• Dedicated to "the mutualists of the world" Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-05-17). Charles T. Sprading’s 1930 Mutual Service and Cooperation is available for download from Google Books. (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• Watch Out, Facebook. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-05-26). “The business press may be filled with rhetoric about ‘participatory media’ and ‘user-generated content,’ but the country’s most prominent Web 2.0 company treats its participants like a bunch of CompuServe subscribers circa 1994. …” (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• Oh No! Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-05-23). Conservatives won’t want to hear it, but the libertarian alternative to antidiscrimination laws is: COMMUNITY ORGANIZING!Atom (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• The Welfare State. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-05-23). Despite what you may read at other libertarian sites, the welfare state is not the result of efforts by lazy poor people to enslave and live off the productive classes. Rather, it is the result of efforts by the political-social-corporate elite to subordinate and control the poor for a variety… (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• Free George Donnelly Handbill. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-05-24). Thanks to ALLy James Tuttle for creating a solid handout in support of George Donnelly. Download the .pdf at LibertyActivism.info. (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• here's a sortof interesting piece of political/cultural. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-05-13). here's a sortof interesting piece of political/cultural commentary by mark lilla. he frames the whole thing in terms of "radical individualism"="the libertarian mob," as against…well, what? obviously the basic contrast of individualism is to collectivism, but it's hard to sit there and squarely endorse that term: there are too many… (Linked Thursday 2010-05-27.)

• Arrivals Lounge. Dorothy, Cat and Girl (2010-05-27). (Linked Thursday 2010-05-27.)

• Gimme Your Best Just-World Play. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-05-27). Come on.  I need it after reading this: Jiang Chun Geng is one of 15 elderly Chinese men and women whom Zhu is treating in his simple village clinic for what locals label "rotten leg disease." A definitive diagnosis is no longer possible so many decades after the initial exposure… (Linked Thursday 2010-05-27.)

Denial of the Day. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-05-26):

The British Royal Navy “does not maintain any form of central repository of information purely devoted to sea monsters.”

Good to know.

• Without a Prayer. Daily Brickbats (2010-05-25). Established churches only, please. (Cont’d.) See also: GT 2009-05-27 (Linked Tuesday 2010-05-25.)

• Plato's Cave. Dorothy, Cat and Girl (2010-05-24). (Linked Tuesday 2010-05-25.)

• Maddow Bashes Anarchism. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-25). Just saw Rachel Maddow explaining that Republicans have a secret hankering for anarchism (if only!), and that the spurious appeal of statelessness can be refuted by considering the nightmarish conditions in Mogadishu, capital of stateless Somalia (interesting that she just happens to pick the area of Somalia with the highest… (Linked Tuesday 2010-05-25.)

• Rekers: A Sick Man in a Sick World. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-05-25). When the news first broke about professional homophobe George Rekers hiring gay prostitutes with taxpayer money, I honestly didn't think too much about it, as I didn't know anything about his background (though it did reaffirm some of my stereotypes about men who sport !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;staches.)  I did brace myself for… (Linked Tuesday 2010-05-25.)

• Bye-Bye for IP. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-20). Another blast from the past, out of the same box: I believe this letter to the Durham-based Independent Weekly was published, in some form at any rate. 3 February 1995 To the Editor: The copyright hassles of Blaise Faint (Independent Weekly 2/1/95) [2010 note: alas, I no longer recall what… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-22.)

• Uncle Grady Still Has a Gun. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-22). The following letter appeared in today's Opelika-Auburn News; it's a rejoinder to a recent reply to my "Uncle Grady" letter. To the Editor: Carol Robicheaux (May 15) accuses me of hubris, hypocrisy, and naivety for my preference for voluntary modes of social organization over coercive ones – as though personal… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-22.)

• How Walter Williams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-22). Walter Williams asks (CHT LRC): There are close to 7 billion people on our planet. I'd like to know how the libertarians answer this question: Does each individual on the planet have a natural or God-given right to live in the U.S.? ... I believe most people, even my open-borders… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-22.)

• 05/21/10 PHD comic: ‘If only’ PHD Comics (2010-05-23). Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "If only" – originally published 5/21/2010 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE! (Linked Sunday 2010-05-23.)

• Infrastructures. xkcd.com (2010-05-20). (Linked Sunday 2010-05-23.)

• I’m a criminal and so are you. Tennyson McCalla, Tennyson McCalla's Facebook Links (2010-05-21). I’m a criminal and so are youSource: www.cnn.comWho am I? How do I identify? Â  Â [H/T Jo Hastings. This is good stuff.]”Lately, I’ve been telling people that I’m a criminal. This shocks most people, since I don’t ‘look like’ one. I’m a fairly clean-cut, light-skinned black woman with fancy degrees from Vanderbilt… (Linked Sunday 2010-05-23.)

• Julian Heicklen's 2010-05-14 Progress Report. bile, blog of bile (2010-05-15). FIJA DISTRIBUTIONS MAY 10–14, 2010 1. FIJA Demonstration in Trenton, NJ, 5/10/10 Jim Babb, George Donnelly, and I arrived at the U. S. District Courthouse at 402 E. State Street in Trenton, NJ, at 11:40 am on Monday, May 10, 2010. It was a sunny, but chilly and mildly windy… (Linked Sunday 2010-05-23.)

• And they moved to Stars Hollow and lived happily ever after. Jill, I Blame The Patriarchy (2010-05-16). This post would have appeared earlier, but I only just now got the gore and debris cleaned up. I allude to the obstreperal lobe tissue dripping from the bunkhouse rafters. That's right, I blew another lobe, and no doubt you did, too, when you heard about the insane bill that… (Linked Sunday 2010-05-23.)

• Counter Culture. Neverfox, Anarchoblogs in English (2010-05-23). Allison Kilkenny writes: The free market can't provide solutions to many social problems. As Oliver Willis (sarcastically) put it, "instead of boycotting [the] bus, rosa parks should have been an entrepreneur and started her own bus service. let the market decide." Therein lies the problem with Libertarian [sic] philosophy. Social… (Linked Monday 2010-05-24.)

Happy Sunday y’all. Time to get down, get down, get down, get Shameless.

This week I’ve mainly been working, and gardening^[1] and writing, and, lately, spending a lot of time arguing elsewhere about Rand Paul. Not because I like Rand Paul — I think in the interview he proved himself to be both mendacious and ignorant; I have other, preexisting reasons for thinking of him as a ridiculous conservative tool. I’m arguing about it, rather, because I do like the sit-in movement, and the rigged debate between Paul’s side and Maddow’s has completely obliterated what that movement actually did, by means of grassroots direct action, without the assistance of federal antidiscrimination laws, Equal Opportunity bureaucracies, or Title II lawsuits.

Here as elsewhere, both conservatives and progressives have shitty arguments that presuppose that free markets mean only stereotypical forms of commerce and cash exchange, while politics means only organized attempts to achieve goals through government lawsuits or government legislation; but if those are the options, where does that leave grassroots social movements? Thus we are given the counterfactual and patronizing claim that without white Democratic politicians handing down a federal Civil Rights Act, the grassroots social movement to dismantle Jim Crow could not have gotten anywhere–in spite of 6 years of repeated grassroots victories for the sit-in movement before the Civil Rights Act even existed. If so profound a transformation cannot easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g. market or political, it is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: the Freedom Movement bursts through them.

And you? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

1. ^[1]We just picked our first vine-ripened tomato–a nice, midsized Roma from a volunteer plant that grew up after I mashed a few too-mushy Food Not Bombs tomatoes into the ground.↩