Law and order where there is neither?

Maybe we could set up some sort of underground railroad to help the victims escape to freedom.

That's definitely the AnCap answer.

Under the current statist order of things, which most people take for granted, refugees are generally turned back unless they are specifically targeted dissidents, who can then make a claim under the Geneva Convention.

That's because China, for example, is not a democracy, and we don't have room for one billion new citizens.

In fact, rather than having a free market and open borders, what most people want is the ratio of resources to people to be kept artificially high where they live, so that the wages of ordinary working people are above average.

So if some foreign country mistreats a minority, well, we might take X refugees temporarily, but ultimately we have to chop off some land from that country to ship those X refugees - or their grandchildren - back to. It's not as if we have any room to give away, or as if it's our fault they mistreated the minority, so we should pay for it from our resources.

Maybe we could set up some sort of underground railroad to help the victims escape to freedom.

That's definitely the AnCap answer.

Regrettably not, because it assumes a well defined and adequately defended territorial boundary between the free land's and unfree lands - which is the statist solution - to be precise, the Westphalian solution.

If we are going to allow freedom of movement, which is the most basic personal freedom, we are not going to have well defined and adequately defended territorial boundaries, except on the scale of private property.

If your enemies want war, there is no anarcho capitalist peaceful solution. 

I read a few old books, many of them written in places and times when the peace of Westphalia was widely ignored,  The common pattern in dealing with religious conflicts was not that some lands would be defended, and other lands not defended, but that some people would be defended and other people not defended.

If the Rajah's son murdered one Christian and raped his wife and daughters, no problem.  If, however, he murdered another Christian, better connected to outside Christians, the Raja's son would get thumped by that Christian's friends, co workers, and employer.  If the Raja's son came back with his father's guards, and massacred that Christian's friends, coworkers, and employer, it might turn out that the employer was the local branch of a large company which then proceeded to hire a big bunch of mercenaries, who proceeded to kill the Rajah, his sons, his guards, and loot and burn the Rajah's city.  (Without worrying much which inhabitants of that city were Muslims and which were Christians)

Thus, for example, when Muslims set to attacking Christians in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Christians called on white co religionists for aid through the religious hierarchy - so that people of one sect came to be off limits for Muslims to attack - but it remained OK for Muslims to attack people of other sects - indeed it was often the case that the flock of one Bishop would have a private peace with the followers of one Muslim cleric, and others have war.

Over the last thirteen hundred years, the defense of Europe against Islam was about twenty percent statist, thirty percent anarcho capitalist, and fifty percent anarcho piratist.  Faced with a superior conventional Christian armies, Muslims went to small scale warfare to make it impossible for those armies to occupy and control Muslim majority areas, and engaged in continual small scale raiding of Christian majority areas to pressure Christians to move out, to pressure them to convert to Islam, and to increase Islam by taking female slaves.  The conventional Christian armies did eventually move out, often creating a desert behind them, and issued licenses to private adventurers to raid Muslims, steal their lands, and abduct their women.  So the warfare was for the most part Christian bandit or Christian vigilante or Christian settler posse versus Muslim terrorist, rather than Christian King versus Muslim Caliph.

Muslims fairly regularly lose in large scale conventional warfare against Christians (and in the last century, they have also been losing in large scale conventional warfare against Jews).  When they do, the result is not peace, but small scale unconventional warfare.  Large centralized Christian armies have always proved alarmingly ineffectual against small scale unconventional Muslim warfare, so the solution has always been either genocide or, more commonly, some form of small scale widely distributed decentralized Christian warfare that heavily relied on private force by Christian settlers, bandits, pirates,and adventurers.

Progressives were largely successful in converting the Jews and Christians because of total coercive control of schools and universities, with even private religious colleges coerced into teaching progressive doctrine.  That will not fly in a Muslim majority country, because they will shoot you.

Nobody seems to be shooting schoolteachers in North Korea. So, just maintain that level of control over the Muslim world for a couple of hundred years.

Not very nice, but it's better than genocide, and much better than raping their women. (If we were doing the latter, I would start to think that al-Qaeda had a point.)

Maintaining that level of control is not easy, and I don't think it is better than raping the women. When the russians pacified Germany they used mass state sponsored rape, which quelled them very well.  East Germany permanently crushed the East Germans, who seem somewhat subhuman as compared to West Germans, and similarly, there is something seriously wrong with North Koreans as compared to South koreans.  The drastic methods used to pacify Germany seem to have made Germans somewhat less manly, but do not seem to have had any very terrible lasting effect on their character.  Prolonged Soviet rule, however, did have a terrible lasting effect on their character.

Further, we have had thirteen hundred years of attempts to maintain that level of control over Muslims, and they just have not worked very well.  We westerners are fortunately not very good at that sort of thing, and those Muslims are unfortunately highly resistant to it.

jamesd,
Let's cut to the chase.  You appear to support atrocities (such as mass murder) against innocent people because you don't like their religion.  Is that correct?

No of course it is incorrect.  I support atrocities, such as Hiroshima and Dresden, to destroy people who endanger my life by persistently making aggressive war.   In war, one cannot separate the innocent from the guilty, because the innocent are under the control of the guilty, so one must kill them all.

In a war where what one is fighting is not exactly a statelike entity, for example the Taliban and Al Quaeda, this necessarily gets messy.  In a war where neither side is statelike, for example Afghanistan from 1992 to 2000, it gets very messy indeed.

The individualist anarchist Muslims that I am familiar with propose that in order to receive protection, you would need to convert to Islam - that only Islamic protection organizations that preferentially protect Muslims would be permitted.

Most of the individualist anarchists I hang with tend to also be individualist atheists like myself.  Some were once Muslims,

Then no longer Muslims.  If your solution to the problem of Islam involves converting them all to progressivism, you have a long wait.  Ann Coulter's program - gunpoint Christianity, rather than gunpoint democracy, seems considerably more feasible.

Progressives were largely successful in converting the Jews and Christians because of total coercive control of schools and universities, with even private religious colleges coerced into teaching progressive doctrine.  That will not fly in a Muslim majority country, because they will shoot you.

Where the F U C K did you get the idea that I'm a progressive (AKA liberal or socialist)?  I'm an individualist anarchist and a libertarian.  Yeah, I would also like to see religion abolished along with government, but I won't initiate force to do so, people have to learn to think for themselves.  I have no problem with the religious except when they insist I obey their rules on what I smoke or drink or who and how many I marry.  Then it's simple self defense  (Whoever throws the first stone gets the next bullet).

Maybe we could set up some sort of underground railroad to help the victims escape to freedom.

That's definitely the AnCap answer.

Regrettably not, because it assumes a well defined and adequately defended territorial boundary between the free land's and unfree lands - which is the statist solution - to be precise, the Westphalian solution.

If we are going to allow freedom of movement, which is the most basic personal freedom, we are not going to have well defined and adequately defended territorial boundaries, except on the scale of private property.

I keep running into your unstated assumptions. You talk like your assumptions are so obviously true that they should be accepted unquestioned.

Say you have a place where a lot of people live who have AnCap ideals. And also there are a significant number of people who live there who go around forcing other people to do what they want using violence and threats of violence. And nobody does anything about it. This is not a free place.

I repeat, if you have an AnCap society and people come in and successfully enforce through coercion something other than AnCap ideals, then you no longer have an AnCap society. If you can't arrange a defense against statists and bandits, then you lose.

This is compatible with freedom of movement through AnCap areas. Anybody can travel if he follows the simple AnCap rules. You get freedom of movement through other areas if the people who live there provide that freedom. Otherwise you buys your ticket and you takes your chances.

And you certainly don't need the borders to be well-defined. Any place that most of the people adopt AnCap ideals and can make them stick, is an AnCap area. Any place they change their minds or they get coerced more than they can handle, is not. How could an AnCap society make an agreement with a state about where the state's borders are? They would need to create an institution to make agreements with states! There is no need for any treaty or boundary. Wherever the citizens cannot be governed but do cooperate among themselves without coercion beyond the rules for how to avoid government and bandits, you have a libertarian area. Wherever the public can be governed, you do not.

Why do you think it has to be either goulash or Westphalia? Why do you claim there are only two ways it can go?

If the Rajah's son murdered one Christian and raped his wife and daughters, no problem.  If, however, he murdered another Christian, better connected to outside Christians, the Raja's son would get thumped by that Christian's friends, co workers, and employer.

This sort of messiness goes on today in places like Nigeria.

It's not good for people to have to live with that much violence.

jamesD, I don't know what good you think you are promoting, but if it involves license to slaughter people by the hundreds of thousands because of your paranoid fantasies, it's not a very attractive form of civilization. The thought of insane people like you with the power to commit mass murder gives me chills. The sooner such holier-than-thou mass murderers are killed, the safer the rest of us would be.

If your solution to the problem of Islam involves converting them all to progressivism, you have a long wait. 

Where the F U C K did you get the idea that I'm a progressive (AKA liberal or socialist)?

I was waiting for that bomb to drop. 

Where the F U C K did you get the idea that I'm a progressive (AKA liberal or socialist)? 

Conversion based solutions to Muslim problem usually mean making Muslims into Christians, or making them into progressives.

Maybe we could set up some sort of underground railroad to help the victims escape to freedom.

That's definitely the AnCap answer.

Regrettably not, because it assumes a well defined and adequately defended territorial boundary between the free land's and unfree lands - which is the statist solution - to be precise, the Westphalian solution.

If we are going to allow freedom of movement, which is the most basic personal freedom, we are not going to have well defined and adequately defended territorial boundaries, except on the scale of private property.

I keep running into your unstated assumptions.

So state this assumption.  What am I assuming that you disagree with.

I repeat, if you have an AnCap society and people come in and successfully enforce through coercion something other than AnCap ideals, then you no longer have an AnCap society. If you can't arrange a defense against statists and bandits, then you lose.

But we cannot defend this place, for to defend a place implies an immigration department and customs officials and so forth.  We have to defend people, not places, which is generally done by engaging in retribution against those who harm those people.

An underground railroad implies a border.  On one side of the border, the bad guys can get at you.  Cross the border and they cannot get at you.  Anarcho capitalism is more a state of mind.  If you have certain affiliations, it is dangerous for the bad guys to get at you.  If you lack those affiliations, it is safe for the bad guys to get at you.

Islam does not have well defined territorial boundaries,.  Neither will anarcho capitalism.

I keep running into your unstated assumptions.

So state this assumption.  What am I assuming that you disagree with.

I repeat, if you have an AnCap society and people come in and successfully enforce through coercion something other than AnCap ideals, then you no longer have an AnCap society. If you can't arrange a defense against statists and bandits, then you lose.

But we cannot defend this place, for to defend a place implies an immigration department and customs officials and so forth.  We have to defend people, not places, which is generally done by engaging in retribution against those who harm those people.

An underground railroad implies a border.  On one side of the border, the bad guys can get at you.  Cross the border and they cannot get at you.  Anarcho capitalism is more a state of mind.  If you have certain affiliations, it is dangerous for the bad guys to get at you.  If you lack those affiliations, it is safe for the bad guys to get at you.

Islam does not have well defined territorial boundaries,.  Neither will anarcho capitalism.

There has to be a mass effect, short of things like Van Vogt proposed in _The Weapon Shops of Isher_. One lone libertarian defying the state, and they call in a SWAT team and he's gone. Likely as not they announce that he killed his family and then killed himself. A hundred libertarians defying the state and they call in the National Guard and announce it's a death cult and they have to save the children. A hundred thousand libertarians and they'll hesitate to send in the Marines. A million libertarians and your undefined borders are as safe as Albania.

If you have a million libertarians who for some reason are collectively safe from SWAT teams, then they can accept ten thousand refugees who take up the same customs that keep the others safe, and if the refugees do in fact become libertarians too then you have one million and ten thousand libertarians who are collectively safe from SWAT teams.

It doesn't have to involve defined borders at all, but it could be territorial. Somehow, a million libertarians have to collectively protect themselves or they have nothing. It could be a geographical thing though it doesn't have to be. And it could be a geographical thing without defined borders. Muslims who want to live among libertarians and follow the customs would presumably be welcome. People who live among libertarians and spread their religion through coercion would surely not be welcome.

It looks to me like you arbitrarily say it must be Westphalian or else it's street gangs that mingle everywhere but fight each other based on affiliation. As if those are the only two choices.

Like you suggest that Iran should give up any hope of having electric power 20 years for now, or else accept that they are forcing us to nuke them. You keep making up two choices where both of them are unacceptable and then telling us that we have to take one of them because the other one is unacceptable.

You say that given bad scriptures the only two ways to reform a religion are to paper it over with so much obfuscation that the meaning is lost, or else get a new prophet to declare the old scriptures invalid. And since the Muslims have not yet done either of those they are stuck with bad scripture.

Like you suggest that Iran should give up any hope of having electric power 20 years for now, or else accept that they are forcing us to nuke them.

Iran had a third choice. Fully comply with all IAEA inspection requirements. Prove that not one milligram of enriched uranium is being diverted.

Instead, they chased IAEA inspectors out of the country, and continued to enrich uranium without international inspectors present.

The way they can avoid being nuked is simple: do not build atomic bombs, and allow it to be seen that they are not building atomic bombs. By accepting all inspection requirements. By ceasing and desisting from having a missile program.

Unilateral disarmament and liberal democracy would help too, but let's not pile too much on the list, so that they have a realistic chance to avoid being nuked.

Iran can have electricity. Even without handing out foreign exchange to buy it from Russia. As long as we know there is absolutely zero chance of them attacking any other country, such as Israel, with a WMD.

This is unreasonable how? (Particularly from the viewpoint of an Israeli: they're people just like us, except we don't have to worry much about Indian uprisings these days.)

Like you suggest that Iran should give up any hope of having electric power 20 years for now, or else accept that they are forcing us to nuke them.

Iran had a third choice. Fully comply with all IAEA inspection requirements. Prove that not one milligram of enriched uranium is being diverted.

Instead, they chased IAEA inspectors out of the country, and continued to enrich uranium without international inspectors present.

Note that Iran fully complied with IAEA rules until last October, and doing that got them nothing whatsoever.

The way they can avoid being nuked is simple: do not build atomic bombs, and allow it to be seen that they are not building atomic bombs. By accepting all inspection requirements. By ceasing and desisting from having a missile program.

Unilateral disarmament and liberal democracy would help too, but let's not pile too much on the list, so that they have a realistic chance to avoid being nuked.

Iran can have electricity. Even without handing out foreign exchange to buy it from Russia. As long as we know there is absolutely zero chance of them attacking any other country, such as Israel, with a WMD.

This is unreasonable how? (Particularly from the viewpoint of an Israeli: they're people just like us, except we don't have to worry much about Indian uprisings these days.)

From the POV of an Israeli, this is all shining golden truth. From the POV of an american statist imperialist it's quite reasonable.

Try looking at it from an Iranian point of view. It looks to them like the USA is waging covert war against them, and has been for a very long time.

If you look at the sanctions in the context of that war, it looks very very different. We imposed sanctions on Iraq, and (after an attempt at secretly building bombs that was discovered in plenty of time) Iraq fully complied with inspections, and we inserted spies among the inspectors to take GPS measurements at every site we might someday want to bomb. We insisted that Iraq was about to get nukes when the inspectors found nothing. We told  the inspectors where to look and they still found nothing. We invaded Iraq, and there was nothing the Iraqis could have done to avert that invasion. At one point Bush demanded that they give us Saddam and his sons to stop an invasion, and when it looked like they might do it he then piled on a bunch of new demands.

Now you say that Iran should take our word that all we want is proof that they aren't making nukes, and we'll be satisfied. .... When we've been doing covert war against them a lot longer than we did against Iraq.

If I was Iranian I would emphatically want to have the whole fuel cycle operating in my country. We have uranium to mine, we have everything we need, why should we artificially put a noose around our neck that foreigners can tighten whenever they want to? If we depend on foreigners for a vital step to make our reactor fuel then any time the USA can get sanctions imposed they can shut down our electricity. Why would any reasonable Iranian accept that?

I would want nuclear weapons. Compare the way the USA treats Iraq versus North Korea and Pakistan. When China got nukes they went from a pariah nation to having a place on the UN Security Council. If Iran gets nukes the USA will probably back off. Until then there's every reason to think the USA will continue its undeclared hardly-secret war.

I would want to arrange smuggling with Russia and China, and particularly with Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Pakistan -- none of whom have any big desire to aid the USA and all of whom have officials open to bribes -- to smuggle whatever sanctioned items are needed.

The US war against Iran isn't shared by a whole lot of nations, though they pay it some lip service. And there is no obvious way for Iran to end that war until the USA decides to end it for their own reasons -- the USA hasn't even given them any plausible way to unconditionally surrender. So the hope would be to just hang on, and if possible avoid getting bombed or invaded, and with luck the US economy will collapse before the Iranian economy does.

When you present your reasoned arguments they sound, well, reasonable. But if the USA is actually fighting a covert war like it did against Iraq, and giving in to US demands will result not in the end of the war but only in tightened pressure against a weakened Iran, what can they possibly have to gain by hurting themselves?

If the USA was serious, if all we wanted was to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons, we might suggest the following compromise:

Israel has nukes, and has threatened to nuke a non-nuclear nation, Egypt. They have made not-so-veiled threats to nuke Iran. We tend to assume that Iran can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, and we have solid evidence that Israel cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. So let's make the entire middle east including Israel a nuclear-free zone with stringent inspections, and with videos of the actual inspections released to the world public.

Israel would be far better off with no nukes in the middle east than they are having nukes themselves. Everybody in the middle east would be better off.

And if the Israelis refuse to go along, then the USA has no obligation whatsoever to keep the people they talk about nuking from getting nukes also.

Try looking at it from an Iranian point of view. It looks to them like the USA is waging covert war against them, and has been for a very long time.

Not only covert.  The Iran-Iraq war was started in 1980 by the Iraq government, extensively supported by the US government, including (later) US military attacks on Iranian facilities.  (The US government sold a few weapons to the Iran government, but that was nothing compared to its support for the Iraq government.)  Iranian casualties (killed and wounded) were about a million people.