds it’s never encountered before, while leaving the body’s own cells alone. But its mechanisms of tolerance aren’t perfect, and when they fail, the result is autoimmune disease: immune cells that attack the body’s organs and tissues as if they were pathogenic invaders.

A technology that was originally designed for cancer treatment is giving us the power to fix this problem. With CRISPR and other means of genetic engineering, we can recode the immune system almost like a computer programmer fixing a software bug. If the promise of this therapy is borne out in clinical trials, we’ll be able to delete the rogue cells selectively and cure autoimmune disease without the indiscriminate carpet-bombing of immunosuppressant drugs.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

CAR-T therapy originated as a cancer treatment. Scientists extract killer T cells from a person’s body and rewrite the genes for their antigen receptors, giving them new receptors that are custom-designed to match the target we want them to attack. The modified T cells are induced to multiply and reinfused into the body, where they’ll hopefully go after the threat they didn’t “notice” before.

CAR-T is well-suited to treat blood cancers, like leukemia and lymphoma, that frequently arise from mutations in B cells. Scientists can modify T cells to target CD19, a protein expressed on the surface of B cells. This is considered an ideal target because you don’t need B cells to survive. If the therapy wipes out healthy B cells along with the cancerous ones, that’s fine, because the healthy ones will repopulate over time.

However, this leads to a natural followup question: Couldn’t this method also be used to treat autoimmune disease caused by rogue B cells?

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The Probability Broach: Whistle blowers

A silver pea whistle

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Win, Lucy and their allies at the Continental Congress have outmaneuvered the Hamiltonians by getting the delegates to vote for unlimited debate. That gives them all the time they need to present their evidence that jackbooted government thugs from Win’s world are planning an invasion, and that the Hamiltonians are in league with them.

Deejay and Oolorie, the scientists who built the Probability Broach, are demonstrating its capabilities by showing videos of Win’s world:

Resuming the Chair, Jenny called on Deejay Thorens, via Telecom, to describe the Probability Broach. A second circuit, to Emperor Norton University, allowed Ooloorie to chip in by split-screen. It was the first I’d seen of Deejay’s recordings of my world. They were depressing. The United States now looked dingy and threadbare to me. I’d forgotten already what grime, noxious fumes, and poverty in the soul of a society can do to the people who have to live there.

Even though he grew up in that dystopian place, Win has internalized the philosophy of the North American Confederacy to the point that he now finds poverty an unfamiliar and disturbing spectacle.

This highlights something I’ve noted before, which is how weirdly, implausibly egalitarian this anarcho-capitalist society is. Everything is cheap and everyone is wealthy; even an average working joe like Ed Bear can own a mansion, multiple cars, and all the drugs, guns and consumer goods he wants.

How can this be the case in a society built on law-of-the-jungle capitalism? Is there no indentured servitude in the North American Confederacy? Are there no private estates with workers locked into serfdom contract? Are there no homeless people, no shantytowns, no workhouses? Isn’t extreme inequality the point of capitalism, because it motivates people to strive?

Other libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, take the stance that in their ideal world, a tiny number of the ultra-rich would live like god-kings, while the rest of humanity would be peons. As evil as this is, at least it’s a realistic outcome of their premises.

But Smith declares himself an anarchist who loves freedom, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to depict corporate feudalism or aristocratic hierarchies. What doesn’t make sense is why those things don’t exist in a world of unbridled capitalism. He has no explanation for why they’re not there.

Suddenly, a delegate rises and demands to be heard. It’s Freeman K. Bertram, the head of the Paratronics corporation, under whose auspices the Probability Broach was built (and, as we found out, he’s also on the side of the bad guys):

“The Chair recognizes Mr. F. K. Bertram.”

“Madame President, we demand this demonstration cease! Those recordings are private property, which these two individuals”—he pointed to the inset images of Deejay and Ooloorie—”are using without authorization!”

… “Is this true, Dr. Thorens?” asked Jenny, knowing perfectly well it was.

“I’m afraid so,” Deejay admitted ruefully.

Bertram shook his fist at the ‘com. “Thorens, you and your, your—specimen, are discharged! Turn those recordings over this very minute!”

This raises a couple of questions.

First of all: Bertram acts as if he can give commands to Deejay and Oolorie, or fire them at will. Can he?

This is the exact reason why academic tenure exists: so scientists and academics can challenge conventional wisdom, advocate for unpopular positions, and otherwise express their views without worrying about displeasing their bosses. At the very least, they can’t just be summarily fired; there’s a process the university has to go through. Is there any such thing as tenure in the NAC?

Second, on the same note: what about faculty unions? Once again, this is a major reason why unions exist: so workers have collective power to push back against unfair, unreasonable, or unethical demands. Does anyone in the NAC belong to a union that gives them this kind of protection? Does that even exist?

Third: are there whistleblower laws? Yet again, this is the reason why such laws exist in the real world: so people can report malfeasance committed by their employer without being punished or retaliated against. Exposing your boss’ secret villainous plot for world domination would certainly seem to fall under that heading.

Obviously, an anarchy like the NAC has no laws, period, so there wouldn’t be whistleblower laws. It apparently also doesn’t have unions, tenure or other worker protections, since no one raises those as obstacles to Bertram trying to shut down the scientists. The only reasonable conclusion is that all employment in the NAC is “at will”—the legal term for an arrangement where employees have no rights and employers can fire them at any time for any reason. But that makes it even less believable that this society is so free and so equal, when not starving depends on staying in your boss’ good graces.

“Wait a minute!” It was Olongo, out of order and towering above the rostrum. “What do you mean, private property? I’m one of your stockholders, and I want to see those recordings!”

“Mr. Vice President, with due respect, we are obligated to make decisions in the best interests of the company as a whole.”

This gives Win an idea, for once. Since nine-tenths of the NAC is represented at this meeting, that must include other Paratronics shareholders. What if they call an impromptu shareholders’ meeting to vote on releasing these records?

Ironically, this scene furnishes a neat demonstration of why private-property rights untempered by any other consideration are a bad idea when it comes to stopping unethical behavior. If Paratronics had been a privately held company, or if a majority of its stock was held by Hamiltonian conspirators, the good guys would have been screwed.

Lucy thinks this is a good idea, and tells Win to bring it to Jenny:

I crossed the great floor self-consciously, but I needn’t have worried: as the wrangling continued down front, I noticed delegates napping, several reading books or their electronic counterparts, and at least two poker games along my route to the rostrum. Someone was working a complicated 3-D crossword in his display, others were walking around, chatting, eating dinner.

As a reminder, Jenny just informed the Continental Congress that they were facing nuclear annihilation and conquest. But even with those stakes clearly laid out, some delegates couldn’t care less and aren’t paying the slightest attention to the proceedings.

Smith probably meant this as an illustration of his principle that everyone should have a right to ignore the government if they so choose. Under the circumstances, it just makes the people of his ancap utopia look stupid. A sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads, and they’re so lazy and incurious that they’re napping or playing games rather than doing anything about it. That may be a more realistic depiction of libertarianism than the author intended.

Image credit: Zephyris via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license

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New on OnlySky: Cutting off the tail of climate change

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some news worth celebrating: we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario for climate change.

Several years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a range of scenarios, dubbed the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs, that set out a range of different visions for the future, depending on how much progress humanity made toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The worst of these, known as RCP8.5, painted an apocalyptic picture of a world so hot and chaotic that billions would be at risk from heat waves, coastal cities would flood, agriculture would be starved by drought, and mass migrations would spark war. Civilization would be at risk of utter collapse. That was the future we were headed toward until recently.

The good news is that this dire scenario now looks like it will never come to pass. Despite the best efforts of rich petrostates and science deniers, humanity has made solid progress toward decarbonizing the economy and replacing fossil fuels with green energy. While we waited too long to act and as a consequence have already missed the best-case scenario of a world that completely avoids climate change, there’s reason to believe that worst-case scenario is off the table as well.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

The RCP8.5 scenario represents 4°C or more of warming. As a reference point, this is roughly the same magnitude as the temperature difference between today and the last glacial maximum, when northern Europe and North America were buried under mile-thick ice sheets. Try to picture a future that’s as much hotter than the present as the present is hotter than that.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), you don’t need to use your imagination. Climate scientists have sketched a picture.

In a world with 4°C of warming, 4.7 billion people would be exposed to potentially lethal levels of heat over the course of the year. Summer temperatures in equatorial regions like the Middle East and North Africa could reach 60°C (140°F) on the hottest days. Southern Spain would become a desert. Cities like Karachi and Kolkata would become uninhabitable. As journalist David Wallace-Wells put it in a famous article: “At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”

4°C is a nightmare scenario. That’s why it should be a vast relief to hear that this isn’t the path we’re on.

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The Probability Broach: Robert’s rules of order

Members of the press raising their hands to ask questions

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Now that the Continental Congress is in session and other business has been dealt with, Win and his friends finally have a chance to inform the North American Confederacy about the enemy at the gates. President Jenny Smythe is on their side, so she yields the gavel to her vice president and addresses the delegates.

(The North American Confederacy’s vice president is a sapient gorilla, Dr. Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, pronounced “Fanshaw”. I’ve commented on this before, but it’s hard not to read racial undertones into the fact that L. Neil Smith never depicts a single Black person in his anarcho-capitalist utopia, but does have multiple named characters who are talking apes.)

“Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Assembled delegates,” she addressed the cameras, “people of North America and the System. Twice in the last century, our culture has embraced new peoples—peoples we had long known, but failed properly to understand. I refer, of course, to simian beings and to the people of the seas, the cetaceans. Today, we anticipate a time when new life is discovered on a distant world, life that shares with us that sum of values we call Civilization.”

“…Fate has chosen me to bring you that news—with two shocking qualifications: the new world is called Earth, its location, anywhere you look around you, for it shares space with our own, existing at a different point along one of the several dimensions of time.”

The delegates are already buzzing over this shocking news, but Jenny has more:

“Ladies and gentlemen! We shall be at war with this new Earth within days—weeks at the most a terrible new kind of war, ending only when all life on both our planets is utterly extinguished!

…Therefore, I move that Congress declare a state of emergency to deal with this situation before civilization itself is destroyed.”

It’s important to include this excerpt for later, because it shows that no one in the NAC wasn’t informed about exactly what level of threat they were facing.

Upon hearing Jenny’s ominous news, the assembly is in an uproar:

A tidal wave of noise swept over the crowded room. Lucy grabbed her mike, punching for recognition. This too was pre-arranged. “Mr. Vice President!—Shuddup, you varmints!—Mr. Vice President!” In exasperation, she drew her enormous pistol, triggering three devastating blasts into the timbered ceiling. Sawdust fell, and with it, silence.

“The Chair recognizes Lucille Kropotkin.”

“About bloody time, too, Fanshaw, old ape. Okay, I second Jenny’s motion, so’s we can explain to all these yahoos here exactly what’s been going on!”

But the Hamiltonians are attending this Congress too, and they’re not standing idly by as their plot is exposed before the world. John Jay Madison rises to speak and is recognized by the chair:

“Mr. Vice President, we have just witnessed the introductory maneuvers of an unprecedented criminal conspiracy… I myself have been accosted by these lunatics, and have some acquaintance with what they’re trying to sell. In the interests of decency, I demand that their fantasies be dismissed immediately, so that we may all go home.” Boos, hisses, interspersed with a cheer or two. One of his henchman rose and shouted, “Second!”

“Out of order, Dr. Skinner. There’s a motion already on the floor.”

This gambit having failed, the bad guys try another one, offering a formal amendment to Jenny’s motion to reconvene as a “committee-of-the-whole” in order to study the problem at length before making any decisions. After a back-and-forth of dueling amendments, it passes:

Slam! went the gavel. “The amendment passes by a majority of 99.44 percent. This body is recessed and reconstituted as a committee-of-the-whole!”

I groaned. Had we lost?

“Great goiters, no!” said Lucy. “We were hoping for something like this, but couldn’t figure a way to swing it ourselves. Those Hamiltonians did it for us, bless their cruddy little hides.”

Win is baffled, but she explains: The bad guys’ plan was to do the NAC version of a filibuster—trying to tie the Congress up in endless debate so they could never actually vote on anything. But, as Lucy says gleefully, the villains played right into their hands. Until that motion passed, any speaker was limited to ten minutes, which would have severely limited their options on how to make their case about what should be done. Now all time limits on debate are suspended, and the good guys have as much time as they want to present their evidence.

L. Neil Smith intended all of this to be boring and convoluted, since he hates politics. But it points to a different problem that I want to flag: None of this parliamentary procedure should exist in an ancap society.

This stuff about “the chair recognizes” and “second the motion” and strict time limits on how long people get to speak are vestiges of a political order that Smith says he doesn’t accept. I thought this society had no laws and no rules!

In an anarchy like this one, which is “free” in a might-makes-right, law-of-the-jungle sense, the way it should work is that when you want to talk, you stand up and start yelling, and the loudest yeller wins by drowning out everyone else. After all, Lucy fired a gun into the ceiling when she wanted to talk! Why is she the only one who’s doing that?

Of course, if they followed this procedure, Congress would be an incomprehensible roar of noise. It would be impossible to agree on anything or take any action, so nothing would ever get done.

That’s an inadvertent demonstration of a philosophical point that this book otherwise staunchly refuses to admit: complete and total freedom isn’t always the best option. Sometimes, you need rules and regulations to get things done. Robert’s Rules of Order, the classic manual of parliamentary procedure, makes this very point to justify its own existence:

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

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New on OnlySky: Conservatism is hazardous to your health

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how American conservatism is slowly killing its adherents.

As recently as the early 2010s, there was no significant difference in American death rates by political affiliation. But sometime within the last decade, that started to change. Conservatives have started dying at higher rates than liberals, not just from COVID-19, but across all causes. This pattern holds true even after controlling for confounding factors like race, income, or geography.

What could be causing this? Here’s one answer: COVID conspiracism, like a malignant cancer, has mutated and spread throughout the ideology of the conservative body politic. They’ve come to mistrust not just the COVID vaccine, not just vaccines in general, but all medical science – and they’re paying the price for it. The Republican party has long fostered a mistrust of science and expertise among its adherents, and now it’s coming back to bite them.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Even as the world was going into lockdown and hospitals were swamped with the dying, conservatives refused to believe any of it. They told themselves that the timing was suspicious; that the pandemic must be a plot to oust Donald Trump from office by causing economic and social disruption just before the election. To that end, they concocted all manner of conspiracy theories to convince themselves that the virus wasn’t real or wasn’t a threat.

But while Fox News pundits and QAnon podcasts could sway conservative voters, they couldn’t alter reality. The virus was real, and it was a threat. Many who refused to believe this fact paid with their lives.

A famous example was the conservative talk show host Phil Valentine, who decried lockdowns, promoted quack therapies, and streamed anti-vaccine documentaries from his website. He argued that it was “common sense” that the coronavirus wasn’t a serious threat and that no drastic measures needed to be taken to stop it.

He then got sick with COVID, was hospitalized, was put on a respirator, and died.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Law of unintended consequences

A beautiful waterfall in the middle of a verdant forest

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

We’ll get back to the proceedings of the anarcho-capitalist legislature soon, but Smith opens this chapter with another quote from one of his fictional mouthpieces that I want to discuss:

I often wonder why the ecology movement attracts leftists—there’s a lesson there you’d think they’d avoid at all costs: the economy is like any other part of the environment, small interferences create elephantine dislocations in later years and unpredictable places. If altering algae populations can cause an Ice Age, it’s equally true that minimum wage laws can cause mass unemployment. If they can learn such things about nature, why can’t they learn them about their own society?

—Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty

This is an argument I haven’t seen before, so let’s spend some time analyzing it.

It’s a clever rhetorical tactic on Smith’s part to compare the economy to nature. It’s true that humans’ well-intentioned interference in nature has sometimes backfired and caused worse outcomes than if we had just left things alone.

The classic example is forest managers being vigilant about stamping out small wildfires, which allows dry tinder to build up on the forest floor. Eventually, this results in catastrophic mega-fires that are impossible to extinguish and cause far more destruction.

Obviously, Smith wants to argue that what’s true for the natural world is also true of economics, and that everyone would be better off if we stood back and stopped trying to interfere with the invisible hand of the market. However, there are some important points of dissimilarity in this metaphor.

The first one is that the economy is a human creation, shaped by human decisions, and therefore it’s more under our control than nature is. We can’t control either one completely or perfectly—as pundits have noted, the president can’t dictate whether the stock market goes up or down, nor is there a dial in the Oval Office he can turn to raise or lower prices—but we do have the ability to create incentives which affect people’s behavior on a large scale.

For example, we can discourage consumption by raising taxes (like with “sin taxes” on alcohol and cigarettes). We can encourage saving and investing by raising central bank interest rates, or stimulate consumer spending by lowering them. We don’t have the ability to influence natural cycles in a similar way.

The second point is that most of us believe we have a moral responsibility to protect our fellow humans, in a way we don’t for other species.

When a lion kills a gazelle or a parasitic wasp lays its eggs in a living caterpillar, we don’t consider that an evil that needs correcting. But most of us do feel an obligation to do something when child laborers are mangled by machinery, or sweatshop workers burn to death in a blaze because there are no fire exits. This tips the balance toward intervention in human affairs, whereas we consider nature to be amoral and not obligated to abide by our notions of right and wrong.

The third point is that, despite what Smith seems to believe, no one—not even the most dedicated ecologist—argues that there should be no interference with nature under any circumstances.

After all (unless you’re an antinatalist), we all agree that human beings have to live on this planet. That means we don’t have a choice about interfering with nature. Whether we take up a lifestyle as cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers, grow crops in industrial monocultures and live in skyscrapers, or build a solarpunk utopia with windmills and organic fields, we can’t avoid having an impact on the planet. The question is what kind of impact we’re going to have, and what interventions we should or shouldn’t allow.

Ecologists and environmentalists do believe that human interference with nature is warranted in some cases. For example, when a deadly pandemic arises, even though that’s a “natural” phenomenon, we still create vaccines and treatments. We breed crops and livestock to be more productive to serve our needs, even if those varieties would go extinct without us.

We also advocate interference in nature to undo our past mistakes. This may take the form of removing invasive species from ecosystems where they didn’t evolve and don’t belong, such as the effort to catch lionfish in the Caribbean, or to stop the spread of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes.

Many ecologists also work on captive breeding programs to restore species that were driven to the brink of extinction by human errors. The successful reintroduction program for the California condor, or the attempt to develop chestnut trees that are resistant to blight fungus, are two high-profile examples.

If I can speak on behalf of ecologists, I’d argue what they really believe is we shouldn’t intervene unwisely. Before we take an action that will interfere with natural patterns, we have to study the downstream consequences, weigh the balance of potential harms and benefits, and act only when we have reason to believe it will yield a better outcome than not acting. Not coincidentally, that’s the same thing we’d say about the economy.

Last but not least—and this is the biggest point Smith glides past—these aren’t separate and unrelated questions. To refuse to interfere in the economy is to interfere in nature, and vice versa.

When chemical plants dump cancer-causing sludge into rivers, developers bulldoze storm-absorbing coastal wetlands to build beach resorts, or factories spew ozone-destroying CFCs or climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere… Smith’s libertarian logic would have us shrug our shoulders and do nothing, despite the clear consequences that result from letting these industries run amok without regulation. Often, allowing capitalists to ravage nature in the name of profit destroys more value than it creates.

In an earlier chapter, he hinted that individuals could sue polluters. But there are obvious reasons this won’t work, such as the near-impossibility of proving their pollution definitively caused harm in a single case, even if we know it’s harmful in general.

Before taking any drastic action, either with regard to the economy or the environment, it’s always good to cultivate humility and to study the results thoroughly. But that doesn’t mean we should never intervene for fear of unforeseen consequences. That’s not sound ecological thinking; it’s the bad-faith “doubt is our product” marketing used by tobacco companies, oil drillers, and other merchants of death to evade regulation as long as possible.

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The Probability Broach: Heads in the sand

The Probability Broach, chapter 18

Win and Lucy are twiddling their thumbs in the meeting chamber, waiting for the Continental Congress to formally convene. Win is upset about how flippant everyone seems to be acting, given the scale of the crisis:

“But it should be taken seriously,” I finally protested. “It’s only the seventh Continental Congress in—”

“Even so, I’ll bet more folks’re watching that Mike Morrison western on channel 962 tonight. Everybody’s got a right to ignore the state and be safe doin’ it. Makes up for fanatics, like me.”

This is a clear demonstration of why anarcho-capitalism is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too fantasy. Smith believes everyone should have a right to ignore the state, and be safe doing so.

Obviously, this is impossible. It’s pure wishful thinking. The reason we have a state is that there are collective-action problems that affect everyone and that can’t just be ignored or wished away. Someone has to organize an evacuation if there’s a flood or a wildfire; to set up quarantine and contact tracing in case of a plague. This whole book is another example: the prospect of an invasion by a Hamiltonian army with nuclear weapons.

You can’t make a problem like that go away by ignoring it. But if you do choose to ignore it, you can’t insist that you have a “right” to be safe from it regardless. Dangers don’t disappear just because you stick your head in the sand so you can’t see them.

As more time drags on, Win gets impatient. He fears for the lives of his friends who’ve been kidnapped by the Hamiltonians, and it’s exasperating that the Continental Congress seems to be in no hurry:

New names blinked onto the screen, the room gradually filled. Important-looking people stopped by to greet Lucy like a long-lost friend. Apparently I’d underestimated this batty little old lady. We ordered a meal. More nothing happened. Finally: “When does this show get on the road anyway?”

… “Ain’t no certified regulation starting time. How could there be?”

“God damn it, Lucy! Clarissa and Ed are prisoners! Maybe dead already.” I cringed inwardly at the words. “And we’re sitting here on our—”

“I know. But whatever happens—even to them—is gonna happen right here, and not until at least nine-tenths of North America’s represented.”

As Lucy explains, the Continental Congress can’t begin until 90% of North America is represented, either as in-person attendees or virtually by proxy votes. Win checks the big board:

I looked: 0.83901256. “Eighty-three percent?”

“Closer t’eighty-four, and no Congress till it hits ninety.”

I brought this up last week, but I’ll reiterate it here: It’s glaringly obvious that this can’t possibly work in Smith’s anarchist politics.

The only way to know if 90% of people are represented is if there’s an authoritative record of how many people live in the North American Confederacy. But Smith has consistently said that no such thing exists. In fact, people there are so fanatical about privacy that they’d shoot a census-taker on sight.

This is a problem that’s dogged the entire book, like with Smith’s discussion of traffic fatalities, or his belief that large, heavily armed corporations would voluntarily obey an unfavorable ruling from a private arbitrator. It’s cargo cult anarcho-capitalism: he assumes that the state can vanish, but all the state functions that he takes for granted would persist as before.

(Also, who decided 90% was the threshold? Everyone treats that number as suspiciously official. Why not 95%, or 85%?)

Win frets that this could take weeks, but Lucy says to give her some credit. She and Jenny Smythe, president of the NAC, have been working behind the scenes for weeks to wrangle enough delegates to get this show on the road. Sure enough, just as she says it, the number hits 0.9:

Jenny entered without fanfare, punching in at her terminal.

Her image appeared overhead as she said softly, “The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is now in session. Mr. Parliamentarian, may I have the protocols?”

Win is eager to speak, but unfortunately, he and his friends aren’t the only ones who have agendas to bring before the Congress. There are other people who get time, too, as Lucy explains:

“I thought we called this Congress to warn—”

“That’s where you’re wrong. This is just us good ol’ folks, whose number ‘happens’ to be ninety percent, remember?

…everyone’s entitled to speak, and in practice, they reserve space on Jenny’s agenda, in case we ever have a Congress. Some been waiting for decades, carried over from her predecessors’ lists. Offering ’em this rare shot helped us put it together. Lucky there ain’t ten times as many.”

Win grouses, but sits impatiently as other delegates take their turn at the podium. One group (the “Franklinites”) wants Congress to agree to meet every year – a notion that’s roundly booed and quickly voted down. The next to speak is a woman who identifies as the leader of the Dissolutionist faction:

“Madame President,” said a pretty, honey-haired girl with a wry smile, “I move that Congress adjourn—”

Catcalls and curses filled the room.

Shouting over the tumult, Jenny exclaimed, “I’ll remind the delegates that a motion to adjourn is always in order! Second?”

“Madame President! May I be allowed to finish my motion?” She was still on her feet, others around her standing in their chairs. The noise died down—what can you add to a motion to adjourn? “Madame President, delegates assembled, I move that this body adjourn—permanently!”

These people are the anarchists’ anarchists. They believe there should be no legislature at all, even this vestigial one, and they’re proposing that it be dissolved permanently. They either don’t know—or, more likely, don’t care—about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It’s head-in-the-sand politics at its finest.

What should be shocking is that Lucy votes for them, despite knowing the stakes:

Lucy had leaped up, shouting, “Second, Second!” Now she came back to herself, grinned sheepishly, and sat down. “Always did have a radical streak, I guess.” She relit her cigar. The Dissolutionists lost, three to one, but for some reason they cheered again, and Lucy beamed.

She treats this as a noble effort that deserves support, even though she was one of the people who worked to get this Congress together – and knowing that if the Dissolutionists succeed in abolishing it before it can do anything, her kidnapped friends will be killed and her world will be annihilated by nuclear bombs. Yet again, Smith’s characters put ideology over common sense.

One more group, the “Neoimperialists”, want the NAC to go to war with any remnants of government left anywhere in the world:

“Nothin’ new,” Lucy explained. “The Neos, mostly war vets, start with a good enough idea. Government’s morally repugnant to any decent person. But how’d they avoid killing a lot of the very folks they’re liberating? Just won’t wash.”

A very common tactic on the right wing – from evangelical Christians to right-wing libertarians – is that they refuse to admit the existence of moral philosophies other than their own. They treat good-faith disagreement about what’s right and wrong as equivalent to vicious indifference to right and wrong.

This passage is an example of that. Lucy says that government is repugnant to “any decent person”. Because the author holds that view, he writes as if it’s the only possible view. Although he wants this book to be a work of persuasion, he’s not trying very hard to appeal to anyone who doesn’t already agree with him.

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New on OnlySky: Don’t look now, but Ukraine is winning

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how, after four years of war with Russia, Ukraine is turning the tide.

In 2022, at the beginning of Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukraine was fighting for its survival. Western weapons allowed it to stymie the Russian advance, at which point the war bogged down into WW1-style trench warfare. Russia willingly sacrificed enormous numbers of soldiers for minimal territorial gains, but Ukraine was unable to recapture most of the territory they’d lost.

This was the status quo for years. But in the last few months, even without American aid, Ukraine has been slowly gaining the initiative. Rapid innovation in drone technology has allowed them to overcome Russia’s air defenses, leading to a steady tempo of strikes on oil refineries and other strategic targets, as well as the embarrassing spectacle of Ukrainian drones attacking Moscow. How long can Russia sustain this punishment before their economy collapses?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

At the beginning of the invasion, Vladimir Putin believed he’d conquer Ukraine in just three days. Russian soldiers were so confident of meeting no resistance, they packed their dress uniforms for a triumphal march through the streets of Kyiv.

It wasn’t just Russians who held this opinion. Many American conservatives counseled Ukraine to surrender because they argued that Russia was invincible, Ukraine had no hope of victory, and the sooner they capitulated, the easier it would go for them.

In May 2026, four years later, Russian refineries are going up in flames and Ukrainian attack drones are buzzing over Moscow.

How the tables have turned.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Who speaks for me?

Two buttons reading "Vote" on a folded flag

The Probability Broach, chapter 18

The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is about to get underway. Win and Lucy file into the delegates’ chamber, which is half legislative chamber and half stadium, complete with vendors hawking overpriced snack food:

I don’t know what I’d been expecting—the U.N. General Assembly or Flash Gordon’s Bathroom—it was a barn: weathered pine, rough beams, dominated by a huge Telecom screen up front. Somewhere a vendor was crying “Peanuts! Piñons! Fried Grasshoppers!” My belly rumbled and I tasted greasy hamburger. Two walls were stepped into tiers of upholstered benches. Thousands of desks cluttered the football field-sized floor.

“Thousands” of desks in a space the size of a football field? I think L. Neil Smith needs to check his math.

An American football field is 360 feet long by 160 feet wide, or 57,600 square feet. Assuming the delegates’ desks are the size of a standard office cubicle, they’d be 6×6, or 36 square feet. That works out to 1600 desks at most, and that’s making the unrealistic assumption of zero space for aisles.

It turns out Lucy has connections, as much as anyone can have in this anarcho-capitalist society. She’s there in an official capacity as a delegate, so they’re not stuck in the nosebleed seats. They have a reserved desk out on the floor, where the action is.

Her name appeared at the front of the room, among a few others already present, followed by a number: 6076. “My constituency, such as it is, six-thousand-odd people—odd enough t’let me stand for ’em at this quiltin’ bee, anyway. Sure y’won’t have a grasshopper?”

“Ulp!” I shook my head, taking the extra seat. “Lucy, you continue to amaze me. You represent some district in Laporte?”

“No district to it, son. We’re all ‘at large’ here. Though there’s some as shouldn’t be. Anybody can represent anybody else or nobody but themselves. Not even themselves, if they just wanna sit in the gallery and be entertained.”

As Lucy explains to Win, everyone in the NAC is free to attend the Continental Congress, either to participate as a delegate or just to watch. All the proceedings are live-streamed, but only people who are physically present can vote. That’s on purpose, because, as Lucy puts it, “This place is supposed to be inconvenient!”

If you don’t want to attend in person but you do want your voice to be heard, you can assign your vote to someone who is there, and they can cast it on your behalf. There’s no limit to how many proxy votes a single person can have, so any delegate might be only representing themselves, or they might represent a small handful of others, or they might represent thousands or millions. Lucy’s constituents are mostly old friends and fellow veterans whom she fought alongside in the Prussian war.

“Most folks just show up representing friends, neighbors, people in the same trade. Maybe half a dozen are professionals, with a million proxies each.”

“That many?”

“Don’t get sarcastical! Votes don’t amount to much, anyway. It’s what gets said here. Though nothing guarantees anyone’ll listen.” The screen changed again, more delegates arriving, vote-strengths shifting as viewers all over the continent punched in proxies and cancellations. Totals were revised moment by moment; many a politico with thousands of supporters might suddenly discover that, through the miracle of electronics, he was representing no one but himself.

This is the most detailed picture Smith gives of how he thinks government should work, so I want to spend this week discussing it.

Let me start with the good: On paper, I like this idea a lot. It would be tricky to get right, but it has some major advantages.

Organizing government this way would put an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other anti-democratic tactics. Since anyone can show up and vote, there’s no need for expensive campaigns—a chronic flaw of our system that limits political participation to the wealthy. If your representative acts contrary to your interests, you don’t need to impeach them or hold a recall election—just switch your proxy to someone else.

It would mean real choice for voters. You wouldn’t be limited to choosing one of the handful of candidates who are willing to run in your district, nor are you stuck with the person who wins 51% of the minority who vote. No one would be shut out of representation because their preferred candidate loses. Everyone can pick the representative who best shares their views, which would mean a legislature that truly reflects the popular will.

That’s the praise. Now the criticism.

This would never work in the kind of anarchist politics L. Neil Smith favors. It should be screamingly obvious that it would fail catastrophically.

Start with the most obvious problem. Smith tells us that Lucy represents 6,076 people. How do they know that?

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, there’s no census. (In fact, Smith specifically says the people of the NAC would shoot a census taker on sight.) There’s no Social Security list or any other official database of the population. There’s no authoritative record of how many people live in this society, where they live, or what their names are.

So, how do they know that a delegate speaks for the number of people they claim to speak for?

If I show up at this meeting and say I represent a million people, how could anyone prove or disprove that? If I gave them a list of names, how would they know I’m not voting on behalf of dead people, or people who don’t live in the North American Confederacy, or outright inventing people who don’t exist? What records would they consult?

Also, even if I could somehow prove my proxies were real people, how would they verify that those people want me to represent them, and I’m not voting on their behalf without their permission? Smith says it’s all done electronically, but any computer system can be hacked.

There are problems in the other direction too. If I’m a voter who wants to influence the Congress, what stops me from assigning my proxy to multiple delegates to boost my views? Or if I have two Telecom setups at home, can I cast two votes?

You can imagine unethical interest groups setting up bot farms—thousands of servers run by software impersonating real people, automatically casting votes for whoever the person in charge wants. It happens all the time on social media, and you can be sure it would be tried here, where the stakes are higher.

Ironically, this system might work with a centralized authority that maintains a voter registration database. But in an anarchy, it never would.

Smith glosses over all these problems. It’s possible that they never occurred to him. That’s a common blind spot afflicting utopian political theorists of all stripes. They’re so sure that everyone would embrace their system and play fair, they never give any thought to dealing with people who are willing to break the rules.

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