• 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.↩

MetaFilter Saved My Pals From Sex Traffickers—Exclusive Interview | Mother Jones. motherjones.com (2010-05-22):

How an online community mobilized to rescue two young Russian women.

Forget the irritating title and summary. Besides being needlessly sensationalistic, the rhetoric of “saving” or rescuing women from sex trafficking is infantilizing and intensely unhelpful; also, it’s just inaccurate as a description of what actually happened.

What is awesome about this story, crappy headlines aside, is how a good friend and an Internet community managed to not only alert two young Russian women that the “agency” was lying to them, that the replacement jobs they’d been promised were actually at a skeazy strip club, and — even more important — while government “hotlines” and “counseling” proved to be alienating and more or less completely useless, an ad hoc group of folks on MetaFilter managed to come together to connect the women with information, a safe place to stay in New York, a friend to advocate for them and help them out, and leads on getting help to secure straightened-out visas — meaning practical solidarity and mutual aid, through an ad hoc distributed grassroots network, scattered throughout cities all across the continent, which managed to foil a gang of lying traffickers, helped two women get themselves out of a really dicey situation, and provided with plenty of resources to help them land on their feet.

(Story thanks to a private correspondent.)

The Santa Cruz Sentinel inaccurately reported yesterday that the government District Attorney’s office had mounted a smash-and-grab raid on SubRosa Cafe, the Anarchist space in Santa Cruz that has been black-baited and scapegoated over the past month for a riot they had nothing in particular to do with. The situation in Santa Cruz got pretty scary, with SubRosa collective members receiving frequent harassment and death threats from Respectable Citizens. What actually did happen sounds here sounds worrying, but the SubRosa collective has made clear that the newspaper story is wildly inaccurate. There has been no raid so far — although there were four armed deputies dispatched to nose around on a pretty flimsy pretext:

Four armed deputies visited SubRosa Wednesday May 19th. SubRosa was closed at the time. They told a neighbor they wanted to talk to SubRosa staff about worker’s comp issues. One of the deputies was an inspector from the Santa Cruz District Attorney’s Office.

Beyond this unsuccessful visit, SubRosa has not had any contact with law enforcement. SubRosa was not raided, and our door was not broken. We did not, and do not call the police.

SubRosa is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and has no paid workers and is an all-volunteer space. SubRosa has a business license to operate in the City Of Santa Cruz. SubRosa is in compliance with all city and county fire codes, zoning requirements, entertainment permits, health codes, workers compensation, and sales tax requirements. No workers comp claims have been filed, nor have we been contacted by the Division of Workers Compensation.

— SubRosa (2010-05-21): A Word About the Reported Raid

It sounds to me like the District Attorney’s office and the po-po would like to take the opportunity to go fishing for connections between SubRosa and the riot. Which is worrisome. Not the same thing as the raid the Sentinel spread sensationalistic rumors about — but still a reason to worry, and to offer your support and solidarity to SubRosa if you believe that they should not be threatened, attacked or harassed by the state’s armed goons solely on the basis of their political beliefs. If you’d like to support the SubRosa project, I’m sure they could use it these days;

Donations

SubRosa is fiscally sponsored by a 501(c)(3) non-profit and your donation is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. We will happily provide you with a tax-deductible receipt.

We can accept donations by check, money order, or credit/debit card.

If you can’t make it down to SubRosa, one-time donations can be sent to:

SubRosa
703 Pacific Ave
Santa Cruz, CA 95060

— SubRosa: Support

• Electoral Race. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-19). Just saw Rand Paul on Rachel Maddow's show doing a not very good job of explaining his opposition to anti-discrimination laws. Paul did make a few good points – like the one about how the liberal case for forcibly desegregating private restaurants backfires by bolstering the conservative policy of forbidding… (Linked Thursday 2010-05-20.)

• Defensive Driving. Daily Brickbats (2010-05-20). Cops are here to keep you safe. (Cont’d.) (Linked Thursday 2010-05-20.)