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Comment on Electoral Race by Rad Geek

Mike D.:

Simply staying put when the owner has made it clear he or she wished you to leave seems to me to be sufficient to constitute a violation, though I admit I need to think more on the matter.

Well, I’ve held the same position as you on de minimis trespass before, so I’m sympathetic to the worry, although I’m no longer persuaded by it.

Would help to think about some concrete cases? For example, do you think that people who slip into talks at conferences (say, the APA) without paying the registration fee are violating the rights of the conference organizers (who have stated clearly ahead of time that the sessions are only supposed to be open to those who register and pay up)? Or does the lack of an attempt to enforce mean that they have effectively abandoned claims against freeriding audience members?

(Note that this is actually directly analogous to some of the sit-ins: many sit-ins ended without any arrests at all. The protesters were refused service, but police often weren’t called in to arrest them unless and until white thugs came in to terrorize or assault the protesters. At which point the black students would be arrested by the police, not for trespassing, but for “disorderly conduct.”)

Comment on How Walter Williams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State by Rad Geek

Anon73:

He linked the map in the post; at any rate I misspoke, my question was *why* the western states are the most owned percentage-wise?

Well, land that was newly conquered by USGov was parcelled into territories, where all empty land was held to be owned by the U.S. government. (This included land that actually was empty, and also a lot of Indian land that the government was happy to seize and ethnically cleanse.) During the first part of the 19th century, the land was typically sold off to politically-connected speculators as a source of revenue; after the Civil War, it was supposedly opened up to homesteading. But the Feds reserved the power to close off federal land from homesteading if they could make up some way of claiming that they were using it, and beginning in the early 20th century the Feds started locking away large sections of the remaining available land in newly-created National Parks, National Forests, set-asides for loosely-defined military purposes, etc.

The Western states have the most federally-controlled land because, among other things, they were among the latest to get state governments; they also were the slowest to have land homesteaded, since Homestead Act specifically called for large-scale planting, but a lot of the land West of the Rockies was marginal to useless for large-scale planting without some fairly massive investments in irrigation, which didn’t exist yet in the 19-oughts. (There were later amendments to the homestead act to better allow for homesteaders to practice dryland farming or grazing, but these weren’t passed until very late in the game.) Anyway, as a result, they were the states with the least land homesteaded, and the most land still remaining under Federal control when the Feds started moving into full lockdown.

Comment on Electoral Race by Rad Geek

**Sheldon,**

The goal was to make the owner’s life so unpleasant that he would relent and integrate. Fine. But are the tactics likely to be effective against someone who wants to integrate but fears for his life and property if he does so?

It’s hard to know how many store-owners were in that position, but briefly, I think the answer is yes. For two reasons. Firstly, because it’s not like the Civil Rights Act itself instantly changed local culture or eliminated the threat of retaliation from the Klan or WCC. (* In a lot of towns the threat of economic blackballing through the WCC was actually more of a threat to white business owners than the threat of physical retaliation from the KKK.) Death and firebombing are also a lot more unpleasant than a Title II lawsuit; at most, what Title II and Title VII did was to give intimidated closet integrationists a plausible excuse to tell the local terror groups — “Well, it’s not that I want to let black people in, you know; but I run a business and I need to follow the law to keep it” — which might make them less likely to retaliate, and also strength in numbers — if all businesses are moving to integrate at once, it’s harder to single any one out for retaliation. But the economic and social pressure created by the sit-in movement also created plausible excuses — “It’s these damn students; I can’t run a business if they’re taking up seats!” — and often allowed an opportunity for a lot of downtown merchants to buck Jim Crow at once — in Nashville, for example, the NSM protests led to an agreement from all the downtown business owners.

Second:

I don’t approve of the CRA64, but there is a sense in which it “worked”; the culture changed relatively quickly,

I agree that the culture changed quickly, but I don’t think that the Civil Rights Act was the reason for that. There’s more than one way to change a culture, and I think the deliberate confrontation, the assertion of black dignity, the practice of social solidarity, and the firestorm of conversations that the grassroots movement provoked, were the social forces that actually brought about cultural change in Southern towns. (See, for example, the decisive role that the cultural pressure from the sit-in movement — and a single question posed by Diane Nash — played in desegregating downtown Nashville in 1960.) Not the Civil Rights Act, which was a late development and which only came about because of the huge cultural shift in progress, not vice versa.

(If anything, tended to *stifle* efforts at cultural change, by redirecting the fight away from moral arguments in the streets and neighborhoods, into legalistic arguments in the federal courts and the Equal Opportunity bureaucracy.)

Re: Scheer

... I think it's interesting that you're so obsessed with people "in power." Why is that? It's not unusual to observe that people in power are often the worst,