Everyone wish L. a happy birthday!

Then, since it’s Sunday, let me know what you all wrote about this week–leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments.

It's Sunday again; that means it's time for Shameless Self-Promotion.

So, what did you all write about this week? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments.

Hey, remember back when MoveOn used to be an anti-war group?

I mean, sure, they’ve always been more than a little too entangled with Democratic Party politicking. And, yeah, they never articulated any particular vision for ways to address the issue except by fundraising, electioneering, voter registration, and periodic useless petitions. But remember back when they used to focus on bringing hardball political tactics to bear on sitting incumbents, to try to prevent the war, or later, to try to end the occupation? When they really identified with, and worked together with, a lot of activists and organizers in the anti-war movement? When they at least put out the occasional real zinger in an anti-war ad or online video?

Now, while the anti-war movement finds itself facing down pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets in the streets of St. Paul; while antiwar activists are imprisoned without charge or threatened with over 7 years in prison on completely bogus terrorist conspiracy charges; while MoveOn itself can’t be bothered to say a damned thing about it, not even to condemn the heavy-handed attacks on activists and the obvious disregard for basic civil liberties on the part of the Ramsey County sheriff’s department–well. We shouldn’t be too hard on them. They’re busy right now and they have their own great way to make a difference. I know because they sent me an e-mail about it. Their great way to make a difference is getting 50,000 or more people to wear this t-shirt:

¡Hasta la Obamarquía siempre!

From: Peter Koechley, MoveOn.org Political Action
To: Charles Johnson
Date: September 2, 2008
Subject: Your Obama shirt

Can you donate at least $12 today to help get this program going right away? If you do, we’ll send you a free Obama T-shirt: . . . These high-quality, union-printed American Apparel shirts feel great, they look great, and they’re a great way to make a difference. . . .

From: Peter Koechley, MoveOn.org Political Action
To: Charles Johnson
Date: September 3, 2008
Subject: 50,000 Obama shirts?

. . . Can you help us put our organizers on the ground and reach our goal of 50,000 T-shirts? Click here to chip in $12 so we can send you a free Obama T-shirt:

. . .

Thanks for all you do. [sic–R.G.]

–Peter

When your starry-eyed messianic enthusiasm, hitched up to your self-satisfied professional-class Progressivism, along with a crew of robotic partisan hacks and apparatchiks, has ended up in a creepy theo-electoral cult of personality that really defies satire — because all that needs to be done is to point at you, just as you are, too obvious to even bother parodying — well, then, I guess it really is time to MoveOn.

These are video segments from a press conference hosted by members of the RNC Welcoming Committee and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. Several police agencies, ramrodded by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department, staged massive pre-emptive raids against houses where activists were staying and against the RNC Welcoming Committee’s convergence space. Many of the imprisoned protesters continue to be held without charges. Many have been abused by their jailers, including a woman being knocked to the ground and dragged by her hair, several protesters being denied prescription or over-the-counter medications for serious medical conditions, and a 19-year-old activist named Elliot Hughes, who was beaten and tortured for over an hour because, according to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department, he was being verbally disruptive.

Ramsey County prosecutors have formally charged eight members of the Welcoming Committee with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism. If convicted, the St. Paul 8 face up to 7 1/2 years in prison. Affadavits filed by police informants who infiltrated the Welcoming Committee allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, attack police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. These allegations have not been corroborated by any physical evidence or any other evidence independent of the testimony of police infiltrators. Members of the RNC Welcoming Committee held a press conference together with the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign in order to respond to these charges and to discuss violence against imprisoned protesters by police and jailers.

In related news, William Gillis is my fucking hero.

See also:

• GT 2008-09-05: Emergency action alert: Twin Cities protesters imprisoned without charges; human rights abuses in Ramsey County jail. Free all political prisoners!
• GT 2008-09-04: This is what a police state looks like. (Part 2 of ???)
• GT 2008-09-03: This is what a police state looks like. (Part 1 of ???)

It’s Sunday again; that means it’s time for Shameless Self-Promotion. This Sunday, unlike most, I’ll be leading off, because here’s what I received in the mail a few days ago:

Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin

To what extent should libertarians concern themselves with social commitments, practices, projects, or movements that seek social outcomes beyond, or other than, the standard libertarian commitment to expanding the scope of freedom from government coercion?

Clearly, a consistent and principled libertarian cannot support efforts or beliefs that are contrary to libertarian principles—such as efforts to engineer social outcomes by means of government intervention. But if coercive laws have been taken off the table, then what should libertarians say about other religious, philosophical, social, or cultural commitments that pursue their ends through noncoercive means, such as targeted moral agitation, mass education, artistic or literary propaganda, charity, mutual aid, public praise, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, social investing, slowdowns and strikes in a particular shop, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action? Which social movements should they oppose,which should they support, and toward which should they counsel indifference? And how do we tell the difference?

In other words, should libertarianism be seen as a thin commitment, which can be happily joined to absolutely any set of values and projects, so long as it is peaceful, or is it better to treat it as one strand among others in a thick bundle of intertwined social commitments? Such disputes are often intimately connected with other disputes concerning the specifics of libertarian rights theory or class analysis and the mechanisms of social power. To grasp what’s at stake, it will be necessary to make the question more precise and to tease out the distinctions among some of the different possible relationships between libertarianism and thicker bundles of social, cultural, religious, or philosophical commitments, which might recommend integrating the two on some level or another.

. . .

— Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty 58.6 (July/August 2008), pp. 35–39.

You can read the whole thing (warning: PDF blob) at The Freeman‘s online edition. Enjoy! FEE’s website doesn’t (yet) support online comments, but I’d be glad to hear what you think in the comments section over here.

One note about the article: it had to be shortened substantially both for reasons of space and considerations of the likely audience. I’ve talked with Sheldon, and I’ll be posting the longer version of the essay here at Rad Geek People’s Daily in a couple of weeks.^[1]

So, that’s me; what about you? What did you all write about this week? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments.

1. ^[1][Edit. The expanded version is now available as GT 2008-10-03: Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin. –R.G.]↩