PorcFest was anarchy in miniature: people were smoking weed, packing heat, selling unlicensed food and alcohol, and generally behaving in a peacefully unauthorised fashion. There were pistol safety classes, gay dance parties, and sessions on everything from polyamory, transhumanism, and cop avoidance to alternative currency, alternative medicine, and planning the revolution. C4SS, S4SS, ALL, AltExpo, Fr33 Agents, and SFL were all represented. In addition to my previously mentioned talks I was on a panel on agorism with Brad Spangler, Dan D’Amico, and Bob Murphy. If I go again next year I’ll bring some copies of Kevin’s Homebrew Industrial Revolution; PorcFest seems like the ideal crowd for it.

After that came the IHS seminar at Towson. The students were great, and I spent a lot of time talking with them about philosophy, libertarianism, and science fiction – which (as will come as no surprise to my readers) are three of my favourite subjects. One of the students was wearing a t-shirt with my picture on it! The topics of my lectures were approximately the same as last year. The other faculty were Dan D’Amico, Brian Doherty, John Hasnas, George Selgin, and Amy Sturgis, so it was an even more radical lineup than last year. We found a good Cuban restaurant; I also got a chance to see Jesse Walker, who lives nearby.

My next gig will be Mises University here in Auburn, July 24-30. And then of course there’s always the APS in September and Libertopia in October.

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.

The President is above the law.

The police are above the law.

So what’s the point of having laws, again?

So far is our political culture in the grip of what I’ve elsewhere called the incantational model of state violence that they cannot even see their own everyday political advocacy as an instance of incitement to violence, let alone consider what role the institutionalised violence they support might play in creating a culture in which freelance statists like Jared Loughner can view firing into a crowd as an acceptable way of addressing their grievances.

The deaths and maimings of the victims in the Tucson shooting are horrendous; but the media’s selective focus on them, while similar but far more frequent massacres by American soldiers and police officers are ignored, is yet another a sign of profound moral blindness.

There was a further inconsistency in Sheriff Dupnik’s blaming the incident on “vitriol … about tearing down the government,” while simultaneously condemning Arizona as a “mecca for prejudice and bigotry” – presumably a reference to the state’s draconian anti-immigrant policies. After all, Arizona’s ethnic-cleansing laws are not exactly the product of anti-government sentiment; on the contrary, they represent government at its most intrusive and virulent. But to the statist mind, the state is such a noble institution that its greatest crimes must somehow be reinterpreted as the fruit of antistatist rhetoric!

See also Brad and Sheldon.

• It’s explicitly in favour of open borders.
   
• It’s implicitly in favour of the right to bear arms.
   
• It dramatises countereconomic resistance to government (“the Network”).
   
• It also dramatises the “Baptists and bootleggers” dynamic, as well as the role of government in helping to cartelise the very industries it claims to be trying to protect people from.
   
• It explicitly endorses the Socratic-Stoic-Ciceronian-Augustinian-Thomistic-Spoonerite principle that an unjust law is not a law.
   
• By contrast with Cory Doctorow’s (otherwise excellent) Little Brother, whose ending disappointed me, Machete does not end with a reformist exhortation to work within the system; on the contrary, it ends with two of the main characters renouncing forms of state authorisation that they have been given. (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers.)

Now we just need to convert Robert Rodriguez to agorism and we’ll be all set.

I’m no fan of the NRA, which is actually a (“moderately”) pro-gun-control organisation and a Republican PAC, but this particular charge is a bum rap. As a former NRA member I’m quite familiar with the Eddie Eagle program, and there’s no pro-gun propaganda in it. The program consists pretty much entirely in conveying to kids the lesson “If you see a gun, STOP! a) don’t touch; b) leave the area; c) tell an adult.” That’s it.

Which part of that is Olbermann against?

18 May 1994
To the Editor:

The current debate over gun control is the latest, and perhaps the last, skirmish in a centuries-old conflict between two radically different visions of social order: the Celtic-Germanic system and the Imperial Roman system.

Under the Celtic-Germanic system, which dominated much of Northern Europe (especially the British Isles) during the Middle Ages, there was no distinct governmental agency known as the “police.” Instead, the responsibility for keeping the peace, enforcing the laws, and maintaining social order lay with the armed citizenry as a whole. In a sense, everybody (or at least, every free adult male) was the police, and all arrests were citizens’ arrests. Like the age-old right to judge the accused in a jury setting, the right to defend the innocent by force was a right of the people, not of government officials. (To be sure, there was some division of labor in provision of security; but this occurred within, rather than as an alteratve to, the context of an egalitarian distribution of police authority.)

More familiar to modern eyes is the Imperial Roman system. When the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire, one of Emperor Augustus’s most significant acts was to establish Rome’s first police system – the Urban Cohorts and the Vigiles. From then on, keeping the peace in Rome was the prerogative of government agents, as in modern states. Where Celtic-Germanic system police authority was bottom-up, Imperial Roman police authority was top-down.

Growing up as we have under a system like the Roman one, we tend to assume that the Roman-style system is the only one that could possibly work. But highly civilised and sophisticated peoples (e.g., medieval Ireland) lived happily and prosperously under the Celtic-Germanic system for centuries. And although the Imperial Roman system has been on the ascendancy in the west ever since the centralisation of state power during the Renaissance, the rival Celtic-Germanic system has yielded only gradually. For example, as incredible as it may seem to many today, there were no police in England before the nineteenth century; the government exercised legislative and judicial functions, but left the actual apprehsion of criminals to the armed citizenry, in the form of the “posse comitatus” or, later, “Associations for the Prosecution of Felons.”

Similar arrangements may be found in American history in the colonial “minutemen,” and later in the so-called “Wild West” – “wild” and violent according to Hollywood depictions, but surprisingly peaceful and crime-free according to current historical research. (I am not speaking of vigilantes or lynch mobs, but [2010 note: apologies for the scrambled grammar; I should have written “I am speaking not of vigilantes or lynch mobs, but of”] responsible citizens’ associations that respected the rights of the accused.) Our country’s founders still recognised the right of self-defense as the foundation and presupposition of all other rights.

On a recent ABC documentary on guns, a gun rights advocate unwittingly echoed the Celtic-Germanic paradigm when he suggested that recent tragedies like the Long Island train shooting could have been averted if the other passengers on the train had also been armed and able to take defensive action. In response, a gun prohibition advocate expressed incredulity, and exclaimed that a society in which everyone “packs heat” would collapse into “anarchy” – a viewpoint unwittingly expressive of the Roman perspective.

Indeed today’s advocates of gun prohibition are so deeply in the grip of the Imperial Roman paradigm that they literally cannot grasp or conceive of the Celtic-Germanic alternative – and thus, for example, are unable to see the Second Amendment’s “militia” as anything but a government agency, despite clear historical evidence that in the eighteenth century “militia” meant the armed citizenry.

In this country today the Imperial Roman system is poised on the brink of its final victory: the complete disarmament of the citizenry. Before we take that final step, we should ask ourselves whether our long journey away from the Celtic-Germanic system has really been a move in the right direction. Are we really safer or more secure today as a result of this transformation? The evidence suggests otherwise.

A restoration of, or at least a move back in the direction of, the Celtic-Germanic system would have at least five advantages over our current Roman-style system.

• First, it would provide greater discouragement to criminal behaviour by in effect raisig the numbers, presence, and reaction time of the “police” to a maximum.
• Second, it would more flexible, efficient, and inexpensive than a tax-funded bureaucracy.
• Third, it would reestablish neighbourhood control over law enforcement, a desperately needed measure in the light of police harassment of minorities.
• Fourth, it would more faithfully embody our democratic egalitarian heritage by making the use of defensive force a universal right rather than the privilege of an elite.
• And fifth, by diminishing the power differential between citizens and their government, it would seriously block the evident tendency of contemporary western democracies to evolve toward a police state.

Roderick T. Long

We haven’t heard what model gun she was using, but don’t most handguns have just six shots? If so, why not assume her gun ran out of bullets rather than that it jammed? Is it that the reporters know more than we do (i.e. that her gun held more than six bullets) or that they know less than we do (i.e. the media’s usual vast ignorance about guns)?

A related question: why didn’t those who pushed her out of the room disarm her first? Weren’t they afraid she might reload and come back?

A simple solution: the Mohawks should secede from Canada and the U.S. Next, any gun-friendly Mohawks should then secede from the seceders. There, all solved.

Well, I didn’t say the implementation would be simple ….

I thought it was amusing that the Globe considers it “bizarre” to protest intrusive government by publicly performing manicures without a license – but doesn’t seem to find it bizarre that there is such a legal offense as performing manicures without a license.