Rad Geek People's Daily

official state media for a secessionist republic of one

Posts filed under Politics

Welcome, FreeTalkers

For those of you who have been around here for a while, you may be interested to know that I recorded a brief interview this afternoon on agorism and electoral politics with Mark Edge from FreeTalkLive. The interview will be attached to the end of the podcast, which I’m told will be available late tonight. Due to time constraints on the interview, there’s a fair amount that I got the chance to mention but didn’t allow myself the time to follow up on; if there’s anything that you want to hash out at greater length, please do drop it in the comments and let’s talk.

Update 2009-10-09. [An MP3 of the 2009-10-07 show, with my interview included, is now available for download](http://media.libsyn.com/media/ftl/FTL2009-10-07.mp3).)

For those of you who found out about me, or about agorism, or about this website, through the interview, or the show notes, welcome! Let me take a moment to introduce myself. I’m Charles Johnson, also known as Rad Geek. I’m an individualist anarchist, originally from Alabama, now living and working in Las Vegas. I am a member of the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left, maintainer of several anti-statist web projects, and an occasional writer for The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. If you’re new to the blog, or to agorism and individualist anarchism as a set of ideas, here’s some things which might give you some idea of where I’m coming from, and what I care about.

For an extended treatment of agorism, counter-economics, and what it’s all about — including its positive aspects, above and beyond its critique of electoral politics, you may want to check out this interview I recorded with Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries back in May:

For an in-depth discussion of counter-economics and direct action, and of the inherent limitations of electoral politics, see:

Among agorists, I’m a bit unusual in the extent to which I stress counter-economic that are either already-existing projects of, or else inspired by the historical examples of, and tied to goals traditionally associated with, the anti-authoritarian Left — including, notably, anti-statist radical labor unions, grey-market mutual aid networks like Food Not Bombs or LETS and other localized trading networks, black-market mutual aid networks like the Jane abortion network, existing feminist projects like the battered women’s shelter and rape crisis center movement, and existing social anarchist projects like CopWatch and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. For some discussions of why, see:

If you’re curious, I discuss my views on why I think that some more familiar forms of libertarian political strategy — such as voting for Ron Paul, or running nominally libertarian candidates for government office, or trying to lobby the state to act less statist, or trying to vindicate some less-statist reading of the United States Constitution in the courts, or indeed spending any considerable effort on teaming up in an ongoing, open-ended political party with minimal-statists — are at best futile, and often actively destructive of serious politics, at some length in:

And since the topic of Ron Paul, specifically, came up, and since, out of concern for time, I stated my views but did not spend long on elaborating them — and since, while we’re here, the miserable failure of Ron Paul’s single-digit primary showing is currently the show pony for the awesome potential of libertarian electoralism — it may be worth pointing to some more detailed discussion of what my problems with the Pauliticos are, or were:

I suppose I could also discuss the even more miserable miserable failure of the Libertarian Party, and particularly of its recent strategy of mercilessly pruning away anything resembling libertarianism from the platform in order to advance the prospects for failed candidacies by ridiculous conservative tools, as in the recent Barr/W.A.R. ticket. But really, I am at the point where I think that kind of thing is really beneath comment. The Pauliticos may be wrong, but they have the benefit of being comprehensible. Not so, at this late date, those who still believe that serious political transformation is going to come about by means of the supporting LP.

Wednesday Lazy Linking

Without her consent

Observed in the midst of Jeff Fecke’s post at Alas, A Blog, which is otherwise mostly quite good, on media responses to the recent arrest of child rapist film director Roman Polanski:

Many, many articles cited the fact that the victim, now grown up and 45 years old, has said she wants the case to be let go, because each time it gets dredged up it brings up painful memories of her being raped. I choose the Telegraph because its headline puts the word victim in scare quotes, because...something:

In January, [the victim]1 filed a legal declaration in Los Angeles formally requesting that the outstanding charges against Polanski be withdrawn.

She said Los Angeles prosecutors' insistence that Polanski must return to the United States before dismissal of the case could be considered as a "cruel joke being played on me".

She also voiced anger that authorities had detailed her grand jury testimony in related hearings to the case.

"True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother," she said, adding that it was time for closure.

"I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child," she said. Polanski had taken flight, she said, "because the judicial system did not work."

— Jeff Fecke, Alas, A Blog (2009-09-28): Rape Apologists: Roman Polanski's Rape of a Child Not That Bad

Jeff’s reply:

I understand the victim's feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn't work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice. …

— Jeff Fecke, Alas, A Blog (2009-09-28): Rape Apologists: Roman Polanski's Rape of a Child Not That Bad

No doubt.

And that’s exactly why 90% of rapes still go unreported.

Because the government court systems which rape survivors are expected to go through, if they report the crimes committed against them, are deliberately unresponsive to women’s wishes, take control out of women’s hands, and do it all because they believe that there is some kind of justice that can be gained independently of, or even in direct violation of, the wishes of the victim for safety and restitution for past wrongs. That, in the alleged interests of society (which, typically, means the interests of the state, or, even more typically, the ambitions of the prosecutor), are willing to go on with the prosecution of a woman’s rape, whether or not she wants them to, and even if she publicly states that the government’s prosecution is proceeding against her will, out of her control, and it will hurt her for it to continue.

When the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of victims, the justice system is an asshole.

Rad Geek Speaks: “Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State?” at the Alabama Philosophical Society, Friday, October 3

This week — specifically, FRIDAY, October 3 — I will be speaking at the Alabama Philosophical Society’s annual conference in Orange Beach, Alabama. The talk will be a presentation of a short paper, Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State? (If you’ve been reading here for a while, it will be similar, but not identical to, something you’ve already read here.) Here’s the abstract:

I defend a strong incompatibility claim that anything which could count as a state is conceptually incompatible with any possible consent of the governed. Not only do states necessarily operate without the unanimous consent of all the governed, but in fact, as territorial monopolies on the use of force, states preclude any subject from consenting – even those who want it, and actively try to give consent to government. If government authority is legitimate, it must derive from an account of legitimate command and subordination; any principled requirement for consent and political equality entails anarchism.

WHAT: Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State? paper and Q&A with Charles Johnson.

WHEN: Friday, October 2, 1:00pm-1:40pm.

WHERE: Alabama Philosophical Society annual conference, Hilton Beachfront Garden Inn, 23092 Perdido Beach Blvd, Orange Beach, AL. (The talk will be in the Island Bay II room, for what that’s worth.)

If you happen to be at the beach already, you might also be interested to know that Roderick Long is also giving a paper in the same room at 3:30:

Left-Libertarianism, Class Conflict, and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice

Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

A frequent objection to the "historical" (in Nozick's sense) approach to distributive justice is that it serves to legitimate existing massive inequalities of wealth. I argue that, on the contrary, the historical approach, thanks to its fit with the libertarian theory of class conflict, represents a far more effective tool for challenging these inequalities than do relatively end-oriented approaches such as utilitarianism and Rawlsianism.

Hope to see you at the beach!

The Police Beat: Shot in the back

Detective Jeremy Hendricks. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Las Vegas, Nevada. Here in Vegas, Jeremy Hendricks, a cop working for the Las Vegas city government’s police force, shot John Paul Hambleton in the back while Hambleton was running away. Hendricks was questioning Hambleton (who was 32) about an alleged sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl; Hambleton decided to leave. Hambleton was not under arrest; he was not accused of a violent crime; he also was completely unarmed. But Detective Jeremy Hendricks wasn’t done with him, and, seeing how running away from a cop is apparently treated as a capital offense in this country, Hendricks started out by tasering Hambleton twice. Then he tried to force Hambleton down on the ground. Hambleton managed to get away Hendricks’ taser, and then started to run away again, so Detective Jeremy Hendricks shot him in the back. Hendricks claimed in court that Hambleton turned around and pointed the taser at him. If so, nobody else who saw what happened — not Hendricks’s own partner, not four non-cop witnesses who watched what was happening — ever saw Hambleton turn around or point the taser at Detective Jeremy Hendricks. But thanks to the magic split second, which absolves all sins and justifies all cop shootings in the eyes of the Law, somehow, this supposedly belligerent Suspect Individual who supposedly was threatening Detective Jeremy Hendricks’ sacred hide with a taser shock, ended up getting shot in the back anyway. Oops.

If you tore off chasing after someone, and then shot him in the back and killed him, allegedly in order to avoid the alleged threat of a less lethal taser shock, which threat, if it even existed, was solely the product of a confrontation that you yourself had created and escalated, then you would probably be in jail for years. Of course, Detective Jeremy Hendricks is a cop, working for the local government’s police force, so the local government’s coroner’s inquest ruled last month that he was justified in shooting a fleeing suspect in the back.

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