From Tom H. Hastings, The Invisible King, at truthout (2011-01-17):

You watch. Over the weekend and on Monday, the Hallmarked memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be sanitized and blackwashed until he is no more than a sentimental husk hoping that little children of all races will one day be able to play together. Then you’ll see shots of just that, as if to indicate, “Well, thanks, that’s all done, nice historical figure. Bye.” One of these years, they will probably launch the USS Martin Luther King Jr., a spanking new destroyer, or perhaps they will name a class of drone aircraft the “MLK Ground Dominators.”

But I am sure that if Dr. King were alive today, he would agree with all of my political objectives, including especially the most violent parts of my foreign policy agenda and all of my most accommodating moral compromises with the political status quo.

As a historical note on the rest of the article, King, SNCC, and other activists in the Freedom Movement certainly innovated and developed the understanding of nonviolent resistance beyond what Gandhi had done. But I don’t think it’s quite fair to Gandhi to say that he volunteered to help the British or stood aside without objection during Britain’s wars. Perhaps this is a fair summary of his attitude toward the Boer War, the Bambatha uprising, and World War I. But Gandhi’s thought was evolving throughout his life, too, and he later said that it was what he saw during the Bambatha war that really brought home the horrors of war and the need for a different approach. It is, in any case, not at all an accurate description of Gandhi’s attitude during World War II. It was in the midst of World War II that he drafted the Quit India resolution and called for non-cooperation with the British war effort. He also routinely criticized the Allied war effort as trying to defeat the Nazis by becoming as ruthless as they were. As a result, he spent 1942-1944 in prison, along with most of the rest of the Indian National Congress leadership, specifically for criticizing and calling for resistance against the War.

LOL: Judith Miller criticizes Wikileaks' Assange for not verifying his sources. Boing Boing (2011-01-18):

Why is disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller not fond of Wikileaks and Julian Assange? “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone,” she said.

Sometimes I am genuinely surprised when the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make somebody’s head explode.

• Why All Police Are Bad — for Society. Ademo Freeman, Cop Block (2010-12-30). I'm often questioned about my stance on police which is fine — anyone who knows me is aware that I don't mind sharing my thoughts. Oftentimes during the conversation I'm accused of being a "cop hater" or told that not all cops are bad. I understand the reasoning most people… (Linked Friday 2011-01-14.)

• From the Downsize DC Foundation: The Dictator Fallacy. DownsizeDC.org (2011-01-13). The Downsize DC Foundation’s website, www.DownsizeDCFoundation.org, continues to grow. Today, we bring you one of those articles, from the Our Lexicon category . . .  "The Dictator Fallacy" by Jim Babka fal·la·cy  –  * a misleading or unsound argument.  * Logic. any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render… (Linked Saturday 2011-01-15.)

• Nothing Natural about It. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2011-01-15). The sharp historical division between labor and capital ownership is not a natural emergent feature of the market economy but largely the conscious result of government privilege.Atom (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Two Little Pigs: How Some Cops Get Jail While Others Go Free. Modesto Anarcho (2011-01-16). It’s not that police “protect their own,” exactly. It’s that police protect their power. Rape your step daughter or get plastered and drive your car off the road, and you’re well behind the blue wall. Do something that disrupts command and control within a prison, and the long knives come out. (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Kiva Lending Team: Anarchists for Empowerment. tolstoyscat, things along the way (2011-01-11). Join here: Anarchists for EmpowermentKiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.Anarchists for Empowerment: We loan… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Mistakes Were Made. Guns Were Pointed. A Family Was Terrorized. Pets Were Threatened. Radley Balko, Gangsters in Blue (2011-01-16). The DEA has apologized for the wrong door raid in the Hudson Valley that I blogged about last week. Sort of. John P. Gilbride, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, issued a statement Friday clearing Spring Valley resident David McKay and his family of anything to do… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Why read about it when you can play? Shelley, MyTech (2011-01-16). Earlier today I got into a friendly discussion and debate on Twitter about a new web site called W3Fools. The site bills itself as a "W3Schools intervention", and the purpose is to wake developers up to the fact that W3School tutorials can, and do, have errors. The problem with a… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• The state begins in robbery; some patterns of robb… Gary Chartier, Comments on Free Association: Take It to the Limit (2011-01-08). The state begins in robbery; some patterns of robbery are doubtless spontaneously ordered, but surely others are planned by groups of robbers.Once the state has been established and mechanisms for obtaining power have been regularized, it will surely be unsurprising if people who do obtain power are people who like… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• The Semicolon Wars » American Scientist. www.americanscientist.org (2011-01-16). I mock the pettiness of these squabbles—and I believe some of them deserve mocking—and yet I don’t want to give the impression that only cosmetic issues are in dispute, or that programming languages are really all alike under the skin. On the contrary, what’s most fascinating about programming languages is… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

• Let a million bookmarks bloom. l.m.orchard, 0xDECAFBAD (2010-12-19). TL;DR: Don't depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes. In the last entry, I wrote about why my use of Delicious has dropped over time, and what I've… (Linked Sunday 2011-01-16.)

In logic, a non sequitur is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which simply does not follow from the given premises. The world being what it is, I noted a while back that that isn't a strong enough criticism for some popular arguments; we need a new category, the contrarium sequitur (or contra-sequitur for short), which is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which is exactly the opposite of the conclusion that you should draw from the given premises.

The New York Times Op-Ed page has always a particularly fertile field for picking ripe contra-sequiturs. That’s no doubt partly a function of the sort of people they employ. But I don’t think it’s just those particular guys; it’s really a feature of the house style, and perhaps an inevitable product of the intellectual environment when Very Serious People set themselves to issuing important opinions about matters of public concern.

Any political hack can churn out something that tries to shoehorn unruly facts into a predetermined party line, but it takes a special kind of environment to go beyond mere hackery day after day, to maintain such consistency in coming up with conclusions so exquisitely opposed to what the facts obviously suggest. For example, consider the recent online battle over Wikileaks, and the ongoing government efforts — led by the Obama administration and by Senators like Joe Lieberman — to pressure corporations like Amazon, Dyn Inc. (EveryDNS), et al. into cutting off the Internet services that Wikileaks needs to keep its website running, and to pressure payment processors like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America to cut off their access to funding, in the interests of national security and the alleged public interest. Many people see this and offer opinions which are better or worse informed, better thought out or worse thought out.

But only the New York Times Op-Ed page could take this government-driven campaign of intimidation to shut down Wikileaks and take it as proof of a crying need for more extensive government regulatory controls, which would allow the United States federal government to take a more active role in directing the business decisions of banks and payment processors. So that they can protect irksome bloggers, risky organizations, and unpopular opinions from being shut down by risk-averse banks, you see. This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks — so, instead, they’ll leave it up to someone you can always count on to stand up for open debate and a free press for organizations like Wikileaks — the United States federal government.

All in the public interest, of course.

• no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2011-01-10). no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary politics or a radical political philosophy or envisioned a big transformation can be entirely comfortable with the the notion that "anti-government" rhetoric must be…controlled, lest it lead to violence. that sort of thing threw eugene debs in prison and deported emma goldman. (Linked Monday 2011-01-10.)

• On Cable News | The Agitator. www.theagitator.com (2011-01-10). Ta-Nehisi Coates: …it’s my impression that much of cable news is rigged. Complicated questions are forced into small spaces of time, and guests frequently (Linked Monday 2011-01-10.)

• The Agony of Paul Krugman. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-11). Paul Krugman is a Very Serious Thinker. His words are like the rain. If he did not say these things about purely political matters, who else possibly could? (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-11.)

• Graceless Degradation: WordPress Uglification for Outmoded Browsers. drench.github.com (2011-01-12). Graceless Degradation Graceless Degradation is a WordPress plugin that gives visitors still using Internet Explorer 6 an appropriate user experience. (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• If suspect Jared Lee Loughner has schizophrenia, would that make him more likely to go on a shooting spree in Arizona? – By Vaughan Bell – Slate Magazine. www.slate.com (2011-01-12). If you found evidence on the Web that Jared Lee Loughner or some other suspected killer was obsessed with soccer or football or hockey and suggested it might be an explanation for his crime, you’d be laughed at. But do the same with “schizophrenia” and people nod in solemn agreement…. (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)