If you’re interested in signing a petition asking Rand Paul to support Red & Black Café’s right to bar cops from their premises, click here.
(I don’t know how thrilled the Café would be with Paul’s support – but I doubt they’re at much risk of getting it ….)
Check out the C4SS news widget.
Larry Arnhart has a blog post about my article (original draft here, revised but shorter version here) on libertarian themes in Confucian thought.
A caveat: as you’ll see, Larry seems more sympathetic to the Burkean side of Confucianism than I am; on the issue of tradition I think the Confucians take a genuine piece of the truth and blow it up to be much more of the truth than it is, at the expense of the recognition that a great deal of tradition is oppressive and needs to be combated. As I say in the original article, “the Confucians can all too often be preachy, hidebound, starchy apologists for an authoritarian status quo”; so I get a little worried when Larry takes the moral of my article to be the need to respect the “communitarian authority of social traditions.”
Bob Cesca, a comedian apparently, is complaining that the free market hasn’t solved the oil spill crisis.
I quote (with the authors’ permission) a great pair of comments on immigration policy from the LeftLibertarian2 list:
Joshua Katz: If you think you can shoot people crossing an imaginary line because they might ask for welfare, why not deport people who already are on welfare? What the hell is the difference?
Scott Bieser: What it comes down to, to put it crudely, is that most Americans can imagine they themselves might someday wake up and find themselves financially destitute and in need of government welfare; but none of them can conceive of someday waking up and finding they have become Mexicans.
My friend William Gillis writes to me:
For over a decade I’ve frequented The Red & Black Cafe in Portland – an IWW, explicitly anarchist, worker-owned coop – and over the years they’ve faced all the sort of police harassment and surveillance you’d expect for a venue catering to radical activists.
Recently a uniformed police officer entered the cafe ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee – I can only imagine the horrified looks – and was politely asked to leave by one of the workers/managers. PDX police have recently committed more than a few outrageous murders and the worker explained with infinite patience that a cop made his clientele feel like they were in danger.
For some reason this seems to be setting off a shitstorm of national-level outrage with coverage on major news networks and blogs. I have good friends on staff and their phones are ringing off the hook with death threats. Mainstream conservative and liberal pundits have talked of showing up with weapons to start a confrontation. Frankly my brain clouds over with rage every time I read the fractally idiotic comments or threats.
My friends could really use some support; in this environment some kind words or awareness from those who aren’t fanatical devotees of the police state would go a long way. I’d really appreciate it if you could use the magical reach of your blog.
Here are some links that don’t directly send me into a rage-coma: 1, 2, 3
I have nothing to add except ditto. Please let’s do what we can to support the Red & Black Café against this crap.
