Thus writes anonymous New York public defender Appellatesquawk in a most excellent post about Julian Heicklen, the retired chemistry professor who’s being prosecuted in federal court for “jury tampering” for distributing pamphlets about “jury nullification” to passerby outside the court’s house in Manhattan.
I am opposed to employers holding the fact of petty non-moral-turpitude convictions against job applicants. Unless you are hiring drivers, you shouldn’t care whether a prospective employee has had a DWI. I can’t think of any job (from the office of the President right down to me and you) for which never having smoked marijuana is a reasonable qualification. (It’s not like the drunk driver or the pot smoker has been working as an internet marketer.)
But employers often seem unwilling to hire people with chickenshit criminal convictions. That DUI might stop you from getting hired in the mailroom; that possession-of-marijuana case might keep you from loading trucks at a warehouse. And computers make it easy.
. . .
(The truth of this drives a good deal of my practice: not fighting is more expensive than fighting.)
. . .
Barack Obama famously “confessed” in Dreams from My Father to having smoked pot and snorted cocaine (a Felony!) while in high school and college:
[I]f the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.
But now he’s The Man, and yesterday he said this:
I don’t mind a debate around issues like decriminalization. I personally don’t agree that that’s a solution to the problem, but I think that given the pressures that a lot of governments are under here, under-resourced, overwhelmed by violence, it’s completely understandable that they would look for new approaches, and we want to cooperate with them. I don’t think that legalization of drugs is going to be the answer.
You will need some better drugs than pot and cocaine to help you see through all that hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. I suggest Magic Mushrooms. I hear they’re good for solving whatever it is that’s getting you down.
Patrick’s post at Popehat, and his link to an essay in which old school “Swords and Sorcery” author Michael Moorcock, who appears to both share my political / economic beliefs and be a total douchebag, compared Tolkien to Adolf Hitler, prompted me by way of a little Googling to remind myself that Tolkien also shared my political / economic beliefs.
A “distributist” is basically a leftist. (See this essay arguing that Tolkien included in LOTR distributist solutions to problems associated with modernity.) A leftist is not a “socialist,” at least not as that word was understood by Tolkien (my quibble with Patrick over the meaning of the word “socialist” might have been better directed at his presumed interpretation of Moorcock’s use of the word “left”), who wrote in a letter:
I am not a “socialist” in any sense – being averse to “planning” (as must be plain) most of all because the “planners,” when they acquire power, become so bad…
He also wrote, in a letter to his son Christopher:
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)…
I strongly believe in free speech, including free speech for attorneys. However, I do not believe it is appropriate for attorneys to publicly comment on a conflict between an attorney and his former potential client, particularly when by the nature of things we cannot be privy to the relevant facts. The turns this online “debate” has taken have made this abundantly clear. Talk about a “rabbit hole.”
It probably comes as no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of Obama implying in a speech that the federal courts lack the authority to strike down Obamacare and the Fifth Circuit responding by directing the Attorney General to hand in a 3 page single-spaced essay on Marbury v. Madison. I am a big believer in judicial restraint: I think judges should be restraining the legislature every chance they get, not because I believe in the authority of unelected judges, but because I don’t believe in the authority of elected legislators. Jonathan Turley makes a halfway decent point:
[W]ith a majority of states in court opposing the law and roughly half of the public opposed to the law, it is hard to gauge the democratic will of the people on the issue. Of course, Obama is right that the law was passed by a democratic process. However, I thought it was a mistake at the time to push through a bill on the thinnest of margins. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously insisted that he would not ask for a declaration of war in World War II until he could secure the vote by an overwhelming margin. He understood that wars — like major legislative programs — tend to become less popular with time. The Administration not only muscled through a poorly written law but did so with roughly half of Congress opposed. I support national health care but this was not the way to do it.
From The Guardian:
Why is this happening? I used to think the push was just led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance – but now I see the struggle as larger. As one internet advocate said to me: “There is a race against time: they realise the internet is a tool of empowerment that will work against their interests, and they need to race to turn it into a tool of control.”
The one titled “Ego.” I’m putting it back up for two reasons: First, when I took it down I didn’t have the evidence contained in my last post. Second, I took it down because Marc Randazza told me he meant something different than what his own words clearly seemed to signify. I figured I owed him the benefit of the doubt, as implausible as his explanation sounded. But it has occurred to me that this is precisely what is not being extended to Crystal Cox by her legion of detractors for her words and actions.
I was predisposed to take Marc’s side in this War. I was the first to comment on the call to arms by Ken at Popehat that made everyone aware of the War, where I wrote:
Now I feel like kind of a schmuck for kind of making fun of everybody for praising Marco in my own post praising him.
In the post I was referring to in my comment, I had written of Marc:
I’ve never detected from him a whiff of the fondness for circle-jerking and (yes, of course, constitutionally-protected, thank God and Marco) internet-mobbing that characterizes to a greater or lesser extent many of his fans.
In line with that predisposition and in deference to Ken, whom I respect and admire as a principled blogger and lawyer whom I believe does what he believes is right, and who had asked his readers not to link to marcrandazza.com, the site from which Crystal Cox is waging her side of this War, I had refrained from doing so, up until my last post.
Now I can’t be so sure.
Here’s the thing. Marc Randazza wrote this in a comment on a subsequent post about the War by Ken at Popehat:
I am . . . not pleased to see that she’s going to take this to the 9th Circuit. [In a comment on Ken’s earlier post, Marc had written: “If this thing goes to the 9th Circuit, I’m afraid it will be an ego trip and not a real desire to clean up the state of the law.”] She’s not about free speech, she’s about ego and insanity. I find it unfortunate that EV [the attorney who is now representing her on appeal] can’t convince her not to appeal. Naturally, if she’s going to appeal, I’d rather someone like EV handle the appeal than let her go pro se and fuck everything up worse than she did in the trial court.
I would think that if EV thought CC shouldn’t appeal and had tried to convince her not to appeal he wouldn’t be representing her on appeal pro bono. Seems he would have clarified what he was agreeing to do before entering his appearance in the case. I don’t think EV is being dragged kicking and screaming up to the Ninth Circuit by CC’s ego and insanity.
I am certain that EV is not being “Dragged” to the 9th. But, here’s what I think:
EV knows, or should know, that the likely outcome of this appeal will not be good for anyone.
EV tells Cox that, and says “you should not appeal.”
Cox says “I’m GoInG tO aPpeal anyHOW!”
EV says “shit, if you’re going to appeal in your own batshit crazy way, I need to go along to make sure that you smear as little shit on the walls as possible. The frigging mess you made at the trial level was bad enough. If I am there, at least I can limit the damage.”
That’s the only scenario that makes sense to me.
But then, there’s this interview, the context of which Crystal Cox describes at her site, and in which she says, “If I do appeal I will appeal with an attorney”:
Then, Crystal posts at her site a lengthy chronology of events leading up to the War along with a bunch of emails, including an email Crystal sent to both Marc and EV which includes this:
[EV] spoke highly of you and even recommended you, thing is I will not speak with anyone on this from the law aspect expect [EV], if he can’t represent me, I will not appeal.
. . .
So Just wanted you to know a bit why, and confirm, Marc Randazza does NOT represent me in ANY way. [EV] represents me, and if he can’t then so be it, I will leave that in the hands of the Great Spirit. I will not lose my voice, my dignity, and respect in this. I know my Truth though many others are trashing me, I know my truth.
. . .
I do not want to sit down and shut up, I do not want a back seat in this, though I dont want to interfere or tell an attorney whats best, thing is I know the clerks, the case, the documents and I just want respect for what I have done and not told I messed up.
The only thing about this War I’m relatively sure of now is that this War, like all Wars, is exceedingly ill-advised and exceedingly unfortunate.
In a comment over at IOZ today I wrote:
[O]urs isn’t really democracy. Democracy is rule by the people. It’s not rule by a majority of the people, or by a majority of the people wealthy and connected enough to buy elections.
Another commenter responded:
just as anarchy can only persist in a society comprised entirely of anarchists, true democracy can only occur in a population that agrees on everything. lol words are meaningless.
I replied:
Not quite true: True democracy can only occur in a population that agrees on everything it will enforce. This is actually achievable in a small population of township or ward size. Here’s how government by consensus works: Everybody in the town hall meeting believes the town should take some particular action, except one or two people. Given that situation, the one or two will generally stand down and go along to achieve consensus. In the absence of such consensus, the majority on the one hand has to ask itself whether the action is important enough to essentially enforce its will on the minority and the minority on the other hand has to ask whether its opposition is so important that it is willing to essentially alienate itself from the community. You may actually wind up with “secession” on the part of the minority, but that doesn’t guarantee that the majority won’t enforce its will on those who’ve seceded anyway if the issue is important enough.
This ward or township of course could be part of a larger confederation that operates by the same principles of consensus governing the ward or township itself.
I’ve removed a post I published last night. It was silly.
I don’t write this blog to “win friends,” although I have it on good authority that it has “influence[d at least one or two] people.”
I also don’t get paid enough for writing this blog to investigate and have an opinion on whether or not Crystal Cox in fact falsely defamed Kevin D. Padrick and Obsidian Finance Group and earned the $2.5 million judgment entered against her by an Oregon federal district court. I will say, however, that as someone who has himself Fought the Power for no pay and got himself slapped silly and called crazy for his efforts, I probably tend more than most to give the benefit of the doubt to people who conceive of themselves the same way.
Cox has been accused of attempting to Extort the plaintiffs in the above-mentioned case, first (in so many words) by the judge in his opinion denying her motion for a new trial and now by a whole slew of media relying on that opinion. She has also been accused by some of the same media of similarly attempting to Extort Marco Randazza, a First Amendment attorney who apparently in the recent past communicated with her about possibly representing her post-judgment in the Oregon defamation case. Those discussions obviously at some point went very very sour. For purposes of this post, however, I’m going to set aside these allegations of attempted Extortion, for a few reasons: First, as a criminal defense attorney I prefer my allegations of criminal conduct proved in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt. Second, at least with regard to the first of the two alleged instances of attempted Extortion, it’s surprising how much “Settlement Negotiations” can sometimes resemble Extortion. Third, it’s not really relevant to what I want to talk about here in this post.
Fourth, Cox bought marcrandazza dot com for $10 (as well as other domains that include Marco’s last name) and is blogging there about, among other things, why she did so, the allegations of attempted Extortion, and her perceptions of the origins of her War with Randazza. (Short version: He started it.) Check it out for her side of the story. The other side of the story is all over the internet.
What I want to write about here is the unwarranted and troubling expansion by some of the “criticism” being directed at Cox to encompass Eugene Volokh, the UCLA law prof and blawger extraordinaire who is representing her on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
On second thought, screw it: I’ve already written about this elsewhere. (Like I said, I don’t get paid enough to write this blog.) See Marco’s comment at Popehat, where he wrote “If this thing goes to the 9th Circuit, I’m afraid it will be an ego trip and not a real desire to clean up the state of the law,” and my comments following; Marco’s comment at his own blog, where he wrote that I was “understanding it incorrectly,” and my replies thereto; and my comment this morning at The Salty Droid.
As for the mention of Joseph Rakofsky and “Internet Mobbing” in the title of this post: I note that Marco is defending a number of blawgers in a civil suit filed by Rakofsky in which Rakofsky has alleged, among other things, a cause of action for “internet mobbing.” I note that Cox appears to constitute all by herself a One-Woman Internet Mob. I note that she is now characterizing on her marcrandazza dot com blog those who are up in arms against her as a “Lynch Mob.”
As I wrote in a comment at Popehat:
I am probably about to reveal how ignorant I am of First Amendment litigation, but these parts of Judge Hernandez’ opinion denying the motion for new trial struck me as especially interesting:
“It is also important to note that in the new trial motion, defendant raises an entirely different argument. Instead of arguing that her status as “media” inserts a fault component into the defamation claim, she contends that there is no special First Amendment protection for “media” defendants and that all defamation claims, even those between a private plaintiff and a private defendant on a matter of private concern, require at least negligence by the defendant. This argument was not raised and therefore not addressed at trial. In addition, while the Supreme Court may one day expressly reach the conclusion urged by defendant in this motion, I do not believe it has done so and thus, the jury instructions in this case did not erroneously state the law. . . . It is not enough to say that post-Gertz cases have held that media and non-media defendants are treated alike because that statement fails to answer the pivotal question in this case and fails to support the basis of defendant’s motion: that a negligence standard, at a minimum, is required in all defamation claims even absent a public figure, public official, matter of public concern, or a media defendant.”
I am exposing my ignorance of First Amendment litigation by admitting that I assumed it was already true that a negligence standard, at a minimum, is required in all defamation claims. If this question has not yet been decisively decided by the SCOTUS, it should be, and by itself suggests that this appeal should be taken. Consider the Rakofsky case for a minute: Imagine that whatever media outlet it was that first reported the story in fact got the facts wrong and that that story in fact defamed Rakofsky. Wouldn’t all the bloggers who then repeated that story be liable for defamation, negligence or no negligence, given the jury instructions in this case?
“I’ve done this for thirty-six years, and I think it’s people like myself that give this system a legitimacy because we try to defend our people. We try to do what’s right. And if people don’t have lawyers that stand up, then guess what? The system just railroads them.”
Thus spake Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer Barry Wilson in his own defense at a hearing right before he was sentenced to 90 days in jail for criminal contempt of court.
Like Barry Wilson, I too believe that racism is alive and well in America. I also believe, like many others, that the circumstances surrounding the shooting in Florida of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman prove it. Not because I know that Zimmerman is a racist, or that his shooting of Martin was unjustified. The jury is still out on those questions. No, the circumstances surrounding this shooting prove that racism is alive and well in America because thus far the criminal justice system is extending to George Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt to which all human beings are entitled but which in my experience only the white are actually given.
There’s an article in the Indianapolis Star today comparing Florida’s self-defense law to Indiana’s. Here’s an excerpt:
Some cases are clear-cut.
In 2008, police did not take any action against an Indianapolis father who strangled a naked man who had broken into his daughter’s room wearing only a mask and latex gloves and carrying a rope, condoms and a knife.
And earlier this year, Prosecutor Terry Curry didn’t need a grand jury to decide not to charge a Kroger manager who fatally shot a man who was trying to rob the store.
But it’s easy to find other cases where prosecutors have brought charges of murder, only to have a jury decide it was self-defense. In 2010, for instance, a jury acquitted the son of a Lawrence City Council member of murder, agreeing that he was defending himself when he fired a shotgun blast to settle a dispute over money.
“Our community is very sensitive, very tuned-in and sympathetic to rights of self-defense and our juries will absolutely give any citizen, any member of our community, a full and fair hearing on this concept of self-defense. I’m here to tell ya, boy, do they,” [Indianapolis deputy prosecutor Barb] Trathen said. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s part of the law. It’s part of our constitutional protections for all of us.”
But compare what Indiana’s criminal “justice” system did to Tyrus Coleman.
Here’s another excerpt from the Indianapolis Star story:
Under Indiana’s law, “a person is not justified in using force if . . . the person entered into combat with another person or is the initial aggressor unless the person withdraws from the encounter and communicates to the other person the intent to do so.”
Florida’s law apparently doesn’t spell out a similar restriction.
Again, compare Tyrus Coleman v. State of Indiana.
I of course can’t say with certainty that racism explains this disparity in treatment. But jurors are routinely instructed in criminal cases that the mental state of the defendant can be inferred from his actions. When an innocent man is gratuitously condemned to decades in prison without rhyme or reason it’s hard not to infer the worst.
Norm Pattis posts today a fascinating account of the early history of New Haven, Connecticut, and observes that that early history suggests that Albert Jay Nock got it right when he wrote in Our Enemy, the State: “The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation.”
I have one minor quibble with Norm’s post, however: He opines that the State is, among other things, a thing of “tragic necessity.” But Nock distinguished between what he called “government” and what he called the “State.” The distinguishing feature of the State is its origin, which is in conquest and confiscation, and its purpose, which is to perpetuate and enshrine that conquest and confiscation as the status quo. The purpose of “government,” on the other hand, is, as Thomas Jefferson said it was, “to secure these rights.” As Nock observed, the Native Americans who were displaced by, among others, the colonists of New Haven, had “government.” Unfortunately, the history of the United States of America, including the history of New Haven, clearly demonstrates that its character and purpose, from its very origins up until the present day, is that of a State, and not of a government, notwithstanding the Declaration of Independence.
Government is a “tragic necessity.” It is tragic that it is necessary, in this fallen world, in which criminality abounds, to organize with others to secure our rights. The State, on the other hand, is not necessary, and is itself criminal in its origin and in its intention.
Cf. Are child porn laws unfair? Viewers’ sentences can be worse than molesters’:
Federal offenders in the Western District of Kentucky were sentenced to an average of 10 years in prison from 2006 through last year for downloading and trading child pornography. That was nearly four times longer than offenders in Jefferson Circuit Court got for sexually abusing children, according to Courier-Journal research.
and Sarkozy: Jail those who browse terror websites:
Sarkozy argued that it was time to treat those who browse extremist websites the same way as those who consume child pornography.
“Anyone who regularly consults Internet sites which promote terror or hatred or violence will be sentenced to prison,” he told a campaign rally in Strasbourg, in eastern France. “What is possible for pedophiles should be possible for trainee terrorists and their supporters, too.”
and Here’s what a real attack on Internet freedom looks like:
A law limiting Americans’ right to visit hateful websites would not last long in American courts.
and Jurors Need to Know That They Can Say No:
The prosecutors who charged Mr. Heicklen said that “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.”
and EDNY Judge Jack Weinstein’s decision in U.S. v. Polizzi:
Extrapolation of the recently emphasized constitutional principle requiring a jury finding of the facts needed to enhance a sentence requires courts to recognize that colonial and British juries in the late eighteenth century had power to control the finding of guilt in order to affect the sentence. In exercising its extensive discretion, the jury was expected to be aware of and understand the sentence that would follow from its decision. That jury power to know and act may not be eviscerated, as was done in this case by this court’s error in failing to advise the jury of the five-year mandatory minimum sentence required on conviction of receipt of child pornography.
Render no share to Caesar—in a word,
I am too proud to be a parasite
And Wendy McElroy writes today:
The most profound truths are simple ones – sometimes deceptively so. . . .
In his pivotal book, The State, the sociologist Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943) stated the basis of libertarian class analysis in fundamental terms. He presented two opposing principles upon which society functioned: the economic means and the political means.
. . .
The organization of the economic means was called “Society.” Oppenheimer wrote, “I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man.” The organization of the political means was called “the State.” He wrote, “I mean by it that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are brought into being by extra-economic power.” Society and the State were in basic and constant conflict with each other. This one insight forms the basis of libertarian class conflict and analysis. Do you belong to the productive and peaceful class, known as Society, or do you belong to the parasitic and violent class, known as The State?
. . .
In an admirably accessible manner, Oppenheimer’s The State explains the dynamics set in motion by the political means. It is in the nature of parasites to multiple and drain ever more of the hosts’ resources. As the political means comes to dominate, those using the economic means see diminishing return from their productivity and, so, they have little incentive to produce beyond subsistence. Why should they labor to feed a thief? Society stagnates, leaving less for the parasite to siphon. And, so, inherent within the State is its own demise.
. . .
According to the Associated Press report on a hearing yesterday in the federal “jury tampering” prosecution of Julian Heicklen for handing out pamphlets about “jury nullification” to passerby outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan, Julian’s own standby federal public defenders wrote the above about him in papers filed in the case.
WTF?
Part of the reason I’m flabbergasted is that I’ve had the opportunity to read (and reread since reading the Associated Press’ story) the 36-page Memorandum of Law these federal public defenders filed on Julian’s behalf, and that Memorandum was excellent and contained nothing like what’s quoted above. Evidently the quote must come from some other papers they’ve filed. I can only further assume that the quote is taken out of context.
Indeed it could. That’s the whole point of such advocacy. The traditional right of juries to judge the justice of the laws (which is itself a necessary and obvious corollary of the moral law, which gives no man, and no juror, and no judge, the right to do wrong) is in apparent and notorious conflict with the “judicial system.”
A couple posts ago I had the temerity to adopt as my own the final words of Rostand’s Cyrano. That’s almost as ridiculous as adopting Atticus Finch as one’s online pseudonym, or claiming to be a follower of Jesus Christ. But I’ve already affirmed many times on this blog my sincerely held belief that no one is Good but God alone. I aspire to panache. (Style is only half of it by the way. I reread most of Cyrano yesterday. A man with panache is first and foremost a target.) With that out of the way, let me quote Cyrano again:
I carry my adornments on my soul.
I do not dress up like a popinjay;
But inwardly, I keep my daintiness.
I do not bear with me, by any chance,
An insult not yet washed away—a conscience
Yellow with unpurged bile—an honor frayed
To rags, a set of scruples badly worn.
I go caparisoned in gems unseen,
Trailing white plumes of freedom, garlanded
With my good name—no figure of a man,
But a soul clothed in shining armor, hung
With deeds for decorations, twirling—thus—
A bristling wit, and swinging at my side
Courage, and on the stones of this old town
Making the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs!
Making the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs!
It is debatable whether America would be better or worse off without the United States of America. I admit that much. On the one hand, we have the monstrosity we know. On the other, I myself am partial to the Iroquois Confederacy as an historical exemplar of liberty, and as a model for future possibilities. But for God’s sake, setting aside that debate, at least see “Authority” for what it is. A Lie!
It’s a small and select group, inclusion in which is determined in part by the sufficient but not necessary criteria of reciprocity. I’m finally adding to it the practical blawgosphere’s favorite son, Marco John Randazza, for a couple reasons.
For one, I’ve never detected from him a whiff of the fondness for circle-jerking and (yes, of course, constitutionally-protected, thank God and Marco) internet-mobbing that characterizes to a greater or lesser extent many of his fans. Everybody loves him, but I’ve never known him to suck up to anybody. As Scott Greenfield writes: “As much as we’ve become friends over the years, I have no doubt that he would be the first to rip my lungs out were I to take a position that he disagreed with.” That’s actually a bit hyperbolic. Again, in contrast to some of his admirers, and despite his well-deserved reputation as a mean motor scooter and caustic foul-mouthed blogger, he’s generally, in my limited experience anyway, positively civil to those who show up in the comments on his blog to disagree with him, and honestly engages them on the merits. When I jumped at the opportunity to razz him here for something one of his co-bloggers wrote, he showed up to make sure I had the straight story, but didn’t take offense.
Ken White wrote in his tribute to Randazza:
Now, Marc’s not perfect. Not everyone agrees with some of his clients or his work for them. And he says “fuck” a bit much for someone who isn’t, technically, a David Mamet character. And now and then when he goes on a rant about religion and indulges in the “Jewish space zombie” rhetoric it irks the living shit out of me (but I don’t dive for the fainting couch, because I figure Jesus will be OK and I will too).
It may be highly presumptuous of me, but I suspect that Marco, as a proud son of Sicily, is not as sure of his atheism as he pretends to be. (No atheist can be, since atheism happens to be a false and irrational belief.) But I share his zeal for that other part of the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause, albeit probably for a different reason than his, to-wit: I don’t want to see this godless nation of ours invoking God, even “ceremonially.” That’s false advertising, which incidentally is not protected by the First Amendment.
As other bloggers have admitted, I confess to maybe being just a tad jealous of Marco. He obviously loves what he does, and he is doing God’s work. I’m in awe of the success and reputation he’s achieved since being admitted to practice law in 2002. In an alternate universe, a universe where things worked out the way they were supposed to, I would have been setting the world on fire right about then, just a few years after my own admission to the practice of law in 1999. Yet even so, and in spite of all those who’ve told me I’m ugly,
there is something still that will always be mine, and when I go to God’s presence, there I will doff it and sweep the heavenly pavement with a gesture: something I’ll take unstained out of this world… my panache.
by Thomas L. Knapp at the Center for a Stateless Society:
At more than ten years into the US government’s never-ending “war on terror,” that government’s excuses for atrocity after atrocity keep getting less and less convincing.
“A few bad apples.”
“An isolated incident.”
“The video doesn’t tell the whole story, and when we find out who leaked it he’s going to jail.”
“It appears that you had a lone gunman who acted on his own in just a tragic, tragic way.”
That last direct from the lips of US President Barack Obama, now serving out George W. Bush’s third term in office, concerning the March 9, 2012 murders of 16 Afghans, including nine children, by a US Army staff sergeant.
The idea that these are “isolated incidents” which do not reflect on the overall character of war is, frankly, absurd.
Make no mistake about it: War is killing on a mass scale, in service to and for the benefit of the state, and that’s all it is. It’s not a natural human activity. The desire for it has to be inculcated in soldiers. They must be thoroughly indoctrinated, and “the enemy” — soldier and civilian alike — must be thoroughly dehumanized in order to move them to their “duty.”
Political warmongers have become quite adept at that dehumanization: I know better now, of course, but I recall the effect of the (false and manufactured) tales of Iraqi soldiers ransacking hospitals and dumping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators told to myself and my fellow US Marines as we prepared for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. We were out for blood against an inhuman enemy. We were brainwashed, because brainwashing is what it takes to get men to kill other men (and, yes, women and children) en masse without compunction.
Sooner or later, though — unfortunately it seems to be later in most cases — the brainwashing just isn’t enough. The human conscience will out, or it will shatter.
In the first case, the result is something like this (I quote William Tecumseh Sherman, because I simply have not the words for it):
“I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers … it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
In the second case, it’s Abu Ghraib, Collateral Murder, and what happened outside Kandahar last weekend.
From this end of a decade of unremitting violence, it’s not these atrocities which I find surprising — it’s that we don’t hear about more of them. And I must say that I suspect that there would be more of them to hear about if not for substantial de facto censorship of the news coming out of combat zones around the world.
The atrocities, shocking as they are, pale next to the “big picture.” Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, have died at American hands since 2001. The soldier lying dead beneath a cairn topped with rifle and helmet is no more dead, and no more or less personally outraged by it, than the baby murdered in his crib or the dead Taliban fighter urinated upon by troops not quite as at the end of their tethers as the killer staff sergeant.
And what is it for? Not to “end terrorism,” surely — for terrorism is what it is.
Nor to “protect America,” which has descended so quickly and thoroughly into banana republicanism that it’s scarcely identifiable as the same country we lived in as recently as, say, 1990. Al Qaeda didn’t have to destroy America. Uncle Sam did it for them.
In truth, the true and fundamental purpose of war is to aggrandize the egos and power-hunger of America’s Joe Liebermans and John McCains, and to keep wealth flowing from you (with those politicians as conduits) to the politically connected corporate players. To wit, the stockholders of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, KBR, Halliburton, et. al. As former Marine general Smedley put it, “war is a racket.”
Is that purpose — cannibalism on behalf of the corporati — worthy of so much as a drop of Afghan or Iraqi or Libyan or Syrian or British or Australian or American blood?
If so, hang your gold stars in your windows, turn on your TVs, and lose yourselves in the latest sitcom.
If not, understand: So long as you tolerate the state, this is the price Moloch will demand of you and yours.
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
On Friday the South Bend Tribune reported:
The Indiana Court of Appeals granted a request Friday that prevents The Tribune from publishing records the newspaper obtained from the Department of Child Services.
The appeals court’s ruling came three days after a local judge ordered the release of phone records from DCS’s child abuse hotline related to 10-year-old Tramelle Sturgis and his family — ending weeks of DCS legal efforts to keep them out of the public realm.
The records include four audio recordings of hotline calls and accompanying transcripts related to Tramelle, who was found tortured and killed in his home Nov. 4.
But an hour after The Tribune published a story on its website Friday that described one of the phone calls and raised related issues, the appeals court granted the emergency stay DCS requested to prevent The Tribune from publishing the material.
On advice from its attorney, The Tribune removed the story from its website and is forced to refrain from publishing information about the content of the calls. If it does otherwise, the newspaper could be held in contempt of court.
“I am saddened by today’s ruling that delays us from telling this important story,” said Kim Wilson, The Tribune’s president and publisher. “We will continue to fight to provide additional insight and information that might help our community to prevent future tragedies such as the untimely death of Tramelle Sturgis last year.”
A hearing on the matter is scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday in Indianapolis. The court will hear arguments from DCS and The Tribune, with each side given 20 minutes to make its case.
The Indiana Law Blog has posted the DCS’s petition in the Court of Appeals for the emergency stay of the trial court order, the South Bend Tribune’s response, and the Order issued by the Court of Appeals granting the stay.
According to the report in the South Bend Tribune linked to above:
In a motion filed Friday afternoon objecting to DCS’s motion for an emergency stay, Tribune attorney Gerald Lutkus argued the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently struck down efforts to restrain the media from publishing information, whether temporarily or permanently.
“The stay requested by DCS is patently unconstitutional in that it is a classic prior restraint on the press,” Lutkus wrote in his motion.
Steve Key, executive director of the Hoosier State Press Association, said it is “very rare” for a court to grant such an order.
“Anytime the government steps in to prevent newspapers from publishing information that they legitimately obtained, it raises huge first amendment issues,” Key said.
He said DCS’s attempt to keep The Tribune from publishing stories on records it already has in its possession is like “trying to put the genie back in the bottle after you’ve let it loose.”
Indeed, the story that the Tribune was forced to remove from its website by the Court of Appeals’ Order is still loose on Google’s cache: ‘This boy is beat to death’: Caller in May pleads 10 times for immediate intervention at Sturgis home.
In the course of announcing that he’s running for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Mark Bennett writes:
I believe that the answer to “how much government do we need” is, and probably always will be, “less,” but I am not an anarchist.
Do away with government, the anarchists say, and the market will fill the role of the state—keeping us free, protecting our property, keeping us safe.
I don’t share the anarchists’ rosy view of human nature. Do away with government, and for a while the strong will dominate the weak. Then the weak will band together and dominate the strong. Then the strong will band together and dominate the weak again. Some of the weak will join the strong until finally more than half of the collective power is dominating less than half. Whatever this dominant 50+% is called, it will be, for practical purposes, the state. Over the long term, anarchy is impossible.
. . .
Libertarianism in national government serves authoritarianism in state and local government. Traditional conservatives—Santorum conservatives—if they favor less government, favor less federal government, as though state governments are benign. I suspect that their reasoning is that government is not dangerous when it is close to home. And for those in the majority, this may be true—it’s easier to remove a school board member who disagrees with you than to remove a senator. But for anyone who might not share the political views of the majority, the opposite is true: the nearer government is to us, the more it can intrude in our lives and interfere with our liberty.
I am cheered to see Ron Paul pulling down good numbers (maybe better than you’ve heard) in the Republican primaries. He may have some influence on the party’s platform, if not on its choice of candidate.
But libertarianism can’t be imposed from above. Libertarianism in federal government but not in state government is not libertarianism, but mere federalism. Libertarianism has to start at home and grow from there.
I understand the reluctance to call oneself an “Anarchist.” One of the greatest lawyers and Anarchists who’ve ever lived, Lysander Spooner, apparently refused to do so. The same could be said for Henry David Thoreau, who wrote:
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
But Anarchy simply means “without rulers.” It doesn’t mean “without rules,” or “without law,” or “without government.”
To speak practically and as Thoreau advises, the kind of government that would command my respect would be one without rulers. One step toward obtaining it is to recognize that those who purport to rule us in fact have No Authority to do so. Another step is to recognize that government without rulers is possible, however remotely, and practical.
A man’s claim to exclusive possession of the yard on which his house is built is the fundamental building block of government, and is in a sense itself a government. Indeed, there is no law which says governments must govern a territory of a certain size, and we could theoretically imagine a world composed only of such “governments.” Why would such a world necessarily be any more “anarchic” than the rulerless anarchy which prevails between nations at this very moment? But the man’s claim to his yard, like the claim of larger governments, has no inherent legitimacy his neighbors are necessarily bound to honor. Georgism supplies that missing legitimacy, and is the mortar for building from the ground up rulerless governments whose purpose is to “secure these rights,” rather than governments States whose purpose is to serve the interests of the rulers at the expense of the ruled.
I’ve always found profound this whimsical poem by G. K. Chesterton:
Behind
I saw an old man like a child,
His blue eyes bright, his white hair wild,
Who turned for ever, and might not stop,
Round and round like an urchin’s top.‘Fool,’ I cried, ‘while you spin round,
‘Others grow wise, are praised, are crowned.’
Ever the same round road he trod,
‘This is better: I seek for God.’‘We see the whole world, left and right,
Yet at the blind back hides from sight
The unseen Master that drives us forth
To East and West, to South and North.‘Over my shoulder for eighty years
I have looked for the gleam of the sphere of spheres.’
‘In all your turning, what have you found?’
‘At least, I know why the world goes round.’
Sheldon Richman wrote an article on the “Libertarian Left” (available here) that is well worth reading in its entirety, but I highlight the following excerpt because I wish to quibble with part of it:
[Murray N.] Rothbard (1926-1995) was the leading theorist of radical Lockean libertarianism combined with Austrian economics, which demonstrates that free markets produce widespread prosperity, social cooperation, and economic coordination without monopoly, depression, or inflation—evils whose roots are to be found in government intervention. Rothbard, who called himself an “anarcho-capitalist,” first saw himself as a man of the “Old Right,” the loose collection of opponents of the New Deal and American Empire epitomized by Sen. Robert Taft, journalist John T. Flynn, and more radically, Albert Jay Nock. Yet Rothbard understood libertarianism’s left-wing roots.
In his 1965 classic and sweeping essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Rothbard identified “liberalism”—what is today called libertarianism—with the left as “the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity.” The other great ideology to emerge after the French revolution “was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order.”
When the New Left arose in the 1960s to oppose the Vietnam War, the military-industrial complex, and bureaucratic centralization, Rothbard easily made common cause with it. “The Left has changed greatly, and it is incumbent upon everyone interested in ideology to understand the change… . [T]he change marks a striking and splendid infusion of libertarianism into the ranks of the Left,” he wrote in “Liberty and the New Left.” His left-radicalism was clear in his interest in decentralization and participatory democracy, pro-peasant land reform in the feudal Third World, “black power,” and worker “homesteading” of American corporations whose profits came mainly from government contracts.
But with the fading of New Left, Rothbard deemphasized these positions and moved strategically toward right-wing paleoconservatism. His left-libertarian colleague, the former Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess (1923-1994), kept the torch burning. In Dear America Hess wrote, “On the far right, law and order means the law of the ruler and the order that serves the interest of that ruler, usually the orderliness of drone workers, submissive students, elders either totally cowed into loyalty or totally indoctrinated and trained into that loyalty,” while the left “has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.”
Albert Jay Nock, although he is commonly understood, as Richman notes, to epitomize (“radically,” no less) the so-called “Old Right,” paradoxically also epitomizes, just as radically, the Left as defined by Karl Hess. Politically, Nock “advocated” (he was far too cynical to lower himself to actual advocacy of anything) Thomas Jefferson’s “Ward System.” Economically, he “advocated” Henry George’s “Single Tax.” Both proposals radically tend “toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.”
Although I’m a big fan of Kevin Carson, whom Richman in his article uses to epitomize what he calls modern-day “left-libertarianism,” I have a couple of quibbles with Carson, too. First, Richman writes:
These laissez-faire left-libertarians [Carson and colleagues] are not to be confused with other varieties of left-wing libertarians, such as Noam Chomsky or Hillel Steiner, who each in his own way objects to individualistic appropriation of unowned natural resources and the economic inequality that freed markets can produce.
Hillel Steiner is basically a follower of Henry George. In contrast to them, according to Richman, Carson does not “object[] to individualistic appropriation of unowned natural resources and the economic inequality” it can produce. To compensate, however, he subscribes to the so-called “use and occupancy” theory of land tenure, as colorfully (albeit unfairly) described by this comment on one of Carson’s recent posts (which incidentally in my opinion is not one of his better efforts) at the Center for a Stateless Society:
Yes, clearly Kevin Carson wants to burn down my aunt and uncle’s business, as they committed the sin of Incorporation. In related news, he encourages appropriating their home as soon as they use their filthy corporate lucre to go on a vacation, as they will no longer be occupying and using it.
My other quibble with Carson and the “left-libertarianism” he epitomizes is his seemingly reflexive conflation of authentic political and economic Leftism with the whole panoply of social and cultural biases and dogmas that have come to be associated with the modern so-called “Left.” This reflexive conflation is what I was reacting to in my own comment on Carson’s recent post.
I’ve re-added a Blogroll to the sidebar at right, and have added the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views to it. (If you want your blog added, add mine and let me know.) Here is a notable post from February 1, 2012:
A bill approved yesterday by the Indiana Senate to allow the teaching of creationism in public schools is being criticized as bad science education by Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading intelligent design think tank.
If made law, Indiana Senate Bill 89 (SB89) would allow creationism, a religious view on the origin of species, into the Hoosier state’s biology classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Instead of scrapping SB89 in deference to legal precedent, the Indiana Senate has amended the bill to allow more religious views on origins, as if more religion could cure the original problem.
“Instead of injecting religion into biology classes, legislators should be working to promote the inclusion of more science,” said Joshua Youngkin, a law and policy analyst at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. “There are plenty of scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory today, and science students should be able to hear about them, not about religion.”
For Discovery Institute’s complete science education policy go to: http://www.discovery.org/a/3164.
Here are a few other notable posts at Evolution News & Views since the beginning of the year:
Rick Santorum, the Santorum Amendment and Intelligent Design
Law prof Doug Berman writes today at his Sentencing Law and Policy blog:
I have long thought that many sentencing reform advocates, especially in the wake of the Sixth Amendment Apprendi/Blakely line of cases, have failed to give enough attention to jury sentencing as a potentially valuable modern form for reform proposals. Specifically, I see many potential benefits from a system that at least encourages jury sentence recommendations in all serious cases that go to trial. And the latest high-profile (aka pretty-white-people) murder case now seems to provide a notable example of a sentencing jury demonstrating a special kind of case-specific sentencing wisdom.
. . .
Without determining or at least knowing the consequences of finding the defendant “guilty” beyond a “reasonable” doubt, how can a jury decide whether a doubt is “reasonable” in the first place?
They can’t.
Furthermore, although this is a double-edged sword from the defense perspective, how can the jury know if a doubt is “reasonable” if they don’t know what evidence has been excluded?
During the jury voir dire for a trial in which our criminal justice system lived up to its name and an innocent man was convicted, a potential juror, a nice older lady, told the court she couldn’t in good conscience serve on the jury because she knew that very often juries were horrified to learn after their verdict that evidence was withheld from them that would have led them to decide the case differently. Smart lady. Little did she know that just a few minutes earlier the judge had granted in its entirety a motion in limine filed by the prosecution and would during the course of the trial exclude so much evidence that the defense wanted to introduce that the trial would ultimately become a complete bastardization of the truth. She was struck from the jury for cause by the prosecution, and avoided the guilt that comes with deciding the fate of other human beings while ignorant.
After another trial, at the conclusion of which the jury had acquitted an innocent man of burglary after 30 minutes of deliberating, counsel and the judge went into the jury room to answer any questions or feedback the jury might have, and a couple of the jurors correctly guessed that my client had been in trouble with the law before. Yes, he had, I acknowledged. He’d been convicted in the past of a burglary. But he’d served his time for that crime, and the fact that he committed that crime didn’t mean he’d committed this one. The judge backed me up, telling the jury that’s why such prior bad acts aren’t admissible. I then told the jury that’s why I couldn’t allow my client to testify (whether potential jurors would hold it against my client if he didn’t testify had been a major issue during voir dire), because if I did the prosecution could have brought up his prior conviction for burglary. After I said that I felt kind of bad. I’d just told the jury I didn’t trust them. After all, hadn’t the jurors, who had just acquitted my client with all due speed, just told me that they had pretty much figured out all on their own that he’d been in trouble with the law before?
Every once in a while I republish here in their entirety posts published over at the Center for a Stateless Society. I do so because of this notice on the Center’s site:
Take our content, please!
All content on this site is available for republishing under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.
We want you to copy and distribute this stuff as widely as possible. That’s what we’re here for!
You don’t have to ask our permission. That’s what the Creative Commons licensing is for. Everybody has permission already. Just do it.
If you want to be nice, you can include a link back to us, but the only requirement is to provide attribution to the author and C4SS.
Here, then, copied and pasted below, is Kevin Carson’s post there today titled Nazi Exceptionalism; or, How Godwin’s Law Gets It Backward:
Most participants in online debates are familiar with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” The implicit corollary, of course, is that the first person to descend to such a comparison automatically forfeits the debate. Oddly enough, though, I don’t remember electing anyone named Godwin to legislate for me. And more importantly, that corollary is — or can be — quite stupid.
Godwin’s Law, by treating Nazi Germany as some sort of unique, metaphysical evil in human history, essentially nullifies its practical lessons for people in other times and places. Although Nazi precedents are now used as symbols of ultimate evil — just look at Darth Vader — they didn’t seem anywhere so dramatic to the German people at the time they were happening.
Nazi repression came about incrementally, in the background, as people lived their ordinary daily lives. Each new upward ratcheting of the security state was justified as something not all that novel or unprecedented, just a common sense measure undertaken from practical concerns for “security.”
After all, the bulk of Hitler’s emergency powers were granted by the Reichstag after a terrorist attack (blamed at the time on communists), a fire which destroyed the seat of Germany’s parliament. Any parallels to 9/11 and USA PATRIOT are, of course, purely accidental. Each new security clampdown, after an initial flurry of discussion, was quickly accepted as normal because it didn’t affect the daily lives of most ordinary people. And of course, those ordinary people had nothing to fear, because they’d done nothing wrong!
The “American Exceptionalism” that people like Sarah Palin appeal to is just the converse of the Nazi Exceptionalism implied by Godwin’s law. “American Exceptionalism” is a stupid ideology. It demands from its adherents a belief that the American people — and the American government — represent some special race of creatures who couldn’t possibly behave the same way normal, run-of-the-mill human beings have behaved throughout history.
The American response to the post-9/11 security state really isn’t all that different from that of the German people in the 1930s. Every expansion of the surveillance state meets widespread responses like “I have nothing to hide.” The TSA’s de facto internal passport system for air travel is defended by many people in these words: “If you don’t like it, don’t fly. If it saves one life, the inconvenience is worth it.”
A friend recently told me of being asked by a fairly “liberal” family member, in response to her complaints about the NDAA’s provisions for indefinite detention of “terror suspects” without criminal charges: “Why should someone like me who’s not doing anything wrong be afraid of it?” The common response, just as with the Nazis, is to take the government’s justifications at face value and accept that they mean well. Take off your tinfoil hat — after all, we were attacked!
The American people, like the Germans, generally also take at face value the “defensive” nature of the American state’s foreign policy. I remember seeing a Democratic Congressman on C-SPAN, defending Clinton’s Balkan adventures in the ’90s, say “I was taught in school that America has never gone to war for a square foot of land or a dollar of treasure.” Using Chomsky’s “person from Mars” thought experiment — looking at the role of the United States in the world as an alien would, judging the actions of the United States by the same standards one would use to judge comparable actions by any other country — is labeled “Blame America First.”
The tenor of CNN’s coverage of Russia’s “aggression” against Georgia in August 2008 was hardly different from that of the German press in response to Poland’s alleged aggression against ethnic Germans in Danzig in 1939. And if the United States attacks Iran based on a recycled version of the Iraqi WMD lies of nine years ago, you can be absolutely certain the major news networks will dust off the red-white-and-blue bunting and the Wall of Heroes, reporting America’s “defensive” action against the “Iranian threat” as straight news. After all, things like the Diem overthrow and the Tonkin Gulf Incident have nothing at all in common with the SS black flag operation in Danzig.
People are people, and the lessons of history apply to all of us. If you kid yourself otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.
. . . (by disclosing confidential information relating to the Lottery) is a Class A felony in Indiana, punishable by up to 50 years in prison.
The Indiana Court of Appeals case which upheld the constitutionality of this penalty noted:
As a matter of perspective, historically, the State of Indiana has prohibited gambling. However, in 1988, the Indiana Constitution was amended to delete the general prohibition against lotteries and to authorize lotteries conducted by the State Lottery Commission. The General Assembly then proceeded to authorize horse race gambling and, in 1993, approved riverboat casinos as a lawful gambling activity. However, aside from these exceptions, gambling continues to be strictly prohibited by Indiana’s anti-gambling laws. Thus, in our state, while gambling is generally prohibited, certain well-regulated exceptions have been created. It is against this background that we must interpret the statutes at issue before us.
Yesterday an Indiana Senate committee approved and moved to the full Senate a proposed statewide smoking ban, which has already been approved by the House, and which exempts casinos, racetrack slots parlors, off-track betting locations, tobacco stores, hookah bars and private clubs:
Supporters and opponents alike called the selective carve-outs bad policy. The proposal’s authors said it was the best they could do given the state’s political atmosphere and the gaming industry’s clout in the Statehouse.
Some senators who voted in favor of the plan said they acknowledged the hypocrisy of preventing some work places from allowing smoking, while allowing employees at casinos and other exempted businesses to continue being exposed to secondhand smoke.
“If this is what it takes to protect some people, I’m going to support this,” said Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis. “But we need to stop being hypocrites and do the right thing, no matter who it affects.”
. . .
Bar owners, who would get an 18-month reprieve before the ban kicks in, said the proposal gives casinos and private clubs an unfair advantage.
These hypocrites are undermining public confidence in the Lottery.
 Lysander Spooner |
 Henry George |
 Harriet Tubman |
 Sitting Bull |
 Angelus Silesius |
 Smedley Butler |
 Rose Wilder Lane |
 Albert Jay Nock |
 Dora Marsden |
 Leo Tolstoy |
 Henry David Thoreau |
 John Brown |
 Karl Hess |
 Levi Coffin |
 Max Stirner |
 Dorothy Day |
 Ernst Jünger |
 Thomas Paine |
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