The Center for a Stateless Society announces a new Arabic website and an open letter to the Egyptian people.
One of Kevin Carson’s pieces has also been picked up by a couple of prominent Middle Eastern news sources, here and here.
Please help fund the world revolution if you can.
I see that Jesse Byock’s 1995 article “Egil’s Bones” is now online. (See also this earlier piece.) The article helps to support the historical reliability of the Icelandic sagas by showing how an aspect of Egil’s Saga once considered fanciful – the protagonist’s skull’s invulnerability to axe-blows – may have a basis in fact.
As of 2005, Byock was seeking Egil’s grave for confirmation; I’ve heard nothing since, though the project seems to be active.
Sheldon’s American Conservative article on left-libertarianism is now online.
The newest (March 2011) issue of The American Conservative features an article by Sheldon Richman titled “Libertarian Left: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.” It discusses, inter alia, the Center for a Stateless Society, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Roy Childs, Karl Hess, Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Gabriel Kolko, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, William Gillis, and your humble correspondent. It’s a great piece to use to introduce left-libertarian ideas to the neophyte. (It’s currently available online only to subscribers, alas.)
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!