Officers’ safety comes first, and not infringing on people’s rights comes second. — Lieutenant Fran Healy, Special Adviser to the Police Commissioner, Philadelphia Police Department

(Via Radley Balko.)

See also:

• GT 2010-08-20: Your authorization says shoot your nation

• feministhulk: SO MUCH HEGEMONY TO SMASH, SO LITTLE TIME! HULK OFTEN RELY HEAVILY ON DAY PLANNER, THOUGH TRY TO STAY FLEXIBLE. Twitter / feministhulk (2010-09-01). feministhulk: SO MUCH HEGEMONY TO SMASH, SO LITTLE TIME! HULK OFTEN RELY HEAVILY ON DAY PLANNER, THOUGH TRY TO STAY FLEXIBLE. (Linked Wednesday 2010-09-01.)

• Concern About Police Secrecy = “Tilting at Windmills”? Radley Balko, Hit & Run (2010-09-01). My column this week was about the continuing secrecy of Virginia’s largest police departments and the way the state’s law enforcement community is opposing efforts to make the departments even marginally more transparent. The journalist sounding the alarm about all of this is Michael Pope, who writes for Northern Virginia’s… (Linked Wednesday 2010-09-01.)

• Can Preschoolers Think? cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-09-02). As I've said before, the NYT often shows up The Onion in terms of laughs.  This week, the NYT featured an unintentionally funny article about preschool depression accompanied by even funnier photos: Kiran didn't seem like the type of kid parents should worry about. "He was the easy one," his… (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• Social Individualism and Solidarity. Darian Worden, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-08-26). A functional libertarian political order will rise the strongest from fertile ground. To maximize individual liberty it is necessary to promote the best kind of individualism at all levels. Controversy over the building of various mosques and the Park 51 Islamic cultural center shows the influence of anti-Muslim sentiment on… (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• New Anarchist Platformist archive. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-08-24). Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches… (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• Practical support for microenterprise. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-08-24). I’ve been featuring the 500 Friends of Reading Frenzy! Kickstarter project in the sidebar here since it was launched. It’s now in its last week for funding, and 75% on its way to a goal of $5000. Reading Frenzy is a remarkable operation: a tiny shop which has been able… (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• E. Armand, "The Gulf" Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-08-08). This short piece by Emile Armand appeared in Horace Traubel’s The Conservator in 1910. It’s an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman—and an interesting example of Armand’s thought.THE GULFAll the societies of the vanguard—Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists—say… (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• What is David Brooks for? der Blaustrumpf » What is David Brooks for? (2010-09-02). Vulture Economics (Cont’d): every mushroom cloud has a silver lining. (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• Some Hard Facts on Copyright. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-09-02). I've referred to Nina Paley quite a bit in recent columns.  Her song "Copying is Not Theft" and her Mimi and Eunice cartoons skewer the moral pretensions of the Copyright Nazis more effectively than just about anything I've seen. In a more serious vein, I just ran onto her interview… (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• The Ruling Class. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-09-02). Few essays attracted as much attention from right-wing readers this summer as "America's Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution," an extended argument that an incestuous social set "rules uneasily over the majority of Americans." Written by Angelo Codevilla of the Claremont Institute and first published in The American Spectator, this… (Linked Friday 2010-09-03.)

• Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye at popular television show. Jill, I Blame The Patriarchy (2010-08-04). Hollywood has long been recognized by the Global Cabal of Spinster Aunts as Ground Zero for American misogyny. Like everything that gurgles forth from that foul city, this Mad Men sensation that's sweeping the nation has many sicko antifeminist repercussions. Never heard of Mad Men? It's a "critically acclaimed" —… (Linked Friday 2010-09-03.)

• Revolutionary Letter #4 by Diane di Prima. editor@arthurmag.com, ARTHUR MAGAZINE (2010-08-29). Revolutionary Letter #4 by Diane di Prima Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one… (Linked Friday 2010-09-03.)

Give Me Down to There Hair. Daily Brickbats (2010-09-03):

Officials at Godley Middle School in Texas have placed 12-year-old Chris McGregor in in-school detention until he cuts his hair. The school dress code bars male students from having hair below the shoulders, and McGregor’s locks are too long. Superintendent Paul Smithson says the rule helps reduce bullying. You see,…

In which Superintended Paul Smithson is using indefinite in-school suspension to make sure that no student “stands out” in any way.

Here’s his justification for this insane enforcement of an inane policy: “Bullying’s a big thing, and we want to make sure everyone’s dressed appropriately, someone doesn’t bring attention to themselves so that someone says something to them, and all of a sudden we have a problem.”

Yep: a problem with the bullies. So why does Paul Smithson’s policy punish the victims instead?

• Three Shalt Thou Count. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-30). The debates in the comments section of my Koch post have gotten me thinking about the different ways in which vulgar libertarianism operates. I think there are three. 1) First, there's the use of libertarian slogans as mere rhetorical covering for corporatist policies. This kind of vulgar libertarianism is standard… (Linked Monday 2010-08-30.)

• C4SS in the MSM. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-30). Congratulations to Ross Kenyon, whose latest C4SS piece has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor! (Linked Monday 2010-08-30.)

• The Cold, Crisp Taste of Koch. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-08-31). From Frank Rich's rehash of Jane Mayer's recent hit piece on the philanthropizin' oilmen Charles and David Koch: When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security,… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Why does the Infrastructurist hate libertarians so much? rationalitate, Market Urbanism (2010-08-25). by Stephen Smith Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism "an enemy of infrastructure," and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand's… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Argumentum ad un-Americanum. Will Wilkinson, Will Wilkinson (2010-08-27). This Forbes column by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins arguing that the government should stop subsidizing homeownership was skipping along predictably but just fine until... When the government encourages homeownership, the story goes, it strengthens individuals and communities and thereby fosters the American Dream. They're wrong. A government crusade to… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Why Do Futurists Get So Much Wrong? Steven Horwitz, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-08-25). The Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann once walked into the colloquium room at New York University, where the blackboard displayed this quotation: "When it comes to the future, one word says it all: You never know. – Y. Berra." Having built much of his economics on the unknowability of the future,… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Scary scary news scary! admin, This Modern World (2010-08-31). Scary scary news scary! (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)