Rad Geek People's Daily

Besides taking very kind notice of my article in The Freeman, Roderick Long (2008-01-18) and Micha Ghertner (2008-01-14) each also mention the epigraph that I included — a long quotation on the experience of oppression by the radical lesbian feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye. The quotation is one of my favorite passages from her essay Oppression, in The Politics of Reality. I had originally hoped to include more of it, but the epigraph had to be trimmed back in the interest of space. The full version would have been:

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.

It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.

–Marilyn Frye (1983), Oppression, in The Politics of Reality. pp. 4–5.

In the case of poor people — and especially poor people who live in the socioeconomic or racial ghettos of large cities — both state socialists and state capitalists have spent no end of time looking at one or two wires, and wondering why the bird behind them builds its nest in such a funny, cramped shape. Since their perspective has excluded treating state oppression of the poor in any systematic way, the state socialists, rightly understanding that poor people are basically alright, wrongly figure that the problem must be the inherent vices of the market process. The state capitalists, rightly understanding that the market process is basically alright, wrongly figure that the problem must be in the vice, folly, or ignorance of individual poor people, or poor subcultures. But both of them are wrong. To understand the problem aright, you have to start by stepping back to see the whole cage. Then, and only then, can you meaningfully talk about what poor people can do about breaking out–and what you, if you are not yourself poor, can do to help them in their efforts.

Fellow citizens, you can rest easier tonight knowing that City Officials in St. Charles, Missouri are contemplating decisive action against a grave and gathering threat to the safety and well-being of their citizens–the threat of coarse language and vulgar songs at saloons.

ST. CHARLES, Mo. — … A St. Louis-area town is considering a bill that would ban swearing in bars, along with table-dancing, drinking contests and profane music.

City officials contend the bill is needed to keep rowdy crowds under control because the historic downtown area gets a little too lively on some nights.

City Councilman Richard Veit said he was prompted to propose the bill after complaints about bad bar behavior. He says it will give police some rules to enforce when things get too rowdy.

… The proposal would ban indecent, profane or obscene language, songs, entertainment and literature at bars.

— Associated Press (2008-01-08): St. Louis-area town considers proposal that would ban swearing in bars

Well, thank God, says I. The last thing that the august officials of that fair city should permit is for consenting adults to indulge in bawdy or profane entertainments. Some might say that City Officials ought to let each bar keeper make his or her own rules as to what is or isn’t permissible behavior in their own bars. But that surely misses the point. There’s a historic downtown district at stake here, and if a City Official isn’t entitled to treat a Historic Downtown District as his own private property in order to preserve its Character from rowdies and vulgarians, then by crackie, what is he entitled to do?

Some are not so sure:

Marc Rousseau, who owns the bar R.T. Weilers, said he thinks the bill needs revision.

We’re dealing with adults here once again and I don’t think it’s the city’s job or the government’s job to determine what we can and cannot play in our restaurant, Rousseau said.

— Associated Press (2008-01-08): St. Louis-area town considers proposal that would ban swearing in bars

But really, M. Rousseau! Think of the importance of keeping a family-friendly atmosphere in a late-night bar district! If the city government doesn’t shield the delicate ears of bar-hoppers from indecent, profane, or obscene language that they are willing to hear, then who will?

Since we already have a cadre of professional bureaucrats, legislators, regulators, and statesmen running behind us all, yelling You’ll put an eye out with that! and Don’t drink that; it’ll stunt your growth! and You're not going out like that, are you?! what could be more natural than to give the police some rules to enforce and have The Law come around, in all its majesty and dignity, to shout at us all, You keep your mouth clean, son, or I’ll wash it out for you with soap!

(Via feministe 2008-01-11.)

In Florida, another man has died after being tasered by cops:

A man in his 20s died after a Coral Gables police officer used a Taser stun gun to subdue him Friday morning.

He was identified Friday afternoon as Xavier Jones, 29.

Jones had been disruptive at a party and resisted arrest, according to Miami-Dade police, whose homicide bureau is investigating the death.

About 2 a.m., police officers responded to a call about a scuffle at University Inn Condominium, 1280 S. Alahambra Cir., near the University of Miami. The building is across the street from the university and borders on U.S. 1.

After the man became disruptive inside the apartment, a security guard attempted to remove him from the property. The confrontation spilled outside.

Miami-Dade police said Jones displayed aggressive and combative behavior so a police officer used a Taser stun gun to restrain him.

After the discharge, Jones became unresponsive, and paramedics took him to Doctor’s Hospital in Coral Gables, where he was pronounced dead.

— David Ovalle, Miami Herald (2008-01-11): Man who died in Gables Tasing identified

Although I write a lot about police brutality involving tasers, I should make it clear that I don’t have any essential problem with the use of tasers, either by police or in individual self-defense. My issue has to do with the brutality, not with the equipment used, and I think that these incidents have a lot more to do with an arrogant, violent, and completely unaccountable institutional culture within police forces than they have to do with the specifics of painful electric shocks. When tasers weren’t available, cops happily used guns and truncheons; I wouldn’t regard a return to that status quo ante as any kind of progress.

That said, there are a couple of things about the use of tasers which may be some reason for special concern. One of them is the capacity to use painful electric shocks as a form of torture which doesn’t leave embarrassing bruises or other visible signs of the brutality. The second is the persistent and institutionalized dogma that tasers shocks are always a non-lethal use of force. This belief–which naturally makes individual cops and policy-setters much less cautious about the use of tasers than they might otherwise be, is endlessly repeated by cops, PR flacks, and by Taser Inc., which has gone so far as to misrepresent the findings of studies and sending PR flacks to personally lean on coroners to alter their findings in order to insulate their claims from inconvenient empirical evidence. The belief persists, in spite of hundreds of documented cases of people dying soon after being tasered, and in spite of an almost complete lack of controlled research on the health effects of taser shocks (particularly repeated shocks), because the cops’ basic interest is to be able to use as wide a variety of pain compliance techniques as possible without any danger of being held accountable for the consequences; the politicos’ basic interest is to curry favor with the Fraternal Order of Pigs and to come across as tough-on-crime; and Taser Inc.’s basic interest is in making a bloody buck through ongoing political patronage. Given the arrogance of power that they have all cultivated, and the political privileges that they all enjoy, none of them have much reason to be particularly interested in empirical reality, or for that matter in the lives of their victims.

(Story thanks to Strike the Root Blog 2008-01-11.)

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-17: Taser first, ask questions at the autopsy

The bad news is that, in spite of an immune system which has been almost preternaturally resistant to common ailments for the past several years, I am currently in the process of getting my ass kicked by a cold or some other (hopefully) 24-hour bug.

In place of saying much of anything that I’d actually have to concentrate write out, I’ll share a little bit of trivia about my recent appearance in The Freeman. This is not actually the first time that something by a Charles W. Johnson has appeared in the pages of The Freeman. But the first article published under that name was not by me, but rather by my granddad. (I still get the occasional e-mail asking me if I am the author of some quote pulled from the article by some libertarian newsletter. Nope; I was just named after him.)

In fact, my dad also had an article published back when he was a frosh in college — A Letter to the President, in January 1964. My grandfather’s article, Medical Care Is Not a Right, appeared in April 1969. (My grandfather also had a couple of articles on medical topics in Bob LeFevre’s Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought: Non-Participation, published in Spring 1967, and Medical Political Protection, published in Fall 1968.) I may be the first third-generation Freeman contributor in the history of the publication.

Here’s something I found in the mail yesterday:

Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It

Governments—local, state, and federal—spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the plight of the urban poor. Look around any government agency and you'll never fail to find some know-it-all with a suit and a nameplate on his desk who has just the right government program to eliminate or ameliorate, or at least contain, the worst aspects of grinding poverty in American cities—especially as experienced by black people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and everyone else marked for the special observation and solicitude of the state bureaucracy. Depending on the bureaucrat's frame of mind, his pet programs might focus on doling out conditional charity to deserving poor people, or putting more at-risk poor people under the surveillance of social workers and medical experts, or beating up recalcitrant poor people and locking them in cages for several years.

But the one thing that the government and its managerial aid workers will never do is just get out of the way and let poor people do the things that poor people naturally do, and always have done, to scratch by.

Government anti-poverty programs are a classic case of the therapeutic state setting out to treat disorders created by the state itself. Urban poverty as we know it is, in fact, exclusively a creature of state intervention in consensual economic dealings. This claim may seem bold, even to most libertarians. But a lot turns on the phrase "as we know it." Even if absolute laissez faire reigned beginning tomorrow, there would still be people in big cities who are living paycheck to paycheck, heavily in debt, homeless, jobless, or otherwise at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. These conditions may be persistent social problems, and it may be that free people in a free society will still have to come up with voluntary institutions and practices for addressing them. But in the state-regimented market that dominates today, the material predicament that poor people find themselves in—and the arrangements they must make within that predicament—are battered into their familiar shape, as if by an invisible fist, through the diffuse effects of pervasive, interlocking interventions ….

— Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It,
In The Freeman (December 2007), 12–17.

You can read the whole thing at The Freeman‘s website. Enjoy! FEE’s website doesn’t (yet) support online comments, but I’d be glad to hear what you think in the comments section over here.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like especially to thank Sheldon Richman for his encouragement and his help, and my companion L. for her patient reading and helpful comments. The article would have been much the poorer, or more likely nonexistent, without their aid.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-14: Friday Ego Blogging
• GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading
• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2007-09-15: Free Riders
• GT 2006-06-14: Enclosure comes to Los Angeles