In the middle of the last decade, political scientist Marc Hetherington wrote about the declining public trust in government. . . . And such [media] portrayals contribute to a remarkable problem: not ideological hostility to government . . . but diminished expectations—in the public and in the press—about what government can accomplish. . . .

–Greg Marx, How the Press Erodes Our Belief [sic] in Government in The Nation (April 9, 2012)

. . . The same government that accomplished the killing of over 180,000 people in Iraq, in the pursuit of a transparent lie and an ever-shifting set of the flimsiest possible rationalizations?

. . . The same government that accomplished the ongoing, decade-long state of perpetual siege in Baghdad?

. . . The same government that accomplished the displacement of 3,000,000 war refugees?

To-day is the tenth anniversary of the U.S. government’s invasion of Iraq. It’s a day when, even more than most days, the same government? should be the question immediately asked by anyone who has an ounce of respect for peace, compassion, human life or human decency. There is nothing that should turn you against government as much as simply watching what it can accomplish when it is let loose.

A very happy MLK Monday to you all. I hear that there is some spectacle of pomp, power, ritualized violence, and safely quarantined content-less liberal admiration going on; which is too bad. Today should be a happy occasion. You can celebrate Disobey Day to-day by using your day off to celebrate the true legacy of the Freedom Movement, to forget the coronation ceremony, to break an unjust law, to tell an unpopular truth, or to disobey an illegitimate authority.

It seems to me that if the only way you can get official national hero types is by oversimplifying, lying, and thus eviscerating the substance of a world-changing life of work and body of thought, then official national hero types are worth less than nothing. What interest do they serve, and what are we supposed to need them for?

Certainly not the interest of honesty, or truth, and it seems to me that in these times those are coins far rarer — and therefore far more dear — than the pompous deliveries of the cosseted clique of power-tripping politicians and professional blowhards, who have convinced themselves that their collective in-jokes, shibboleths and taboos constitute the public life of a nation. I don't give much of a damn, in the end, whether or not King gets ritualistically name-checked by men and women who were or would have been his mortal enemies to make stentorian speeches supposedly on his behalf. What I give a damn about is what the man, for all his many faults, actually cared about, fought for, and died for: the struggle of ordinary men and women for their own freedom, which meant their struggle to defy, resist, or simply bypass the consolidated violence of the belligerent power-mongers and the worse-than-useless moderate hand-wringers who made their living peddling excuses, apologetics, and the endless counsel of wait, wait.

This, not public-school pageants and official national hero types, is what the vast majority of us, who get no profit from the fortunes of the political-intellectual complex and its pantheon, need . . . .

–From Official national hero types, Rad Geek (7 April 2008)

Because:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. … One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all.

–Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963)

And also:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. . . .

. . . A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

–Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence (April 4, 1967).

See also:

• GT 2011-01-19: One of these years
• GT 2009-01-15: Freedom Movement Celebrity Birthday Feast (this year with big round numbers)
• GT 2008-01-21: Disobedience Day
• GT 2008-04-07: Official national hero types
• GT 2006-01-16: MLK Monday #2
• GT 2005-01-17: MLK Monday

• Groves of Luxury and Idleness? Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-05-28). As is so often the case with right-wing critics of academia – even, or perhaps especially, those who are academics themselves (and so, perhaps, often brimming with resentment against their mostly left-wing colleagues?) – retiring sociology professor David Rubinstein, in his recent piece in The Weekly Standard, offers what I… (Linked Saturday 2011-05-28.)

• Imagine No Taxation. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-05-26). The following letter appeared in today's Opelika-Auburn News: To the Editor: Charlotte Ward asks us to imagine a world without taxes. ("Don't like taxes? Imagine a world without these services," Tuesday.) Okay, let's try. What would it be like? True, the government wouldn't be able to provide its services any… (Linked Saturday 2011-05-28.)

• The Atrocity of Hope, Part 15: Toward a New Radicalism. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-05-23). Chris Hedges on corporate liberalism: The pillars of the liberal establishment – the press, the church, culture, the university, labor and the Democratic Party – all honor an unwritten quid pro quo with corporations and the power elite, as well as our masters of war, on whom they depend for… (Linked Saturday 2011-05-28.)

• The Manifesto of the Sixteen (1916) Shawn P. Wilbur, Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule (2011-05-25). [Here is a translation of the controversial “Manifesto of the Sixteen,” the document issued by Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave and others, advocating support for the Allies and opposition to Germany in World War I. I had promised this to members of the Anarchist Task Force on Wikipedia quite awhile back,… (Linked Saturday 2011-05-28.)

• *"Whoever does not affirm at some time the. Masha, Cyganeria (2011-05-23). “Whoever does not affirm at some time the definite..terribleness of life, never takes possession of the unutterable powers of our existence; he merely walks at the edge; and when the decision is made eventually, he will have been neither one of the living nor one of the dead.”~RilkeI know many… (Linked Sunday 2011-05-29.)

• The slow boil. admin, This Modern World (2011-05-26). (Linked Sunday 2011-05-29.)

• Food Nullification: The Sequel. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-05-29). The War on the Informal Sector (Cont’d). (Linked Sunday 2011-05-29.)

• Revisionist History Day, 2011. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2011-05-29). Today is Revisionist History Day, what others call Memorial Day. Americans are supposed to remember the country’s war dead while being thankful that they protected our freedom and served our country. However, reading revisionist history (see a sampling below) or alternative news sites (start with Antiwar.com and don’t forget to… (Linked Sunday 2011-05-29.)

• alternatively, why would i add you after only meeting you once? what sort of dark magic is this. Dinosaur Comics (2011-05-27). archive – contact – sexy exciting merchandise – cute – search – about!!!@@e2;2020;90; previousMay 27th, 2011nextMay 27th, 2011: This weekend I’m getting my first tattoo. Which tattoo? I’ll give you a hint: it’s one of the tattoos mentioned here. :0– Ryan (Linked Sunday 2011-05-29.)

• Columbia SWAT team kills dog during drug raid — again. Dr. Q, Gangsters in Blue (2011-05-28). One of the most widely watched police brutality videos from last year showed members of the Columbia Police Department's SWAT team breaking into a man's home in the middle of the night, shooting his two dogs, terrorizing him and his family, and finally arresting him for a tiny amount of… (Linked Sunday 2011-05-29.)

• D. McCarthy Stalks LibertyOnTour.com – Again. Ademo Freeman, Gangsters in Blue (2011-05-27). Originally posted at LibertyOnTour.com On our last day in Greenfield Beau and I headed to the local gas station to pick up a few things. On our way there we witnessed Daniel McCarthy, a member of the Greenfield police, make an illegal U-turn and park near our location. As we… (Linked Monday 2011-05-30.)

• Toronto activists take back the slut. Jill, I Blame The Patriarchy (2011-03-31). SlutWalkers say it loud and proud on April 3 Canadian blamers have just hipped me to SlutWalk. Thanks, Canadian blamers!  On April 3rd, Toronto anti-rape activists will be protesting the reification by law enforcement of the bogus cultural construct "slut." The protest march was ignited by this remark, recently uttered… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-03.)

• Reshaping. ongoing by Tim Bray (2011-04-01). For the first time in years, I'm working on changing the look of this here blog. I've been bored with it in recent years, then Blaine Cook's Beautiful Lines pushed me over the edge. As of today, if you're reading this at tbray.org rather than in one feed reader or… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-03.)

• Reasoning in Midstream. Jad Davis, The jVerse (2011-03-26). "Reasoning in midstream[1]" is a common phenomenon in public discourse that typically starts right around the time that bombs start dropping or legislation starts being penned in response to a "crisis". It is the monotonous focus on the present state of a problem–a pending genocide, a health or financial emergency,… (Linked Sunday 2011-04-03.)

• feministhulk: HULK BELIEVE IN EMOTIONAL RISK TAKING. HULK ASK SELF, “WHAT CAN HULK DO TODAY TO HELP MORE PEOPLE FEEL SAFE AND LOVED?” Twitter / feministhulk (2011-03-29). feministhulk: HULK BELIEVE IN EMOTIONAL RISK TAKING. HULK ASK SELF, “WHAT CAN HULK DO TODAY TO HELP MORE PEOPLE FEEL SAFE AND LOVED?” (Linked Sunday 2011-04-03.)

• The Just-World Bias Gets Us All. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2011-03-28). After reading about the horrific gang rapes of a Texan child, and the assault of Lara Logan in Egypt, I am starting to suspect that anti-rape activists and sympathizers are as caught up in the just-world bias as rape apologists.  In this NYT "update" on its previous coverage of the… (Linked Wednesday 2011-03-30.)

• Julian Assange and Naomi Wolf. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2011-03-28). Last year Naomi Wolf wrote some interesting essays on the international indifference to sexual violence; unfortunately, they were written to defend a rebellious and charismatic man, Julian Assange, who may very well be a rapist.  I was very tempted to go easy on Wolf because she sometimes seems like the closest… (Linked Wednesday 2011-03-30.)

• C4SS Fundraiser: One More Day. Kevin Carson, Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism (2011-03-30). Well, we’ve got one more day left in the C4SS fundraiser and still need a little less than $1800 to pay our writers and staff through December. As Director Brad Spangler says, if we don’t raise enough money by the end of the First Quarter to pay our expenses through… (Linked Wednesday 2011-03-30.)

• Best General Strike Poster Ever. reddit: the voice of the internet — news before it happens (2011-03-25). submitted by rechelon to Anarchism [link] [4 comments] (Linked Wednesday 2011-03-30.)

• Monsanto Sued By Organic Farmers Who Don’t Want To Be Accused Of Patent Infringement. Mike Masnick, Techdirt (2011-03-30). Monsanto’s incredibly overaggressive use of patents to corner the market on certain crops and to bully farmers has been well-documented over the years. Some of the really crazy stories involve Monsanto accusing farmers of patent infringement, because some of its “patented” seeds were used by neighboring farms, and the newly… (Linked Friday 2011-04-01.)

• You Say Anarchy Like It's a Bad Thing. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2011-03-30). Writing in The American Conservative, William Lind bemoans the tendency revealed by current upheavals in the Middle East. "[T]he worst possible outcome ... is the disintegration of states and their replacement either by statelessness — as we see in Somalia — or by fictional states, as in Iraq and Afghanistan."… (Linked Friday 2011-04-01.)

• Unsorted Thoughts on Libya. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2011-03-26). Jacob Sullum put it well when he wrote, "Obama claims ‘we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.’ Yes, we can, and we often do.” I'd only add this: Some of "our" best friends have been tyrants (sometimes called prime ministers… (Linked Friday 2011-04-01.)

• i love our political culture. On Tuesday, Senator Charles. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2011-03-30). i love our political culture. On Tuesday, Senator Charles Schumer convened a media conference call of Democratic senators, in order to talk about the budget negotiations. Moments before the call was to start, Schumer briefed the other senators on the talking points they should be using. But the phone line for the… (Linked Friday 2011-04-01.)

• +1 for knowing your history. Kellan, Laughing Meme (2011-03-30). "+1!!!@@e2;20ac;b3; is a convention that arose on the Apache Software Foundation mailing lists. The ASF still has the best, most functional process for mailing list based collaboration which has ever been evolved of which -1/0/+1 is only the thin wedge. (the whole vocabulary of lazy consensus, commit-then-review, etc is incredibly… (Linked Friday 2011-04-01.)