honeybrown1976:

It’s hilarious. The tribe of choice is always Cherokee as though they were the only ones. … As far as AAs making claim, the likelihood is a little greater considering that many runaway slaves were protected by Native Americans.

Well, that, and also because some Indian nations, notably the Cherokee and to a lesser extent the Muscogee, enslaved black folks prior to Emancipation.

The attitude towards slavery varied a lot from nation to nation. (The nation that most famously protected black refugees from slavery — the Seminole — were deeply divided on the question of slavery, and partly as a result of that Seminole bands eventually ended up dividing and fighting on both sides during the U.S. Civil War.)

macon d.:

I’ve read that the Cherokees were considered less “savage” than others,

They were the largest groups in what were called the “Five Civilized Tribes” by white slave-owners. The main reason white slave-owners considered them especially “civilized,” as compared to other American nations, was the fact that the Cherokee also practiced field slavery and settled agriculture, just like the white slave owners.

Tristan,

Thank you for the mention, and for the kind words.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about “real socialism,” for reasons that I discuss at [1] and [2] (which are basically just riffs on Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism”).

meika:

The reality in Tasmania is that we have a free market corraled by an alignment of interest which, for example, sees a puported private company (Gunns Tasmania, I suppose the profits are privatised) bankrolled by Tas Government pension money …

So, in other words, you don’t actually have a free market?

Markets in which purportedly private companies are bankrolled by big government slush funds aren’t free markets. At most what you have is an example of state-capitalist privateering. And consistent free marketeers are against that as much as they are against any other state-controlled or state-manipulated mode of production.

If we, the market, are stupid (Tasmania is an island all the bright ones leave or are left on the dole) then the ‘real left’ is also stupid, mediocre and falling into a hole.

Well, if everyone is stupid then widespread stupidity may lead to stupid outcomes on the aggregate. (Although this isn’t guaranteed; to infer that individual-level stupidity must lead to aggregate stupidity would be to commit a fallacy of composition. Sometimes a process can counterbalance individual stupidities in order to get a smart aggregate result. A lot of “wisdom of crowds” research tends to show that this happens more often than you might think, and that even when individual answers stand a good chance of being wildly wrong, on aggregate the results tend to converge around the right answer.)

But, in any case, I don’t see how this is an objection to free markets. If most people are stupid, then presumably democratic politics will also produce stupid results (indeed, stupider results, since unlike markets, majoritarian democracy provides no way for the minority to try out alternative experiments on a small scale). And anti-democratic politics will only produce non-stupid results if you have some reliable method for making sure that the ruling elite will tend to come from the few who are non-stupid rather than from the majority who are stupid. If it fails, then non-democratic regimes will tend to produce even stupider results than democratic regimes, since they allow one stupid person, or one select class of stupid people, to magnify their peculiar stupidities without any means for others to check, neutralize, or countervail against them. But I would submit that no reliable non-democratic method for filtering out stupid rulers has ever been devised in the history of world politics.

So if people tend to be mostly smart and good, then it seems like statist “solutions” are unnecessary. If people tend to be mostly stupid or wicked, then it seems like statist “solutions” are far too dangerous. In either case, freedom is preferable.

The people to whom Ms. Arguello-Kline refers as “immigrants” aren’t “immigrants,” by that sensible definition, at all. They’re trespassing illegal aliens,

A “trespasser” is someone who intrudes on another person’s property against the will of the property-owner.

Let’s pretend I’m an illegal immigrant renting an apartment, working for a meat-packing plant, shopping at the local grocery store, et cetera. Presumably my landlord is willing for me to live on his or her property: if the owner didn’t want me to live there, he or she wouldn’t have signed the lease. Presumably, also, my boss is willing for me to be inside his or her plant; otherwise he or she wouldn’t be paying me to do it. Presumably, also, the stores I shop at are willing for me to be inside their stores: otherwise, they wouldn’t welcome my business.

So just whose property, exactly, am I “trespassing” on?

How does giving amnesty to a couple million knowing law-breakers not encourage the next set of knowing law-breakers, inviting them in no uncertain terms to “Come on in and enjoy all the free stuff; after a few years you can get ‘amnestied’, too!”?

You say “knowing law-breakers” like it’s supposed to be a bad thing to knowingly break the law. Coming from someone who so vocally praises the American Revolution, this seems odd.

If the radicals who gathered downtown on June the first want to demonstrate in favor of a mass amnesty — for open borders, over which hundreds of millions of the world’s poor and oppressed would be invited to come here and swarm our free public schools and free hospital emergency rooms until our current socialist policies drive us finally, completely, bankrupt — let them at least say what they mean.

That sounds like a problem with the socialist policies, not a problem with free immigration.

Why exactly do you want to save socialist policies like government control over schools and hospitals?

Amp:

Thanks for the link, and for the kind words.

I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.”

Well, I don’t dispute that CATO and the LP are significant parts of American libertarianism. But you don’t have to find some crazy-ass Red-card-carrying left-mutualist anarcha-Dworkinist like me to find self-identified libertarians who speak out vocally and repeatedly on the specific political issues that Bartlett claims libertarians aren’t speaking out about. You can find that standpoint among many people in the LP (including pretty much all LP presidential candidates prior to Bob Barr), or in any issue of Reason, which is not even remotely a radical publication, which you can find on the newsstand at any Barnes and Noble, and which is, as far as I know, the highest-circulation libertarian publication in the United States. These aren’t small or irrelevant parts of American libertarianism either, and if Bartlett can’t find the kind of libertarians that he’s looking for, then my suspicion is that he’s not looking very hard.

The claim that libertarians don’t speak out often enough about the War on Drugs, of all things, strikes me as particularly loopy and ill-founded.

For what it’s worth, Charlotte was a sympathetic interviewer who among other things took time to contact Dana Ward before she ever interviewed me, in order to get some background on anarchist ideas. She didn’t miss or misrepresent my distinction between senses of “law”; rather, I used the phrase “lawless order” several times in the course of the interview without stopping to mention the distinction between law-as-general-prescription and law-as-government-edict (although I did mention the importance of private mediation and arbitration along the way), because I figured (rightly, I think) that spelling out the distinction would only introduce complications that couldn’t be very well captured in the story — not because of any problem with the reporter, but simply because of the format of a short newspaper feature is such that the medium won’t bear the message.

The only thing that really baffles me, actually, is the headline. I mean, yeah, down with “The Man” and all, but my appropriation of New Left argot hasn’t gone that far yet, and I don’t think those two words were ever even uttered in that order at any point during the meeting.

Those who are curious about how Anarchists expect their ideas of lawless order and consensual cooperation to work out peacefully in a free society, those who are sure they have a knock-down argument that Anarchism cannot possibly work, and those who are just interested to learn more are all invited to come to our upcoming Anarchist Cafe event tomorrow at 6:00pm at the Coffee Bean (4550 S. Maryland Ave.). Part of the night’s event will be a freewheeling “Ask An Anarchist!” Q&A session in which you can ask your questions directly, and you can find out more about how Anarchists would respond to them.

(For example, questions such as “How would people defend themselves from violence without government law-and-order?” is nothing that Anarchists have not heard before. Our literature table, in fact, carries pamphlets that address precisely that question.)

goingbust, regardless of what I, personally, am or am not capable of defending myself from, if you think that Anarchists advocate a society without peace or social order, then you have misunderstood what Anarchists advocate. We advocate a society without rulers, not a society without rules. Perhaps you think that without government laws, there can be no rules of orderly social conduct and no organized defense against violence; but if so that claim is something you’ll need to prove.

Anarchists (or at least, those who believe in the kind of Anarchism that I advocate) have no beef with peace, order, civilized society, or organized self-defense. What we believe is that peace, order, and civilization can emerge from the social connections between free and equal people, without having to be imposed by a central government. In such a society order is achieved by means of community-based (rather than government-based) self-defense, a peaceful and competitive selection of private mediators and arbitrators for disputes (rather than monopolizing mediation in an overwhelmed and constantly rigged government court system), and voluntary associations for community, trade, and mutual aid (rather than government welfare bureaucracies, government-privileged-and-government-subsidized corporations, and government-controlled “public spaces”). If you think that such an arrangement is impossible or impractical, again, that’s fine, but you’ll have to give some explanation of what’s wrong with it, rather than simply assuming it away, if you want anyone else to agree with you.

mred, I agree with you that the American Right is not consistently opposed to invasive big government. That’s part of the reason why I’m an Anarchist rather than a Rightist.

Anarcha-feminists believe that government should not intervene in any way in women’s decisions about their own bodies or about their own reproductive healthcare. So they oppose any form of government prohibitions on birth control (or abortion). There is no one particular anarcha-feminist position on whether women ought to choose to use birth control, and if so what methods they ought to choose; that’s something that each individual woman needs to work out for herself in her own life. The important thing is that she be free to choose and able to get all the relevant information needed to make the choice.

Hope this helps. And if you’ve got more questions, again, come on down to the A-Cafe tomorrow night and you can ask them directly.

Neil,

Because the profit-maximizing point in a monopolistic market is at a higher price and a lower quantity than the market-clearing prices and quantities.

The solution, of course, is to remove the government-granted monopoly on the printing and distribution of ideas.

Thanks for the link.

Note that both of these tyrannies primarily involve local and state government.

Do they?

The Interstate Highway System and the earlier U.S. highway system, for example, certainly involve state and local government. But I’d hardly say that the federal government was only “secondarily” involved in them.

Similarly, police brutality has existed always and everywhere where there are unaccountable government police, regardless of what level of government was involved in running them. But the specific phenomenon of increasing numbers of police on city streets and increasing militarization of the arsenal, training, personnel, and attitudes of police, over the past 40 years or so, has largely been the result of locally-administered federally coordinated programs (e.g. the War on Drugs and targeted repression of political “extremism”), and it has been bankrolled by the federal government to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars in domestic nation-building exercises like “homeland security” grants, federal “community policing” initiatives, free federal training, subsidized military equipment sales, etc. (Where would small-town cops in South Carolina be getting a tank, if it weren’t for federal grants and subsidized federal sales of U.S. military equipment to local cops?)

These aren’t examples of local tyranny where the Feds are just standing by watching, or where the Feds could even potentially be enlisted as a countervailing force.The Feds are actively complicit and have been one of the primary forces in making things as bad as they are.

Just as peaceful secession would actually have profoundly destabilized slavery in the Southern states — because it meant the end of Fugitive Slave laws, the moving of the line of freedom from the Canadian border to the Mason-Dixon, and the removal of Northern military resources from the effort to suppress Southern slave revolts and John Brown raids — I think there’s good reason to think that, ceteris paribus, without the Feds at their back, the local Growth Machine types and the local paramilitary constabulary would be in a much more precarious position than they are now.

Of course, this is no reason to cry about “federalism” or “judicial activism” or some other conservative claptrap when looking at the handful of specific cases where the Feds do act against locally-administered tyrannizing (say, Miranda, or the recent Gant decision). But if we’re trying to figure out how things would “work out” on balance, then we do have to look at how much these forms of tyrannizing are incited, coordinated, and bankrolled from the center.

quasibill:

As long as we’re playing “add to the hypo”, I’ll grant your addition, and add this: Those that the woman struck were standing by silently, watching the “pantsing” and doing nothing to assist. In some cases, they actively cheered on the instigator.

Is it now a tougher call as to piling on the woman?

You might think it’s a tougher call, insofar as bystanders have some kind of ethical obligation to intervene when they see someone being physically assaulted in front of them (and when the potential danger involved in intervening is such that not intervening would be cowardice or complicity).

But the problem, then, is that I think you’ve now extended the thought experiment to the point where it has lost contact with the situation it’s supposed to be analogous to. If you believe that everybody reading a comment thread, or writing on it, or whatever level of involvement is supposed to be, has the same sort of ethical obligation to come in to rescue Keith from uncalled-for insults or strawman presentations of his views, then you might find it odd that many people didn’t get involved into Keith started slinging insults based on gender identity or started pulling out the most colorful sorts of schoolyard taunts in order to bash whole groups of people based on their sexuality and suggest, at length, in a stand-alone essay that has nothing directly to do with any kind of personal back-and-forth with Aster, that those groups of people (identified with the crudest sorts of schoolyard taunts) be run out of the anarchist movement.

But what makes you think that there is such an obligation to intervene in such a case?

We are not, after all, talking about a physical assault; we’re talking about people calling each other names over the Internet. Is there some reason why I should feel compelled to put myself in the middle as long as the two parties are only engaged in bagging on each other in an open comment thread?

If you’re going to charge a double-standard, you need a case in which the things being evaluated differently are actually the same. But they’re not the same, and there are obvious reasons why people who do not care to intervene in the purely personal part of the sniping that both Aster and Keith engaged in, and who have no real reason to, might nevertheless have good reasons to get involved once Keith starts slinging the fag-bashing, not to mention the standalone essay-length extended arguments for running large groups of people out of the movement based on their sexuality, gender identity, or racial or sexual politics. (Which was studded with vile insults against all kinds of people, sure, but which was primarily objectionable because of the substantive position taken in it, not because of the tone or diction.)

quasibill,

And yes, I agree Keith overstepped the bounds with his counter. But again, I’ll ask you whether you think you’d be piling onto (and making offhanded jokes and jibes about) a woman who over-reacted to being ‘pantsed’ in public by permanently crippling her attacker.

While we’re playing the analogy game, I wonder what you would say about a woman who overreacted to being “pantsed” in public by grabbing a crowbar and beating the shit out of not only her attacker, but also everyone else in the room, regardless of whether or not they had ever done anything to her?

I ask because that’s actually more like the situation that’s going on when Keith replies to Aster calling him names by going on a tirade about “cock-ringed queers,” “pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair,” “homosexualists” (?), and “persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity,'” inter alia, and generally a bunch of other people who aren’t Aster.

This is not, actually, a two-person feud in which a bunch of bystanders have just inexplicably (or all-too-explicably, or whatever) picked on one side — the side you consider to have been the instigator — to pile on against. What happened was that Aster repeatedly insulted Keith and has in the past attributed positions to him that he claims not to hold, based on insufficient evidence; Keith in response has not only returned the insults; he has also, in the process, launched the most vicious sorts of broadsides against all sorts of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the purely personal aspects of the feud.

Perhaps this might just help explain why a number of folks who have mostly opted out of trying to intervene in the interpersonal sniping, have had something to say about Keith’s recent sorties of rhetorical saturation-bombing.

I don’t need to investigate or comment on the history of the fight in order to justify getting pissed off at Keith for punching me in the face, even if somebody other than Keith started the fight that got him swinging. If he doesn’t want to get piled on, he should start by fighting in a way that doesn’t involve bashing a lot of people other than his putative target.