Lew Rockwell interviews me on today’s LRC podcast, on the subject of anarchism. (Actually the interview took place last September; there’s a bit of a podcast backlog.) I tried to avoid too much duplication with my previous LRC podcast on the same subject from two years earlier. (I vaguely remember now that we also did one on taxation two years ago but I don’t think that one ever aired.)
(CHT Lew Rockwell and François Tremblay.)
Obama’s remarks about the nine-year-old girl who was murdered in Tucson were very moving.*
I look forward to his equally moving encomium to the Afghan and Pakistani children murdered by his air strikes and drone attacks.
* Well, actually they were somewhat insulting, inasmuch as he suggested that her future, had she lived, would or should have been devoted to organised crime. But apart from that they were nice.
Here’s a bit of fairly banal Doctor Who news – except that it has an implication some may consider spoilerish, so I’ll elaborate in the comments.
Congratulations to Kevin Carson, who has just won the Foundation for Economic Education’s Hoffman Prize for his Freeman article on transportation subsidies.
I wonder which response will come first: left-conflationist attacks on Kevin or right-conflationist attacks on FEE?
Pundits are reacting with gross (but predictable) inconsistency to the Tucson shooting: denouncing all calls for violence – even purely metaphorical ones – only to issue their own calls for violence of a decidedly non-metaphorical sort, in the form of restrictions on free speech or gun ownership or equal protection or whatever.
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!