Lorenzo,

What, exactly, do the (numerous) crimes of Arab rulers, against both Jews and Palestinians, have to do with whether or not the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli rulers is just?

Of course, the situation would no doubt be better if Arab rulers weren’t a pack of criminals. But all rulers are a pack of criminals, so that’s a pretty slender reed to lean on, and in any case the fact that Arab rulers dispossessed and expelled a lot of ordinary Jews doesn’t somehow make it less bad that Israeli rulers dispossessed and expelled a lot of ordinary Palestinians, who had neither practical control nor moral responsibility over the actions of autocratic Arab rulers in far away countries, to whom they were not even subject to begin with, and with whom they had absolutely nothing in common besides the fact that they are, in some extended sense, members of the same ethnic group. Which is to say, nothing in common at all, of any moral or political relevance, unless you subscribe to a theory of morals and politics that allows for collective punishment and retribution against individual victims for crimes committed by unrelated third parties, based solely on their sharing an ethnicity or race. But those kinds of moral and political theories are, to be quite frank, stupid, racist, and appalling.

I wouldn't dare to speculate about why people like Trotsky became won to Bolshevism. But I don't know why you think that people like the butcher of Kronstadt would be good figures to appeal to around a bunch of Anarchists. In any case, if your "successful anti-capitalist revolution" includes industrial conscription, the dismantling of all independent trade unions, the Red Army, the Cheka, and confiscating grain while 5,000,000 peasants starve to death, then I have to wonder what "anti-capitalism" means to you; apparently you don't have in mind the end of bosses, death squads, political repression, militarism, or (literal) starvation wages. If that's what "success" looks like, what in the world would you count as a failure? If I can't survive, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

This just in: Tea Party conservatives are ignorant police statist blowhards who prefer to make Dirty Hippy jokes rather than standing on anti-statist principle.

Film at 11.

P.S. I don’t know about you, but I can actually name off at least a half dozen friends and loved ones who have been victims of rape or robbery. Care to guess how many of them went to the police for “help”?

You may not be aware of this, but 90% of rape survivors never report the rape to the police. The main reason why is because most rape survivors have a reasonable belief that the police are not going to do a goddamned thing for them.

Rocky,

Let’s say I am the victim of a rape or robbery. If I decline to call the cops, and instead make my own arrangements for healing and restitution without their proffered help, will you then concede my right to be left the hell alone, rather than forced to pay the police’s salaries and submit to the police’s arbitrary demands?

If so, great — I’m in. You can can the charges of hypocrisy, and since many Anarchists do refuse to call the police on principle, that would suggest that a lot of people ought to be left alone who are not currently being left alone.

If not, then you can still can the charges of hypocrisy, because unless you will actually respect the wishes of those who would like to opt out of police “protection,” this muttering of “Just you wait and see!” is nothing more than a crude argument from intimidation.

Big Mack: I wonder if they would be willing to tear their phones off their walls so that in case of a fire or a robbery, they won’t have to “bother” the 911 operators by asking for a responder to come over to help.

Really, dude, seriously? I can’t speak for Red and Black, but I for one would love it if I could get out of being subjected to government laws and government force simply by not dialing 911. Just leave me alone, stop taxing me for “services” I didn’t ask for, stop imposing laws on me I didn’t agree to, and let me make my own arrangements as far as fire safety or self-defense goes, and I’ll be more than happy if you never pick up the phone for me. I suspect that many Anarchists feel quite the same.

Of course, no-one who raises this kind of argument really means it seriously. They point out “services” we didn’t ask for, insist that we must obviously want them no matter what the cost, and then presume without asking that we’ve consented to the government that provides them, without so much as stopping to genuinely ask whether we would indeed like to buy what they are selling. It’s not an argument so much as a guilt-tripping wail: “Look at how much I do for you, and you don’t even call on Rulers’ Day!”

Katie: It is illegal to fail to respond to the census

Well, so? You say that like there’s supposed to be something wrong with breaking the law.

Let’s grant that this effort by the government to force peaceful people, who were just minding their own business, to snap to and divulge personal information on command to government officials, is legal. If so, then the law is a pointless exercise in petty tyranny.

There’s nothing wrong with exercising your moral right to break tyrannical laws. There is something wrong with government agents using violence against peaceful people in order to see that those laws are enforced.

MBH: Yeah. I’m sure if he wore jeans and a t-shirt, then everyone in the cafe would have freaked out just the same.

If it was obvious that he was an armed police officer? Yes, I think that would make the other folks in the shop equally uncomfortable. Of course, if he went undercover, people wouldn’t feel particularly uncomfortable; but that’s simply because they’d be lacking the relevant information about the thug’s criminal profession. The reason the uniform makes people uncomfortable is because of what it reliably signifies about the profession.

MBH: You’re acting as if I base my objection on feelings instead of the dictates of natural law.

I presumed that you were basing your objection on a deliberation about fairness and kindness (in which balancing people’s feelings does matter). If your claim is about “the dictates of natural law,” then your claim seems to be obviously idiotic. Red and Black has no obligation whatever under natural law to produce any further reason for expelling the cop than the fact that they didn’t want him on their property. Cops do not have a right to barge in where they are not invited.

There’s a further ethical question, beyond the question settled by the natural right to throw out trespassers, as to whether Red and Black ought to evict the cop. I thought you were considering that. If not, then all this stuff about whether or not they were overgeneralizing or jumping to conclusions or whatever is a bunch of pointless nonsense: shopkeeps have a perfect natural right to overgeneralize and jump to conclusions in their own damn shops.

MBH: But the difference between law enforcement dehumanization and klansman dehumanization is the difference between many and all.

You think people didn’t have all kinds of different motives for joining the Klan? The point is that you just made a wild, evidence-free claim about the intentions of the police (as individuals? as an institution?). The fact is that police constantly act in such a way as to falsify this claim. Even if we are only talking about “many” police rather than “all” (which I don’t concede — I said “many” before as a lower limit on the number, not an upper, and the fact is that all police routinely enforce unjust laws, or directly collaborate with those who do), it would still be perfectly reasonable for Anarchists to distrust a cop who they had no other knowledge of besides his profession. Because the cop is quite likely to be a dangerous thug, and his profession gives him ample opportunity to exercise his thuggery at any moment.

JOR: It’s not the “uniform” (anyone can wear a police costume; it means nothing), it’s the occupation.

MBH: It is the “uniform” in the Black and Red Cafe instance.

No, it isn’t. He was asked to leave because he was a cop and his being a cop made people uncomfortable. If he were wearing the suit but were not, in fact, a member of that profession (say he’s one of G.O.B.’s Hot Cops friends), I doubt that he would have been asked to leave.

In any case, you’re acting as if the cop were the only person whose feelings mattered. He is not. The people who you have silenced are the people who could not enjoy the use of the space while an armed stranger who was advertising his criminal profession was standing around in the shop in full battle regalia. Their comfort matters quite as much as the cop’s — more, since they are the people who the space was opened for, not for government law enforcers. Perhaps their comfort wouldn’t matter if the attitudes behind their discomfort were unreasonable or invidious. But if you think that it’s unreasonable for Anarchists to fear or distrust armed police officers, you’ll have to give some reason why that’s unreasonable; you certainly haven’t yet. Given the profession he participates in and was advertising his participation in, the other folks in Red and Black had every reason to be uncomfortable with his presence. And given that he was making other folks in the shop uncomfortable, the Red and Black collective had not only the right, but also every reason to ask him to leave.

MBH: Your example is not analogous. Klansmanship intends to dehumanize. Nazism intends to dehumanize. Law enforcement intends to protect humanity.

You have a lot of italics in your assertion here, but no evidence. Where did you get this revelation as to the intentions of law enforcement? Last I checked, many law enforcers are perfectly happy to dehumanize, and reveal through their actions that they have little practical interest in protecting large swaths of humanity. They’ve revealed these preferences repeatedly in how they’ve handled my friends and comrades. Even at the level of mission statements, last I checked, law enforcement institutions stated that their primary purpose was to enforce the laws; when the laws are dehumanizing, they proceed to dehumanize, and when the laws don’t protect any identifiable victim (as most government laws do not), they will happily assault and imprison “humanity” in the name of the law, without any compunction about protecting anybody.

Free [sic]: after how you treated a guest in your establishment mid-May – a upstanding officer and a military veteran, there is no way in the world I will every spend money at your facility

Man, if you think that being an “upstanding officer and a military veteran” is the sort of thing for somebody to be proud of being, what in the world made you think that you’re the sort of customer that a revolutionary Anarcho-syndicalist collective is trying to reach?