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Monday Lazy Linking

  • The Hong Kong of Africa? Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-01-08). I don't know much about Bouake, the second largest metropolis in the Ivory Coast, but as peace establishes itself in that formerly war-torn country the BBC makes it sound like the city is heading in the right direction: Bouake is the ex-rebel capital of "Soroland", as the zone is sometimes… (Linked Friday 2010-01-08.)
  • $250 fine for waving one's hands. Don't Tase Me, Bro! (2010-01-08). The War on the Informal Sector (Cont’d) / Waving While Latino. In which socioeconomic cleansing meets international apartheid, as the arbitrary government over the town of Oyster Bay, New York, proposes to inflict $250 fines on local residents working as day laborers, if they “solicit employment” in public, which can mean just about anything, including, but not limited to, “shouting at cars, waving arms or signs, making hand signals, approaching motor vehicles or standing in public roads facing in the direction of oncoming traffic.” Of course, both the intent and the practical effect of the law is to provide government police with another weapon in their legal arsenal to harass and threaten peaceful immigrant workers, in a deliberate effort to drive them out of public spaces. (Linked Friday 2010-01-08.)
  • Border thugs are thugs around the world, hate people & computers. Xaq Fixx, Everyone's Blog Posts – FR33 Agents (2009-12-15). I am sorry we blew up your laptop, Welcome to Israel Woman went to Israel and when they didn’t like they way she answered questions they shot her laptop, 3 times, saying it might have been a bomb. click the link at the top for the full sotry. They have… (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • How would Michael Palin say "Quod erat demonstrandum"? 360 (2010-01-09). The letters QED (or the unabbreviated "quod erat demonstrandum" ["which is what was to be proved"]) are often used to indicate the end of a formal proof.  This longstanding tradition goes back to a style of proof writing, where the culminating sentence of the argument gives a recapitulation of the… (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • The Big Blue Crime Wave. William Grigg, LewRockwell.com Blog (2010-01-08). Amid a world-historic economic collapse and the emergence of a fully-orbed doctrine of official impunity, an increasing percentage of those hired by the State to protect "public safety" are freelancing as undisguised criminals. Spacer Rapist on Patrol: Marcus Jackson, a patrol officer with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, was arrested last… (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • Perverted Police. LewRockwell.com Blog (2010-01-09). Rapists on patrol. (Cont’d, cont’d, cont’d.) Trigger alert. (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • "Keep 'em coming!" Nevada Prison Watch (2010-01-09). Anarchist Communications: “The latest Prison Action Newsletter, of January 2010, is out now!” (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • Big Lebowski rewritten as a work of Shakespeare. Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing (2010-01-08). “The knave abideth.” Sweet baby Jesus, the attention to detail in this sucker is just mindblowing! What a thing of beauty. Here’s the carpet-staining scene: WOO: Rise, and speak wisely, man–but hark; I see thy rug, as woven i’the Orient, A treasure from abroad. I like it not. I’ll stain… (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • Spare the taser spoil the toddler. Don't Tase Me, Bro! (2010-01-09). Men In Uniform (Cont’d.) Officer Kevin McCann, Dellroy Police Department. Dellroy, Ohio. Officer Kevin McCann was arrested in Canton on assault charges, for torturing his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son using a wooden paddle and a “Taser-like device.” The abuse was discovered after the children were taken to the hospital with marks and bruises. (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • Claiborne grand jury will not hear testimony in shooting case – Shreveport Times. "Bernard Monroe" – Google News (2010-01-09). The white government cops who gunned down Bernard Monroe — an frail 73-year old black man in Homer, Louisiana, who was never accused of any crime, and who was gunned down in his own home at a family reunion — base the entire justification for the shooting on the claim that Monroe was holding a gun. About 14 eyewitnesses say that the police are lying, and that Monroe was holding nothing more dangerous than a water-bottle. Now that a government prosecutor has called a government grand jury to “investigate,” he won’t be calling any of those witnesses. I am sure that we can count on government to insist on objectivity and accountability for its own hired muscle in this case. (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • Sumner on Experts. Will Wilkinson, Will Wilkinson (2009-12-29). I agree: In the last year my respect for authority, which was never very high, has fallen to a new low.  As I read each interview in the Big Think, it becomes more and more obvious that the experts don't have a clue as to what went wrong, nor how… (Linked Saturday 2010-01-09.)
  • Easterly, Acton, and Visionary Leadership. Art Carden, The Beacon (2010-01-09). In prepping for my appearance on Radio Free Market this afternoon I've done some thinking about society's search for Great Leaders and Great Men. This made me think about a recent post on Aid Watch by William Easterly that everyone should read and a few passages in Democracy in Deficit,… (Linked Sunday 2010-01-10.)
  • Man Threatened by Gang for Giving Water to Neighbors. Fr33 Agents (2010-01-10). The Border Police State Vs. Private Property and Human Kindness (Linked Sunday 2010-01-10.)
  • They Could Be Twins. Daily Brickbats (2010-01-10). Oops, Our Bad. (Cont’d.) (Linked Sunday 2010-01-10.)
  • I Don't Feel Truant. Daily Brickbats (2010-01-10). Perpetual State of Supervision (Cont’d) (Linked Sunday 2010-01-10.)
  • Never Enough. Daily Brickbats (2010-01-10). Sado-statism Vs. Human Decency and Grieving Widows in Alabama (Linked Sunday 2010-01-10.)

Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

It’s Sunday. Everybody get Shameless.

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.

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.

See also:

Friday Lazy Linking

Officer-involvement

Here’s Jenn Rowell in the Montgomery Advertiser on a recent murder in Tallassee. Notice the amazing disappearing subject:

Tallassee police have released additional information about a fatal shooting that involved officers.

In the news, fatal shootings just happen somehow, and officers, poor things, somehow end up involved.

Of course, what actually happened is that some white cops working on the Tallassee city government’s police force chased a black man down and then they shot him to death. Their victim, Michael McIntyre, was not actually accused of any crime whatsoever; the cops were in the housing projects where he lives because they were looking for somebody else to serve a warrant. (Who they found, and arrested, without any trouble. But Michael McIntyre ran away, which cops in America take as a crime in itself, and sufficient reason to chase after you, force a violent confrontation, and take you down by any means necessary, even if it means lighting you up (the police so far have refused to disclose how many shots were fired, beyond the fact that their victim was hit multiple times).

Cops claim that McIntyre brandished a weapon — after a gang of heavily-armed strangers had chased him for 200 or 300 yards. I don’t know whether that’s true or not — there’s certainly no reason to just take the police at their word — but even if it is true, I don’t much care. If I had no reason to be looking for you, no reason to hang around bothering you — if you were never accused of any crime and I had no basis to arrest or detain or harass you over anything — and you decided to leave, then you have a right to leave. If I took your decision to leave as an offense against my person or prerogative, and then chased you down, threatening to use my small arsenal of weapons to restrain you by any means necessary, and so forced a violent confrontation with you when, again, you were not suspected of committing any crime, or of posing any threat to anyone, and if I then ended it all by lighting you up, in self-defense against a threat which, if it existed at all, was purely the product of my own belligerence and escalation, then I would be considered a dangerous maniac, and I would probably be in prison for the next couple decades, if not the remainder of my natural life.

Of course, here the dangerous maniac is a gang of cops armed and uniformed by the city government. So instead they get a crowd control goon squad to clear the area of upset black people, while the Mayor pro tem of the city government takes time out to roll up and do some damage control, while their colleagues in the Alabama Bureau of Investigation perform a perfunctory investigation that will almost certainly end up by declaring that everything they did was done According To Official Procedures.

(Via Roderick 2009-12-31.)

See also:

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