New on OnlySky: American religion continues its fadeout

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the continuing trend toward a secular future, in America and other nations.

In most countries, the power and influence of religion declines as the populace becomes wealthier and more educated. As people look toward the future with greater optimism, they feel less need for the illusory consolation of faith. For a long time, the United States was an outlier in this regard: a rich, developed country where religious fundamentalism exerted a powerful political influence.

But those days may be coming to an end. A new poll shows that less than half of Americans say religion is important in their daily lives. This is the first time that this has ever happened, and it points toward a future where religion has waned in cultural influence and power – despite the regressive right-wingers in office doing their utmost to prop the churches up. Their best efforts have done precisely nothing to stop this trend.

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:

The numbers of atheists, agnostics and generally nonreligious people have been growing for years. As a share of the U.S. population, they now outnumber every single religious denomination. As of 2021, for the first time ever, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or other organized house of worship.

Even among those who still identify as religious, the intensity of their belief is declining. Increasingly fewer people say that religion is an important part of their lives.

There’s a new poll on this topic, and it comes with a whopper of a title: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Fair cop

A prison cell with light streaming through a barred window

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

[Content note: Mention of suicide.]

After their meeting with Bertram, Ed and Win pay a visit to their prisoner from the home invasion the other night, to see if he feels like talking:

First stop, Valentine Safe & Vault, where the thrifty shopper can get anything from a titanium can that’d hold both Thorneycrofts, to a tiny padlock smaller than a matchhead, guaranteed to withstand a full clip of .375s.

Most Confederate crooks post bond, not to assure appearance in court, but restitution to their victims.

How strangely gracious of them.

Consider the logic of this. If you’re accused of a crime, either you did it, in which case you obviously don’t care about the “laws”/customs of this society; or you didn’t, in which case you’re not going to have fond feelings toward the person who falsely accused you.

In either case, why would an accused criminal be so obliging as to put up a bond, when there’s no authority that can force them to do so? Apparently, L. Neil Smith expects us to believe that criminals in the North American Confederacy follow the rules and politely acknowledge, “It’s a fair cop” when they get arrested.

Valentine was in the hoosegow biz sort of by accident. Some client had ordered up a pair of cells, intended for the rare bird who wouldn’t make bond, then had gone bankrupt before the goods were delivered. Valentine had tried to make up the loss by renting them out.

Smith implies that if you’re accused of a crime and can’t or won’t post a bond, you’re jailed until the trial. That seems normal and familiar – until you think about it, because the North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with no laws, police or justice system. Yet he writes as if the legal regime he scorns is still in effect.

If you’re accused of a crime, who sets the bond amount? This is supposed to be a free society with no coercion, so on whose authority can you be locked up?

The apparent answer, as we saw in a previous chapter, is that the private security firm you hire to protect you also adjudicates disputes. This includes detaining you until trial, if it’s a criminal matter.

But what if you don’t have a security company, or you refuse to say what yours is? Do they have to let you go? Or can the person who caught you just kill you on the spot?

This also ignores, as I mentioned, the predictable consequence that wealthy people would have impunity, because these firms would always side with their paying customers. They’d give them a slap on the wrist, or let them off with no punishment at all. Even if some firms tried to be fair, they’d quickly lose all their customers to less-principled competitors that promised their clients sweetheart deals.

The reason this doesn’t happen in real life is because there’s a justice system that won’t let you stonewall forever. If you harm someone, you can be prosecuted or sued in a court with the power to enforce its judgments. If you have an insurance company that indemnifies you, they can be forced to pay up. But in Smith’s world, these companies are a law unto themselves. There’s no higher authority that can force them to do anything.

When Ed and Win arrive at the private, for-profit jail business (just try not to shudder at the thought of that!), they get some bad news. Like other fanatic cultists from fiction, their prisoner committed suicide rather than face interrogation:

Penology’s scarcely a science here, but Valentine hadn’t taken precautions any two-bit county calaboose would consider elementary. Our prisoner, subcontracted to Valentine’s by his insurance company, had torn up a bedsheet and hanged himself in the night.

“And this makes money for me?” I asked, unsure what Ed was talking about as we bellied up to the counter.

“It better. You put that bullet in his leg, so I listed him as your prisoner.” He fixed the manager with a frosty glare. “It’s just as if he’d escaped.”

Worse, the prisoner refused to give his name or address (and his insurer also refused to identify him – further evidence that security firms will do favors for their customers), so they have nothing to go on. Their investigation has hit another dead end.

The silver lining is that the proprietor of the lockup owes Win compensation for this inconvenience: three hundred and seventeen gold ounces’ worth, according to the text. Under Ed’s glare, he grudgingly agrees to pay up:

“Say, bud, where do you want this forfeit credited?”

“Good question. Ed, where do they send your money?”

“Mulligan’s. But hand them a second ‘Bear, Edward W.’ and I’ll never get balanced again!”

I felt around in a pocket for the Gallatin goldpiece. “Then how about the Laporte Industrial Bank?”

This is one of those little throwaway lines that has gigantic implications. Let’s analyze it.

“Mulligan’s” is presumably a reference to Midas Mulligan, the banker from Atlas Shrugged, but that’s not the line I was talking about.

I was referring to Ed Bear’s dismissive remark about something that’d actually be a big problem in this anarcho-capitalist society: How do they handle people with identical names?

It seems like the only means of identifying people is by name. There are no Social Security numbers, nor any other government ID scheme that could be used to disambiguate people. Biometrics would be an option, but that’s out too; remember, they don’t know about fingerprints in the NAC.

So, how do you handle it if you’re a banker and your bank has a thousand John Smiths as clients? How do you know which account to apply a credit or a debit to?

Again, the seemingly-obvious answer is that private companies could develop their own ID numbers and tracking schemes, like credit card numbers. But if that’s Smith’s solution, he never says so. As we just saw, Ed Bear believed that his bank wouldn’t be able to deal with two accountholders who had the same name.

This should be impossible. You can’t run a high-tech industrial capitalist economy on a first-name basis.

Dozens or hundreds of different companies, and thousands of workers, are needed to manufacture all the parts that go into making something sophisticated, like a computer or a jet plane. For this to work, you absolutely need ways to identify and keep track of people, so that goods, services and payments all get routed to the right places. Otherwise, the flows of commerce would seize up, accounting would be a nightmare, and long-distance trade would be inefficient to the point of impossibility. And just try to imagine how stock and bond trades could work!

As we saw last week, Smith handwaves all this complexity away. He claims that most Confederate citizens run small businesses out of their homes in their spare time, doing business with their neighbors on a handshake. Yet, somehow, they also live in a hyper-advanced, highly-organized society with interstate highways, interplanetary travel, immense skyscrapers, and massive scientific endeavors like transdimensional portals. It just doesn’t add up.

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The Probability Broach: Economies of scale

A crowded, futuristic skyline

The Probability Broach, chapter 11

Ed and Win are going to see a client in Laporte’s Old Town district. Win narrates that, where he comes from, “old town” conjures up a Norman Rockwell image of quaint little cottages. But here, the oldest part of the city is a megalopolis, with skyscrapers “swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air”:

That expression, “Old Town,” conjured up mental pictures that couldn’t have been more wrong. Most Confederates do business out of their living rooms, which discourages undue formality and keeps enterprises small. Mention time clocks or commuting, they’ll look at you like they know where you escaped from. But like many inhabitants of Laporte’s older district, Freeman K. Bertram had things turned around: the high-powered executive’s version of sleeping over the delicatessen.

Paratronics, Ltd., an impressive pile of Aztec Modern rock, was planted where the Poudre River canyon empties onto the plains. We slid into an underground parking lot, dismounted, and pulled three gees getting up to the 223rd floor.

Once again, this section has one of those libertarian/anarchocapitalist sleights of hand we need to pause and unpack. Just like a conjurer distracting the eye with flashy moves, L. Neil Smith’s invocation of massive skyscrapers is meant to distract readers from the precarious assertion one paragraph earlier.

Libertarians always claim that they’re the realists, the ones who understand the cold hard truths of math and economics, not like us silly socialists with our heads in the clouds. Yet at the same time, Smith says that most businesses in the North American Confederacy are small businesses—so small, in fact, that they need nothing more than a home office.

So how does he explain economies of scale?

Large businesses have an inherent advantage over small businesses, because they can take advantage of high volumes to get by on a smaller profit margin. If you own a factory where machines churn out a million widgets per year, you only need to make pennies on each one to turn a profit. Meanwhile, the artisan who crafts each widget by hand obviously has to charge much more to make a living.

Even if the small business buys the same machines as the larger business, there are fixed costs that have to be repaid. The more sales they have, the more they can spread out those costs across each sale, increasing the amount of profit they can squeeze out. So, again, there’s a built-in drive toward bigness. It’s inherently more efficient to be big than to be small.

Of course, there may be sentimental reasons why people prefer to shop at small businesses, even if it costs them more. But in raw economic terms, a bigger business can always undercut a smaller one. And Smith has crafted a world where economics outweighs everything else. Why aren’t people in the North American Confederacy obeying the incentives of the free market?

It would appear that, even though he’s depicted an anarchocapitalist society where nothing limits how big or powerful a corporation can get, L. Neil Smith is uncomfortable with the implications of that.

He wants to depict a Jeffersonian country where most people are homesteaders living under their own vine and fig tree, running small cottage industries from their porches, beholden to no one. He doesn’t want readers to picture a cyberpunk dystopia where colossal, amoral megacorps carve up the world, and most people are impoverished peons who live in company-town slums and spend their lives in indentured servitude to their employers.

But he doesn’t have any explanation of why the latter scenario doesn’t crowd out the former. Why don’t larger businesses outcompete smaller businesses and drive them to extinction? Why don’t companies agree to merge rather than compete with each other, so they face no competitive pressure and can gouge their customers for as much as they want to? Why don’t they try to buy up critical resources to become a monopoly, gain a chokehold on the flow of commerce and raise their prices to eye-watering levels? There seems to be nothing in this world that would prevent any of this from happening, and yet somehow it doesn’t.

High up in that skyscraper, Ed and Win meet their client: Freeman K. Bertram, the head of Paratronics, Ltd.

Bertram was a tallish, nervous type who preferred hornrims to getting his eyeballs resculpted like everybody else; he affected a sort of Italian Renaissance beard and a kilt.

The backstory here is convoluted, but to summarize: Bertram had hired Ed Bear to investigate a series of thefts from one of Paratronics’ warehouses. By coincidence (or is it?), a pen with a Paratronics logo somehow turned up in Win’s world, on the other side of the dimensional portal.

Ed and Win relay this story to him, including the fact that Win comes from a parallel universe, something that Bertram doesn’t seem that shocked by. He’s more annoyed by the fact that Ed hasn’t caught the culprits behind the warehouse theft. To this, Ed replies that he’s advised them on how to tighten their security, and that’s all he’s going to do: “I protect property. I don’t collect people!”

Side note: Is there anyone in this universe who does collect people? Does the North American Confederacy have bounty hunters for hire? Or do you just get away scot-free unless you’re caught red-handed at the scene of the crime?

L. Neil Smith never addresses this question. He makes a big deal out of how everyone here carries weapons at all times to protect themselves, because no one can trample on the rights of an armed individual. If that’s true, it’s hard to see how that profession could exist here, unless they swarm suspects with superior force—but a government can do the same thing, and yet Smith is adamant that his armed anarchists are more than capable of repelling any government intrusion.

Bertram grudgingly accepts Ed’s explanation. He says that to help Win out and solve the mystery of the pen, he can refer them to one of the researchers his company works with, a Dr. Thorens at Laporte University.

On the way out, Win muses, “this country could use a few lessons in elementary sneakiness”. Ed asks what he’s talking about, to which he responds that Bertram was wearing a bronze ring with the eye-in-the-pyramid logo. For some reason, they don’t double back to interrogate him about it, even though this implies that Bertram has ties to the same gang that tried to murder Ed and Win at home.

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How many churches would feed a starving baby?

In the Bible, Jesus commands his followers to feed the hungry, shelter refugees, and comfort the afflicted. Whether they obey or disobey this command, he says, on judgment day they’ll be treated as if they had done the same to Jesus himself:

“Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’

Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.'”

—Matthew 25:31-46

Although the Bible contains many atrocities and evils, it also has some good, even beautiful passages. This verse, in this atheist’s opinion, is at the top of the list.

It’s praiseworthy because it teaches the bedrock value of empathy. It says that the measure of a Christian’s character isn’t how often they go to church, how many gospel tracts they hand out, or how many Ten Commandments plaques they cram into classrooms and courthouses – but how they treat the poor, oppressed and downtrodden. It tells them to focus on those society looks down on.

This is a beautiful message, and if more churches followed it, the world would be a better place. That being said, it’s fair to ask: do Christians follow it? Or is it just one of the many parts of the Bible they ignore?

One person conducted a brilliant experiment to find out.

On TikTok, Nikalie Monroe had a simple yet ingenious test. She called churches and religious institutions across the country – some small and humble, some large and wealthy – and posed as a mother in need of help.

She said she was out of food and money and her two-month-old baby had had nothing to eat since last night. (For verisimilitude, she played the sound of a crying infant in the background.) She asked the church if they’d donate a can of baby formula. If the person who answered the phone suggested a local food bank, she said that she’d already called that place and they couldn’t help.

The test was whether the church would help, as Jesus told them to, or whether they’d make up excuses or deflect the responsibility onto someone else.

Can you guess what happened?

According to Nikalie’s report, she called 42 churches and other religious institutions. Of those, 33 – a huge majority – either gave her the runaround or said no.

In this category, there were many huge, wealthy churches that unquestionably could have helped: for example, Dream City Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Phoenix which Charlie Kirk attended.

Joel Osteen’s massive Lakewood Church in Houston told Nikalie she could put in an application to their “benevolence ministry”, but said it might take weeks for them to approve her request – as if that’s helpful for a baby who’s starving now. (This is the same church that refused to house flood refugees during Hurricane Harvey.)

At the 13,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, the person who answered the phone said, “I’m not aware of any programs that we have to help you.” Nikalie asked if the church was pro-life, and they hung up on her.

Germantown Baptist Church in Memphis said, “Our benevolence is for our members” and turned her away. Note, it wouldn’t even be good enough for her to be Christian – she’d have to be a member of that specific church for them to consider helping!

(As a side note: I listened to a lot of Nikalie’s videos to write this post. The sound of a screaming baby is viscerally disturbing. It was taking a psychological toll on me, and I knew there was no actual baby! Imagine the hard-heartedness of people who listened to it in the belief that it was real and still did nothing.)

This is just what an atheist would have predicted. We’ve always said that the churches’ pretensions of morality are empty shams. They claim to be the source of all goodness, but in reality, most are self-perpetuating clubhouses of privilege. The only thing they care about is accumulating as much wealth and power as they can get their greedy hands on.

To be sure, not every church flunked Nikalie’s experiment. Although most turned her away, a few said yes. Most of these were either smaller, poorer churches, or non-Christian religious minorities.

For example, when she called a tiny church in rural Kentucky, the pastor, who’s a great-grandfather, immediately offered to go out and buy it himself. (After her experiment was publicized, this video went viral and over $100,000 in donations poured in to that church.)

A mosque in North Carolina said yes the instant she asked.

A Buddhist temple suggested several ideas for her to try, and when she said none of those had panned out, the woman who answered the phone offered her money.

What’s striking is that some churches that failed the test – and were called out on social media for it – didn’t react with shame or contrition. Instead, they attacked Nikalie personally. It’s as though they thought, if they could find some reason to condemn her, it would invalidate her experiment.

For example, the pastor of Germantown Baptist gave a sermon where he huffed that his church was targeted by “radical woke unbelieving trolls” who engaged in “an unrighteous fake attempt to set a trap for us“.

He didn’t show the slightest remorse. He didn’t concede that, even if this was a trap, the way the church responded says something about them. He couldn’t even be bothered to say that they’d learned a lesson or that they’d reevaluate their members-only policy.

It gets worse. Raymond Johnson, pastor of Baton Rouge’s Living Faith Christian Church, arrogantly sneered, “I don’t apologize to the devil.” He said Nikalie had “the spirit of a witch” and, most shockingly, “my Bible say[s]… do not allow that thing to live”. (Is this a death threat wrapped in scripture?)

And Steven L. Anderson, the grotesquely misogynist pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, snarled and raged about “‘single mother’ whores” (Nikalie never claimed to be a single mother in her experiment). He said – where other people could see it, under his own name – “Churches should not be funding fornicators and their bastards.” (Remember, brethren, Jesus threw the first stone at a prostitute!)

What deepens the sting is that most of these churches are conservative institutions who believe that government safety nets should be dismantled because it’s the church, not the state, that’s supposed to be helping the needy. But when presented with a perfect opportunity to do just that, they failed miserably. They put the lie to their own faith and their own politics.

These churches are naked in their hypocrisy. But rather than treating this as an opportunity for self-reflection, they lashed out in anger at the person who exposed them.

Again, while this was the more common response, there were good people in every religion who were willing to help a fellow human in need. The beauty of Nikalie’s test is that it’s a clear, unambiguous way to tell which is which. It’s like a litmus strip that changes color the moment you walk through the door. More than anything else, that’s what most churches fear: an inescapable test of their actions, not just their words.

The Probability Broach: Whose streets? Our streets!

An 1847 map of lower Manhattan

The Probability Broach, chapter 11

After several tedious days of convalescence punctuated by assassination attempts, Win Bear is back on his feet. The North American Confederacy’s advanced medical technology has healed his injuries, and his friends gift him new clothes. For free, because they’re just that nice.

He’s eager to get out and about, and he plans to join his counterpart Ed Bear on a case. Ed’s vehicles were damaged in the shooting that nearly killed Win, so they’re borrowing his neighbor Lucy’s. (Everyone here owns hovercraft rather than cars, because hovercraft are cool.)

Lucy had a matched pair of elderly Thorneycroft 418s, a stately machine dating back almost to the beginnings of hovercraft production. Enameled a garish yellow paisley, they’d rolled off the assembly line sixty years ago, but, with the help of an adoring mechanic, Lucy proudly kept them in mint condition.

…She pointed toward the drive fans, rudders high and stately behind them. “Can’t handle more’n a six-degree incline unless you give ’em full power and blow out every window in town.”

See, this is why you’re better off with no government. Those meddling busybodies pass all kinds of nanny-state laws, like “you’re not allowed to have machines so loud they can shatter your neighbors’ windows with sheer sonic force”.

Here, they believe in freedom! Don’t take our choices away. Let every individual decide for themselves whether they want to rupture everyone’s eardrums within a six-block radius.

As near as I can figure, Laporte occupies about half the area of Colorado’s Larimer County. According to the ad agencies who keep track—a census-taker would be cold meat before his second nosy question—population varies between two and three million. North Americans are incredibly mobile. A lot of that is underground. We swept through timber and prairie Ed swore was high-density industrial, then the forest primeval would give way with breathtaking suddenness to skyscrapers swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air.

This is another of those little moments that make you do a double-take.

Smith says outright that the trigger-happy residents of the North American Confederacy would shoot a census taker… but ad agencies are somehow better?!

In this bizarro-world, public servants going door to door to ask basic demographic questions is an intolerable infringement on privacy. However, unaccountable private companies collecting that info and much more besides, building up detailed profiles on people’s interests and affiliations, with no restrictions on how this information can be used or who it can be sold to—that’s completely fine, and doesn’t raise even a flicker of concern.

Ed’s place is in south-central Laporte, dominated by the university, an enormous park I was acquainted with, various retail businesses and small industries. We slid easily and quickly through the manicured streets, finding an artery that let us rev up almost to eighty, and, with cross-traffic whisking around us by landscaped viaduct and tunnel, were in the Old Town in minutes.

Reading libertarian novels is like watching a magician’s act. You know you’re being fooled; you just have to spot the sleight of hand when it happens. Often, it’s a casual mention of something that logically shouldn’t exist in their world. This passage has one of those.

L. Neil Smith refers to “manicured streets” so straight and wide and well-maintained that Ed and Win can drive at eighty miles an hour. Say what? Who built those streets?

As any student of history knows, roads are one of the oldest functions of the state. The Roman roads are the classic example. They spread tens of thousands of miles across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, knitting together far-flung provinces, enabling fast movement and long-distance trade. They were so well-made that some are still in use today, two thousand years later.

In South America, the Inca built roads on an immense scale throughout their mountainous empire, with bridges, retaining walls and water drainage. Like the Roman roads, the benefits persist: one study found that, even today, communities living near the old Inca roads are better off economically.

But whether Roman, Incan or wherever else, a road network is a colossal engineering project. In every instance, it requires the power of a state to plan, organize and marshal the labor of thousands of people. The same goes for other massive infrastructure projects, like bridges, dams, canals, tunnels or sewers.

The most important part, possibly even more than the labor, is the decision-making power. Inevitably, people along the proposed route get inconvenienced or displaced. How are their objections handled? Who has the final say?

In the modern era, building the interstate highways required the government’s power of eminent domain to seize property from landholders, on a vast scale. From Tom Lewis’ book Divided Highways:

It required seizing more land by eminent domain than “had been taken in the entire history of road building in the United States,” according to Lewis.

Obviously, eminent domain is a dangerous power that can be abused. Racist urban planners like Robert Moses bulldozed highways right through the middle of thriving minority neighborhoods, displacing residents, destroying homes and businesses. Moses and those like him created an architecture of segregation that persists to this day.

But just because a power can be used in unjust ways, it doesn’t follow that it shouldn’t exist. No one wants to go back to the medieval era, when long-distance travel meant a grueling, hazardous journey that took months to go a few hundred miles. Reliable roads make civilization possible, but they have to be put somewhere. Inevitably, some have to sacrifice for the benefit of all.

So, again, how can you have roads without a state? Who decided the routes? How did they pay for it? Most important, how did they get everyone else to agree?

It would be one thing if libertarians tried to answer these questions, however implausible their answers were. But they don’t even seem to realize the problem.

The same issue exists in Atlas Shrugged. In the capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch, there’s no government and everything is privately owned. Yet somehow they, too, have roads and other infrastructure. There’s no explanation of who built these things or how; it’s as if they just condensed from the ether.

If landholders had an absolute right to refuse to sell, it would be almost impossible to build roads in a populated area. In an anarcho-capitalist world, if roads existed at all, they wouldn’t be convenient straightaways laid out in a logical grid. They’d be a crazily branching network of tight, tangled paths with no rhyme or reason, riven with hairpin turns and dead ends, twisting and dividing around buildings whose owners wouldn’t move. They would all look like this “nail house” in China.

Also, there would be toll booths on every block charging extortionate fees—both because this would make roads incredibly expensive and difficult to construct, and because the investors would expect high returns. (In case you were curious, the word “toll” never appears in TPB.)

This goes to show how libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have a cargo cult philosophy. They insist that government does nothing good or worthwhile, but only because they have an ideological blind spot to everything it gives them: the roads they drive on, the clean water that comes out of their tap, the electricity that flows into their house, the standards and measures that enable smooth trade.

They never wonder where that stuff comes from; they believe it just appears when people need it. They overlook all the collective effort it takes to create, organize and maintain the architecture of society, because acknowledging that would point them in directions they don’t want to go.

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New on OnlySky: The era of Zohran Mamdani

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor and what it means for the future of American politics.

This month, a democratic socialist Muslim was elected to run one of the world’s greatest cities. In his rise to power, Mamdani defied conventional wisdom, flummoxed the media establishment, infuriated the billionaire class, and shrugged off suspicion and outright hostility from the ossified Democratic party elites. But his brand of unapologetically progressive politics connected with voters. It inspired the young and motivated an army of thousands of volunteers to get out the vote for him. It’s drawn positive attention and renewed hope all around the world.

Is his victory a fluke that can’t be repeated elsewhere – something unique to the political conditions in NYC? Or does it signal the approach of a sea change in our politics?

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:

At the start of the campaign, Andrew Cuomo was the heir-in-waiting. The son of a popular former mayor and a member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, he was governor of New York during the COVID era. He resigned in 2021 after accusations that he sexually harassed women in his staff, but he decided to make a comeback.

By contrast, Mamdani, a city councilman from Astoria, started out as an unknown. The earliest polls showed him at 1%, tied with “someone else”. He’s a Muslim—long thought a liability in the city that went through 9/11—and a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Uganda—at a time when the U.S. is experiencing a violent resurgence of xenophobia. As mentioned, he’s also a democratic socialist, an ideology that one party distrusts and the other despises.

But he ran a smart, media-savvy campaign. He combined an unapologetic progressive platform with undeniable personal charisma and a string of viral videos: like jumping into frigid January water in a suit to promote his proposed rent freeze, or a ferocious confrontation with Trumpist border czar Tom Homan, or walking the entire length of Manhattan while talking to voters along the way.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Cracks in utopia

The "all seeing eye on the pyramid" from US dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

By threatening a captive prisoner, Win Bear was able to extract two useful pieces of information: one, that someone named “Madison” sent the goon squad after him, and two, that this Madison has or wants to acquire nuclear weapons (“He’ll blast you all to radioactive slag!”).

That second part is more disturbing to Win than to his new friends. Although the North American Confederacy has more advanced technology than the world he came from, Win knows what a nuclear bomb is, while his friends seem unfamiliar with the concept. They give him blank looks when he asks them about it.

But even though it got them the information they wanted, torturing a prisoner is against the rules of this society. Anyone who commits a crime and can’t make restitution is supposed to be ostracized by all, thrown out into the street and left to starve. That’s the way Smith tells us it works here.

However, even though Win flagrantly violated a prisoner’s rights in front of them, his friends never even consider doing that to him. We saw last time that they’re a little angry, but their anger only lasts a few paragraphs and then it’s never brought up again. Despite Smith’s insistence that his anarchy works because everyone follows the unwritten social contract, he unintentionally depicts the more realistic outcome: people overlooking the rules to help out their friends.

That said, when Win asks, “I’ve gone and spoiled it, haven’t I?”, they confirm the prisoner can file a legal case:

“‘Fraid so, buster,” Lucy absently swirled her ice, “He’ll likely sue our pants off and you don’t have that much to spare.”

… “He can’t get blood out of a turnip. Does that mean Devil’s Island?”

“Asteroids. No, Winnie, it just means we can’t sue him: our claims’ll cancel out.”

Once again, no one proposes the obvious solution, which is to kill the prisoner before he can complain to anyone about his treatment. In a world with no laws, where murder is perfectly allowable as long as you say it was self-defense, that’s the rational course of action.

Luckily for Win, this never becomes an issue. When the Civil Liberties Association arrives, the prisoner denies being tortured. No reason for this is given. You’d think the bad guys, who want to subvert this society, would be eager to wield its rules against their enemies. Even if they failed to kill Win, why not try to tie him up in court?

By the time I got to bed, the authorities had carted off the bodies, living and otherwise, along with depositions in living color and stereophonic sound, from every witness and participant—a lengthy process, but not without its rewards.

I wasn’t going to the asteroids, after all. Our damaged guest denied being intimidated—was downright vehement about it. I wasn’t looking any gift horses in the mouth, but everybody else was curious as the CLA shook him down.

“What’s this?” The representative removed a medallion from the prisoner’s neck.

… “Private property!” he snarled. “Give it back!”

The medal is bronze, engraved with “1789” and the “eye-in-the-pyramid” logo—better known as the Eye of Providence—which Win recognizes because it’s on the money where he comes from.

(Evil Overlord tip: Don’t make your henchmen wear identifying regalia when they go out to commit assassinations!)

Lucy, who until this point hasn’t been described as anything other than Ed Bear’s elderly neighbor, declares that she recognizes the symbol:

“I’ve seen this type before”—Lucy chuckled grimly—”back in the War in Europe. Coulda collected a mess of those medals if I’d been the souvenir type.”

Ed looked exasperated. “There you go again, Lucy, that was seventy years ago, and the Confederacy was neutral. The only Americans over there were volunteers in—”

“The Thousand Airship Flight! Bloody Huns shot us to pieces, but I got my passengers down okay, and joined the fighting.”

Lucy explains that they were fighting the Prussians, who had launched an imperial war of conquest against the rest of Europe. It’s this timeline’s version of World War I.

The North American Confederacy, being an anarchy without a standing army, officially stayed neutral. But thousands of its citizens volunteered to go and join the resistance, and Lucy was one of them. (As we’ll see, the NAC has life-extending technology, which is how she’s still alive to recall it seventy years later.)

The symbol dates back to the war, but doesn’t come from the Prussians, she says. Rather, it’s from the conspirators who were giving them their marching orders:

Ed goggled. “You mean it’s really—”

“That’s right, Eddie, it’s them. And Win, I do know what an atom bomb is. I helped move Phobos into synchronous orbit over Coprates.” She jerked an unkind thumb toward the prisoner. “If these crablice’re plannin’ t’use thermonuclear earth-movers as weapons…”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “Who’s them?”

“The Hamiltonians,” Ed answered quietly. “They’re the ones trying to kill you, Win.”

If you hadn’t guessed, the “Hamiltonians” are a secret cabal plotting to impose that ultimate evil: government. Smith chooses this appellation for his villains because he hates Alexander Hamilton the most of all America’s founders.

This is the first indication that that anyone is plotting to overthrow this society. Smith is eager to convince us that his version of anarchism works; that the North American Confederacy is a super-advanced, prosperous, peaceful utopia. But, clearly, it still has people who are so disgruntled that they want to tear it down.

This could be the launching point for an interesting philosophical discussion. If the NAC is as good as its author says it is, what motivates people to be Hamiltonians?

In fact, they’re so attracted to this ideology that they’re willing to kill or die for its sake—as opposed to, say, writing angry letters to the editor. That’s an extreme level of devotion that’s normally only brought out by severe oppression or desperation.

Cover of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin

What made them so fanatical? Are these the poor and homeless, people who couldn’t earn enough to survive, and joined a cult because it was better than starving? Did they suffer some appalling injustice at the hands of its for-profit legal system? Are they serfs or indentured servants who escaped brutal treatment by rich owners and want to strike back? Is there a dark underbelly to the NAC that we’re not seeing?

These are the kinds of questions any decent world-builder should ask. Obviously, some societies are better and some are worse, but no arrangement is going to please everyone. The best way to learn about a civilization, real or fictional, is to look into its cracks—to ask who it’s not serving, and why.

Alas, this potentially interesting question goes unanswered in this book. Smith never explains what motivates the Hamiltonians, nor treats them as anything other than anonymous, disposable goons. For plot purposes, there have to be bad guys even in his superior anarcho-capitalist world, but he doesn’t want to delve into their reasoning. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t give them believable motivations without risking his utopia seeming not so utopian.

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New on OnlySky: The fossil fuel era is ending in flames

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the fossil fuel era will end – not with a whimper, but with a bang of exploding refineries.

Despite sanctions, price caps and other attempts to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the Western world can’t kick the habit of buying its oil. The dollars and euros are the lifeblood of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war machine. Now Ukraine is changing the calculus, with fleets of domestic drones and cruise missiles destroying Russian refineries, pipelines and other fossil-fuel infrastructure. And Russia’s military seems helpless to do anything about it.

This is something every politician should be thinking about. Even if you think climate change is a liberal hoax (or are paid by lobbyists to say that you do), there’s also a national security argument for renewables. The Ukraine war has proven that oil and gas infrastructure can’t be protected, especially with drones becoming cheaper and more capable all the time. But a society with solar panels on every roof has no such vulnerable points. What will it take for the world to learn that lesson?

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:

For years, Russia served as Europe’s gas station. Despite having few other industries of note, Russia has abundant oil and gas reserves, which it was happy to sell to European nations to cement their economic links.

However, Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine showed Europeans the folly of depending on a belligerent, warmongering dictator for their energy needs. Like any drug dealer, Putin wanted his customers hooked so he’d have leverage over them. At the start of the war, Russia engaged in brazen energy blackmail, threatening to cut off the fuel supply unless the E.U. looked the other way.

But to the Europeans’ credit, they didn’t knuckle under. They slapped Russia with sanctions, sought out alternative sources of fuel, and redoubled their efforts to shift to renewable energy. Putin’s attempt at blackmail fizzled: in the first month of 2025, Russia’s last gas pipeline to Europe was shut off for good.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Might makes right

A fallen pink peg surrounded by a ring of blue pegs

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

Win Bear and his friends have captured a hitman. By threatening the prisoner with summary execution, Win got the thug to confess who sent him. His tactic was a success, but his friends are angry at him, especially Clarissa Olson, the doctor. She was warm with him before, but now she’s decidedly frosty:

She glared. “Is this the way you treat wounded prisoners in Denver?”

“Not for a long, long time.” I shook my head slowly. “Back home, he’d have more rights than honest people. I’m sorry.”

Wait, what?

In case you’ve forgotten, because L. Neil Smith apparently has, the world Win Bear came from is a dystopian autocracy where bloodthirsty secret police gun down enemies of the state with impunity, and even kill cops who get too close to the truth.

It would be a better excuse for Win to say this is how he normally treats prisoners, and didn’t know they do things differently here. Perhaps Smith thought that wouldn’t cast his protagonist in a sympathetic light.

The reason for this dialogue is that Smith is trying to achieve two incompatible things at the same time. He wants to show Win’s world (which, remember, is meant to be our world) as a nation of slaves oppressed under the brutal jackboot of government. However—in line with his right-wing Dirty Harry politics—he also wants to accuse it of coddling criminals, rather than giving them the swift, harsh justice they deserve.

You can’t have it both ways. Do we live in a power-mad dictatorship that tramples on people’s rights? Or are we too soft, too legalistic, and overly concerned with people’s rights? Those are opposite problems!

“It was a horrible thing you did. Immoral. I’m not sure I like you very much, Lieutenant Win Bear!”

“I’m not sure I like myself very much,” I answered, tasting bile. “And what do you mean, ‘immoral’? After what he did? I’ve had about enough of this self-righteous crap. You’re all so smugly satisfied with your Confederate status quo, you can’t see the lunacy of it flapping right in front of your own silly noses!”

Lucy turned, disbelief on her face. “What’s bitten you, son?”

Suddenly they were all strangers, creatures from another world. “The good doctor here—for something I already feel rotten about, thanks—while everybody in this safe, stable, oh-so-humane society carries a handgun, prepared to kill at the drop of a hat! What the hell are you all afraid of? How come such well-adjusted people cling so hysterically to their perverted phallic symbols?”

“What the hell are you all afraid of?” is a bizarre question under the circumstances. Win arrived in this anarcho-capitalist society a few days ago, and people have already tried to murder him at least three times.

It would make more sense for Win to accuse this society of dishonestly pretending to be idyllic and peaceful, while really it’s a violent hellhole where death lurks around every corner and no one is safe. The fact that everyone carries guns for protection would serve as proof of how dangerous it is. But Smith doesn’t have him make that argument, perhaps because it would hit too close to home.

This is the place for an Ayn Rand-style monologue, as Clarissa explains to him just why guns are so damn important:

“Win, civilized people go armed to say, ‘I am self-sufficient. I’ll never burden others.’ They’re also saying, ‘If you need my help, here I am, ready‘—yes, a contradiction, but a pretty noble one, I think. Independence is the source of freedom, the first essential ingredient of mental health. You’re good at taking care of yourself, Lieutenant. Why can’t you allow others the same right?

Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out. Is that evil? Is that wrong?

People who object to weapons aren’t abolishing violence, they’re begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically ‘right.’ Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.”

Smith thinks that weapons make you “free”, in the sense that they overrule raw physical strength. A person with a gun will beat a person without a gun. I could agree with that.

But he fails to ask the followup question: what beats a person with a gun? The answer should be obvious: two people with guns.

This is the problem Smith never grapples with, possibly because he’s so entrenched in an ultra-individualist, every-man-for-himself mindset that it never occurs to him. No matter how macho you are, you can’t hope to win a fight if two or more people gang up on you. Being armed doesn’t change this calculus, not if everyone has the same weapons—it only raises the stakes.

He seems to believe that, in an armed society, tyranny is impossible because every individual will fight to the death against oppression. But a single person bravely fighting off an armed mob only happens in movies. In reality, when you’re outnumbered, most people will make the rational choice to give in. That’s how it worked for most of history, after all.

The actual best way to protect yourself is being part of a group whose members defend each other. And because a bigger group beats a smaller group, what you really want is to be part of the biggest group of all.

That, in a crude sense, is what the state is: an entity that has a monopoly on force. In a democracy, we control the state’s actions by consensus, passing laws that define under what circumstances its power can be unleashed, rather than leaving it up to the whim of a dictator or a king. Some more-civilized societies occasionally even have constitutional guardrails to protect the rights of minorities from majoritarian abuse.

The tradeoff is that not everyone gets to do what they want all the time. But of course, no society could guarantee that, however constituted. Smith disagrees only because of his view that there are no tradeoffs between freedom and safety; that by abolishing all laws that restrain how people act (including laws against murder, robbery, rape and the like), we all magically become safer.

What would actually happen, if we abolished the state and no one had a monopoly on force, is that all the historical factors that led to the creation of states the first time would play out again. The most wealthy and powerful would gather small armies of thugs to themselves, becoming local warlords or robber barons.

In this new, lawless world, the most ruthless would rise to the top. They’d rule by fiat, imposing their will on all the regular people in their sphere of influence, conquering smaller gangs. The only check on their power would be if they happened to encounter a bigger gang. It would be the might-makes-right world that Smith claims to be worried about, but brought about by his own ideology.

And because it would be starting over from a blank slate, with no historical precedent to guide it, there’s no guarantee it would bind itself to protect anyone’s rights. It might well be a tyranny as bad as or worse than the most brutal dictatorships of the past.

Remember, Win Bear grouses that in his world, criminals (or—to put it more accurately—people accused of a crime) have too many rights and protections! That sounds a lot like Smith admitting that democracy is less oppressive than he wants us to believe it is. He wants to scrap all those hard-won legal protections and replace them with nothing. That’s not a recipe for freedom, but for chaos.

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The Probability Broach: Justice for sale

An 1881 political cartoon showing the Hawaiian Islands being auctioned off

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

Win Bear and his friends fought off a home invasion and captured one of the thugs. Win wants to threaten the captive into talking, but his friends Ed and Lucy say things are done differently here.

They’ve already contacted the Civil Liberties Association, or CLA, which is the closest thing to the authorities in this society. Ed says the CLA will investigate, collect evidence and testimony, and pay for a defense if an accused person has no money:

“Then we’ll get together and hire a judge acceptable to all sides. Any appeal will go to a second judge—”

“Paid for by the first!”

“Yes, Lucy, paid for by the first. And if that decision doesn’t stick, a third judge may be called. His vote is final. Any two judges finish the matter. The whole process could take as long as a week.”

You’re supposed to focus on “as long as a week”—which is meant to sound great, although it’s an unrealistically speedy time for any justice system to operate.

But there’s another part of this that deserves more scrutiny.

One of the biggest problems I see with anarchism—including L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist variety, but other types as well—is that the justice system can’t be voluntary. Otherwise, stubborn wrongdoers will ignore attempts by others to correct their behavior.

This passage illustrates the problem. Smith tries to slip it in without you noticing: if there’s a dispute in his North American Confederacy, you have to hire a judge who’s “acceptable to all sides” to settle it. Well, what if I declare that no judge is acceptable to me? Can I hold off the legal process forever by refusing to participate?

If I’m beating my kids, or catcalling women in the street, or having noisy late-night parties that keep my neighbors up, or driving drunk, and someone files a complaint—what stops me from just ignoring them, refusing every attempt at resolution, and continuing on my merry way?

In our society, if you keep dodging subpoenas and skipping court dates, the court will eventually issue a default judgment against you that the police can enforce. If your behavior rises to the standard of serious criminality, you’ll be arrested whether you consent to it or not (as sovereign citizens have found out, to their dismay).

But an anarchist society lacks those options. The overarching idea of anarchism is that there should be no coercive power relations or hierarchies. That sounds good in theory, but only until some antisocial asshole is making your life miserable and there’s no way to make them stop.

There’s another problem here, and this one is specific to Smith’s brand of anarcho-capitalism. Let’s say we have a dispute, and we choose a judge following the procedure Smith suggests. Then I turn to the judge and say: “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to rule for me.”

Why wouldn’t people do that? There’s no law against it, after all!

Obviously, the other side will offer a competing bribe, and things will escalate. This means the NAC’s legal system isn’t a trial. It’s an auction, where a favorable verdict can be purchased by whoever can pay the most. It’s yet another reason why the rich would be untouchable, while the poor would be completely shut out of obtaining justice.

Ed spelled out the rest of the procedure… People who hurt others are expected to pay for it, literally. There are no “victimless crimes:” shoot heroin, snort a little coke, ride your bike without a helmet, do anything—to yourself.

The “law” only compels you to restore your victims to the state they’d be in had the crime never occurred. Fail in that, and your name and face get plastered all over, a formidable threat in a society geared to something like the Telecom. Who’ll do business with somebody who refuses his moral debts? No place to purchase food, clothing, shelter, ammunition—any of the necessities of life.

And one certain way to get ostracized is to commit an irrevocable crime, like murder, for which restitution cannot be made.

Please don’t overlook the mention of ammunition as one of the “necessities of life”.

This is Smith’s answer for how an anarchist society could have enforceable justice in the absence of punishments like prisons or chain gangs. You have to compensate your victim for the harm you did, or else be ostracized and risk starvation.

He asks, rhetorically, “Who’ll do business with somebody who refuses his moral debts?”—so let’s go over the answers to that question.

1. Someone who hasn’t heard of you: This is the first and biggest one. According to Smith, the North American Confederacy encompasses the entire continent of North America (hence the name). Together with other anarchist societies in this world, there are over seven billion inhabitants.

For this to work, every business owner would have to recognize, on sight, every single wrongdoer in the world. Otherwise, criminals could just change their name, maybe dye their hair, and move to the next town over. Remember, there are no public records or official documents you can check to ID someone—they’ve never even heard of fingerprints!

Even if a minuscule percentage of the population commits crimes, that’s still tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Does he really think store clerks are going to pore over comically long lists of mugshots to figure out who not to do business with?

2. Someone who doesn’t care: Smith takes it for granted that everyone in the NAC will stand on principle and refuse to do business with a criminal who won’t make restitution.

This is, obviously, absurd. In an uber-capitalist economy, there are bound to be business owners who take the attitude that money is money and they don’t care where it comes from. That shouldn’t just be a common attitude; it should be the majority opinion.

How many businesses in our world would turn down the chance to profit, just to signal their disapproval of a customer’s behavior in an unrelated matter? Is this even a little plausible in a society based entirely on self-interest?

3. Someone who approves of your crime: Here’s another obvious problem: what if outcasts band together and support each other?

What if there are racists who approve of hate crimes against minorities? Religious cults and fundamentalists who scorn outsiders and support each other no matter what? Aggrieved people who suffered unfair rulings, and help others who they believe are in the same situation? What if you’re a beloved celebrity and your fans refuse to believe you’re guilty?

Unless ostracism is unanimous, it’s not effective as a punishment. That might happen in a tiny village where everyone knows everyone, but there’s no chance of it in a civilization this scale. It flies in the face of human nature.

Smith comes close to conceding this won’t work, as he says that self-exile is also an option:

Exiles can take their property and leave. Several countries still accept them, and a number of asteroid colonies. None very pleasant. The bright side is there’s no professional criminal class, no “ex-offenders.” Once you’ve made it good, you’re square. Every day is a fresh start, and that beats hell out of sitting in a concrete box, stamping out license plates.

It seems as though Smith felt compelled to add that “none very pleasant” line. Would it be a problem if exiles could go someplace that was pleasant? Would the people of the North American Confederacy see that as unacceptable?

Now that he was safely caught, our prisoner was relying on a highly-civilized system: no Confederate would harm him, but he was afraid of me. And that was intriguing.

“Screw your goddamned CLA!” I bellowed, working up a totally artificial rage, “I’m gonna get some answers the good old-fashioned way!” I waved the gun, brushing the tip of his nose. “You wanna wind up with your friends out there, face down in the driveway?” I shoved the muzzle against his left eye and clacked the hammer backward, grinning like a demon.

He screamed and struggled. The guards had to plant their feet. “Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!”

The death threats have the intended effect, and the prisoner spills his guts:

The prisoner sobbed, head forward on his chest. “It was Madison. He said it was for the Cause! Keep that savage away!” I was suddenly afraid he’d faint before he really opened up. “Madison will get you! He’ll take care of you all! He’s—he’s got something, something from the other—” He stared at me, I think in sudden comprehension. “He’ll blast you all to radioactive slag!”

So… torture is a good thing?

Smith wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, he’s anxious to prove his political ideas could work. He wants to write an anarcho-capitalist world where everyone is unimpeachably moral and respects everyone else’s rights. Even Win feels bad about threatening the thug, and his friends are mad at him for it (though of course they quickly forgive him).

On the other hand, he’s written a plot where torture is justified, arguably even essential. As we’ll see, this “Madison” name is a crucial clue. Without it, the protagonists’ investigation would have gone nowhere. The North American Confederacy would have been invaded, possibly conquered. And Win was only able to obtain it by “breaking the law”.

Which is it? Should we hold to our principles even at risk of annihilation, or do desperate times justify desperate measures?

That’s a dilemma every society faces, not something unique to this one. But it hits with special force because Smith insists there is no tradeoff—that more liberty also means more safety. Yet even in a fictional world of his own creation, he can’t make it work out that way.

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