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Posts filed under Smash the State

In Their Own Words: Master and Commander edition

The Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, on their understanding of Officer Safety:

This time it was a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, essentially ruling that unless an officer is actually under physical attack, he/she cannot use a Taser to subdue a suspect. And, for good measure, these starry-eyed jurists, who probably have never been in a physical fight in their lives, opined that police officers should not fear irrational suspects defying officer commands as long as the suspect stays 15 feet from the officer.

As every street cop knows, any suspect within 15 feet who is actively resisting verbal commands is a threat to officer safety.

If a suspect complies with an officer's commands, the use of force or a weapon is unnecessary. When a suspect fails to comply with verbal commands, it means the situation is rapidly escalating and some form of force will be required to gain compliance.

— Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, lapd.com: The Official Blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League (2009-12-30): The Ninth Circuit’s year-end ‘gift’ to law enforcement

(Via William N. Grigg.)

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Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

Hey everyone; it’s Sunday. Late Sunday — but it’s never too late for Shamelessness.

I’m back from Hawaii. My paper (a revised, expanded and paper-ified version of Women and the Invisible Fist) seems to have gone down well — at least, I got some good discussion and had a couple of requests for copies of the paper. L. and I did get to spend a lot of time by the water, and a bit in the forest. My next trip, coming up real soon now, is out to L.A., with some ALLies from Vegas and, hopefully, to meet up with some more from So. Cal., to represent ALL at the Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair. Busy busy busy.

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.

Wednesday Lazy Linking

  • Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson Were Anti-Slavery. Chuck Baldwin (2010-01-11). This article has perhaps the highest ratio of simple falsehoods to true statements in any article I have ever read. The man barely even pauses for a half-truth. But I look for the best in people, so let me just say that Baldwin says one thing I absolutely agree with: “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson … were the spiritual soul mates of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.” Well, yeah. (If you haven’t read my stuff on Lee before, cf. 1, 2, etc.) (Linked Monday 2010-01-11.)

Tiny weapons searches

So here’s something a judge on the Massachusetts Appeal Court recently said — in reply to government cops who forced their way into Wilbert Cruz-Rivera’s car, without any warrant, and opened up a pill bottle while rummaging around in his things, and then claimed that this invasive warrantless search, conducted on the private property of a man who was not accused of any criminal offense, was justified as an officer safety search:

On this record, it simply was not reasonable to believe that the defendant might, upon his release with a message that he was free to go, enter his car, reach into the console, open a pill bottle, extract a weapon smaller than four-and-one-half inches by one-and-three-fourths inches, and use it in an effort to harm the two nearby, fully armed police officers who had just released him.

— Quoted in The Boston Globe (2009-12-17): Court: Concern about tiny weapons didn’t justify search

I suppose I am glad that a judge said this. But the fact that a judge had to say it — to clarify to a gang of pushy government cops that officer safety really is not a excuse reason to go on a warrantless search for tiny weapons hidden in closed pill bottles — and that to do so they had to overturn a lower court’s ruling, which upheld this ridiculous opportunistic lie — does not really make me very optimistic about the reliability or effectiveness of those constitutional brakes on police power that the court is supposedly out to save.

Losers of the World Unite!

Arnold Kling recently wrote that the problem with liberaltarianism is that generally speaking, and especially right now, technocratic Harvard liberals are primarily concerned with, and irrevocably committed to, expert control over the economy. Will Wilkinson writes in reply:

But the Harvard narrative is gauche. People can learn to have better taste if someone shows them how. More generally, you can't expect a way of thinking to become popular with the elite if you concede from the outset that it appeals primarily to losers. Anyway, yes, high school never ends.

Actually, I’d say that the real problem with liberaltarianism[*] is precisely the expectation that the point is to make libertarian thinking popular with the elite. Which strikes me as neither likely nor especially desirable. The elite generally aren’t in the market for significant alternatives to the political status quo; why would they be? Under the status quo, they’re already the elite. They don’t need or want another world to be possible; they’ve already got one of those.

But losers have have no real stake in maintaining the existing relations of political power. And if the existing political-economic arrangements are marked by statist exploitation, injustice, and petty tyranny, then it’s the losers who benefit most from the repeal of unjust laws and from movement towards a freer society. When that’s the case, if your ideas don’t appeal primarily to losers, you’re doing it wrong. Losers, unlike elites, have little more to lose, and plenty to gain.

(Incidentally, if you think that my speaking against elites and in praise of losers amounts to opting for Tea Partisans over Harvard liberals, then I’d like to suggest that you have an awfully constrained notion of the available alternatives. And have probably lost sight of how the American system of socioeconomic status actually works, by confusing it with the idiotic shouting match commonly dignified as American electoral politics. What I’m after is hardly belligerent Republican dudes posing as the scrappy underdogs. It’s pro-immigrant, pro-worker, libertarian Leftism, with a special emphasis on solidarity with the people who are the most criminalized, the most marginalized, the most exploited and oppressed.)

All power to the people.

* I mean, other than the problem with it being an abominable word that nobody should ever have committed to print. Or even thought of, really.

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