Rad Geek People's Daily

Here’s an announcement from Roderick Long about the debut of the Molinari Review.

The Molinari Institute (the parent organization of the Center for a Stateless Society) is proud to announce the publication of the first issue of our new interdisciplinary, open-access, libertarian academic journal, the Molinari Review, edited by yours truly, and dedicated to publishing scholarship, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, very broadly understood. (See our original call for papers.)

You can order a copy here:

Print	Kindle
Amazon US	Amazon US
Amazon UK	Amazon UK
CreateSpace Store

It should also be available, now or shortly, on other regional versions of Amazon. And later on it’ll be available from our website as a free PDF download (because copyright restrictions are evil).

So what’s in it?

In “The Right to Privacy Is Tocquevillean, Not Lockean: Why It Matters” Julio Rodman argues that traditional libertarian concerns with non-aggression, property rights, and negative liberty fail to capture the nature of our concern with privacy. Drawing on insights from Tocqueville and Foucault, Rodman suggests that privacy is primarily a matter, not of freedom from interference, but of freedom from observation, particularly accusatory observation.

In “Libertarianism and Privilege,” Billy Christmas charges that right-wing libertarians underestimate the extent and significance of harmful relations of privilege in society (including, but not limited to, class and gender privilege) because they misapply their own principles in focusing on proximate coercion to the exclusion of more indirect forms of coercion; but, he argues, broadening the lens of libertarian inquiry reveals that libertarian principles are more powerful tools for the analysis of privilege than privilege theorists generally suppose.

In “Capitalism, Free Enterprise, and Progress: Partners or Adversaries?,” Darian Nayfeld Worden interrogates traditional narratives of the Industrial Revolution. Distinguishing between capitalism (understood as a separation between labour and ownership/management) and free enterprise, Nayfeld Worden maintains that the rise of capitalism historically was in large part the result of a suppression of free enterprise, and that thanks to state intervention, the working-class benefited far less from industrialisation and technological innovation than they might otherwise have done.

In “Turning the Tables: The Pathologies and Unrealized Promise of Libertarianism,” Gus diZerega contends that libertarians misunderstand and misapply their own key concepts, leading them to embrace an atomistic vision of society, and to overvalue the market while undervaluing empathy and democracy. (Look for a reply or two in our next issue.)

Finally, Nathan Goodman reviews Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, an anthology edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano. Goodman praises the book for its illumination of many aspects of the intersection between anarchist tradition and the LGBTQ community, with particular emphasis on the tension between LGBTQ activists who seek to dismantle oppressive institutions and those who merely seek inclusion within them; but in the area of economics, he finds its authors to be too quick to dismiss the free market or to equate it with the prevailing regime of corporatist privilege.

Want to order a copy? See the ordering information above.

Want to contribute an article to an upcoming issue? Head to the journal’s webpage.

Want to support this project financially? Make a donation to the Molinari Institute General Fund.

— Roderick Long, Molinari Review 1.1: What Lies Within?
Austro-Athenian Empire (19 May 2016)

It’s a beautiful May day in the bright, sunny South. And it’s been a spell but I’ve been trying to keep things a bit more active once again here at the Rad Geek People’s Daily, and I feel like the time is right for a return to Shamelessness.

So, gentle reader, what have you been up to lately? What have you been working on? Got anything big coming up? Anything you’ve written lately? 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.

Don’t hold back. Let’s get Shameless again.

So I don’t know if this is your thing, but if it is, you may have noticed that in all of the Iberian Romance languages, the most commonly used words for the left — the direction left, or on the left-hand side — are obviously related to each other: Castilian Spanish izquierdo, Catalan esquerre, Galego/Portuguese esquerdo, etc. — are all obviously related to each other, but none of them seem to bear any particular relation to the usual Latin word for left, which is sinister.^[1] So then if they didn’t get it from granddaddy Latin, where’d they all get it? Well, the other day I learned that the answer is that when people give you directions on the Iberian peninsula, they’re all getting their word for left from Basque. Neat.

1. ^[1]Forms of that word still exist in the modern languages — it’s siniestro in Castilian Spanish, sestro in Portuguese, etc. — and they can strictly speaking still be used to mean to the left or on the left-hand side. But their primary use is much more like English sinister, to suggest something perverse, evil, unsettling or insidious; using them to indicate left as a direction or handedness would be to make a word choice with a certain connotation of archaism or exoticism, like using sable instead of black to describe the color of my coffee table.↩

Here’s a great recent article by Jacob Hornberger:

Of course it is. There’s no reasonable question about this. The fact that Right-wing cultural politics and American nationalism continue to bamboozle professed libertarians into believing that there is even the slightest compatibility between border controls and libertarian politics — and the fact that so many people within political libertarianism continue to prevaricate about the issue or shove it to one side, as if it were unimportant — the fact that anyone could take libertarianism to mean anything other than an uncompromising enemy of deportation, criminalization and exclusionist border control of any kind, is the shame of the so-called Liberty Movement.

CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report

The CIA inspector general's office has said it "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved.

The erasure of the document by the spy agency's internal watchdog was deemed an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News.

One intelligence community source told Yahoo News, which first reported the development, that last summer CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document.

–Sadie Levy Gale, CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report
The Independent (17 May 2016)

Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s just nobody’s fault, really. Sometimes accidents happen or mistakes are made, and everything just happens to come up CIA. Whoops, there it goes. Oh, there goes the disk too.

Here’s a bit more on the oopsie.

The 6,700-page report contains thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation methods, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation techniques at "black site" prisons overseas.

. . . Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr opposed the publication of the report in 2014. Since taking power he has attempted to recover copies of the report that were distributed throughout the Obama administration.

–Sadie Levy Gale, CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report
The Independent (17 May 2016)