A lot of people on the Left who participated in, or supported, Black Power and the Black Panther Party criticized King in particular, the SCLC, and the emphasis on integration as the be-all and end-all of liberation for Black people. Kwame Toure (nee Stokeley Carmichael) and Jamil al-Amin (nee H. Rap Brown) were two of the leading figures, and the trajectory of SNCC from 1965 to 1967 an indicative moment. Carmichael and Brown both explicitly criticized integrationist civil rights legislation as a mere palliative, began talking about “self-determination” for Black people as the proper goal rather than “integration” into existing social structures, and aimed to align the Black liberation movement in the United States with revolutionary Leftist movements in Africa and the Third World broadly. The Nation had a bit of a discussion of the criticisms in broader historical context (reviewing the radicals of the Old Left as well as the New) back in 1998, by Robin D. G. Kelly, entitled “Integration: What’s Left?”; you can find it online at http://tinyurl.com/byq5w … Stokeley Carmichael’s SNCC position paper on “The Basis of Black Power” is also online at http://tinyurl.com/e4okd — which defends Black self-determination and Black nationalism, although it mostly leaves the criticism of the NAACP and SCLC integrationist approach tacit rather than explicit.)

gabriel: Your main problem, from a practical POV, is that the current left is doing great without you and they have their own agenda, pretty much centered on things you technically don’t like.

What is the statist Left currently doing great at? Nothing in the United States comes to mind. The dominant tone of every orthodox Leftist publication and organization at the moment seems to be a combination of outrage and despair. Even hand-wringing lefty Democrats seem to be pretty firmly convinced that the project of the Left is in a state of debilitating crisis.

On a global scale, they’ve won some a series of recent elections in South America. But in Brazil (for example) the victory has already led to a great deal of tension between the governing Left, the grassroots state socialists, and the autonomists (whose relationship to the State is ambiguous at the most, and often straightforwardly hostile) who laid much of the organizational and ideological groundwork for recent electoral wins.

That’s about the beginning and the end of what comes to mind in terms of Leftists “doing fine.” Maybe you could explain what it is that you had in mind?

It’s also worth noting that, while I can’t speak for Brad, I can say that my dialectical goals in advancing “Left Libertarianism” (and related notions) have as much to do with convincing libertarians to stop being corporate (patriarchal, etc.) tools as it does with convincing leftists to stop being state socialist tools. Whatever my opinions about the various departments of the left (and my hopes vary a lot depending on the departments in question), I am quite sure that the goal with regard to libertarians is achievable and that it will (1) get libertarians closer to the truth of matters, and (2) improve their ability to work substantial changes as libertarians, quite independently of whether the established left cooperates or not.

ericvfsu: “However, it is also possible that having an abortion does increase somewhat the possibility of depression or other disorders. Is anyone out there willing to objectively consider that possibility? I know, I know – more studies, better designed studies, this one not conclusive … All true. However, if an effect were at some time established, how would you digest that fact? Just asking.”

That’s a good question, and an important one.

I can’t speak for anyone else, of course, but my answer is that I’d digest it the same way I’d digest any other fact about medical risks attendant on abortion, or any other medical procedure: it should be honestly and neutrally documented as a side effect, and women allowed to make their own decisions in light of the knoweldge. (The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for how I’d take a genuine demonstration that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, if it ever happened.) I think Lucinda Cisler makes the point excellently in “Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women,” in regard to the particular case of restrictions for “safety” in the case of late-term abortions:

3: Abortions may not be performed beyond a certain time in pregnancy, unless the woman’s life is at stake. Significantly enough, the magic time limit varies from bill to bill, from court decision to court decision, but this kind of restriction essentially says two things to women: (a) at a certain stage, your body suddenly belongs to the state and it can force you to have a child, whatever your own reasons for wanting an abortion late in pregnancy; (b) because late abortion entails more risk to you than early abortion, the state must “protect” you even if your considered decision is that you want to run that risk and your doctor is willing to help you. This restriction insults women in the same way the present “preservation-of-life” laws do: it assumes that we must be in a state of tutelage and cannot assume responsibility for our own acts. Even many women’s liberation writers are guilty of repeating the paternalistic explanation given to excuse the original passage of U.S. laws against abortion: in the nineteenth century abortion was more dangerous than childbirth, and women had to be protected against it. Was it somehow less dangerous in the eighteenth century? Were other kinds of surgery safe then? And, most important, weren’t women wanting and getting abortions, even though they knew how much they were risking? “Protection” has often turned out to be but another means of control over the protected; labor law offers many examples. When childbirth becomes as safe as it should be, perhaps it will be safer than abortion: will we put back our abortion laws, to “protect women”?

“The nomination of Alito is an abomination, but as Knapp points out, it is a defilement of a corpse of a constitutional Republic, which if not completely dead yet, has at least jumped the shark in my own opinion.”

I’m trying to imagine a defiled corpse jumping the shark. A zombie on water-skis? In a leather jacket?

In any case, I think that the “constitutional Republic” jumped the shark around the time folks agreed on the three-fifths compromise, and the idea that “a republican form of government” in the several states could include the absolute tyranny of the landed gentry of the South over millions of their fellow creatures. Alternatively, if you think that something has to have actually gotten started before it can be said to have “jumped the shark,” I think that the Whiskey Rebellion seems as good a time as any to call it. Certainly, to mix the metaphors again, by the War of 1812, the Creek War, etc. the corpse was already beginning to smell.

“Four decades ago, the Democrats fought the right fight.”

Four decades ago, the Democratic Party in my home state was ardently committed to the strategy of “massive resistance” to desegregation. The Freedom Movement was fighting against the established Democrat power structure; a Democrat mayor fought for bus segregation tooth and nail, a Democrat governor proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” and a Democrat police commissioner turned firehoses and attack dogs on unarmed children. Over in Mississippi (home of Jim Eastland) and Georgia (home of Richard Russell) and Arkansas (home of Orval Faubus) the situation wasn’t much different.

“What kind of Democratic Party would greet Dr. King today?”

I find it hard to imagine how the Democratic Party of today could manage to displease Dr. King more than it did at the time, given that at the time it was held in a stranglehold by his cruelest and most powerful enemies.

“Across decades, they have walked away, abandoned, left town, turned away, did not show up. Finally, as a party they just morphed, became the lesser versions of the modern Republicans.”

Not so many decades ago, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Jim Eastland, Richard Russell, Bull Connor, and nearly all the other deadly enemies of the Freedom Movement in the South were Democrats. Those billy-clubs and mounted cops and attack dogs were ordered by Democrat governors and Democrat commissioners. Many of these folks were the elite of their state parties and power brokers in the highest levels of government and the national party committee. Established “liberal” Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy depended on their favor, bent over backwards to please them, and stonewalled or went on the offensive against civil rights activists such as the delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who stood up to challenge the stranglehold of militant white supremacy within the Southern state parties.

How could the Democrats walk away from anything when they were never there to begin with?

Lopez:

Are American blacks better off now than if their ancestors had been left alone in Africa? Let’s see: on the one hand you can have ignorant backwoods fucks calling you a coon, on the other hand you can have your neighbors chopping your family up with machetes.

1. If European marauders had left Africa, and the West African coast in particular, alone, then the political and economic situation there might be somewhat different from what it is today.

2. Who cares? At best you’ve offered a utilitarian argument in favor of free immigration here. But the question was about property rights, not about whether some other regime of theft and terror would have left them worse off in the end. From the standpoint of just compensation, what matters is how well-off they would have been if no theft had occurred, not how well-off they would have been if someone else were left to do the thieving.

Kennedy:

Being long dead, the slaves cannot be compensated and their masters cannot pay.

As an historical note, the era of chattel slavery was not the last time that Black people in the United States had their rights to person and property systematically violated. Lots of people living today remember government-enforced Jim Crow.

Kennedy:

Because B’s property is not anyone else’s. Only B’s rights are at stake. If you rob my parents you’ve violated their rights, but not mine because I had no right to their property.

If you murder my parents, do I (as an heir) have the right to demand compensatory damages for wrongful death?

Wayne Besen: People will learn how destructive the closet is, not only for gays, but also on the people caught up in the sham families created to protect these closets.

I understand Besen’s temptation to put things this way, but it seems like there’s something importantly wrong here. The heterosexual families that closeted gay men and lesbians created were not “sham” families; they were real families made up of real people, and they suffered genuine pain when those families were betrayed. The tragedies here were tragic precisely because real families and real commitments were built on sham feelings.

Note also that most crusty cultural conservatives who object to hip-hop care very little about the endless use of misogynist and homophobic invective. Typical complaints have usually revolved around (1) the use of dirty words, (2) hostility towards established authority in general and the pigs in particular, and (3) musically illiterate complaints about how “easy” it is and how there’s no musical talent involved and the rest of the usual claptrap.

Incidentally, just to be clear, when you say this: “Why couldn’t Rothbard just say that he didn’t care for certain types of music rather than develop a wordy critique that opens him up to look foolish on the subject?” — are you complaining about Rothbard, in particular, holding forth on things about which he was ignorant, or are you mounting some kind of general complaint against people offering “wordy critiques” of general aesthetic trends or genres, instead of merely confining their complaints to “I don’t care for it”? Because the first point seems to me to be obviously right, and the second one dangerously tempting, but in fact quite wrong.