leftlibertarian.org

In Florida, a white prison gang brutally beat a Black 14-year-old named Martin Lee Anderson to death last year. Anderson had been sentenced to a juvenile boot camp prison in rural Florida as punishment for taking his grandmother’s car for a joyride and then violating the terms of his probation. Within hours of his arrival, gang members surrounded him, held him down, punched him, kicked him, and, while restraining him, held hands over his mouth for up to five minutes at a stretch. They went on beating him for half an hour. They kept on beating him even as he lay limp and unable to move. The attack was captured on tape in a surveillance video, and the autopsy report concluded that Anderson died of suffocation. But just a couple weeks ago, in spite of the video, in spite of the report, the thugs who murdered Martin Lee Anderson were acquitted by an all-white jury in Panama City, Florida. Why? Because when they battered Martin Lee Anderson to death, the gang colors they were wearing looked like this:

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

The shocking verdict came down despite a half hour of videotape that showed the guards hitting and kicking the 14-year-old, Martin Lee Anderson, and holding their hands over his mouth for as long as five minutes at a time, while the nurse stood by and watched. The jury seemed persuaded by the first and widely discredited autopsy report that blamed the boy’s death on a sickle-cell condition, even though a second autopsy ordered by the state had ruled Anderson died from suffocation (the Justice Department has since announced it will investigate whether federal civil rights violations charges should be brought in the case). It’s wrong! Anderson’s mother, Gina Jones, shouted as she stormed out of the Panama City courtroom after the verdict was read.

—Tim Padgett, TIME 2007-10-17: What’s Wrong With Florida’s Prisons?

(Story thanks to Alas, A Blog 2007-10-25 and The Bias Committee 2007-10-18.)

There’s more. Because there is always fucking more. For example, there are the repeated efforts by state and local officials to cover up the murder. Or there are the other cases.

The Anderson decision was reminiscent of another bewildering verdict five years ago, when three Florida state prison guards charged with stomping 36-year-old inmate Frank Valdes to death in his cell in 1999 were acquitted — even though the guards’ boot prints were found all over his back.

… The state is facing lawsuits alleging that its prisons subject too many inmates, including the mentally ill, to a prisoner “warehousing” culture of unlawfully extreme isolation and deprivation, usually with little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as malicious and sadistic use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates’ skin, according to the suit. Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct, says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state’s current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials.

… In June of 2003, Omar Paisley, 17, an inmate at a juvenile detention center in Miami that was filled 135% beyond capacity, died when nurses ignored his pleas for help after his appendix burst. The nurses were later charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, to which they have pleaded not guilty, and their trials are pending. Prosecutors at the trial of Valdes — who was awaiting execution for murdering a Palm Beach County corrections officer in 1987 — contended that one of the reasons he was beaten was the letters he’d begun writing to the media about abuses at Florida State Prison under its then warden, James Crosby. That made it all the more surprising when Bush appointed Crosby secretary of the state’s Corrections Department in 2003. Then last year Crosby was convicted after a sweeping federal probe of corruption inside the state’s prisons — and he’s now serving eight years in prison himself.

Whenever these kind of atrocities happen, mainstream media sources routinely decry and marginalize them in the same breath, by describing the sadism and the violence as abuses within the prison system, rot within the corrections culture, etc. This admits the problem while not really taking it seriously. In fact, intimidation and violence are the currency of control in prisons as we know them, and these practices bear no meaningful relationship whatsoever to any defense against imminent threats: convicts are imprisoned and coerced whether or not their crimes were violent, whether or not their crimes were even particularly serious, and whether or not there is any realistic chance that they will pose an ongoing threat to anybody in the future, because the hangman State exercises its power in the name of after-the-fact deterrence of unrelated parties, in the name of rehabilitation, and sometimes in the name of punishment and vengeance. This is not a matter of some fundamentally humane institution being perverted, under the influence of corrupt individuals or a corrupt internal culture, into an abuse of power. The thing itself is the abuse.

Related:

• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2006-04-07: Over My Shoulder #18: Barbara Deming’s A World Without Prisons (1970), from We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

1. A theory of universals is traditionally supposed to answer two questions: first, what makes generic identity possible across specific difference (e.g., what makes red horses and brown horses both count as horses?), and second, what makes qualitative identity (whether generic or specific) possible across numerical difference (e.g., how can red-horse-hood exist in both of these red horses at the same time when they are two horses rather than one?).

I understand Rand’s answer to the first question: red horses and brown horses possess different measurements of the same attribute, and we grasp the attribute by mentally omitting the measurements. But this can’t be her answer to the second question, since this solution, by helping itself to the notion of “same attribute,” presupposes that the second question has already been answered.

So what I’m wondering is: what is Rand’s answer to the second question? Does she even address the second question, or does she mistakenly think that all the philosophical fuss about universals has solely been about the first question? One reason for thinking she doesn’t quite see the second question is that when she first introduces the problem of universals (in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) she describes it this way:

When we refer to three persons as “men,” what do we designate by that term? The three persons are three individuals who differ in every particular respect and may not possess a single identical characteristic (not even their fingerprints). If you list all their particular characteristics, you will not find one representing “manness.” Where is the “manness” in men?

It’s clear from what Rand says here (e.g. the reference to fingerprints) that by “differ” and “identical” she means to signify qualitative difference and qualitative identity, not numerical difference and numerical identity. But in that case she’s missed half the question. Before we can start worrying about how it’s possible for two things to be qualitatively identical in the generic sense without being qualitatively identical in any specific sense, don’t we first need to justify the puzzling notion of qualitative identity per se?

2. In her 1964 article “Patents and Copyrights” (reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) , Rand offers inter alia the following argument:

As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition.

Here my question is this: does the patent office create the right, or merely record a pre-existing right? Because if the patent office creates the right, that seems to attributing to government a more sweeping authority than Rand ordinarily wishes to grant. But if instead the patent office records a pre-existing right, then that right, existing prior to certification by the state, cannot be lost by failing to receive such certification.

Nor is Rand’s analogy with commercial competition helpful. What I have on entering the market is not an unconditional right to sell my product, but only a right to try to sell it, or in other words, a right to sell it if I find a willing buyer. So if I am outcompeted by a rival seller who snaps up all my potential customers first, I haven’t lost any right. But if my rival beats me to the patent office, I do lose the right to try to find a willing buyer for my product (and the potential buyers likewise lose the right to try to buy from me). What justifies this?

After I wrote the above, I thought to look through my older writings on copyright to see whether I’d commented on Rand’s argument before. Turns out I did, and said basically the same thing:

Rand is suggesting that the competition to get to the patent office first is like any other kind of commercial competition. For example, suppose you and I are competing for the same job, and you happen to get hired simply because you got to the employer before I did. In that case, the fact that I might have gotten there first does not give me any rightful claim to the job. But that is because I have no right to the job in the first place. And once you get the job, your rightful claim to that job depends solely on the fact that your employer chose to hire you.

In the case of patents, however, the story is supposed to be different. The basis of an inventor’s claim to a patent on X is supposedly the fact that he has invented X. (Otherwise, why not offer patent rights over X to anyone who stumbles into the patent office, regardless of whether they’ve ever even heard of X?) Registering one’s invention with the patent office is supposed to record one’s right, not to create it. Hence it follows that the person who arrives at the patent office second has just as much right as the one who arrives first – and this is surely a reductio ad absurdum of the whole notion of patents.

Oh well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with having two different wordings of the same objection out there.

Normally I wouldn't want to spend much time or effort upon the current Saskatchewan provincial election campaign but the following little gem was just too good to pass up. Apparently Mr. Dan Harder, Saskatchewan Party candidate in the Regina constituency of Walsh Acres has "offered" to withdraw from the race (The Saskatchewan Party is a continuation into this century of the old PC, Progressive Conservative, party in this province and country. The Saskatchewan PCs folded up in the eighties after more than a third of their sitting members went to jail for various counts of fraud involving public funds. Federally the old party of Diefenbaker and Stanfield was absorbed into the neoconservative Canadian Alliance to form the new Conservative Party. The old Tories had a definite "Red" tinge and were largely responsible for expanding the welfare state in Canada. The "new" Conservatives under Stephen Harper are now the federal government). Harder's decision was made after Saskatchewan Party Leader Brad Wall learned the details of a 2006 complaint made by employees against Harder while the latter was the Executive Director of the Regina Big Brothers organization. The complaint involved allegations of inappropriate comments made by Harder to employees. Brad Wall, leader of the party, claimed he "knew" about the complaints against Harder so it seems a bit strange that this action has only come about after a year.

Today in the book section of the grocery store I saw a pair of children’s books titled What Mommies Do Best and What Daddies Do Best. I took a look, wondering to what sort of gender stereotypes I was about to be subjected – only to find, to my unexpected delight, that the two lists of parental tasks (including baking and sewing) were identical!

The mills of God grind slowly ….

Despite my best efforts, I often get misunderstood. I can only conclude, despairingly, that there is something about the way my brain is wired which causes me to unintentionally phrase things in ways that lack clarity. I’ll work on that. Meanwhile, here’s an example…

A while back, a new correspondent on the LeftLibertarian2 email list asked for clarification of some things and this, in turn, led to my attempt at explaining the small differences and similarities between the usufruct and Rothbardian approaches to property.

BG posted:

Isn’t a major distinction between left and right libertarians how left-libertarians treat the just appropriation of land?

• left Rothbardians - mixing one’s labor
• mutualists - occupancy and use
• geoists - sharing economic rent

And I responded:

Mixing one’s labor (with the unowned) and (personal) occupancy and use are mostly two ways of saying approximately the same thing. Rothbardian and usufruct approaches to property mostly differ in terms of nit-picky details of transfers, abandonment and the nature of property title.

As I understand it, usufruct says ongoing occupancy and use is necessary for a property claim to *remain* valid, whereas the
Rothbardian approach says title has to *originate* in occupancy and use. Kevin has explained this before as two points on a spectrum of potential legal consensus [plural: consensi? consensuses?] in regards to what constitutes abandonment.

Even under usufruct, you wouldn’t be considered to have “abandoned” your house just because you go to visit relatives a few hundred miles away for the weekend. Under Rothbardian property law, a scholar could potentially leave their house boarded up for maybe five years while they go on a sabbatical and return to it with their property claim intact, provided their affairs were in order and neighbors had some way to contact an agent of hers [lawyer, property management company or whatever]. In between the two, we have intermediate cases — such as a farmer leaving a field fallow for a year. My guess is that if leaving a field fallow for a year was a common agricultural process, the resulting usufruct law would recognize that field as not necessarily being “abandoned” even though a residential house vacant for the same period of time might be considered abandoned.

Whereas usufruct says absentee landlords are always bad, the Rothbardian partially agrees and partially disagrees based on the
legitimacy of the particular property claim — i.e. title having originated in occupancy and use and the property not being an example of stolen plunder. So, prior to the smashing of the state and nullification of illegitimate property titles, BOTH Rothbardians and usufruct adherents *might* defend a particular group of squatters but the Rothbardians might not defend some other group of squatters, depending on the particulars of each case. After the land monopoly is smashed and the only property titles are legit, Rothbardians would be more likely to defend absentee landlords if one takes the more widespread legitimacy of remaining property titles as an indication. But with a lot more widespread access to land, a Rothbardian might expect more widespread ownership to replace the bulk of leases anyway.

To my mind, this makes the Rothbardian approach the superior approach because it basically addresses the social justice concerns that lead to usufruct theory in the first place but makes for a smoother transition because the rules of property remain closest to the existing conventional understanding. Everything is bound up in the question of “who” owns what and we don’t have to get all squirrelly about “how” ownership is handled once established.

Apparently, I failed to make it clear that going over the finer-grained differences between “A” and “B” is not necessarily going to be conducive to providing a good, more or less complete, description of “A” or “B”. In this case, I got the insight from Kevin Carson about a year or two back, and which I related above, that usufruct and Rothbardian property theory could be related to each other as (approximately, but not entirely) two points on a spectrum of possible legal consensus about what constitutes “abandonment”.

I just feel it deep in my bones that Camelcase, the author of this (otherwise very good) piece was confused by what I had to say above and the way I said it. Why do I say that? Because the following mostly isn’t what I’m talking about at all when I’m referring to Rothbardian property ethics.

The radical Rothbardian view (Brad Spangler exemplifies this view) being a very radical interpretation of Lockean property minus the proviso, so that if you stop using land for some period of time (I’m not entirely clear on this) that you homesteaded, and then someone else starts homesteading it, they now own it. It’s radical because it’s so so so close to possession that the distinction between the two becomes negligible.

Well, yes and no — but not really. Yes, I believe that a legal consensus would evolve to answer the question of at what point property abandoned in fact should be legally considered to be abandoned. The thing is, that’s understood to be a common feature of almost any property system (including present property relations under statism) and therefore the above doesn’t really provide a good picture of what I’m talking about when I refer to Rothbardian property theory.

What I DO mean is that:

• Legitimate property title originates in homesteading. One can also legitimately hold title to property by reason of production or exchange, but these are derivative of homesteading.
• Stolen property is not really owned by the possessor.
• The State is a massive system of theft that uses its coercively-maintained monopoly of law to fraudulently award fake property title to its members and allies.

The above is simply the basic property theory of ordinary Rothbardian market anarchism. The moderate, reformist libertarian may not give much thought to the ramifications of those ideas because they aspire to more modest immediate goals (“Hey, gang, has anybody seen my habeus corpus lately? I know I left it laying around here somewhere…”) But when viewed in the context of Konkin’s agorist theory of revolution, Rothbardian property theory amounts to a program for the revolutionary redistribution of property.

Homesteading that isn’t state approved is counter-economic. The free market “courts” (arbitrators, really) that would uphold or reject property titles based on Rothbardian property theory would arise from underground, as would the security service providers who could liberate such property from statist political class control. The process by which that “arising from underground” would occur I’ve summarized before here in the following way:

Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.

In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform. Instead, they will come about as a result of market processes.

As government is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of government by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and therefore can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.

We are not merely socialists in the sense that Benjamin Tucker considered a completely free market to be “socialism”. We’re fucking Reds! Propertarian Reds, but Reds none the less.

I’m going to keep explaining this over and over again until people get it.

Here is something very true from an excellent post by Kai at Zuky:

As I’ve often noted, many white liberals remain oblivious to the depth and breadth of anti-racist work, opting to hide behind the delusion that anyone who votes for Democrats and doesn’t have a pointy hood in the closet is a good guy in the movement toward greater social justice — as though the Democratic Party is some bastion of progressivism and not one of two hands strangling US polity on behalf of the ruling class and the corporate-political establishment which sponsors its power. Some might be surprised to learn that when people of color talk about racism amongst ourselves, white liberals often receive a far harsher skewering than white conservatives or overt racists. Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words. At least the former gives you something to work with, something above-board to engage and argue against; the latter tacitly insists on imposing and maintaining an illusion of non-racist moral purity which provides little to no room for genuine self-examination or racial dialogue.

Countless blogospheric discussions on racism amply demonstrate the manner in which many white liberals start acting victimized and angry if anyone attempts to burst their racism-free bubble, oftentimes inexplicably bringing up non-white friends, lovers, adopted children, relatives, ancestors; dismissing, belittling, or obtusely misreading substantive historically-informed analysis of white supremacism as either divisive rhetoric or flaming; downplaying racism as an interpersonal social stigma and bad PR, rather than an overarching system of power under which we all live and which has socialized us all; and threatening to walk away from discussion if persons of color do not comform to a narrow white-centered comfort zone. Such people aren’t necessarily racists in the hate-crime sense of the word, but they are usually acting out social dynamics created by racism and replicating the racist social relationships they were conditioned since birth to replicate.

Of course not all white liberals are like this. I’d say that a significant minority of white liberals are actually interested in learning about anti-racism once properly exposed to it. This requires enough humility to admit that people of color have something to teach white folks, a concept that many whites struggle with because racism teaches us that whiteness is the seat of authoritative knowledge, while brownness is the repository of murky musical mysticism which whiteness may dip into at will for spiritual support and servile entertainment. Nevertheless, some white folks manage to claw and bootstrap their way out of their own conditioning, opening their hearts and minds to previously unseen worlds from which the voices and stories of people of color emerge; studying and observing the profound effects of racist society on their own perceptual prisms and on the shape of the world; and consciously, steadily working to counteract those effects. Such people become allies to people of color.

From what I can see, though, a solid majority of white liberals maintain a fairly hostile posture toward anti-racist discourse and critique, while of course adamantly denying this hostility. Many white liberals consider themselves rather enlightened for their ability to retroactively support the Civil Rights movement and to quote safely dead anti-racist icons, even though their present-day physical, intellectual, and political orbits remain mostly segregated. They somehow take pride in being more down with the brown than their conservative brethren; indeed they exhibit a certain strange glee in highlighting and exploiting the macaca and call me moments of their political opponents. Armed with diversity soundbites and melanin-inclusive photo-ops, they seek electoral, financial, and public relations support from people of color. Yet the consistent outcome of their institution-building agendas is to deprioritize and marginalize our voices, perspectives, experiences, concerns, cultures, and initiatives. When you get right down to it, the unrecognized political reality is that most white liberals have more in common with white conservatives — social cues, family ties, cognitive biases, cultural backdrops, etc. — than they do with people of color. I’m calling this tangle of contradictions the white liberal conundrum.

—Zuky 2007-10-11: The White Liberal Conundrum

You really should read the whole thing.

(Link thanks to Jack Stephens at Alas, A Blog 2007-10-25.)

Related:

• GT 2004-04-19: Whited sepulchres
• GT 2006-02-22: Congratulations on washing! (or: men and feminism)
• GT 2004-11-11: Whereof one ought not speak

A

Regrettably, I’ve never gotten to London’s National Portrait Gallery (I only got as far as the plain old National Gallery nearby). But this story of the fate of Mary Wollstonecraft’s portrait therein is worth a read.

Henry Cohen published a number of editions of William Batchelder Greene's Mutual Banking in the 20th century. The pieces of that particular bibliographic puzzle have been hard to assemble. Thanks to archive.org, we have at least one more piece: a digital facsimile of the 1919 edition by The Reform League of Denver, Colo. It's available in a number of formats. Cohen's editions closely follow the 1870 edition, with notes and an introduction by Cohen.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on an online edition of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One for the Fair Use Repository. Work is ongoing, and I’m pleased to announce that Part IV: Socialism is now available in full online. The articles in this section defend Tucker’s conception of socialism against critics both from the state socialist and from the anti-socialist camps; he argues that the most consistent and logical form of socialism, i.e. anarchistic socialism, in fact means radical laissez-faire in economics—voluntary socialism, based on the eradication of monopolistic legal privileges for capitalists, and the practice of bottom-up mutual aid between workers. The details are discussed more in Part II and Part III than here; his main target in Part IV are those critics who treat Socialism as if it were synonymous with State Socialism, thus making it seem as though the only options were the nationalization of all industry (passed off as if this were synonymous with Socialism), or else the perpetuation of legal privileges to the capitalist class (passed off as if this were synonymous with Free Markets). Here’s something from the first essay, Socialism: What It Is.

Do you like the word Socialism? said a lady to me the other day; I fear I do not; somehow I shrink when I hear it. It is associated with so much that is bad! Ought we to keep it?

The lady who asked this question is an earnest Anarchist, a firm friend of Liberty, and—it is almost superfluous to add—highly intelligent. Her words voice the feeling of many. But after all it is only a feeling, and will not stand the test of thought. Yes, I answered, it is a glorious word, much abused, violently distorted, stupidly misunderstood, but expressing better than any other the purpose of political and economic progress, the aim of the Revolution in this century, the recognition of the great truth that Liberty and Equality, through the law of Solidarity, will cause the welfare of each to contribute to the welfare of all. So good a word cannot be spared, must not be sacrificed, shall not be stolen.

[…]

Why, then, does my lady questioner shrink when she hears the word Socialism? I will tell her. Because a large number of people, who see the evils of usury and are desirous of destroying them, foolishly imagine they can do so by authority, and accordingly are trying to abolish privilege by centring all production and activity in the State to the destruction of competition and its blessings, to the degradation of the individual, and to the putrefaction of Society. They are well-meaning but misguided people, and their efforts are bound to prove abortive. Their influence is mischievous principally in this: that a large number of other people, who have not yet seen the evils of usury and do not know that Liberty will destroy them, but nevertheless earnestly believe in Liberty for Liberty’s sake, are led to mistake this effort to make the State the be-all and end-all of society for the whole of Socialism and the only Socialism, and, rightly horrified at it, to hold it up as such to the deserved scorn of mankind. But the very reasonable and just criticisms of the individualists of this stripe upon State Socialism, when analyzed, are found to be directed, not against the Socialism, but against the State. So far Liberty is with them. But Liberty insists on Socialism, nevertheless,—on true Socialism, Anarchistic Socialism: the prevalence on earth of Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity. From that my lady questioner will never shrink.

You can find a break-down of the essays from Fair Use Blog 2007-10-26. Read, cite, and enjoy!