I’ve blogged before about the late Dwayne McDuffie, a leading voice for African-American writers, artists, and characters in contemporary comics. Go read it, then come back.

What is evidently McDuffie’s final work, the direct-to-dvd animated film Justice League: Doom, has just been released (a follow-up to his earlier, likewise excellent Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths). It’s terrific, of course; but the 2-disc version comes with a great bonus: a fascinating documentary on McDuffie’s life.

You don’t have to buy the dvd to watch the documentary, though; here it is in three parts:

On the one hand, they want it to be the case that George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin was unlawful, so that they can blame the authorities for not arresting and prosecuting him.

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman

On the other hand, they want it to be the case that the shooting was lawful, so that they can blame the law (specifically, Florida’s stand-your-ground law) for allowing the shooting.

So the establishment lapdogs at MSNBC are inconsistent; no surprise there. But which way should they resolve this inconsistency?

Well, here’s the actual text of the stand-your-ground provision, which actually seems pretty reasonable to me:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

(Read the entire law here, including some not-so-nice bits, such as the 14th-Amendment-violating exception concerning self-defense against police officers.)

So unless Zimmerman a) was attacked by Martin, and b) had a reasonable belief that Martin posed a serious danger to him (two conditions that, from the evidence thus far available, do not appear to have been met – and certainly the critics clearly do not believe either condition was met), the stand-your-ground provision offers no defense of his actions.

Of course it is entirely possible that local Florida authorities have been misapplying this law, and indeed that they have been doing so with racist motivations. That wouldn’t exactly shock me. But in that case, the problem lies not with the stand-your-ground law but with the authorities; and the solution is to hold them accountable by depriving them of their monopoly.

1. Right-libertarians sometimes accuse left-libertarians of misrepresenting right-libertarians’ relation to corporatism. “They say we support government favouritism toward big business,” they complain, “yet no libertarian supports any such thing.”

To answer this, I need to invoke the de re / de dicto distinction.

Suppose I’m reading Ozma of Oz, and I think, “hey, this guy Baum is a good author.” Assume I don’t know that Baum also wrote a novel (a lousy one, in fact, though that doesn’t matter for the example) called The Master Key. Would it be true or false to say, “Roderick thinks the author of The Master Key is a good author”?

Well, it’s ambiguous. I don’t have a thought of the form “The author of The Master Key is a good author,” since I’m not aware of any such book. But I do think of Baum that he’s a good author; and since Baum is the author of The Master Key, I thereby think of the author of The Master Key that he’s a good author. So the philosopher’s way of marking the distinction is to say that I believe de re (“of the thing”), but not de dicto (“of what is said”), that the author of The Master Key is a good author.

Or again, suppose I want to marry Griselda. And suppose Griselda is, unbeknownst to me, a pathological liar. Then is it true or false that I want to marry a pathological liar? Well, in one sense it’s true and in another sense it’s false. I don’t have such a desire de dicto; I don’t form any thought expressible as “I want to marry a pathological liar.” But I do have such a desire de re, since there’s a pathological liar that I want to marry.

So when left-libertarians accuse (some) right-libertarians of supporting corporatism, this is to be understood in a de re sense, not in a de dicto sense. Thus the claim is that right-libertarians are supporting certain policies/institutions/phenomena that are in fact instances of corporatism; we are not claiming that right-libertarians are deliberately supporting them qua instances of corporatism – and so pointing out that they’re not is not relevant as a reply to the original point.

2. The left-libertarian call for worker empowerment can itself be construed as a (left-wing) form of corporatism.

Lew Rockwell recently wrote:

[S]yndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

not a left-libertarian

Lew doesn’t draw the inference that left-libertarians are corporatists, but he illuminates a way in which that inference might be drawn. After all, we too favour economic control by producers, right? So why doesn’t that make our position akin to corporatism?

I think there’s a perilous ambiguity here. In one way, “economic control” can mean ownership; in that sense, we left-libertarians do favour economic control by producers.

But in that sense capitalists (taking that term in the Rothbardian sense) do not favour economic control by consumers; they favour economic control by producers too, even if capitalist employers loom larger in their conception of “producers” than in ours.

When Lew says that capitalism favours consumer control, he’s not talking about ownership; he means that consumer preferences determine production decisions through the price system – which is true enough (although I think that way of putting it makes producers seem too passive – what about advertising? entrepreneurial experimentation?) but that’s just as true when the producers are workers’ co-ops. So there’s no one sense of producer control which is both advocated by left-libertarians and akin to corporatism.

(These issues are closely related to those I’ve discussed under the name of the “POOTMOP” problem, here and here, as well as to the different ways that the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the French industriel movement understood the concept of producer control, discussed here.)

3. There is a tendency among right-libertarians to treat racism and sexism as equivalent to hostility toward persons of a different race or gender. Thus where such hostility is absent, racism and sexism are presumed to be absent also – with the upshot that left-libertarians are seen as exaggerating the amount of racism and sexism around.

For example, Walter Block argues that because heterosexual male employers are attracted to women, they are more likely to be prejudiced in their favour rather than against them.

But racism and sexism are found in more forms than simply that of hostility (not that there isn’t plenty of that form around too – and we all know, too well, that being a heterosexual male is not exactly an obstacle to hostility against women). A white male employer who feels no hostility toward women or minorities may still be inclined to pay them less or deny them positions of authority if he holds, say, prejudicial expectations about their likely capacities.

But what if these expectations are rationally justified? The problem is that they generally aren’t. And the arguments on behalf of such expectations are so shockingly sloppy (as, e.g., Anne Fausto-Sterling shows), and the historical track record of such arguments is so wretched, that an employer’s indulgence in such expectations is overwhelmingly likely to be the result of an irrational bias, most often one unconsciously absorbed from the culture. In such cases we will say that the empoyer’s decision is shaped by racism or sexism – but in saying that, we are not (necessarily) saying that the employer is an evil, hate-filled person. After all, by analogy: most people are statists, but that doesn’t mean that most people are filled with hatred for individual liberty.

Walter says in the same piece that the persistence of unjustified racist or sexist prejudices is unlikely, since “as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets.” Now of course we have “continued statist interference with markets,” so for anything Walter says here we could still have plenty of prejudice in the real world. But in any case I question the implied (and un-Austrian!) assumption that the market always gets us to equilibrium in the long run. There’s a difference between saying that the market has a tendency to equilibrium and saying that the market eventually reaches equilibrium. After all, everything on earth has a tendency to move toward the center of the earth, but that doesn’t mean that everything eventually gets to the center of the earth. Culture matters; it’s not just an epiphenomenon of the price system.

And of course, comme l’on dit, “we are market forces.”

We therefore say this with regard to Enoch Powell. He was a classical scholar of great brilliance and distinction. His Lexicon to Herodotus (1938) is one of the most valuable works ever produced on the ancient historian. As well as in Latin and Greek, he was fluent in every main European language, and in Welsh. He was also at least competent in several ancient and modern oriental languages.
— Sean Gabb, 2011

And then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.
— Monty Python, 1972

]]> http://aaeblog.com/2011/08/26/torremolinos-torremolinos/feed/ 16 http://aaeblog.com/2011/07/01/cory-maye-to-be-freed/ http://aaeblog.com/2011/07/01/cory-maye-to-be-freed/#comments Sat, 02 Jul 2011 04:03:37 +0000 Roderick http://aaeblog.com/?p=7568

Cory Maye, about whose case I’ve blogged previously (here, here, here, and here), is finally due to be released. (CHT Sheldon.) It falls short of what he deserves – he was required to plead guilty to manslaughter for exercising his right to defend himself and his family, and he’s being offered no compensation for the unjust treatment he has received – but it beats being murdered by the state or spending the rest of his life in a cage, the two fates that judges had previously chosen for him.

All honour to Radley Balko for his untiring efforts to keep this case before the public!

Addendum:

If you’re interested in donating to help Maye get his life back together, Radley has details.

]]> http://aaeblog.com/2011/07/01/cory-maye-to-be-freed/feed/ 2 http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/28/them-poor-old-slaveholding-founders-need-all-the-help-they-can-get/ http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/28/them-poor-old-slaveholding-founders-need-all-the-help-they-can-get/#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:33:06 +0000 Roderick http://aaeblog.com/?p=7544 Walter Williams writes:

Here’s my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the Founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool as they try to reduce respect for our Constitution.

Well, I don’t regard slavery as “merely a convenient moral posturing tool,” but yes, I do have contempt for the Constitution’s so-called guarantees of liberty, and I am certainly out to try to reduce respect for that statist and statism-enabling document. So yes, he’s essentially right about people like me.

]]> http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/28/them-poor-old-slaveholding-founders-need-all-the-help-they-can-get/feed/ 6 http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/17/jim-crow-returns-to-alabama-part-2/ http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/17/jim-crow-returns-to-alabama-part-2/#comments Sat, 18 Jun 2011 04:50:34 +0000 Roderick http://aaeblog.com/?p=7506 For a giggle, check out this critique (CHT Brandon) of my recent immigration post, by a “John J. Ray, M.A., Ph.D.” (Yes, he’s one of those.) The best bit is when the guy infers my deranged mental state from my picture. Yes, this picture. René Allendy, move over!

]]> http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/17/jim-crow-returns-to-alabama-part-2/feed/ 6 http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/10/jim-crow-returns-to-alabama/ http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/10/jim-crow-returns-to-alabama/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:52:13 +0000 Roderick http://aaeblog.com/?p=7461 This past Thursday the Alabama legislature put on their white hoods and enacted the harshest anti-immigrant regime in the country, one even more tyrannical than Arizona’s ethnic-cleansing laws.

As in Arizona, the new edict “allows police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant if the person is stopped for some other reason”; but it also “requir[es] schools to find out if students are in the country lawfully,” “requires all businesses to check the legal status of workers using a federal system called E-Verify,” “makes it a crime for landlords to knowingly rent to an illegal immigrant,” and in a flourish of pure petty malice, “mak[es] it a crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride.”

The old Jim Crow laws enforced discrimination based on the colour of a person’s skin; the new Jim Crow laws enforce discrimination on the basis of a person’s birth on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Though of course racist motivations are not exactly absent.

To make sure that racism and misogyny continue to march hand in hand, the legislature also passed an abortion ban on the same day. Well heck, if the state can treat immigrants as second-class persons, why can’t it do the same to women, and force them to use their bodies as incubators for unwanted fetuses?

If only we could get some Republicans in power! They’re for smaller government, you know.

]]> http://aaeblog.com/2011/06/10/jim-crow-returns-to-alabama/feed/ 101 http://aaeblog.com/2011/05/29/well-theres-spam-egg-sausage-and-spam-thats-not-got-much-spam-in-it/ http://aaeblog.com/2011/05/29/well-theres-spam-egg-sausage-and-spam-thats-not-got-much-spam-in-it/#comments Sun, 29 May 2011 05:15:16 +0000 Roderick http://aaeblog.com/?p=7278 Kevin Carson, in the new Freeman, on European “socialism” versus American “capitalism”:

[S]ocial democracy treats privilege as normal and leaves it intact – then regulates it to make it bearable to the subordinate classes without altering its fundamental nature as privilege. But most of the positive aspects of the European model simply duplicate what could be achieved by dismantling privilege altogether.

(Celý piroh.)

In the same issue, see John Blundell on the Grimké sisters and Stephan Kinsella on IP. There’s other good stuff too.

]]> http://aaeblog.com/2011/05/29/well-theres-spam-egg-sausage-and-spam-thats-not-got-much-spam-in-it/feed/ 0