In a remark on my last post on Iraq, Sam Haque points out:

The situation is that occupation forces have taken for themselves the role of guardians by and large without the consent of those who they are ostensibly protecting.

— Sam Haque, comment (2006-05-10) on GT 2006-05-08: Why We Fight

This is true, and not just of the situation in Iraq. It is as accurate and concise a description as you could make of what governments do for a living, always and everywhere. It’s war that brings this into the sharpest relief, because the normal restraints on brutality are released, the beneficiary-victims are strangers in a faraway land, and the public intellectuals and the official press line up to shout down any serious challenge to the progress of war aims. But war and occupation are only the starkest and most explicit expression of what State power essentially means, not just with bombers and soldiers and tanks, but also with every spook, cop, G-man, prosecutor, jailer, and hangman whose paychecks we are forced to cover. Consider, for example, the local cops in New Britain, Connecticut, who protected the hell out of an 11 year old boy and his mother in the name of serving a drug search warrant without interruption, or last week’s riot and reign of terror by Mexican police asserting their authority to protect and serve the people of San Salvador Atenco, whether they like it or not.

The State is, as Catharine MacKinnon says, male in the political sense. But not only because the law views women’s civil status through the lens of male supremacy (although it certainly does). It is also because the male-dominated State relates to all of its subjects like a battering husband relates to the household of which he has proclaimed himself the head: by laying a claim to protect those who did not ask for it, and using whatever violence and intimidation may be necessary to terrorize them into submitting to his protection. The State, as the abusive head of the whole nation, assaults the innocent, and turns a blind eye to assaults of the innocent, when it suits political interest — renamed national interest by the self-proclaimed representatives of the nation. It does so not because of the venality or incompetance of a particular ruler, but rather because that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area, as a good German might tell you, and to beat, chain, burn, or kill anyone within or without who might endanger that, whether by defying State rule, or by simply ignoring it and asking to be left alone.

Or, as Ezra Haywood once put it, A cruel kindness, thought to be friendly regard, assumes to protect those who, by divine right of rational being, are entitled, at least, to be let alone. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors. And so it is for us civilians, facing the doorkeep before the Law.

Further reading:

• Randolph Bourne (1918): War is the health of the State
• Lysander Spooner (1867–1870): No Treason

Around the web in the past couple weeks. Part of the news that’s fit to link…

• In honor of Carnival, let’s start with a couple of Carnivals. The Ninth Carnival of Feminists is up at Mind the Gap! and Philosophers’ Carnival #26 is up at Hesperus/Phosphorus. I happen to have a submission featured in each; but if you’re here you’ve probably already read them. Fortunately, like all good Carnivals, they contain multitudes. Prepare to fill out exactly one zillion tabs with excellent reading material.

• Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-02-21): Spooner on Rent does his best to sort out just what Lysander Spooner’s views on land ownership and rent are. The evidence suggests that Spooner was more like Murray Rothbard and less like Benjamin Tucker on this one. Interesting mainly as a historical and exegetical question (Spooner didn’t dwell on the issue, so it’s not like a treasure trove is being discovered; and the fact that Spooner thought something hardly makes it so). But, Roderick adds, to the extent that there's any polemical payoff I suppose it's this: those anarcho-socialists who grant the title of anarchist to Tucker and Spooner but deny it to Rothbard and other so-called anarcho-capitalists on the grounds inter alia of the latter's disagreement with Tucker about land will find their position at least somewhat harder to maintain to the extent that the distance between the saved Spooner and the damned anarcho-capitalists is narrowed. Read the whole thing.

• ginmar, A View from A Broad (2006-01-30): It doesn’t matter what you think we said…: You ever dealt with somebody who uses the word pussy in front of you–I’m speaking as a woman, here–as a synonym for cowardly, disgusting, vile–and then gets up in your face when you call them on it? Well, uh, I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t intend it like that. … Not thinking is no longer proof of innocence. What it just means is that you don’t give enough of a fuck to think about it. (Boldface added.) Read the whole thing.

• Media Matters (2006-02-14): If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 – 2005: In fact, as this study reveals, conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows. Media Matters for America conducted a content analysis of ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, and NBC’s Meet the Press, classifying each one of the nearly 7,000 guest appearances during President Bill Clinton’s second term, President George W. Bush’s first term, and the year 2005 as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral. The conclusion is clear: Republicans and conservatives have been offered more opportunities to appear on the Sunday shows – in some cases, dramatically so. The Right had an especially pronounced advantage when you screened out government flunkies and just looked at journalists. Read the whole thing.

• Natalie Bennett, Philobiblon (2006-02-19): The baby choice, not the baby gap: Well I wanted many things when I was 21 – although I didn’t want children – and I don’t now want many of the same things. I didn’t want many of the same things when I was 25 or 30. At 21 you are still chiefly the product of your conditioning and upbringing – you are only just starting to grow up and construct yourself as an independent individual. No doubt many of those women later changed their minds, or decided that while a baby might be nice, it wasn’t their top priority. Also, no doubt, when they asked those early twenties women the question, they were thinking of having a baby as something that would happen in the far distant future – it is not a serious practical prospect. With, as I’ve reported before, 30 per cent plus of women in Scotland chosing not to have babies, when are the researchers (and the newspaper editors) going to recognise that this is a valid, sensible, entirely normal choice? Sometimes the demographic hand-wringers try to coerce you; other times they just try to hector you and generally treat you like an idiot. In either case, they’re acting like a bunch of bullies and need to drop it already. Anyway, read the whole thing.

• Andy the Slack Bastard (2006-02-18): Burn-A-Flag-For-Lenin Week!: Andy has sort of an ongoing hilarious documentary on the weird, wild world of Marxist-Leninist splinter sects. It’s kind of like a form of neo-surrealist theatre in which the actors don’t realize that they’re part of a show. The latest? Confronted with a recent and continuing downturn in membership, the youth wing of the neo-Trotskyist Democratic Socialist Perspective appears to have hit upon a brand new (sic) idea to try and reverse the trend (or at least make a few dollars): selling flag-burning kits to University students. Commodification of dissent in the name of Communist dictatorship? The power is yours Australia! Read the whole thing.

• Lab Kat (2006-02-20): The barefoot and pregnant crowd, Part III takes notice of Ypsilanti’s finest, Tom Monaghan. Now he’s planning to build his own city. No, not on rock and roll; on the mercy of Our Lady. I’m all for this clown building his own city. Get all the religious right nutjobs in the country to move there, away from those of us who don’t buy their dogmatic horseshit. Let them go play in their La-La Land while the rest of us live in the real world. Read the whole thing.

• Meghan Sapp, Women’s eNews (2006-02-20): Fight to End Mutilation Hits Gritty Juncture looks at the hard work to come in the struggle against female genital mutilation in Africa: moving from international sentiments and governmental resolutions to actual change on the ground. Amid the surge in activities and reports, campaigners against the practice find themselves at a critical juncture. For nearly three years, they have been focused on persuading African Union leaders to ratify the Maputo Protocol. But now that is done, application of the anti-FGM provision at the national and local levels becomes the gritty political challenge. Of the 28 countries where genital mutilation is practiced, 14 countries have passed anti-FGM laws. But only Burkina Faso, Ghana and Kenya actively uphold those laws, according to the London-based Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development. Countries faced international pressure to ratify the Maputo Protocol, but within their own societies they face the opposition of many traditional ruling classes to cultural change. Read the whole thing.

• Kieran Healy, Crooked Timber (2006-02-11): The Papers Continue Fatuous looks on aghast as Andrew Sullivan happily reprints e-mails from his ever-present Anonymous Liberal Reader explicitly pondering genocide against Muslims in Europe. Here’s the word from Betty Bleedheart: I'm honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations–for elementary safety's sake: (1) Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent. (2) Intern all of them. (3) Deport all of them. (4) Throw all of them into the sea. Kieran adds: It's a hollow joke that Sullivan's blog is graced by a tag-line taken from Orwell–and one about not being able to see what's in front of your face, at that. … I certainly hope European countries are not about to capitulate to demands from some radical muslims that civil society be brought to an end for the sake of the prophet's honor. … Nor, I take it, are they about to round up and dump all of them (for any value of them) into the sea. And if some countries have started down one or other of those roads, it certainly isn't because some clerical thugs are so awesomely powerful that they are in a position to destroy the institutions of western democracy. You'll have to look elsewhere to find people with the leverage to do real damage there. Read the whole thing.

• tiffany at BlackFeminism.org (2006-02-20): SXSW Collective Brainstorming: Are you a gay blogger or a blogger who is gay? and Tensions between being speaking for yourself or for a group looks at identity blogging and asks some hard questions for those who do (or don’t) care to do it. Read the whole thing.

• Marjorie Rosen, Los Angeles Times (2006-02-19): The lady vanishes — yet again takes an all-too-uncritical but sometimes interesting look at the declining prospects for women in the Hollywood star system. One of the better moments: The studios are nothing if not practical, suggests Michael Seitzman, the screenwriter of North Country. Hollywood would give a role to my dog if it would bring in an audience. The real question is not Why isn’t Hollywood creating roles for women? It’s Why aren’t audiences going to see them? Men aren’t interested in seeing movies about women anymore, but from the response to movies like In Her Shoes, it appears that women aren’t, either. But there may be a perception problem here. Could it be that because Hollywood produces so few movies featuring women’s stories, each one is held up to cold, hard and — dare I say it? — unfair scrutiny? Read the whole thing.

• moiv, media girl (2006-02-21): If You Can’t Get EC at St. Elsewhere, Call Boston Legal, meanwhile, catches us up on the wit and wisdom of Catholic League president William Donahue, who informs us that the real problem is that Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost. Oh it gets better — Donahue’s keeping files, you see. Big fat ones. Read the whole thing.

• The Guardian NewsBlog (2006-02-20) reports that the occupation may soon be over, troops drawn down, and genuine independence at hand after a tricky political process … in Kosovo. Black Looks (2006-02-19) reports on the violence leading up to putatively open elections in Uganda. (All in the name of counter-terrorism, of course.) Ryan W. McMacken, LewRockwell.com Blog (2006-02-21) finds that red-blooded Iranians aren’t above some good old Liberty Cabbage idiocy.

• The Guardian NewsBlog (2006-02-21): Milton Keynes: Shia inspiration watches the End of History rising over the ruins of Najaf, with a bit of help from the military-industrial complex. Come watch as the mauling of a holy city by the Warfare State is followed up with the worst that coercive, centralized Urban Renewal has to offer. For those who want to return to the glory days of Soviet-era architecture in Warsaw, I suppose. Read the whole thing.

• rabble at Anarchogeek (2006-02-22): On the futility of creative commons suggests that the increasingly ubiquitous Creative Commons stickers and tags are useless, because they cater too much to the whims of publishers and don’t take a principled stand in favor of freedom. Looking through the guide, i realize that it’s not possible simply to replace the CC with something else. The problem is not that there aren’t good licenses, rather that the cultural war over ideas is being lost. We need a concept like GPL compatible or maybe even the less radical OSI compliant. I think that this may miss the point of what CC’s out to do in the first place, but it’s an interesting debate. Read the whole thing.

• Jill, feministe (2006-02-20): Categorizing Race in the Bookstore reflects on the assets and liabilities of the African-American Interest (Women’s Studies, GLBT) bookshelves at your friendly neighborhood bookstore. Ghettoization? Useful classification? Both? Neither? Read the whole thing.

• Discourse.net (2006-02-25): Florida Cops Intimidate Would-be Complainants picks out an amazing transcript of an attempt to get an official complaint form from the pigs. Via Boing-boing, a link to this absolutely amazing piece of investigative reporting: Police Station Intimidation–Parts 1 and 2 in which CBS4 News found that, in police departments across Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, large and small, it was virtually impossible to walk in the door, and walk out with a complaint form. … The TV station that broke the story reports that Remarkably, of 38 different police stations tested around South Florida, all but three had no police complaint forms yet it nonetheless felt obligated to introduce its report by saying that Most police officers are a credit to the badge, serving the community and the people who pay their salary, getting criminals off the street, making the community safer for everyone. Guess none of those guys happen to work the front desk, eh? Read the whole thing.

• Echidne of the Snakes (2006-02-18): Virgins Matter More reports on how a man in Italy got a reduction in his sentence for raping his 14 year old stepdaughter because she wasn’t a virgin at the time she was raped. Because, you see, being forced to have sex against your will isn’t so bad if you’ve had sex already. The supreme court, apparently quoting from an amicus brief filed by Humbert Humbert, mused that the victim’s personality, from a sexual point of view, is much more developed than what would be normally expected of a girl of her age. Read the whole thing. But only on an empty stomach.

• Laurelin in the Rain (2006-02-21): The Patriarchy Phrasebook: Occasionally (actually make that all the damn time), we rad fems find ourselves visited by Ambassadors from Planet Patriarchia, who speak in a language that is hard to understand, mostly because it's less of a language and more of a code consisting of standard statements and arrogant presumptions. But never fear, for I am here with my dictionary of Commonly Used Phrases of Patriarchal Lackeys. These phrases are found variously in patriarchal literature, common conversation, newspapers, TV programmes, blog comments and shouted slogans when you're minding your own frickin' business. Read the whole thing.

Here’s a predictable pattern.

1. A new revelation is published or broadcast about a controversial new policy or by-product of the War on Terror. (Abu Ghraib/torture, extraordinary rendition, the outing of Valerie Plame, an alleged plan to attack Iran, secret propaganda in Iraq, FISA-free NSA surveillance of Americans, and so on.)
2. Some supporters of Washington’s foreign policy wonder whether the reporter or news organization or leaker who revealed the information might be guilty of aiding and abetting the enemy.
3. The media, Democrats, and anti-war activists are criticized for piling on, for ignoring worse crimes committed by the enemy, and for hysterically exaggerating the underlying issue.
4. Think-pieces are written about how this controversial or possibly illegal policy should actually be legalized and embraced.
5. Some self-described small-government conservatives and libertarians exasperatedly ask if critics of the policy understand that we’re at war, and explain how this latest kerfuffle illustrates why libertarians should never be invited to the grown-ups’ table when discussing foreign policy.

— Matt Welch, Hit and Run 2006-01-05

… to which we can add,

6) The critics respond with expressions of horror at the idea that some particular group of people could be treated that way — American citizens, in particular — without giving any grounds for regarding that group of people as morally or politically special.

As for myself, I’m tired of softball. So, come one, come all, and take the A Fortiori War Powers Quiz, Take One. Liberal hawks, liberal doves, progressives, leftists, anarchists, and pro- and anti-war libertarians are all invited to play. Previous respondents — Cathy Young, Bill at So Quoted, Anthony Gregory, Matt Welch, Blar, etc. etc. — are all especially invited to play. (You should note that unless you scored pretty high on Welch’s quiz, your answers to this one are unlikely to be all that interesting — the a fortiori will run from your answers to Welch’s questions toward your answers to mine, rather than vice versa. Don’t worry, surveillance hawks; the A Fortiori War Powers Quiz, Take Two will be coming in a few days, and will have more interesting diversions for you.)

Anyway, here’s how the quiz works. The unifying theme is How far is too far in the War on Terror? The question is a bit open-ended, so it helps to come down to brass tacks, with yes / no hypotheticals. First, take Welch’s quiz to get the first ten. The next thirteen are below. My answers to every one of them is No. What about yours?

1a) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor foreign phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?

1b) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails with judicial approval?

1c) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor foreign phone calls or e-mails with judicial approval?

2) Should the government have the ability to hold a citizen of a foreign country without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?

3) Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding a citizen of a foreign country?

4) Are there foreign journalists who should be investigated for possible treason or other crimes against the United States? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?

5) Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is at war?

6) Should any cops (whether concerned with terrorism or not) be given every single law-enforcement tool currently available in non-terrorist cases?

7a) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) foreign terrorist, and then sell it?

7b) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a charged (though not convicted) American terrorist, and then sell it?

7c) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a charged (though not convicted) foreign terrorist, and then sell it?

7d) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a convicted American terrorist, and then sell it?

7e) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a convicted foreign terrorist, and then sell it?

Now compare and contrast with your answers to these questions with the analogous questions from Matt Welch’s quiz. Are they the same or different? If they different, what, if anything justifies the difference in your answers?

I, too, would love to know.

Roderick’s recent post (2006-01-06) reminded me: Cory Maye needs our help, and we need to keep eyes on his case. About a month ago, I mentioned the case of Cory Maye in the course of my commentary on the premeditated murder of Tookie Williams by the state of California. Maye was sentenced to die by poisoning on January 23, 2004. Now, as far as the death penalty is concerned, I just don’t care whether Maye is innocent or guilty. Innocent or guilty, the state of Mississippi has no right to kill him when he poses no threat; that’s premeditated murder, with or without the black hood and the Crown on the heads of those responsible. (See GT 2004-12-15: God damn it and GT 2005-12-13: Murder in the first for further discussion in the context of different cases.)

But there are good reasons to think that Maye is innocent, and that the crime of murdering him would be doubly foul. Radley Balko has been talking this up since discovering the case in early December. There are lots of legalistic worries about the conduct of the police and the progress of the trial. It’s important to keep track of those for the purposes of defending Maye’s life, but it’s also important to remember that the pretext on which the narco-cops were storming Maye’s house in the first place — the so-called War on Drugs — is itself a massive, systematic, and senseless paramilitary assault on innocent people, for committing the crime of taking drugs without a permission slip — an act which is at worst foolish, perhaps a vice, but which can at worst hurt only themselves. The cops, in other words, had no damn right to storm Maye’s house, and the state of Mississippi couldn’t give them one even if they had complied with all the official paperwork (which it seems that they didn’t). Whether or not a judge wrote them a warrant that covered Maye’s home, they had no right to be there. Whether or not they knocked and identified themselves, they had no right to break into Maye’s house by force. And when an armed gang that has no right to be there invades your home without your permission and comes after you, you have a right to defend yourself, by force, if necessary. Balko’s right to say:

Maye’s case is an outrage. Prentiss, Mississippi clearly violated Maye’s civil rights the moment its cops needlessly and recklessly stormed his home in the middle of the night. The state of Mississippi is about to add a perverse twist to that violation by executing Maye for daring to defend himself.

— Radley Balko, The Agitator (2005-12-17): Cory Maye

But it’s important to note that that’s true even if the police and D.A.’s version of the story were (as it almost certainly is not) true from beginning to end. The War on Drugs is indeed a war — but it’s a war on people, not substances, and those people have done nothing to deserve being attacked by the paramilitary forces of the State. The warriors are trying to make Cory Maye its latest casualty. They must be stopped.

WikiPedia’s article on Cory Maye summarizes the details of the case. There’s a new website, MayeIsInnocent.com, that provides a clearing-house for information and news about the fight for Maye’s life. If you want to help, here are three things you can do:

1. Write a couple letters: Read over the information on Maye’s case at The Agitator, at WikiPedia, and at MayeIsInnocent.com. Write a polite, well-considered letter to Governor Haley Barbour (for an example, see Silent Running (2005-12-10): An Open Letter) mentioning the legalistic details that I’ve mostly set aside here, and ask him to grant clemency or a pardon. Be sure to mention what you’re going to do next: take that letter, pare it down to 300 words or fewer, make it a bit less polite, and send it to your local newspapers. Be sure to include URIs for Balko’s coverage and/or MayeIsInnocent.com. The more heat that Barbour gets, and the more that it makes its way into the Op-Ed pages of newspapers across the country, the more pressure there will be to act. And the more that it appears in those Op-Ed pages, the more people will learn about the case.

2. Post news or commentary on your website about the case. If you haven’t done so already, get on it. If you have, mention anything that’s new since your last post. Why? Because this is important, but it’s in danger of receding into bloggers’ archive sections and out of public sight. Keep the debate alive online and it will have a better chance of reaching more ears both online or offline. If you’ve written letters, you can post copies online for other people to see. If it’s nothing more than a Cory Maye is still in jail and the state of Mississippi still threatens to murder an innocent man, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Because he is still in jail and the state of Mississippi is still threatening to murder an innocent man; the sword over his head hasn’t moved away just because your attention has. (If you’re the sort to post buttons or banners at the top of your page, Roderick (2006-01-08) and Laura Denyes (2006-01-04) have some suggestions. Don’t forget to link the image to MayeIsInnocent.com or a similar clearing-house.)

3. Help Cory defend himself in court. If you have the money, you can help by contributing to [Cory Maye’s legal defense fund]. Even small contributions ($10, $20) can be immensely helpful in a case like this. Maye’s case is on appeal, but his current lawyer is a public defendant and needs financial help to be able to continue his investigative and advocacy work on Maye’s case. Contributions can be sent by mail to:

   Cory Maye Justice Fund
   c/o R.E. Evans
   P.O. Box 636
   Monticello, MS 39654

   See Balko’s post (2005-01-06 for the details.

Battlepanda (2005-12-13) suggests some more ways you can try to raise a ruckus about this. Let’s get on with it: an innocent man’s life is on the line.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I ought to start a feature leading up to the (upcoming) 5th anniversary of Geekery Today, called Dumb Things I’ve Said. The basic idea being that anyone who spends five years writing regularly on controversial topics is likely to change their views over time, and it’s better to spend your commemorative anniversary posts hammering out your own errors than clapping yourself on the back, because you’ve probably said things you later ended up thinking were pretty dumb. I’m no exception, and what I wrote a couple years ago in belated recognition of Bill of Rights Day is a case in point. I doubt that I’ll actually start the feature, but that won’t keep me from ragging on myself for today, at least.

It’s been 214 years today — December 15th — since the first ten amendments, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were scribbled onto the end of the United States Constitution by order of the several states and the Congress of the United States. Folks with too much time on their hands have dubbed it Bill of Rights Day and think you ought to celebrate the grand legacy of those ten amendments. A couple years ago, I took the opportunity of the 212th anniversary to sing the praises of the Bill of Rights, to bemoan the erosion of some of their traditional protections, and hope that a brighter day would dawn soon. It was a bunch of nonsense, and I should have known that it was at the time, but it took me a while to really see through the dust that the canonical fairy-tales about legal history kick up.

Not surprisingly, I had started doubting the usefulness of leaning on the Constitution when I became an anarchist. But old cognitive habits die hard, and it wasn’t until last year, when I really started reading about William Lloyd Garrison and the rest of the disunionist abolitionists, that I began to feel anti-constitutionalism in any serious way, and it was largely through the Garrisonians that I came to realize the importance of making your arguments from moral basics rather than from legal hermeneutics. Voting abolitionists, and even Lysander Spooner, insisted on twisting the Constitution every which way they could to avoid the conclusion that it was (1) a pro-slavery alliance, and thus (2) an objective force for evil, the covenant with Death and agreement with Hell that Garrison denounced. But as interesting as Spooner’s argument was, it was really Garrison that was right about the Constitution (as I think Spooner came to realize later in his career); the important thing wasn’t constitutionality, but justice, which is not subject to legislative fiat. The Garrisonians, because so many of them were fervently religious, talked about a higher law than the Constitution; that’s partly right, but in a sense it’s also a matter of a lower, more human law; any serious theory of justice has to start from our ordinary claims to justice and dignity, the kind of demands that we ordinarily address to our fellow human beings (don’t attack me without reason, don’t trash my stuff, mind your own business if it’s not hurting you) rather than the ritual incantations that you might utter before a Court (Eighth Amendment, Public Use Clause, penumbral right to privacy, blah blah blah).

But as of a couple years ago my recognition of all this was nowhere near complete, and so my half-complete anti-statism didn’t stop me from singing the Bill of Rights’ praises, piously hoping that other branches of government would force the Bush administration to stick more closely to it, and absurdly describing it as that good old parchment barricade against tyranny.

Well, the thing about parchment barricades is that they don’t hold up very well against pressure. (That’s why you usually want to make barricades out of mud or bricks, at a minimum.) Constitutions don’t protect liberty; people do. Or don’t, which is the legacy the Constitution of the United States leaves us with today. Whatever protections the Bill of Rights was supposed afford white male citizens from the federal government, and whoever those protections were supposed to be extended to in the present day, we have (just to pick a few arbitrarily-selected examples) the FBI spying on us in secret, increasingly arrogant and militant paramilitary police ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) occupying our cities, a rampaging global war machine, deliberate and systematic gutting of habeas corpus, and a Justice Department that seems to believe that it can threaten and arrest people for failing to comply with secret laws whose terms they refuse to disclose. Either the Bill of Rights permits this kind of abuse, in which case it does not deserve the praise of rational people, or it forbids it but is incapable of stopping it, in which case it is useless.

In either case, my whining that this sort of thing oversteps this or that clause is bloody well irrelevant; the problem with invading people’s lives with unwarranted searches and seizures, government-sponsored religious persecution, seizing guns, maintaining a standing war machine, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, or rounding people up and throwing them in prison forever without charges, is not that they’re unconstitutional; it’s that they’re evil. There may be cases where something is wrong just because it violates some bit of positive law — respect for human life demands that you drive on the side of the road other people drive on, but it’s a matter of arbitrary convention which side that should be — but these are certainly not that sort of case. The right to your own body, to self-defense, to your conscience, to peace and freedom, are prior to any law or compact, the only possible foundation for any just law or legitimate authority at all, and therefore not dependent on the Constitution saying one mumbling word about them.

Human rights don’t need to be written on scraps of paper to be worth defending, and wasting your time and energy wrangling over the right enchantments to invoke The Law on your side is a distraction and a sucker’s bet. I’ll take my rights. You can keep the bill.

Further reading

• GT 2005-09-17: International Ignore the Constitution Day
• GT 2005-09-02: Definition 2
• GT 2005-07-04: Burn, baby, burn
• No Treason! 2005-12-11: Bush Gets it Right