My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man And Superman
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Moral gymnasium
Friday, July 27, 2012
The Stupid! It Burns! (comic book edition)
Marc Barnes… …deals with yet another New Atheist whose worship of his own intellect is in vast disproportion to his almost non-existent use of that intellect. Funny, patient stuff.
Seriously, what strikes me again and again about Internet Atheist culture is how, well, dumb these guys are who constantly trumpet their immense intellectual superiority. They can’t even get elementary facts right, much less construe the meaning of those facts.
What's Shea talking about? A fucking comic strip. It's not like comics ever deal in exaggeration, hyperbole, and other literary forms for comedic effect.
I'm sure Shea wouldn't mind if we drew inferences about all Christians from this comic.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
The Stupid! It Burns! (Worst. Religion. Ever. edition)
Atheism is the Worst Religion Imaginable I have come to the conclusion that of all religions, Atheism is the worst, including all the others.
Atheism begins with the idea that we can know for sure that there is no supernatural power above our own. . . .
Atheism begins with the assumption that logic is the first thing. It continues by preaching that logic is all that is needed, and faith and belief are obsolete, along with hope and all other virtues derived from them. . . .
With no logical foundation for morality, Atheists still persist in using words like “good” and “bad”, “should” and “should not”. . . . “It doesn’t matter what you do. You will die and disappear. So do whatever you want to.” This is the thought that I think most Atheists have. . . .
Atheists have to borrow their morals from some other system. The prime candidate is the most superior religious system the world has ever seen, the Christian religion. [ETA:] After all, it’s the religion that gave us modern science and unprecedented wealth that was simply unimaginable even 50 years ago. [Thanks, Alex!] . . . Atheists treat Christianity like a buffet line. How they choose which bits to take and which to leave behind is beyond me. . . .
I scratch my head at the logical inconsistencies one must embrace to be an Atheist. I laugh inside when Atheists violate their own sacred law of logic to preach and argue in the public square. In the end, I pity them as little children. They are simply too immature to really think about what logic really is, and to learn how to apply it in one’s life.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Evolution, physicalism, and ethics
Yet again, Christians are arguing that evolution and/or physicalism structurally leads to some kind of ethical failure. See, for example, Tom Gilson: Does Atheism Have a Sexism Problem?:
There are a number of things wrong with Gilson's position. First, why should atheism or evolutionary science provide anything on a theoretical level to curb our tendency to abuse power? We don't expect such a curb with cosmology, biochemistry, or computer programming. Secondly, it's empirically unsupported: all the evidence points to atheists at worst acting just as ethically (and just as unethically) as believers. (At best, atheists are somewhat better: you won't find a Fred Phelps or a Rick Warren in the atheist community with anything like the prominence you'll find them in the Christian community.) Even if atheism does not in theory curb our abuses, that lack does not have any discernible effect on our behavior. Finally, atheists do not typically compare themselves to Christians by claiming that atheism curbs abuses; rather, we claim that atheism removes at least one support for abuses: atheists cannot claim that God wants them to abuse some group or one's subordinates.
Of course, it is equally true that Christianity does not provide a curb on abuses. At best Gilson (or any other advocate) can say that his own interpretation of Christianity provides a curb. But there is no way to say that any particular interpretation is authoritative: there is no objective way to differentiate between the truth or falsity of competing interpretations of any religion. At best, Gilson can say only that he chooses an interpretation of Christianity that is good by secular social standards; there's no substantive difference, however, between choosing a good interpretation and simply choosing to be good. Indeed, atheism criticizes the practice of making up ontological "just-so stories" to objectify one's choices; it is better, we say, to just describe one's choices as one's choices and leave it at that.
But Gilson's worst error is completely misrepresenting evolutionary science. Evolutionary science is science: it describes what is true regardless of anyone's or everyone's beliefs or norms. It neither forbids nor compels any particular norm. Individual as individuals are not "winners" if they pass on their genes, nor are they as individuals "losers" if they fail to do so. All evolution says is that some individuals will pass on their genes more often than other individuals, and that differential reproductive success will have observable effects on the prevalence of genes — and the physical characteristics — of future generations. (Furthermore, all the vast physical and genetic variation of terrestrial life can be explained using this framework.*) Evolution happens regardless of what any individual does or what they all do.
There is no particular reason, however, why any individual needs to consider the passing on of his or her genes to future generations to be a good thing and the failure to do so to be a bad thing. Of course, many individuals, Christians included, do in fact consider passing on their genes to be good, but there is no reason we should consider an individual who feels differently to be mistaken or reprehensible. Even if one were to consider differential reproductive success to be "good" in some normative sense, the outcome does not effect our judgment. In this framework, a "good" genome, by definition, is one that successfully reproduces, and a "bad" genome is one that fails to reproduce. Therefore, an individual who successfully reproduces is "doing good" by promoting a good genome, but an individual who fails to reproduce is also doing good by suppressing a bad genome. If a framework holds all all outcomes to be equally good, then framework is ethically meaningless.
Criticizing naturalism or physicalism, instead of a particular scientific theory, doesn't change the analysis. Naturalism is the idea that knowledge can be justified only by some sort of appeal to public observation and experiment rather than private revelation and opinion; physicalism is the idea that the physical world* is "all there is." Neither of these metaphysical ideas preclude by definition any particular ethical truth: they say only that any ethical truths must be, at some level, physical phenomena publicly knowable by appeal to observation and experiment. Ethical laws, just like physical laws, might be abstract objective qualities of the universe, knowable by appeal to observation. Alternatively, our ethical beliefs might be physical truths about our individual and social psychology, the outcome of the specific details of our biological and social evolution.
Neither evolution, naturalism, or physicalism compel any particular ethical norms; at best, we can observe by evolution that any biological or cognitive feature that causes substantially lowered reproductive success, broadly defined, will not long persist. But no theory, scientific or metaphysical, says anything at all about what any specific individual should or should not do. All they say is that we cannot justify our ethical beliefs by appeal to private, unsharable claims about something outside the physical world. But why would we want to do that in the first place, unless our intent was to subordinate or exploit other individuals?
But I say that atheism (especially as practiced by the New Atheists) does entail a constellation of beliefs, and among them are the evolutionary theory that life is for the winners, the survivors, the successful reproducers. Taken on an individual level, that could hardly discourage the attitude, “I’m going to be one of the winners!” Taken on a genetic level, it’s obviously not going to inhibit a man from misusing a woman. Taken on a group-selection level, it cannot prevent groups from employing whatever power they have as a group.Gilson clearly ties evolutionary theory to moral failure.
So if there is anything in atheism on a theoretical level to curb our tendency to abuse power, I don’t know what it is.
There are a number of things wrong with Gilson's position. First, why should atheism or evolutionary science provide anything on a theoretical level to curb our tendency to abuse power? We don't expect such a curb with cosmology, biochemistry, or computer programming. Secondly, it's empirically unsupported: all the evidence points to atheists at worst acting just as ethically (and just as unethically) as believers. (At best, atheists are somewhat better: you won't find a Fred Phelps or a Rick Warren in the atheist community with anything like the prominence you'll find them in the Christian community.) Even if atheism does not in theory curb our abuses, that lack does not have any discernible effect on our behavior. Finally, atheists do not typically compare themselves to Christians by claiming that atheism curbs abuses; rather, we claim that atheism removes at least one support for abuses: atheists cannot claim that God wants them to abuse some group or one's subordinates.
Of course, it is equally true that Christianity does not provide a curb on abuses. At best Gilson (or any other advocate) can say that his own interpretation of Christianity provides a curb. But there is no way to say that any particular interpretation is authoritative: there is no objective way to differentiate between the truth or falsity of competing interpretations of any religion. At best, Gilson can say only that he chooses an interpretation of Christianity that is good by secular social standards; there's no substantive difference, however, between choosing a good interpretation and simply choosing to be good. Indeed, atheism criticizes the practice of making up ontological "just-so stories" to objectify one's choices; it is better, we say, to just describe one's choices as one's choices and leave it at that.
But Gilson's worst error is completely misrepresenting evolutionary science. Evolutionary science is science: it describes what is true regardless of anyone's or everyone's beliefs or norms. It neither forbids nor compels any particular norm. Individual as individuals are not "winners" if they pass on their genes, nor are they as individuals "losers" if they fail to do so. All evolution says is that some individuals will pass on their genes more often than other individuals, and that differential reproductive success will have observable effects on the prevalence of genes — and the physical characteristics — of future generations. (Furthermore, all the vast physical and genetic variation of terrestrial life can be explained using this framework.*) Evolution happens regardless of what any individual does or what they all do.
*The actual mechanisms of genetic evolution and selection are, of course, complicated and subtle.
There is no particular reason, however, why any individual needs to consider the passing on of his or her genes to future generations to be a good thing and the failure to do so to be a bad thing. Of course, many individuals, Christians included, do in fact consider passing on their genes to be good, but there is no reason we should consider an individual who feels differently to be mistaken or reprehensible. Even if one were to consider differential reproductive success to be "good" in some normative sense, the outcome does not effect our judgment. In this framework, a "good" genome, by definition, is one that successfully reproduces, and a "bad" genome is one that fails to reproduce. Therefore, an individual who successfully reproduces is "doing good" by promoting a good genome, but an individual who fails to reproduce is also doing good by suppressing a bad genome. If a framework holds all all outcomes to be equally good, then framework is ethically meaningless.
Criticizing naturalism or physicalism, instead of a particular scientific theory, doesn't change the analysis. Naturalism is the idea that knowledge can be justified only by some sort of appeal to public observation and experiment rather than private revelation and opinion; physicalism is the idea that the physical world* is "all there is." Neither of these metaphysical ideas preclude by definition any particular ethical truth: they say only that any ethical truths must be, at some level, physical phenomena publicly knowable by appeal to observation and experiment. Ethical laws, just like physical laws, might be abstract objective qualities of the universe, knowable by appeal to observation. Alternatively, our ethical beliefs might be physical truths about our individual and social psychology, the outcome of the specific details of our biological and social evolution.
*The laws of physics are, like evolutionary science, complicated and subtle; the 19th century "materialist" idea that "all there is" is atoms in motion is charmingly naive.
Neither evolution, naturalism, or physicalism compel any particular ethical norms; at best, we can observe by evolution that any biological or cognitive feature that causes substantially lowered reproductive success, broadly defined, will not long persist. But no theory, scientific or metaphysical, says anything at all about what any specific individual should or should not do. All they say is that we cannot justify our ethical beliefs by appeal to private, unsharable claims about something outside the physical world. But why would we want to do that in the first place, unless our intent was to subordinate or exploit other individuals?
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Labor and labor power
theObserver would like me to explain the difference between labor and labor power. So here you go.
According to the labor theory of value, economics in the broadest sense is the study of how human beings act on the natural, physical world to produce stuff we want. We define labor as an action that a) transforms the physical world and b) is instrumentally satisfying to the actor (the satisfaction gained by the product or outcome of the action, not the action itself, is the primary goal). Even picking an apple off a tree and eating it is labor: I am transforming the physical world by moving the apple away from its position on the tree to first my mouth, and then transforming it into mush by chewing it, and finally moving it to my stomach. Not only that, but I have to transform my own position towards the tree. The physical world is a given; the only thing human beings can do is choose how to act, how to allocate our labor.
In the narrower, modern, sense, economics is the study of how we labor specifically for the purpose of exchange, labor either directly performed for the benefit of someone other than the actor (services), or labor performed to create an object that will be given to someone else. Economists let the political scientists study slavery and psychologists study pure altruism; we study the processes by which people exchange their labor.
In real economics, we try to exclude the study of money. Either we abstract money away by dividing nominal values by price levels (e.g. we divide nominal GDP, total dollars exchanged, by price level in dollars; the dollars unit is cancelled) or we try to completely ignore money. Once we have excluded money, we are left with no unit to calculate costs except labor. So if we want to look at the real cost of a pair of shoes or a computer, we say it takes three hours of labor to produce a pair of shoes and sixty hours of labor to produce a computer. That's the total amount of labor, including, for example, the time it takes to make a shoe factory or all the factories necessary to make a computer, divided by the number of shoes or computers these factories will produce. The real absolute cost of something is the total amount of labor necessary to produce it.
There's a complication, of course: not all labor is exactly equivalent. Some labor is more-or-less intrinsically easier than other labor: an hour typing on a computer in an air-conditioned office is easier than an hour cleaning a hot, stinking sewer. Furthermore, not everyone is equally efficient: some people or companies can produce a shoe in only two and a half hours. Hence Marx introduced the concept of "socially necessary abstract labor time." This qualification becomes important down the road, but for our purposes now, we can make the simplifying (albeit unrealistic) assumption that all labor is exactly equivalent.
It is easy to see, then, that when we exchange commodities (goods and services), we are going to exchange them on the basis of equivalent absolute labor cost. If it takes sixty hours to produce a computer and three hours to produce a pair of shoes, then people will exchange one computer for twenty pairs of shoes. If Mike wants thirty pairs of shoes for his sixty-hour computer, then I'm just going to use sixty hours of my time to build my own computer instead of ninety hours of my time to make thirty pairs of shoes. In a more complex environment, I might not be able to produce a computer, but Alice will, and she will charge only twenty-five pairs of shoes to undercut Mike. Then Bob, Carol, Dave, etc. will get in on the action, each undercutting the other until the price has dropped to twenty pairs of shoes.
(There's also real relative cost, a.k.a. real opportunity cost, which is basically what we have to give up to get something else. An hour spent making shoes is an hour that cannot be spent making computers: we have to give up some computers to make shoes, and vice versa. But the real relative cost affects only the quantity of various commodities produced; it does not affect the real absolute cost, or that commodities are exchanged at equivalent real absolute cost.)
Workers are people, and people have to eat. They have to drink. They have to wear clothes. They have to live in houses. They have to rear children, who will become the next generation of workers. All these things have a cost. It requires a specific amount of labor labor to produce food, store clean water and transport it to people, create clothes, build houses, and educate children. The labor required to make all of these things comprise the total real absolute cost of living.
It seems clear that the total absolute cost of living per day in labor hours is substantially less than the number of hours a person can work in a day. If it were not, we would be living at a subsistence level. The difference between the cost of living and the total number of hours a person actually works in a day is the surplus value of labor.
In a capitalist economy, workers produce and exchange a particular commodity. But they are not producing and exchanging their labor directly as a commodity. They are, rather, producing and exchanging their ability to perform labor, what Marx labeled their labor power. There's a real difference between these two things. The cost of labor itself is the labor itself; labor is the cost. But the cost of labor power is the cost of living, which is substantially less than the number of hours of labor that cost of living makes available.
In a perfect market, the difference between labor and labor power wouldn't make much difference. The cost of labor power would simply act as a real floor on the quantity of labor produced: it could not be less than the number of workers times the absolute real cost of labor power. But there's no such thing as a perfect market: all the qualities* of a perfect market are unrealistic. Economists assume them to make the basic analysis more tractable, to isolate and describe, in some sense, the "essence" of one important force in economic behavior. It is one thing to make unrealistic assumptions to isolate some important force; it is quite another to assume that the ignored complications don't actually exists. And the essence of capitalism intentionally and systematically violates the assumptions of the perfect market.
*"Perfect market information, No participant with market power to set prices, No barriers to entry or exit, Equal access to production technology."
Capitalism, which is in essence the private ownership of the means of production, entails that there is privileged, unequal, access to production technology (the means of production) as well as barriers to entry in the capitalist class. There is a higher real cost, absolute and relative, for workers and their children to enter the capitalist class than for capitalists and their children to remain in the capitalist class. Furthermore, nominal (money) issues become important; capitalists have two substantial short-term monetary advantages. A capitalist will not die if his factory is shut down for a month; a worker will die if her income is absent for a month. Additionally, because there are many fewer capitalists than workers, capitalists have a much easier time colluding, and therefore becoming a cartel of price-setters. Thus when money is involved, the negotiations between capitalists and workers structurally and systematically push money wages down to the cost of labor power, rather than the absolute cost of labor.
Fundamentally, the question is this: how do capitalists make a profit? What does that profit really represent? Profit is, in nominal terms, the difference between the money collected from consumers (who are typically workers) and the money paid to the workers. We would have to get into monetary economics to find out where the extra money comes from (debt), but it real terms, what does that money represent? Money is demand, but what real thing does that money actually demand? In Marxian terms, the "extra" money represents a demand on the surplus value of labor, the labor performed by the worker that is not necessary for his survival and reproduction.
Also see The Labor Theory of Value
According to the labor theory of value, economics in the broadest sense is the study of how human beings act on the natural, physical world to produce stuff we want. We define labor as an action that a) transforms the physical world and b) is instrumentally satisfying to the actor (the satisfaction gained by the product or outcome of the action, not the action itself, is the primary goal). Even picking an apple off a tree and eating it is labor: I am transforming the physical world by moving the apple away from its position on the tree to first my mouth, and then transforming it into mush by chewing it, and finally moving it to my stomach. Not only that, but I have to transform my own position towards the tree. The physical world is a given; the only thing human beings can do is choose how to act, how to allocate our labor.
In the narrower, modern, sense, economics is the study of how we labor specifically for the purpose of exchange, labor either directly performed for the benefit of someone other than the actor (services), or labor performed to create an object that will be given to someone else. Economists let the political scientists study slavery and psychologists study pure altruism; we study the processes by which people exchange their labor.
In real economics, we try to exclude the study of money. Either we abstract money away by dividing nominal values by price levels (e.g. we divide nominal GDP, total dollars exchanged, by price level in dollars; the dollars unit is cancelled) or we try to completely ignore money. Once we have excluded money, we are left with no unit to calculate costs except labor. So if we want to look at the real cost of a pair of shoes or a computer, we say it takes three hours of labor to produce a pair of shoes and sixty hours of labor to produce a computer. That's the total amount of labor, including, for example, the time it takes to make a shoe factory or all the factories necessary to make a computer, divided by the number of shoes or computers these factories will produce. The real absolute cost of something is the total amount of labor necessary to produce it.
There's a complication, of course: not all labor is exactly equivalent. Some labor is more-or-less intrinsically easier than other labor: an hour typing on a computer in an air-conditioned office is easier than an hour cleaning a hot, stinking sewer. Furthermore, not everyone is equally efficient: some people or companies can produce a shoe in only two and a half hours. Hence Marx introduced the concept of "socially necessary abstract labor time." This qualification becomes important down the road, but for our purposes now, we can make the simplifying (albeit unrealistic) assumption that all labor is exactly equivalent.
It is easy to see, then, that when we exchange commodities (goods and services), we are going to exchange them on the basis of equivalent absolute labor cost. If it takes sixty hours to produce a computer and three hours to produce a pair of shoes, then people will exchange one computer for twenty pairs of shoes. If Mike wants thirty pairs of shoes for his sixty-hour computer, then I'm just going to use sixty hours of my time to build my own computer instead of ninety hours of my time to make thirty pairs of shoes. In a more complex environment, I might not be able to produce a computer, but Alice will, and she will charge only twenty-five pairs of shoes to undercut Mike. Then Bob, Carol, Dave, etc. will get in on the action, each undercutting the other until the price has dropped to twenty pairs of shoes.
(There's also real relative cost, a.k.a. real opportunity cost, which is basically what we have to give up to get something else. An hour spent making shoes is an hour that cannot be spent making computers: we have to give up some computers to make shoes, and vice versa. But the real relative cost affects only the quantity of various commodities produced; it does not affect the real absolute cost, or that commodities are exchanged at equivalent real absolute cost.)
Workers are people, and people have to eat. They have to drink. They have to wear clothes. They have to live in houses. They have to rear children, who will become the next generation of workers. All these things have a cost. It requires a specific amount of labor labor to produce food, store clean water and transport it to people, create clothes, build houses, and educate children. The labor required to make all of these things comprise the total real absolute cost of living.
It seems clear that the total absolute cost of living per day in labor hours is substantially less than the number of hours a person can work in a day. If it were not, we would be living at a subsistence level. The difference between the cost of living and the total number of hours a person actually works in a day is the surplus value of labor.
In a capitalist economy, workers produce and exchange a particular commodity. But they are not producing and exchanging their labor directly as a commodity. They are, rather, producing and exchanging their ability to perform labor, what Marx labeled their labor power. There's a real difference between these two things. The cost of labor itself is the labor itself; labor is the cost. But the cost of labor power is the cost of living, which is substantially less than the number of hours of labor that cost of living makes available.
In a perfect market, the difference between labor and labor power wouldn't make much difference. The cost of labor power would simply act as a real floor on the quantity of labor produced: it could not be less than the number of workers times the absolute real cost of labor power. But there's no such thing as a perfect market: all the qualities* of a perfect market are unrealistic. Economists assume them to make the basic analysis more tractable, to isolate and describe, in some sense, the "essence" of one important force in economic behavior. It is one thing to make unrealistic assumptions to isolate some important force; it is quite another to assume that the ignored complications don't actually exists. And the essence of capitalism intentionally and systematically violates the assumptions of the perfect market.
*"Perfect market information, No participant with market power to set prices, No barriers to entry or exit, Equal access to production technology."
Capitalism, which is in essence the private ownership of the means of production, entails that there is privileged, unequal, access to production technology (the means of production) as well as barriers to entry in the capitalist class. There is a higher real cost, absolute and relative, for workers and their children to enter the capitalist class than for capitalists and their children to remain in the capitalist class. Furthermore, nominal (money) issues become important; capitalists have two substantial short-term monetary advantages. A capitalist will not die if his factory is shut down for a month; a worker will die if her income is absent for a month. Additionally, because there are many fewer capitalists than workers, capitalists have a much easier time colluding, and therefore becoming a cartel of price-setters. Thus when money is involved, the negotiations between capitalists and workers structurally and systematically push money wages down to the cost of labor power, rather than the absolute cost of labor.
Fundamentally, the question is this: how do capitalists make a profit? What does that profit really represent? Profit is, in nominal terms, the difference between the money collected from consumers (who are typically workers) and the money paid to the workers. We would have to get into monetary economics to find out where the extra money comes from (debt), but it real terms, what does that money represent? Money is demand, but what real thing does that money actually demand? In Marxian terms, the "extra" money represents a demand on the surplus value of labor, the labor performed by the worker that is not necessary for his survival and reproduction.
Also see The Labor Theory of Value
Thursday, July 19, 2012
The Stupid! It Burns! (sexual harassment edition)
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Atheist women complaining they're being sexually harassed at atheist conventions. . . .Ya think?
[M]ost of the atheist women I've encountered throughout my life ought to be flattered that any guy would want to "harass" them in the first place. They're not known for their womanly femininity, if you know what I mean. As my aunt's brother Kermit use to say, "Someone’s done fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch coming down." . . .
Yes. I realize that could be taken as a mean-spirited, generalized stereotype. . . .
Second. When it comes to the atheist men, we're not necessarily dealing with suave, debonair gentleman dressed for success. Its [sic] mostly a room full of scruffy, ponytail guys with borderline Asperger's. . . .
Of course, this makes me wonder if what we have happening at these conventions is a bunch of goofy guys trying their socially awkward best to pick up women. The women don't necessarily want to be picked up because … well … They’re socially awkward atheist guys who are going to bore you to death about Larry Niven. It's the classic, if the guy is a weirdo it's sexual harassment; if he's attractive, he's flirting. . . .
And we have bonus stupidity from the lone commenter:
I'm still waiting for Atheists to explain why sexual harrassment [sic] is wrong. . . . I know they can't possibly.
(via reader Ben Wallis)
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
The Stupid! It Burns! (denying the evidence edition)
Why Do Atheists Deny The Big Bang? [Atheists] decline to offer their criteria for evidence of God, so that anything that the apologist offers can be dismissed just as quickly as it was proposed. ... But when evidence does arise, they will not only reject the philosophical conclusion that it leads to. They will reject the evidence itself, without giving pause to even the most valid scientific credentials. When the alternative to theism is to abandon scientific naturalism and endorse irrationality, that this precisely what the skeptic will do. ... [T]he atheist does not acknowledge the evidence acknowledged by the scientific community, namely, the Big Bang.
We don't? I'll be damned. I must have missed the memo.
Lots more stupid in the article.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Spam spam spam spam
Pedro, will you please kick this lasata brand asshole spammer off of Planet Atheism? Seriously.
Monday, July 09, 2012
Who said it?
Who said this?
Note: I've obscured the author's ideal form of government to make it more interesting to guess.
Read Corey Robin's post for the answer.
[A]s long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in [an ideal] way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of [idealism]. Personally, I prefer [an ideal] dictator to democratic government lacking in [idealism]. My personal impression. . . is that in [country with a dictatorship] . . . we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to [an ideal] government . . . during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.
Note: I've obscured the author's ideal form of government to make it more interesting to guess.
Read Corey Robin's post for the answer.
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