The Probability Broach: Go directly to jail

A prison cell with light streaming through a barred window

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

Our heroes fought off a gang of thugs that attacked them in the night, and they’ve captured one of the assailants alive.

Win Bear is all in favor of torturing the prisoner (or at least scaring him into believing he’ll be tortured) to force him to talk. But his friends from the North American Confederacy say that’s not how it works there:

“What the hell do you mean? This guy and his friends rough you and Forsyth up, and now I can’t even bend him a little? We’d know how to take care of him back home!” I began describing the Spanish Inquisition, the Iron Maiden, certain North Korean variations. I was just warming up the hot pincers when Ed worked himself in between the prisoner and me.

“Look, Win, we’ll do this my way. I’ve just called Civil Liberties Association—”

“Huh?”

“What would you prefer, a lynching? He’s got rights, my friend, the same rights you’ll want, if you’re ever accused. The CLA or some other professionally neutral organization takes care of everything. They’ll call his security company, his relatives, friends—”

… “And what do they do, send him to the country club?”

Ed looked exasperated. “He’ll spend the night in custody, just as I might, under similar circumstances, wind up under Professional Protectives’ supervision. No, they won’t let him go—not the way they’re bonded!”

“Y’gotta admit, Eddie,” Lucy butted in again, “the accommodations’re pretty accommodatin’. Shucks, the guest pays for ’em—and recovers with interest if he’s proven innocent.”

On the very next page, L. Neil Smith says “there aren’t any real prisons” in the North American Confederacy. But this is obviously false, and his own writing contradicts it. There are prisons, or at least jails, in this society. It’s just that they’re run by private companies, rather than administered by the government.

There are two big problems with this, both of which L. Neil Smith is blissfully ignorant of. Let’s examine them one at a time.

The first one is that, because this is an anarcho-capitalist society, there are no police, but there are private security companies that perform the same “policing” function. According to Smith, these companies cooperate with each other. I hire my security firm to protect me from criminals, but if I’m accused of a crime, they’re also responsible for holding me in custody until I get a trial.

This would never work. Take a moment to think about the incentives.

Is my security firm going to imprison or punish me, their paying customer, merely on the say-so of a person who isn’t their customer? Obviously not.

Even if a security company was rigorously fair and treated everyone impartially, the race to the bottom of capitalist competition would guarantee that company would go out of business. Everyone would drop them and switch to a different security company that promised favorable treatment to its subscribers. (Imagine the commercials: “Bob’s Discount Security—Where your first felony is free!”)

Before long, these security companies would be little more than protection rackets, ensuring that their customers have impunity for any crimes they commit against outsiders. If you mugged or pistol-whipped someone and they made a complaint against you, your security company would check that your dues were paid up, then announce that in their professional judgment, you’re 100% innocent and are free to go about your day.

Meanwhile, if two customers of the same firm got into a dispute, it’s obvious what would happen: whoever pays more would get the verdict they wanted. It would be justice for sale to the highest bidder, which is what you should expect in a society where everything is driven by money and profit incentives.

These problems would be even more acute when it comes to the people who own these security companies, as I’ve pointed out before. Are private cops going to arrest the person who pays their salary? Of course not.

In this society, the CEOs and top investors of security firms would literally be above the law. They’d be in charge of private armies that answer only to them, like mafia dons or feudal lords in the days of old. Needless to say, TPB never depicts the extremely foreseeable abuses that would arise from this arrangement.

But let’s set this aside and say for the sake of argument that it works the way Smith insists it would. Let’s say I’m accused of a crime, I’m in arrears to my security firm, and they decide to lock me up to send a message about the consequences of not paying your bill.

The problem is that, once a suspect is in custody, the incentives flip the other way.

As Lucy said, a prisoner in this society has to pay for their own imprisonment. (What if you can’t afford it? Do you just starve to death in jail? Better hope that trial is speedy!)

But if they’re found innocent, they can get that money back. This creates yet another massive conflict of interest: once you’ve been detained, private prison companies have a strong incentive to ensure you’re found guilty—because otherwise, they have to eat the costs of your room and board.

If this is also the firm you hire to protect you on a regular basis, they’d have access to all kinds of intimate details about your life, your associations and your daily routine that they could selectively deploy. They could leak information to a judge, jury or whoever’s overseeing the trial to cast you in a bad light. (I’ll write more about Smith’s view of courts and trials next week.)

Whichever way it works, there’s no one in this legal system whose only motive is seeing that justice is done. Everyone ultimately serves the interests of their profits and their paymasters—and if those don’t align with the facts of who’s innocent and who’s guilty, too bad. That’s the only outcome we’d have any right to expect in a society where money reigns supreme and there’s no such thing as law to check its power.

L. Neil Smith insists that none of these things will ever happen, because everyone in his North American Confederacy has ironclad principles that they’ll never bend or break—even when staring into the face of someone who just tried to kill them.

But if everyone was so unimpeachably moral, it wouldn’t matter what kind of society we had. The reason we have rules is because some people, sometimes, will try to harm or exploit others for their own benefit. How does society respond when that happens? What, if anything, prevents the rich and the powerful from trampling on everyone else? An anarcho-capitalist system like this one has no answer for that.

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New on OnlySky: A cure for Huntington’s disease?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the hope of genetic therapy to cure a particularly nasty disease.

Huntington’s disease is the paradigm example of DNA as destiny. If you have the mutant gene that causes it, you’re guaranteed to develop the disease. No lifestyle change can prevent it or slow its progression, and Huntington’s is inevitably fatal. It gradually kills brain cells, causing a host of terrible symptoms, from uncontrollable jerky movements to memory lapses to mood swings, and eventually dementia and death. From the first onset of symptoms, typical life expectancy is at most twenty years.

Until recently, there was nothing whatsoever that doctors could do for sufferers. But now medical science has provided a ray of light, in the form of an audacious experimental treatment that combines genetic therapy with brain surgery. It’s the first treatment that has clinical evidence to show that it slows the progression of the disease, and more advances may be coming soon, holding out the hope of a true cure.

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 member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Targeting most internal organs is a challenging task as it is. But the brain, which is protected by the blood-brain barrier that blocks most drugs, seems like a nigh-impossible target for genetic therapy.

However, one team of scientists has made a breakthrough. uniQure, a gene therapy company from the Netherlands, has developed an experimental therapy called AMT-130.

AMT-130 uses an adeno-associated virus or AAV, a harmless virus that’s easily engineered to deliver genetic material of our choosing. The hard part is getting it where it needs to go: the striatum, a region deep inside the brain that’s involved in motor skills and cognition, and that suffers some of the most severe damage from Huntington’s.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Crime and punishment

A gavel resting in front of a set of scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

When he arrived in this alternate universe, Win Bear was shot and almost died. Lucky for him, the North American Confederacy has super-advanced medical technology. The high-tech cast that’s healing his bullet wounds is supposed to come off tomorrow. He’s giddy at the prospect, feeling like a kid the night before Christmas.

His counterpart, Ed, tells Win he’s going out to check up on a client. Among Win’s belongings, he notices a pen with a “Paratronics” logo, which he recognizes as his and asks to have it back—except Win brought it from his own world. It’s the one he found in the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss’ office.

That seems like a clue, especially since Paratronics is the corporate client Ed was going to visit. They both vow to investigate it.

That night, Win is drifting off to sleep when he’s suddenly jerked awake by an alarm. A mechanical voice blares: “INTRUDER AT FRONT GATE!”

He grabs his gun, leaps out of bed and runs outside, to find a melee at Ed’s front door:

At the gate a cluster of forms wrestled just inside the entrance… One guard lay on the ground, blood seeping ugly black onto the driveway, someone in charcoal-colored coveralls standing over him. Ed was on his back, arms outstretched and empty. A huge figure, also in gray, was pointing a weapon at his face. I lined up on the stranger’s chest and pulled the trigger, launching a blinding fireball in the semidarkness. The figure leaped and crumpled.

With Win blazing away at them, plus the rest of the private security team converging on the spot, the attackers scatter.

Ed and Captain Forsyth were both sucker-punched. They’re concussed, but alive. The man that Win shot—actually a gorilla, because that’s a thing here—is dead, and another of the attackers, this one a human, was wounded in the leg.

They carry the wounded into the house. Ed’s neighbor Lucy, awakened by the gunshots (“frustrated at missing all the excitement”) shows up in short order, and again calls for Clarissa the healer to treat their injuries.

That left our friend with the hole in his leg parked sullenly in a corner, two angry chimpanzees holding him none too gently and exchanging interesting notions about what to do with him if Forsyth got worse. That gave me an idea, so I went upstairs to put some clothes on. Draped in a bathrobe, I came back with my forty-one… The prisoner stiffened visibly when I caught his eye, kept looking over at Ed, then back at me, with an occasional wild glance at the S & W.

“Okay, asshole,” I said in my best backroom rubber-hose voice, “You gonna come clean, or do I hafta ventilate you some more?”

… “Barbarian!” he spat. “You don’t frighten me!”

“Is that so?” I shifted the muzzle to rest between his eyebrows. “I got two more slugs left. Think the boys here’d mind if I splatter your brains all over their uniforms? I’ll pay for the dry cleaning. Or would you like it somewhere neater, fellas?” I pointed the gun at his crotch.

“Get this savage away!” he screamed. “I stand on my rights!”

Yes, mock executions are a war crime. Win notes that he made sure the gun was unloaded before pulling this stunt, as if that makes it better.

We’ll get into this question more next week, but as an intro, let me point out that the idea of a person—prisoner or otherwise—having “rights” in the North American Confederacy is a contradiction in terms.

A right is a freedom or protection that the government can’t legally deprive you of. But there is no government here. There might be rights in the sense of moral principles that most people voluntarily agree to respect, but that’s not the same thing at all. You can do anything to anyone if you’re powerful enough or clever enough to get away with it. You won’t be breaking any laws, because there are no laws.

For example: L. Neil Smith is clear that in this society, killing someone in self-defense is completely fine. No one will give you any problems for it. What he seems less clear about is the obvious implication: if you kill someone, you just have to say it was self-defense.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true; it shouldn’t even matter if your story is contradicted by the evidence. There are no police who’ll investigate, after all. Your story only has to be plausible enough to pass minimal scrutiny, to convince everyone else to mind their own business.

(Wait, you say—wouldn’t friends or relatives of the deceased investigate their death, and come after you if they think you’re lying about what happened? Logically, yes. But the same thing should happen even for a justified killing, and yet Smith is adamant that there are no endless blood feuds here—despite that being a common feature of societies with weak or ineffective governments.)

There’s another unpleasant implication that Smith glides past. All of his protagonists—including Win himself, despite his fake execution ploy—have a rigid code of morality and would never actually harm a prisoner. But we can hardly assume that everyone in this society is so principled.

Basically, if someone tries to commit a crime and you capture them, you can torture them as much as you want, just as long as you kill them afterwards so they can never complain about it.

As we’ll see, Win’s friends are upset with him for threatening a captive, but really, he’s the one acting logically. That should be the way to handle this problem: break out the thumbscrews and the hot irons, make the hitman spill his guts about who sent him, then shoot him and bury his body in the wilderness.

In an anarcho-capitalist society where you’re solely responsible for protecting your own life, that’s the proper way to handle this problem. Why respect these imaginary, unenforced “rights” and let him go, when that just gives him a chance to try again?

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New on OnlySky: What would it take to raise the birth rate?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend of falling birth rates and what, if anything, we can do to reverse it.

The birth rate is falling across the world, in both wealthy and developing nations, in societies that seemingly have little in common culturally or politically. If this trend continues, the global population will level out within a few decades and then start to shrink. If this is a problem we need to collectively address – and not everyone agrees that it is – then the first thing we need to do is to figure out the cause.

This column proposes one possible explanation, and a solution to go with it.

Within the last two decades, for the first time ever, humanity became a majority-urban species. But cities are crowded and expensive, and tens of millions of people around the world are struggling with the burden of sky-high housing prices. Could this also be the cause of our birth woes: people forgoing having kids just because they can’t afford enough space for a family? Would building more affordable housing increase the birth rate 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 member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

In spread-out rural regions, land is cheap and there are few barriers to population growth. However, in an urban setting, space comes at a premium. If your apartment doesn’t have an extra bedroom, having kids requires moving to a bigger place. That can be a costly proposition, if it’s financially feasible at all.

The repercussions of super-expensive housing don’t stop there. It also makes it harder for young adults to move out from their parents’ houses, delaying them from starting families of their own. It causes a trickle-down effect that increases the prices of everything else, including school taxes and daycare. It forces even people who have homes to devote a greater and greater share of their budgets to upkeep, leaving less for everything else.

With the deck so heavily stacked against them, it’s no surprise that some people decide kids are a luxury that’s simply too expensive to afford.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Ook ook

A close-up of a chimpanzee

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Win Bear keeps getting attacked by unknown assailants, and he’s narrowly escaped death twice. In the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, there are no police. If you’re in danger, you have to pay for private security to protect yourself. Win’s counterpart, Ed Bear, has done just that:

Captain Forsyth, head of the security contingent, was an old friend of Ed’s, a grizzled, wiry customer in a gray herringbone lava-lava and long black cutaway coat—right in style for Confederate rent-a-cops, and not the least bit funny once you took in the wide leather gunbelt and heavy automatic strapped around his waist.

…Oh yes. He’s also a chimpanzee.

On the day he arrived in the NAC, Win remembers seeing funny-looking strangers on the street. He thought they were mutants, but actually, they were apes. Now that he’s met Captain Forsyth, he learns how this came to pass:

I remembered the discovery in my own world that simians can’t talk only because their vocal apparatus isn’t up to it. We’d only just begun teaching them sign language. It had started here a hundred years earlier, maybe because Darwin’s opinions were more graciously received, or maybe because Confederates view innovation as a blessing instead of a threat. Or maybe because they haven’t wasted so much time and effort, so many useful lives, on war and economic disaster. Anyway, science and philosophy have never been separate departments here. Any critter who can handle more than a few hundred words is human.

We saw how, in Smith’s alternate history, racism just melted away when government was abolished. Now it appears the same is true of religious fundamentalism.

We’re never told if religion still exists in this world. Are most citizens of the NAC Christian, Muslim, or something else entirely? Are there still churches, and if so, what do they look like? Smith is uninterested in that subject; he never addresses it in any meaningful way.

But whatever their beliefs, everyone in the North American Confederacy welcomes science. There’s no ideological resistance to new discoveries. Smith says evolution was “more graciously received” than in the real world, where it faced (and still faces) stubborn opposition from religious literalists who believe their book of myths is absolute truth.

(This is a contrast to Ayn Rand, who got the heebie-jeebies about evolution. She didn’t outright deny it, but she refused to say if she thought it was true. She was an atheist, but she found it icky that humans might be related to other animals.)

I can’t deny it’s an attractive idea, but again, the causality cries out for an explanation. In the absence of government, it seems likely that religion would get stronger, since churches would claim to offer a source of stability in a world otherwise lacking it. That’s what happened in Europe during the Dark Ages.

With no public schools, religious schools would be some of the main providers of education, and they’d be free to teach children anything without oversight or standards. And while some denominations don’t deny science, many do. Why wouldn’t biblical literalism, young-earth creationism, and every other kind of pseudoscience and superstition run amok in this world?

As soon as they understood the setup, chimps, gorillas, a couple of other species waded right in and began exercising their rights.

…Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound. As with individual handwriting and telegraphy, each “voice” has its own personality: natural variations in bone-structure, muscular development, perhaps even character.

…Gallatin and Spooner believed it: any creature who can think is, Q.E.D., “people.” It’s calmly anticipated here that someday there’ll be computers with rights—and they’ll be welcome too.

There’s something missing from this chapter. The more sci-fi you’ve read, the more likely you are to overlook it—because it’s such a familiar and expected element, it’s easy to assume its presence and not notice that it’s never mentioned.

In many sci-fi works, advanced civilizations use genetic engineering to uplift other species to intelligence. If you read this part quickly, you might think that’s what Smith is saying, too.

But no. There’s no genetic engineering. What he’s saying is that chimps, gorillas and other apes were always intelligent, and the only reason we didn’t notice is because they lacked the capacity for spoken language.

The only thing they were waiting for was a political system to their liking. When they saw Smith’s version of anarchy and approved of it (were chimps reading the newspaper?), they came forward.

Once technology gave them the ability to speak, it immediately became obvious that they were equal in every other respect to human beings: written language, tool making and tool use, economic understanding, political participation, and scientific reasoning. As commenter andrewnotwerdna jokingly summed up Smith’s view: “Did you know that gorillas would be able to speak if it weren’t for taxes?”

(This does, ironically, echo the Indonesian mythology which claims that orangutans can speak but choose not to, fearing that humans would enslave them and put them to work if they knew.)

It’s true that great apes, our closest relatives on the tree of life, share some of our intellectual talents. They can learn language, to an extent, and use tools, to an extent. They can pass the mirror self-recognition test. They’re capable of feats of multi-step reasoning, like figuring out that they need to stack boxes on top of each other to reach a reward.

However, I mean no disrespect to our ape cousins when I say that they’re not intelligent in the same sense or to the same degree as humans.

Chimps use sticks to fish for tasty termites and rocks as hammers to crack nuts. But you’ll never see a chimpanzee constructing a fire drill or a rudimentary lathe – or even knapping stones into spearheads.

Similarly, apes can be taught some sign language (some have learned several hundred signs). However, they’ll never compose a sonnet or write an autobiography. They don’t have the capacity for complex syntax that human children learn intuitively.

Once again, I think Smith was trying to make a generous gesture toward inclusivity, but he went about it in one of the weirdest ways possible. Also, by asserting that these species were intelligent all along and didn’t need any help from us, it allows him to sidestep a different problem: Are there animal rights in the North American Confederacy?

If a creature can’t speak or advocate for itself, does it have any legal protections? Against cruel treatment, or abuse, or being hunted to extinction? Can NAC citizens bring back bear-baiting or dogfighting, or perform cruel medical experiments on them without oversight, or raise animals in cramped and filthy cages for food or furs?

Given that this is an anarchy where the only rights you have are what you can defend for yourself, the answer would seemingly have to be no. No hands means no firearms, which means no rights. That leads to some very ugly scenarios which, no surprise, go unmentioned in this book.

Image credit: Clément Bardot, via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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New on OnlySky: Vaccine wars

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about anti-vax ideology on the ascent in America, and the utterly predictable consequences that are soon to follow.

Vaccines empowered us to banish the killers that have plagued humanity for thousands of years. It was a victory that would have seemed unimaginably miraculous to anyone who lived before modern medicine. But in our victory, we got complacent. We forgot why we’d ever needed them, which left room for anti-vaxers to slip in, sowing their poisonous lies. Now this anti-rational ideology has gained control of one of our two major political parties, and through them, the government.

Red states and the corrupted federal government are rolling back vaccine mandates, and as sure as night follows day, these preventable diseases are reappearing: measles, polio, diphtheria, and more. Tragically, it’s the next generation of children who will pay the price. If we keep going down this path, we may end up revisiting the era when childhood death was a normal and expected part of existence.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only (registration is free!). Members of OnlySky also get a subscriber newsletter:

The consequences of ignorance are completely predictable, and we’re already seeing them. In 2022, polio reappeared in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in upstate New York.

Then, in 2025, the U.S. suffered its biggest measles outbreak in at least twenty-five years, mostly striking unvaccinated religious communities in West Texas. Dozens of people were hospitalized, and three died: two children and an adult.

Pertussis, or whooping cough, is also surging. We’ve had over 20,000 cases so far, more than at this point last year, which was itself a fivefold increase from the year before that. There have already been ten infant deaths.

How much worse could it get? A research paper from April 2025 simulates the result for the U.S. if vaccination rates continue to drop, and arrives at some grim numbers.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Indian trouble

Artwork representing Columbus and a group of Christian soldiers landing in the New World

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

We saw last week how L. Neil Smith alters American history to fit his ideology. He dislikes the fact that the Federalist founders, who were in favor of centralized government, also tended to be the most opposed to slavery; while the Anti-Federalists he admires were fine with it. So, he rewrites the historical record to put everyone on the “right” sides.

This week is another example.

Libertarians of all stripes have a problem justifying the conquest and settlement of the New World. If they believe in property rights, as they constantly affirm, how can they give their allegiance to countries created by murder and displacement of the original inhabitants?

Some, like Ayn Rand, defended it in flatly genocidal terms. She denounced the Native Americans as savages who had no right to their own land. But Smith takes a different tack.

Here’s what happens in his fictional North American Confederacy:

Take the Westward Movement: France at war with England and the world; Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark; the Homestead Act; cattle barons and squatters; gold in California; the U.S. Cavalry, and war with the Indians. But to Ed it meant Sam Colt, whose repeating sidearm allowed individuals, rather than mobs, to make a place for themselves, self-sufficient and free. And it meant renting or buying land from Indians cannily eager to take gold, silver, or attractive stock options.

As with federalism and slavery, Smith is aware that actual history doesn’t fit easily into his assumptions. Rather than grapple with this problem, he writes a new history that’s more ideologically comfortable.

In this libertarian-friendly alternate history, the Native Americans were still displaced by white colonizers—but they were happy to move and no one felt any resentment over it. In fact, he hints they got the better half of the deal (“cannily eager”).

Needless to say, this is laughable nonsense. No group of people, in any society or timeline, is going to cheerfully vacate their ancestral homeland to make way for a wave of new settlers. I don’t care how much they got paid.

Famously, Manhattan was “purchased” for 60 Dutch guilders, or about $925 in today’s money. The Native Americans who made that deal almost certainly didn’t think they were giving the land away entirely, but granting their European guests the opportunity to share it—a welcoming gesture that came back to bite them. Obviously, the colonizers made no effort to correct that misunderstanding.

Based on interactions like this, it’s possible to imagine a coexistence scenario, where Europeans share the land with Native Americans and assimilate into their culture. But that would imply a radically different history than even this one. In Smith’s timeline, American westward expansion went more or less the same as in our world. The only difference is the political ideology that justified it.

To further show that the Native Americans did better in his reality, Smith makes one of them president:

There seems no mention of Indian trouble—a Cherokee is elected president in 1840, that same Sequoya, I think, who taught his people to read and write.

The list of Confederate presidents is short, many serving five or six terms without upsetting anybody. Year after year, their steadily diminishing power was less an object of envy or violent ambition… there was another Indian president, Osceola; Harriet Beecher was her own First Lady; in 1880, a French-Canadian of Chinese extraction was elected—so much for for the Yellow Peril, mes enfants!

Again, I can credit Smith for trying to write a less-bigoted history. Unlike Ayn Rand, who vigorously endorsed the prejudices of her era, he recognizes that racism and sexism are bad things. He wants to portray a world where they’ve diminished.

But the way he goes about it is absurd. What he’s implying is that racism is caused by government. As soon as the Constitution is abolished, all prejudice disappears in a puff of smoke, and people are suddenly happy to coexist and treat each other as equals.

What’s the causal mechanism for this? Does government somehow force people to be bigoted, even when it’s not their inclination?

The answer he’d give, I suspect, is something along these lines: Centralized government offers the choice of ruling over others or being ruled yourself. This kicks off a zero-sum scramble for power, where people turn to bigoted ideas as a way to give themselves a leg up. Without government, people no longer feel threatened by each other, so those beliefs naturally die out.

The flaw in this argument is that abolishing government wouldn’t erase people’s fears of being conquered and oppressed by others. We can see this in real history.

Slave revolts were a pervasive fear of the founding generation. To put it another way, slave owners were afraid that if enslaved people won their freedom, they’d rise up and seek vengeance, massacring their former masters. The only way to prevent that was to keep them in bondage forever. And thus, bigotry and oppression became self-perpetuating, until abolished by outside force.

Considering how tenacious racist ideas are in our world, you might think Smith could have them linger a little, if only to show how bigots find no aid or comfort in his North American Confederacy. But no. He can’t abide the suggestion that his anarcho-capitalist utopia might have any flaws, so he scripts this unbelievable scenario where prejudice simply vanishes overnight.

He goes on to explain how history after this point diverged from ours:

Mexico and Canada enthusiastically join in the “Union” half a century later. With no slavery and no tariff, there’s no Civil War.

History must have some weird elastic logic, though. Hamilton got eighty-sixed, but his malady lingered on, becoming vogue with dispossessed European nobility. Splinter groups continued to clash for years, often violently, over who was really his “legitimate” intellectual heir…. In 1865, while Lysander Spooner presided over a rapidly shrinking national government, a politically shady actor, John Wilkes Booth, plodded through a backwoods tour with an English play, Our North American Cousin, when out of the audience an obscure Hamiltonian lawyer stood and shot the thespian through the head.

If you missed it, Smith groups Abraham Lincoln with those villainous Hamiltonians. (The play he mentions is the one Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated.) For all he claims to detest slavery, that speaks volumes about how he viewed the president who actually emancipated the slaves.

To close out this section, he writes that after his brand of anarcho-capitalism overtook North America, it spread throughout the world:

There’s something resembling World War I, but no trace of the Spanish-American War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or New Guinea. And nothing about Karl Marx, Socialism, or Communism; European revolts in the 1840s are called “Gallatinite.” Men first walked on the Moon—with women right beside them in 173 A.L.—1949! And North America fought a bitter war with Russia in 1957. The Czar was finally overthrown.

Since there was never any such thing as communism in Smith’s timeline, this makes it even more implausible that Ayn Rand still exists in this world. (According to the index at the end of the book, she was one of the past presidents of the North American Confederacy and “the first president to travel to the Moon”.) Whatever happened to only people of Native American descent being identical in both realities?

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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New on OnlySky: An era of violence

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the increasing frequency of political violence in the U.S., and what this tells us about democratic breakdown.

From the Capitol insurrection, to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, to the killing of Charlie Kirk, to ordinary (“ordinary”) school shootings and other mass shootings, America is a violent nation and becoming more so. Democracy was supposed to give the people a means to settle our differences peacefully, but it isn’t working out that way. Instead, more and more people – mostly on the right, although not exclusively – are concluding that change only comes at the barrel of a gun.

Why is democracy giving way to outbursts of violence? Is it the system that’s at fault, conspiring to thwart the will of the voters at every turn, leaving the frustrated and the disaffected feeling as if they have no other choice? Or are voters themselves demanding something impossible, and becoming increasingly angry when they can’t have it?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

What’s remarkable is that so much violence is committed by right-wingers—even though conservatives, at the moment, control all three branches of the U.S. government.

They’re seemingly getting everything they’ve always wanted: savage cuts to the safety net, mass deportations of immigrants both legal and not, mass firings of federal employees, curtailing DEI policies, outlawing abortion, rolling back LGBTQ rights, more guns with fewer restrictions. You’d think they’d be happy. And yet, seemingly, the more of their agenda they achieve, the more furious they become.

What this implies is that politico-religious conservatism is a self-defeating philosophy. Whether they realize it or not, conservatives are voting for policies that make their lives worse. They’re getting angrier not despite their success, but because of it. That’s why levels of violence in America keep on rising.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Failed Rapture prophecies (2025 edition)

I’m so old, I remember when the Rapture was supposed to happen in 2011:

A red and yellow billboard reading: "Judgment Day May 21, 2011 - Cry mightily unto God" with a silhouette of a man praying

This prophetic pratfall was the legacy of Harold Camping, a 20th-century Christian evangelist whose Family Radio broadcast to 150 stations across the United States.

In his later years, Camping made a career of predicting the second coming. First he said it would be in 1994. When that failed, he moved the date to May 21, 2011 based on a convoluted numerological scheme supposedly based on the date of Noah’s flood.

The May 2011 date was the big one. Family Radio sank over $100 million into a promotional campaign. They put up billboards and distributed tracts all over the world urging the masses to repent. Some of his followers were so convinced the end was near, they quit their jobs and spent their savings. I personally encountered at least one devotee spreading the word.

When this failed to come true, Camping announced that it had been a “spiritual” judgment and revised his date to October 21, 2011 for the real, actual, this-time-we-mean-it apocalypse. That one obviously failed as well, and Camping died soon afterward, perplexed and humiliated.

Of course, Camping wasn’t the first. He was just one in a long line of fanatics who’ve been continuously predicting the apocalypse almost every year since the beginning of Christianity.

Before 2011, there was 2007Rapture.com. Before that, there was Edgar Whisenant and his book 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, which singled out Rosh Hashanah 1988 as the date. Before that, there was Hal Lindsay and his 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth.

Before that, there was the 1920 book Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Before that, there was the “Great Disappointment” of 1844. Before that, there was Cotton Mather in 1692.

And you could keep on going back, all the way to the founding generation of Christianity. According to the Bible, Jesus told his contemporaries that some of them would still be alive when he returned to earth (Matthew 16:28, 1 Thessalonians 4:15).

However, fundamentalists never learn their lesson. With the unfounded confidence of faith, they keep on predicting the end, undaunted by the prophetic blunders of their predecessors.

Now there’s a preacher from South Africa, Joshua Mhlakela, who aspires to be the latest to join the list of false prophets:

Speaking on the Cettwinz TV YouTube channel, Mhlakela said in a video that has gone viral: “The Rapture is upon us. Whether you are ready or not.

“I saw Jesus sitting on his throne. And I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.'”

The pastor added, “He said to me on the 23rd and 24th of September 2025, ‘I will come back to the Earth.'”

According to the preacher, Jesus’s return would be announced by the Feast of Trumpets, which would ring in the Rapture and Judgment Day.

If you want to see the prophecy in his own words, here it is:

God took me to see the future and then he brought me back. And then in heaven in a throne room, I see Jesus sitting on his throne and I could hear him very loud and clear: “I am coming soon.” And to the people who are listening, please pay attention to what I’m going to say. He says to me, on the 23rd and the 24th, 2025, I will come to take my church.

Yes, this is the same date that Whisenant proclaimed in 1988. Christians seem to have an affection for Rosh Hashanah.

Despite several erroneous reports to the contrary, Mhlakela isn’t a pastor or leader of any church. He’s just an ordinary believer who claims to have had a divine revelation. (He says he was an assistant pastor at his church for several years, until he resigned to spread the prophetic word.)

For whatever reason, this claim struck a nerve on social media. A number of Christians on TikTok claimed to have had dreams or visions confirming Mhlakela’s date – spawning the so-called RaptureTok hashtag.

It’s tricky to find good examples, because many of the videos on this hashtag are from nonbelievers mocking or parodying it. But some are definitely sincere. For example, here’s a Christian who’s stocking her house with emergency supplies, together with handwritten laminated cards explaining the Rapture, for the benefit of those left behind who’ll find them after she disappears:

@stopwiththebuttholecramp Preparing for the left behind. What are you doing? Let’s try to save as many souls as we can while we are gone. #Christian #missingpeople #christiantiktok #help #jesus ? original sound – Melissa Johnston

Here’s another who’s put out several videos about the date, including one in which she claims her 3-year-old son started speaking in Hebrew as confirmation (obviously, he’s just repeating things he heard his parents saying):

@romans.ten.9through11 My last video. See you in the clouds my brothers and sisters. Jesus please use my account and the remaining videos for YOUR glory and YOUR will. I plead your blood over it and speak a hedge of protection over it that no weapon formed against this content will prosper. Please water every seed that has been planted throughout the time you’ve used it. In Jesus name. Amen. #JESUSISCOMING #rapture #alienabduction #whathappenedtoallthepeople ? original sound – romans.ten.9through11

And a third, who hedges her bets a bit about the date (“pretty much any day now… if not next week, by the end of the year, most definitely”) but nevertheless believes the Rapture is so close, Christians should take the PIN lock off their smartphones, so that converts who find them afterward (in the empty piles of clothes) will be able to use them:

@kingdomwealth_christina I literally just thought of this today! I still have to put together letters for people. I rounded up all of the Bibles in my house and any book that helps explain scripture. Jesus is going to come and get his bride very very soon! ##pretrib##raptureready##rapture2025##jesussaves ? original sound – Kingdom Wealth | Christina

This prophecy stuff sounds appealing, so I’m going to try my hand at it. To be clear, I’m an atheist. I don’t claim to have special revelation or privileged access to the will of a god. However, I can make a few predictions with confidence.

The Rapture isn’t going to happen on September 23, 2025, or September 24, 2025, or any date thereafter. On the predicted date, people will wake up, eat breakfast, drive to work, do chores, care for their families, and fall asleep, just as people have been doing for thousands of years. There may well be wars, earthquakes and other tragedies, but life as we know it won’t come to an end. The sun will keep shining, the earth will keep spinning, and the dead won’t rise from their graves. No one is going to float up into the sky to meet Jesus.

When this date passes and nothing happens, the true believers will respond in one of three ways. Some will delete their videos, try to erase the evidence of their failure, and go on as if nothing had happened. Others will move the goalposts and announce that the prophecy came true as predicted, but in a “spiritual” sense that’s invisible to skeptics and scoffers. Still others will pick a new date and start all over again.

Few, if any, will forthrightly announce that they blundered. None will discard their foolish religious beliefs and choose a more rational philosophy in the future.

Belief in the second coming and the apocalypse is a kind of religious narcissism. It’s founded in the belief that my generation is special – that all of history up to this point, all the believers who lived and died, were just preparation for me, and that I’m one of the chosen ones who’ll live to see the culmination of it all. They think the Bible passages about the apocalypse are for them in a way that didn’t apply to any previous generation.

Because of this self-deluding arrogance, they’re blind to history. The unbroken string of failures racked up by all the past believers who thought the same thing doesn’t give them any humility, nor daunt them at all – just as their example won’t daunt the next generation of believers who’ll start the cycle all over again, a few years down the line, once this prediction has faded into history’s dust.

The Probability Broach: Villainous authoritarians

A close-up of the founders' signatures on the Constitution

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

L. Neil Smith has a serious grudge against the Constitution.

It’s not just that he disagrees with its goals, as you’d expect from an anarchist. Like a good sovereign citizen, he claims the whole thing was illegal. He denounces it as a grand conspiracy led by Alexander Hamilton. As Smith’s narrator Win Bear tells it:

He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation. Adopted during an illegal and unrepresentative meeting in Philadelphia, originally authorized only to revise the Articles, this new document amounted to a bloodless coup d’état.

Funny—as near as I remembered, these were the same events that had happened in my own world. But in the eyes of my new friends, historic figures like John Jay and James Madison became villainous authoritarians. Of seventy-four delegates chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, nineteen declined, and sixteen of those present refused to sign. Of the thirty-nine remaining, many of whom signed only reluctantly, just six had put their names to the original Declaration of Independence.

It’s true that not all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were willing to sign, but that’s not surprising. It’s easy to reach agreement that an existing system isn’t working; it’s harder to agree on what to replace it with. Governing always involves compromise, and no political system makes everyone happy. That’s not a challenge unique to America, but something that every band of revolutionaries throughout history has discovered.

Smith roars that the Constitutional Convention was an “illegal” meeting, but he omits a relevant fact: the delegates met to revise the Articles of Confederation because it was very clear that they weren’t working.

Under the Articles, America was more like a loose alliance of thirteen separate nations. There was a national Congress, but it had no power to levy taxes. To fund anything it voted for, it had to beg the states to contribute.

This created a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. Each state had a selfish incentive to sit out and let the others do the unpopular work of raising revenue—and because they all reasoned the same way, almost none of them ever did. In 1786, Congress requested $3.8 million from the states to pay national obligations, and got… $663.

The early American republic was chronically broke and hamstrung. It couldn’t pay the debts it had taken on while fighting for independence. It couldn’t even pay its own soldiers.

Smith puts huge importance on the Whiskey Rebellion. But there were other, equally serious crises that he ignores because they don’t fit with his worldview that blames centralized government for all evils.

In March 1783, in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, officers in the Continental Army were enraged over not receiving their promised pay and pensions—in some cases, for years on end. They circulated a letter hinting at plans to overthrow Congress. George Washington personally intervened to defuse the conspiracy.

But he couldn’t stop the next one: the Pennsylvania Mutiny of June 1783, when Congress was surrounded, mobbed and threatened by hundreds of angry, rebellious soldiers demanding their promised pay. They had to flee Philadelphia, the seat of government at the time.

Last but not least, there’s Shays’ Rebellion. It was an uprising of rural Massachusetts farmers, many of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were angry about state taxation when they themselves hadn’t been paid for their service. They attacked local courts, preventing them from meeting, and tried to storm a federal armory and seize its weapons to overthrow the government. Once again, the federal government was helpless to intervene. An alliance of private citizens paid out of their own pockets to fund a private militia to suppress the rebellion.

Meanwhile, America faced pressure from foreign powers. Spain, which controlled the Mississippi River, closed it to American navigation—strangling trade from western regions—and pressured Americans to swear allegiance to Spain in exchange for access. Once again, there was nothing the U.S. government could do.

These repeated crises made it clear that the fledgling American state was too weak to govern, and risked being torn apart by internal uprising or subjugated and carved up by European powers. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was widespread recognition that something better was needed. It wasn’t a sinister conspiracy, as Smith imagines.

Smith’s fuming about a “coup d’etat” or the Constitution being “shoved down the country’s throat” ignores another obvious fact: the delegates to the Constitutional Convention didn’t force a new government on the nation at gunpoint. How could they have?

There was no skullduggery or subterfuge. The new Constitution was presented and debated in public over the course of several years. It took until 1790, but all thirteen states ratified it democratically. To assuage some holdouts’ concerns, the Bill of Rights was added—arguably a step up from the Articles, which had no such thing!

After the Constitution was ratified, Smith’s alternate history proceeded the same as ours, until the Whiskey Rebellion. We’ve already heard about Albert Gallatin, and he makes another appearance in this chapter.

In 1794, a Pennsylvania gentleman stepped into the fray. A former Swiss financier, Albert Gallatin disapproved of the way Alexander Hamilton handled the nation’s checkbook. He organized and led the farmers and began convincing federal soldiers they were fighting on the wrong side…

Thus “fortified,” the 80-proof revolution marched on Philadelphia. Washington went to the wall, Hamilton fled to Prussia and was killed in a duel in 1804. Gallatin was proclaimed president.

Smith acknowledges (vaguely) that the Articles of Confederation gave rise to some problems, which he tries to address as follows:

Economic problems that had precipitated the Constitution Conspiracy were solved with a new currency, backed by untold acres of land in the undeveloped Northwest Territories.

…Gallatin’s land certificates were redeemed, the last money ever issued by a United States government. He served five four-year terms in all, and lived long enough to see his own peculiar brand of anarchism begin spreading throughout the world.

There’s a lot of furious handwaving in this passage. I’ll limit myself to pointing out the top two problems.

In Smith’s history, America’s Revolutionary War debts were settled by a new currency, backed by land in the Northwest Territories. Except… the Northwest Territories were occupied at that time—by the British—who refused to relinquish them because, again, the Articles of Confederation government was shirking its financial obligations under the Treaty of Paris that ended the war!

Smith expects us to believe that the British crown would accept land they already controlled as payment for the debt we owed them.

In reality, the British didn’t withdraw from those territories until the 1794 Jay Treaty, negotiated by that villainous authoritarian John Jay. (There were also Native Americans living there—more about this next week.)

Second, to re-raise a point I made before: How can a currency be backed by land, unless there’s a central government that can protect and adjudicate claims of ownership?

In the anarchist society that Smith envisions, there’d be nothing to stop crowds of claim-jumpers and squatters from taking over territory that other people thought they owned. Any currency whose value was predicated on being able to redeem it for parcels of land would rapidly become worthless.

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Other posts in this series: