Comments Elsewhere

Dave Holmes: We need an emergency mobilisation of society, a five- or 10-year plan to achieve a drastic reorientation of our economy ….

You know, I’ve got the funniest feeling that I’ve heard this one somewhere before.

Jon,

Depends partly on what you’re looking for, of course.

On superhero comics, I don’t have much to contribute other than what’s already been said.

In the broader field of comics, I really, really strongly recommend Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis books, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Dykes to Watch Out For (you might want to wait for a while on the last before buying; there’s supposed to be a big collection coming out this fall, with most of the run collected in one volume rather than spread out over 11 different (varyingly difficult-to-find) books.

goffchile:

I would argue that there *are* significant entry barriers–owning a computer, internet access, and time being huge

I think the latter is by far the most important. In more or less every city, the availability of Internet terminals in public schools and public libraries means that not owning your own PC, or not being able to afford home Internet access, is no longer a significant barrier to web-based applications like blogging. Working 60 hours a week at three different jobs, on the other hand, is.

Besides the barriers on the supply-side, the other important concern (which a lot of feminist bloggers, for example, have raised) is on the demand-side. As many millions of blogs as there may be, attention in blogging is structured much more hierarchically than blog boosters are inclined to acknowledge, and that hierarchical structure much more closely reflects traditional social hierarchy than they care to admit (actually, often, a hyperthyroidic version of traditional social hierarchy, because straight white male educated professional “A-list” bloggers have, so far, been subjected to critical scrutiny far less than straight white male educated professional “MSM” outfits).

Unfortunately being able to speak is fairly irrelevant, from the standpoint of politics or civil society, if nobody hears what you have to say, or nobody takes it seriously enough to consider it worth listening to. I think that blogs are a move in the right direction — and one which will become increasingly important with time — but there’s a long walk down and a long, hard slog ahead between that mountaintop to the Promised Land.

I should say that in the medium to long term, actually, I think that what will be far more important than any blogger’s ability to show up on the mainstream media’s radar, or even to break through into “A-list” bloggers’ boys’ club mutual linking society, is that blogs are making it much easier for writers with a distinctive view to simply bypass broadcasting prominence and to reach a smaller, mostly self-selected audience with more narrowly focused interests. As people change their habits of reading, conversing, and news-gathering, broadcast success will become less and less relevant, and deadlocked mainstream consensuses will be shifted because, by nearly imperceptible steps, the ground collapses out from under them, not because some mighty force erupts up through them. But, again, we’re still a long way from that, and I think that part of the process of getting to that will involve recognizing how far we are from it and consciously changing our tools and our habits (in both reading and writing) to work towards traversing the gap.

Start using public key cryptography to the extent possible in your private correspondence. Encourage others to do so. Help non-technical users get started with it.

Support your neighborhood CopWatch. If you don’t have a neighborhood CopWatch, get in touch with the nearest one and ask for their advice and/or help in starting one.

Write to public forums that don’t usually publish anarchist material, but where you stand a chance of getting published anyway, explicitly advocating anarchism. For example, a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Include pointers to online resources where people can learn more about anarchist takes on the issue you’re writing about.

Find ways to get things that you need outside of the documented cash economy. For example, if there’s a Food Not Bombs in your town, you can get to know a bunch of other anarchists, do some mutual aid work, and, in the process, get some free food for your labor. If there isn’t a Food Not Bombs in your town yet, again, get in touch with existing FNB groups and try to start one. (There are lots of guides online.)

If you have it, I’d also recommend contributing some money to groups that provide direct relief and aid for victims of violence, and which combat cultural attitudes that promote violence. For example, I give a fixed percentage of my income to women’s shelters and groups like Women for Women International (which focuses on relief for women in war zones). By doing so I not only provide direct aid to real people and to a network of institutions which can supplant the supposed welfare functions of the State; I also remove that much more money from the taxed economy, and put it toward the purpose of healing and mutual aid, rather than what it would otherwise have been used for — graft, handcuffs, bombs, prisons, etc.

Micha: I fail to see how the issue of immigration could be seen as complex, rather than for what it is ….

I think the short answer is this: calling border laws and internal immigration policing a complex issue for libertarians primarily serves a social function, not an intellectual one, in the Mises Institute / LewRockwell.com circle.

The issue is actually, obviously, extremely simple, and Hoppe’s and Ron Paul’s positions are actually, obviously, completely wrong. I suspect that most of those who criticize their positions but pass off the issue as a complex one realize this, but also reckon that it wouldn’t go over well in mixed company to say so in as many words.

Radfem,

I think the sad fact is that it’s never going to come up in the Presidential campaign, or in any other electoral campaign, because there’s no real disagreement within the ruling class over the issue of police brutality; both of them believe that the hirelings of the (white, male) State should be given every possible benefit of the doubt, and some impossible benefits of the doubt besides, in their use of violence to “control the situation” in dealing with people who are “suspect” in the eyes of the (white, male) State. Meanwhile their victims, especially people of color, “belligerent” women, etc., should be automatically presumed to be either liars or crazy if they complain about their treatment at the hands of police. Nearly all of the leadership in both of the major parties believe in this because it’s in their interest to believe it; they both want control of the State apparatus, and when they have that apparatus in their hands, they want it to be an effective weapon, which requires a brutal and unchecked police force. Besides which, anyone who exhibited enough humanity to see through the politics, and dared to suggest anything different would be promptly crucified by the Fraternal Order of Police and the howling sado-fascist bully brigade that gets their back in every major media outlet. The only real constituency for reform on this issue are a handful of radical political activists who have made this a pet issue, and a vast run of ordinary people who have been themselves threatened or hurt by police violence–and neither of these groups have or are likely to have any real power in partisan politicking anytime soon. And since there is no real difference within the ruling class on the issue, there’s no real wedge for driving it into the stage-managed political debate.

It’s for precisely this reason that I think any attempt at healing the survivors and defending ourselves from police violence has to come through fundamentally different means–means which disrupt, or simply bypass, that stage-managed political debate in favor of much more direct action. For example, supporting your neighborhood CopWatch.

Thanks for the mention, and for the kind words. I agree about the tone of that OC Weekly article. It’s kind of baffling, because the analysis is actually so much better than the analysis in most abusive-cop pieces, but the tone comes off as if it were written by a fugitive from a direct-to-video American Pie script.

As for self-described libertarians, what I’ve found is that they (we) are a pretty diverse lot. A lot are tools or creeps, and especially those “small government” types whose views are conventional enough to fit into the outer fringes of mainstream political discourse. But, while I don’t want much to do with those folks, radical libertarians tend to be a very different sort, and those that I get along with and try to learn from (e.g. Roderick Long, Kevin Carson, Jennifer McKitrick, Carol Moore, Anthony Gregory, Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler ….) are generally maneuvering to out-Lef the establishment Left, in terms of exposing the class dynamics of the State and making a case for radically decentralist, grassroots approaches that achieve Leftist and feminist goals by ordinary people getting together amongst themselves, and bypassing or confronting the State, rather than collaborating with it or trying to seize control of it. Maybe that approach is the right approach, and maybe it’s the wrong approach; but in any case it’s a very different approach from the one that you’d be likely to see from the “small-government conservative” types, or at your local Libertarian Party, or in your average MeetUp for Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. And it’s an approach that more libertarians seem to be adopting lately; a tendency which I hope I might be able to encourage, in whatever small ways I can manage.

Anyway, that’s how I see it now. Does that help clarify, or does it muddy?

GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2) in which David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, is acquitted on all charges, by a jury of eleven men and one woman. Not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence–but rather because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club.

Mike G:

I have yet to be convinced that once the state is dissolved we would default to the well conditioned individuals required for governmentless existence.

So, Mike, if you’ve “yet to be convinced” that enough people could become “well conditioned” enough to govern their own affairs without intervention from the government, then why are you convinced that enough people can become “well conditioned” enough to run a government, which requires not only governing their own affairs well, but also governing the affairs of millions of complete strangers? Governments are, after all, made of people, and if you think that people are basically unfit to run their own lives, then it seems like the worst thing you could do would be to put such paragons of folly and vice in charge of other people’s lives, too.

Of course, you might instead claim that a most people aren’t equipped with the wisdom or virtue necessary to govern their own affairs, but that a select few people do have it, and have enough of it to successfully govern others, too. But if such philosopher-kings exist, then it’s up to you to figure out how you will ever find them and what sort of political process could ensure that the people who get into power are members of the select few rather than the multitude that you consider to be so ill-conditioned for self-government. But what would that be? By heredity? Conquest? Election? Self-selection? If the first two, then certainly neither heredity nor fighting it out (which are by far the most common means, for the vast bulk of known human history, by which these questions have been decided) provides any guarantee whatever that the wise and temperate will tend to win out in either the genetic lottery, or in armed combat, over the careless, ignorant, or brutal. If the third, then you are just proposing that the select few are to be picked out and installed by the multitude. But then why should people who are (on your view) incapable of self-government be capable of correctly picking out those who are capable of governing them? Or, in the fourth option, if the select few are to be picked out and installed by predecessors who are also part of the select few, then you face a regress; for how did we go about finding and installing those predecessors?

If you want to try and use general folly, ignorance, or vice as an argument against anarchy, then you take on the burden of showing how you could successfully find and organize enough people who avoid that general condition in order to constitute a government and maintain it over long periods of time. Until you give some concrete idea of how to do that, proposing to solve the problem with government is hard to distinguish from proposing to put out a fire by pouring some cool, fresh gasoline on it.

Angelica:

My point actually doesn’t have very much to do with “personal responsibility.” It has to do with the priorities that you’re expressing in your action, and with some basic considerations of fairness.

You evidently don’t think that the problem is important enough to stop you from eating at El Toro. That’s fine; as I see it, that’s your business, and if don’t consider it a big enough deal to affect your eating choices, I’m not about to butt in and try to tell you that you should. But if you’re fine with eating there, under those conditions, then why oughtn’t other people be able to eat there, too, under those conditions?

If the argument is that other people should be able to, if they know what they’re getting into, but currently they don’t know what they’re getting into, because only the boss and the employees know about the situation, then that response only seems to relocate the problem. Firstly, an argument like that doesn’t actually justify having the government threaten restaurateurs with being fined or shut down over their rat problems. At most it would justify having the government publish the information about the rat problem, and then allowing customers to make their own decisions once they have been given the opportunity to find out about it.

But, secondly, it also seems obvious, from your actions, that you don’t consider the rat problem at El Toro, or the problem of customers not knowing about the rats, to be a very serious problem, anyway. If you did believe that your customers’ health or well-being was likely to be put at a serious risk, then what excuse would you have for not telling them about the danger? (So you’d lose your job. Better to risk that than to conceal information and gamble with other people’s health.) If, on the other hand, you don’t believe that there’s a serious enough issue here to justify you putting yourself out in any way to protect others from it, then what makes you think it’s a serious enough issue to justify calling in the government to force other people to pick up costs that you don’t see as worth taking on? The issue here isn’t so much with personal responsibility; it has to do with the mismatch between your explicit claims about the importance of the problem, and the real-life priorities that seem to be revealed in your chosen course of (in)action.

As for what would happen if El Toro got put out of business over the rat problem, have you considered that if restaurants started getting put out of business by conscientious private individuals who exposed rat problems, then remaining restaurants might have a pretty strong motivation to clean out any rat problems they may have before the same thing happens to them?

JOR,

The same. The original essay is available online; cf. also GT 2003-09-30: Why There Are No Arguments for Terrorism for my responding to Honderich with a certain gesture of the hands.