Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Witch Hunt Against L and P Blogger
A witch hunt is underway at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale against L and P blogger, Jonathan Bean. Several articles have appeared, including here and here, and Ralph Luker has blogged in Bean's support.
Here is an account, "Handout Hysteria’ or Insensitivity?," from Inside Higher Ed (comments are at the bottom of the article):
But in the last two weeks, he has found himself under attack in his department — with many of his history colleagues questioning his judgment for distributing an optional handout about the “Zebra Killings,” a series of murders of white people in San Francisco in the 1970s. His dean also told his teaching assistants that they didn’t need to finish up the semester working with him, and she called off discussion sections of his course for a week so TA’s would not have to work while considering their options.
Students and professors at the university are trading harsh accusations about insensitivity and censorship, talking about possible lawsuits, and assessing the damage. Shirley Clay Scott, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, sent a memo to faculty members warning that they could “easily self-destruct if we do not exercise restraint and reason.”
I suggest you contact the following:
James Walker,
President@notes.siu.edu,
618-536-3331,
Office of the President-SIUP
Shirley Clay Scott,
Sscotts@siu.edu,
618-453-2466,
Dean College of Liberal Arts
Given a discussion a couple of weeks ago on antibiotics, bacteria, and pro[perty rights, the following report from the Washington Post today is worth considering: The above are one of the parties fighting the General Election in Britain (where else?) on the 5th May. Some excerpts from their 'Manicfesto':
Jonathan Bean is a popular professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — even though his libertarian politics don’t always coincide with his students’ views. A historian, he was just named Teacher of the Year in the College of Liberal Arts.
More on antibiotics and property rights
"The German pharmaceutical giant Bayer suffered a serious setback last year when a federal administrative law judge backed a proposed ban on a drug used to fight poultry infections at factory farms. The judge cited growing scientific evidence suggesting that the practice was reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics vital to human health."
Since I only just discovered I can add blogs, i don't have the system down yet to enable you to click a word. Here is the the article
The article also raises another problem for anyone like me who supports markets and democracy. It adds:
"Facing defeat in a three-year legal battle, Bayer sought help in a new arena -- Congress. In a letter written in the office of Rep. Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (R-Miss.), and with the assistance of a Bayer lobbyist who was a longtime Pickering friend, 26 House members argued that the poultry medicine was "absolutely necessary to protecting the health of birds." It called on Lester M. Crawford, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to set aside the judge's decision regarding the class of drugs. The Bayer product is known as Baytril.
"The Baytril case provides an unusual look at an attempt by lawmakers to influence the executive branch's handling of an important public health issue involving parochial economic interests and complex science."
This raises the question of how does a market society with democratic institutions handle the problem of money being used to purchase political favors. Libertarian orthodoxy likes to emphasize how government penalizes entreprenaurial activity - and often it does and this is bad. But the problem is more complex because successful businesses too often use their wealth to purchase favors and exemptions from government. This time they were caught.
The Official Raving Monster Loony Party
"Our team of experts has decided that Income Tax has not proved popular with the public and will therefore be abolished. It was started in order to finance the Napoleonic war in 1799 and we now believe that the time is right to announce the cessation of hostilities with Napoleon. Some of the money left in the coffers will be used to fill in our part of the Channel Tunnel in case no one has mentioned it to the French. Any remaining money will be strategically placed on a horse at the 3-30 at Haydock Park [racecourse] at odds of at least 12/1 in order to see us through until the next election. Income Tax will be officially replaced by people lending the government a bob or two at the end of the week when we’re a bit skint.
"In the interests of fair education policy, under a loony government all children will automatically be given full marks in their exams.
"Anyone caught breaking the law will be made to mend it.
"All food shall be clearly labelled “Recommended for Oral Use”.
"All WMD’s (weapons of Mass Distraction) will be made highly visible so that we can find them.
"Any politician wanting to start a war will be shipped off to the country in question with a bag of conkers [chestnuts.] They can then conker the country themselves.
"To keep up with the present government we promise to introduce many policies that have not been thought through properly, purely for cheap votes.
These include:
Giving everyone a quid who votes for us
"Vote for Insanity, You Know it Makes Sense!"
Their website: http://www.omrlp.com/
Friday, April 29, 2005
ACLU Enemy of the State
On the right side of the Instapundit screen, there is an advertisement for a t-shirt with the slogan, "ACLU Enemy of the State."
I wonder what the great libertarian Albert Jay Nock, not to mention L and P blogger Walter Grinder who wrote an introduction to Nock's book of nearly the same name, would make of this. The hammer and sickle is an odd touch. What's next? "Stalin: Enemy of the State."
Hat tip Matt Barganier. A leftist friend of mine, Softball Kenny, sent me an excellent column by conservative Andrew J. Bacevich titled the “The Normalization of War.” You must scroll down a little ways on the link to read it.
Aeon's posting on the possible destruction of "The Scream" is not complete without a picture. According to this Norwegian news story, Munch's "The Scream" has been destoyed. That's not good. This NYT story is interesting in lots of ways, but what struck me the most was the revelation that that famous photo of the helicopter evacuating people from the embassy roof in Saigon is actually something else. Have a look!
In other news, my promotion to Associate is now official. Woo-hoo! Brendan O’Neill explains why here. Sad but true. Reader Dan Schmutter passes along this preview of the Arianna Huffington group blog. I'm guessing this is satire, but who knows. In light of all the good discussion on Herbert Spencer that we've seen here and here on L&P, I wanted to share some good news.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to do an encyclopedia article on "Karl Marx" for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, to be published by Routledge. Amazingly, there was not a single entry offered for Herbert Spencer (who many view as one of the founders of sociology) or of any of the great classical liberals. I knew that Spencer had fallen out of favor with sociologists over the years, and that too many working in that discipline had a tendency to dismiss (wrongly, I might add) the work of classical liberals as somehow too "atomistic" and not worthy of the sociological imagination.
Whatever the reason, I was quite frankly shocked that nothing on Spencer, liberalism, or libertarianism had been scheduled for discussion in the encyclopedia. So, I asked the fine editor if he would be interested in one additional contribution from me: a general, broader piece on libertarianism, that is, on the relevance to sociology of theorists working in the classical liberal/libertarian tradition. The editor accepted my offer. And instead of writing a sole piece on Marx, I wrote two pieces.
The entry on libertarianism brought into the encyclopedia a discussion of the works of Herbert Spencer (to whom I devote much space, relatively speaking), Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and others.
I've just been informed today that the encyclopedia is due out in October 2005; I'll be sure to note it here when the time comes.
Thus, this is my way of thanking Roderick Long doubly: not only for his continuing work on Spencer, but also for offering constructive commentary on my essays before they were submitted to Routledge.
Cross-posted to Notablog. I've written ad nauseam about Election 2004, still of the conviction that the issue of same-sex marriage (and its connection to the broader issue of "moral values") had an important impact on the outcome. I have always believed "that other issues, especially the war, had an effect in shoring up Bush's winning coalition." Still, "the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were promoted by GOP strategists to bolster one aspect of the winning Bush coalition"; without "the socially conservative vote," which supported those initiatives, Bush could never have won such states as Ohio—indispensable to his national electoral victory.
One recent analysis of the Presidential election comes to a similar though much more informed statistical conclusion. Gregory B. Lewis, in the April 2005 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, concludes that the "same-sex marriage" issue "mattered ... less than some issues but more than most. ... At the state level, even after controlling for Bush's vote share in 2000 and the general conservatism of the state population, popular disapproval of homosexuality influenced Bush's share of the 2004 vote and may have contributed to party switches by New Hampshire and New Mexico." Lewis admits that "[t]he vote was close in Ohio despite relatively high disapproval of homosexuality." But the question remains: "Would it have turned out differently without same-sex marriage on the agenda?"
That question will inspire many different answers. But I think the evidence strongly suggests that without the support of socially conservative Protestant and Catholic voters, who came out en masse to vote against same-sex marriage, Bush would have lost to Kerry.
In the same issue of PS, even those with a dissenting view (such as Hillygus and Shields) argue that the "values-based appeals," though not the only crucial issue, served to reinforce Bush's appeal among his supporters. As I have argued for months, this was part of the Rove strategy: without that support among Bush's core constituency, Bush does not win re-election.
Whatever one's views on this subject, I think the implications are becoming clearer with each passing week. Social conservatives believe that the Bush administration owes them. Of greater importance is the apparent belief of the administration that social conservatives are owed.
Cross-posted to Notablog. In his new article, "Evidence that the U.S. May Be Losing the Global War on Terror", Ivan Eland discusses how the administration might be hiding evidence of its own failures in the war.
War as a Way of Life
The Destruction of "The Scream"
Barbarians
Know what this is? Guess I didn't.
Iraq Still Isn't an Election Issue
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Huffington group blog
Spencer, Long, and a New Encyclopedia
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Same-Sex Marriage and the 2004 Election
Eland: U.S. Is Hiding Indications of Its Own Failure
According to Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who still has many sources within the intelligence community, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office is suppressing data showing that the number of major terrorist attacks worldwide exploded from 175 in 2003 to 625 in 2004, the highest number since the Cold War began to wane in 1985. U.S. officials said that when analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center declined the office of the secretary’s invitation to use a methodology that would reduce the number of terrorist attacks, her office terminated publication of the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.
Dr. Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute:
Happy Birthday, Herbert Spencer
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Today marks the birthday of Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820---8 December 1903), a thinker whose contributions to philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, and political theory earned him the status of required reading in most universities a century ago. Today he is largely forgotten -- except in ludicrously inaccurate caricature as a "Social Darwinist" who supposedly advocated letting the poor and weak die off in order to improve the breed. (Nope, he never said it.) These days most of Spencer's works are out of print; no historic plaque marks his London residence (38 Queen's Gardens, just north of Kensington Gardens; I paid my respects there last May), and his grave is overgrown and neglected. Happily, however, interest in Spencer seems to be reviving of late.
Spencer was one of the last stalwarts of classical liberalism, holding up the banner of peace and freedom, and inveighing against regimentation and the régime of status, long after the liberal mainstream had sold out to collectivism and militarist imperialism. After working as a railroad engineer and an editor at The Economist, Spencer devoted the rest of his life to developing, over the course of many volumes, an integrated and systematic theory of life and society. His political philosophy (which I summarize in Herbert Spencer: Libertarian Prophet) anticipated -- and influenced -- much of contemporary libertarian thought. Likewise, his theories of spontaneous social order, pattern-perception, and the self-defeating character of direct utilitarianism anticipate the work of Friedrich Hayek; his evolutionary cosmology anticipates that of astrophysicist David Layzer and chemist Ilya Prigogine; his writings on the relation between statism, militarism, and male supremacy anticipate the insights of radical feminism; and his pre-Darwinian (1852) critique of creationism could have been written yesterday.
One of Spencer's contemporaries described him as a "prophet whose greatest discoveries can only be duly appreciated after two or three centuries." Let’s hope we can accelerate that process a bit. (For a list of online works by and about Spencer, click here.)
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Another "Hate Crime Hoax" (Trinity International University)
Earlier this week, CNN and other news outlets reported that black students at Trinity International University in Illinois had received racist letters, presumably from whites.
The school administration responded by evacuating all 200 black students on campus for their safety. No doubt, mandatory diversity training was being considered. It turns out that a black female student has confessed to sending the letters. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened recently. Will these latest revelations receive the same national coverage as the original story? In light of all the inconvenience experienced by the students, evacuated or otherwise, the comments of Lt. Ron Price (shown below) seem overly complacent to say the least.
Police said Hardin wanted to transfer to a different school because she was unhappy at Trinity but her parents would not let her. The letters, police said, were her way of implying the campus was not safe.
Hardin appeared at the Lake County Courthouse in Waukegan Tuesday morning on a charge of disorderly conduct and a hate crime charge. Bond was set at $5,000.
“This was her way out of it,” said Lt. Ron Price of the Bannockburn police. “This was just a prank by someone who was very unhappy and it got out of control. There was no weapon and no one was ever in any real danger.” John Tierney keeps up the good work, with this excellent column comparing the Chilean approach to social-security reform to that of the US. I've had a lot to say about Saudi Arabia, and about the Bush administration's Adventures in Mideast Democracy.
Well, in Episode #2,345 of this Quixotic Political Saga, the Saudi royal family, which has been a trusted US "ally," "has been under pressure from Washington to engage in political reform at a time of social tension and a two-year campaign against the state by militants associated with al-Qaeda." Today, the news tells us:
Of course, the regime itself will pick "roughly half" of 1,200 councillors, which might "dilute" the power of Islamicists. Not that the Saudi regime is all that liberal by comparison. After all, this election news comes on the heels of another news story that the Saudis had detained 40 Pakistani Christians who were caught "attending a service in Riyadh" in a private home. The police also found (horrors!!) "Christian tapes and books." Since one cannot practice any religion other than Islam in Saudi Arabia, this is a crime, in case you were wondering.
I get exhausted pointing out the obvious. This is a regime that is allegedly a "friend" of the United States government. Let's put aside the prospects for democracy among "unfriendly" regimes. Of what use is procedural "democracy" when a "friendly" regime schools its citizens in a fanatical ideology of intolerance, when it marginalizes and criminalizes women, non-Muslims, and freedom itself? Of what use is "democracy" when the dominant culture would bring about a political condition that might make the current Saudi regime appear "moderate" by comparison?
Cross-posted to Notablog. On March 25, 1821 the Greeks declared themselves free of Ottoman rule. War ensued. On May 11, 1832 Greece was finally recognized as a sovereign state and this state of affairs was formally recognized by the Turks and the European powers with the signing of the Treaty of Constantinople in July 1832. Go here for an account of the Greek War of Independence.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subsequently witnessed the gradual withdrawal of the Ottoman empire from Europe as various Balkan states sought and achieved independence from Ottoman rule. In the First World War the Ottoman empire was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Following military defeat in 1918 these three empires vanished from the face of the earth and a multitude of successor states arose. Most of the Ottoman empire in western Asia was divided into territories that became League of Nations mandates under British or French rule. In 1923 the Republic of Turkey was founded, in some sense the heir of the Ottoman empire. Today Turkey seeks membership of the European Union. Although the events of the First World War and its aftermath now seem very distant, they cannot be so easily forgotten for they continue to have a profound impact on our lives.
Today, Monday, April 25, marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. The Gallipoli campaign, a futile eight-month effort to capture Constantinople and so enable French and British forces to join the Russians in the war against Austria-Hungary and Turkey, cost the lives of more than 100,000 Allied and Turkish soldiers with another quarter of a million wounded. Australian casualties were 8,000 dead and another 18,000 wounded, and New Zealand casualties were 7,500. Australian and New Zealand nationalists regard the Gallipoli campaign as the coming of age of their respective states. The irony is that they were actually fighting for the British empire. For more on Gallipoli see here and here. And let us not forget Peter Weir’s fine movie Gallipoli (1981) starring the young Mel Gibson.
On Sunday April 17, the Biloxi Sun Herald ran a lengthy
interview with Senator Trent Lott on his "economic development" activities in Mississippi. What Senator Lott presents as economic development activity, others would see as pork barrel politics and the dispensation of privileges to the politically connected -- and there's plenty in the interview to support such interpretations. For instance, references to defense contractors that operate in Mississippi (particularly, to shipyards on the Gulf Coast) are sprinkled throughout the interview. One relatively brief passage, however, is especially pertinent to those of us who have been following the USM saga. In it, Lott describes the Congressional appropriations he has secured for universities in the Mississippi state system:
Chancellor Khayat at Ole Miss hasn't taken Federal subsidies to the physical acoustics program as a signal to tear down the English program or run off the senior professors in Psychology. President Lee at Miss State hasn't seen any need to shut down the Math department or bring the ax down on the Business school so his university's technology programs will shine forth with greater glory.
But at the University of Southern Mississippi, Shelby Freland Thames has interpreted special appropriations for Polymer Science and Economic Development as commands to ruin Nursing, deaccredit Business, gut the Honors program, underfund Math till it collapses, run off 1/3 of the English faculty, and take periodic whacks at everything else.
While I would imagine that Trent Lott's understanding of universities is rather limited, I very much doubt that either he or anyone on his staff expected Thames to take a wrecking ball to the rest of USM. I doubt, too, that anyone in Lott's office thought that demolishing most of USM would help draw high-tech industry to the southern third of Mississippi. Somebody forgot to tell Shelby Thames. D'oh!!! News is breaking in the case of Hussein S. Hussein,
an Associate Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Nevada Reno. Updated
Alicia Hardin, 19, of Dolton, confessed Monday to members of a task force investigating the matter that she mailed the three letters.
Tierney on a roll
Monday, April 25, 2005
Democracy and Saudi Arabia
Candidates on an alleged "golden list" backed by religious clerics have swept the final round of Saudi Arabia's first nationwide municipal elections. Islamist candidates won all the municipal council seats contested in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They also fared well in northern towns as well as the comparatively liberal port of Jeddah, according to results released on Saturday. Women were barred from the polls, which were presented as a step towards more popular participation in public life.
There's No Escaping the Ottoman Empire--Part 1
Sunday, April 24, 2005
USM: You Mean I Wasn't Supposed to Kill the Rest of the University?
One of the things I've worked on over the years - and I've talked about it
and a lot of people didn't quite see it at first - but I tried to find niches
at our universities, which I could support with federal funds, federal grants
that were unique programs at those universities, which could then relate to the
creation of jobs.
At the University of Southern Mississippi it's the polymer science center
(and) the center for economic development and entrepreneurship; it's the
technology programs at Mississippi State University; it's the physics
acoustics program at Ole Miss and now with shipbuilding and with Northrop Grumman
looking to polymers or composites for hulls of the future, University of Southern
Mississippi is perfectly situated to collaborate.
Some Really Nasty Administrative Behavior at the University of Nevada Reno
A story picked up and given wide circulation by the Associated Press suggests that Hussein has been targeted by the administration at Nevada-Reno for whistleblowing. An earlier AP story, dated April 20,
includes further details.
Among the ingredients of this witches' brew are a bogus tip from the university police to the FBI that Hussein, a native of Egypt, was involved in terrorism; a Kafkaesque application of hate crime legislation (to punish the victim of the alleged hate crime); and what looks like major abuse of the university's Federally mandated committee for reviewing animal research studies.
I'm actually surprised that more university administrations aren't manipulating Animal Research Committees (or Institutional Review Boards, their counterparts for research with human subjects) in order to get even with researchers whose statements or actions have displeased them. But then, I don't want to give anyone any ideas. At least Nevada-Reno's administration failed to convince a hearing panel that there was anything to its trumped-up charges of violations of animal research rules.
All indications are that this one is going to get much uglier before it's over.
(A hat tip to Jameela Lares at the AAUP-USM
message board.)
Does Neuroscience Negate Personhood?
"Should we ditch the concept of personal responsibility and construct the therapeutic state?," asked Michael Shapiro, a University of Southern California law professor.
Shapiro posed the question during a panel discussion devoted to "Responsibility and the Law," on the second day of the Our Brains and Us conference at MIT. Do any of the findings of contemporary neuroscience force us to ditch the concept of personal responsibility? Shapiro argued they don't. Why? Because we already knew that we are embedded in a network of physical causes from which our behavior arises. Neuroscience may give us a better understanding of the physical bases of causes in our brains, but it does not change the fact that our behavior has always been caused.
Those are the opening paragraphs from a new article, "Prozac Justice: Does Neuroscience Require a Therapeutic State?" by Ron Bailey, now on the Reason magazine website. It is sure to excite some comment from those of us who believe in free will and personal responsibility.
Bailey ends up expressing concern about a world where crime is regarded as a sign of illness rather than wrong-doing, and he rightly abhors the possibility of "prospective intervention" and indeterminate "therapy." But the article is plagued by a misunderstanding of free will, leading to the topsy-turvy view that while determinism would not negate moral responsibility, freedom of the will, if it existed, would. Thus:
Shapiro recognized that many people naively believe that free will, and thus personal responsibility and moral culpability, depends on the notion that people are somehow uncaused causers. But can someone really be held responsible in such a contra-causal world? Not really. As psychologist and philosopher William James put it: "If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible?"
What's a contra-causal world? Free will does not mean actions are uncaused. It means they are caused by persons. The popular notion that persons can be reduced to mechanistic neurological processes is self-refuting—if true, its advocates are uttering not words but meaningless sounds. The "causes" of actions, Thomas Szasz reminds us, are called reasons. But those cannot be reduced to brain activity, however much they may depend on it.
Shapiro and Bailey surely can do better than James's straw-man argument—although not much better. The fact is, the free-will proposition is a self-evident axiom. One must tacitly acknowledge it even in trying to refute it.
Hat tip: Jeff Schaler
Cross-posted at The Szasz Blog.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
USM: Wheels Are Coming off the Thames Machine
Last Friday, April 15, I had the honor and the pleasure to visit the University of Southern Mississippi campus, where I gave two talks to members of the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors. I'm particularly indebted to Amy Young, the President of the USM chapter of AAUP, as well as to Michael Forster, Mark Klinedinst, and Myron Henry for being my hosts during different portions of my stay. I got the chance to meet many other USM faculty members who have been working to rescue USM from the misrule of President Shelby F. Thames, as well as some sympathizers from the surrounding community. I ate lunch and drank coffee at Javawerks, known in Hattiesburg as the "center of the resistance." I was given a handsome plaque by the AAUP chapter, which I will display in a prominent place--while remaining fully cognizant that the other two recipients of the same award, Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer, ran major personal risks standing up to the Thames regime.
The faculty members I talked to, far from being the lazy whiners of pro-Thamesian apologetics, struck me as tired but determined. They were bearing all the responsibilities that professors normally bear when the Spring Semester is about to end. Many were close to buckling under 3 years' worth of administratively neglected reports and committee work for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits USM and has put the university on probation. The struggle to rid the university of Thames and his henchcrew has called forth whatever might be left in the reserve tank after they've attended to their primary responsibilities.
I wasn't there to rouse resistance against Thames by reminding everyone of the worst things he has done. I've done some of that in the past, and the audience scarcely needed reminding. Besides, a powerful three-minute video, apparently by the pseudonymous satirist See More, was played before both talks; it movingly (and sometimes hilariously) set images from the Thames era to "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones. My talks were about the faculty's role in running the university (known as "shared governance" in academic circles). I'll get to the substance of them in a later post. Instead of focusing exclusively on the ways in which Thames and crew have undermined shared governance, I also talked about some areas, such as financial reporting, that faculty members have traditionally conceded to administrators, but that I thought USM professors would be well advised to pay attention to in a post-Thamesian era.
Confidence is slowly growing that there will actually be a post-Thamesian era. I wish I could say that Shelby Thames is no longer enthroned at USM. Or at least that lame-duckitude has descended upon him. For in that case everyone could get to work neutralizing what's left of his power to do harm, while counting the days till his contract expires in March of next year. But the monthly meeting of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees came and went largely as predicted. The communiqué that the Board issued after its meeting on Thursday April 21 indicated further movement toward a strong-commissioner model for the 8 univerisities in the Mississippi state system, while voting on the key components of the new system still won't take place for another month:
The Board also heard a subcommittee recommendation on annual performance goals to be used in evaluating universities and institutional executive officers. The goals, which will vary from institution to institution in order to take into account differences in universities’ missions, will be considered in final form in the May Board meeting. In addition, the College Board began considering a measure which would require annual evaluation of the institutional executive officers.
So May 19, when Thames opponent Virginia Shanteau Newton takes over as Board President from Thames cheerleader Roy Klumb, is the earliest that the Board can formally evaluate Thames' performance and decide whether his 4-year contract will be allowed to expire.
Action against Thames can still not be marked down as a done deal. Everything remains in the hands of an IHL Board that still has no formal channels of communication with professors or faculty bodies, and has made a whole series of incredibly irresponsible, high-handed decisions in his particular case. But the Board, seeking to recover from its biggest spate of bad press since the Civil Rights era, keeps grinding glacially toward internal reform, and desperation is rippling through Thames' supporters. This week, Shelby Thames lost a key component of his machine, and another has been discredited.
Yesterday, after months of rumors kept alive by her much diminished visibility in media stories about USM, the announcement came that Lisa Slay Mader is leaving the university on May 2.
Lisa Mader, who has served as spokeswoman for University of Southern Mississippi president Shelby Thames for more than two years, is leaving the university to join Wesley Medical Center, the hospital announced Friday.
The American even noted that she was Shelby Thames' private spokeswoman who only pretended to speak for the entire university.
Mader has ended up being loathed by just about everyone at the university, including those who doubt that she played any role in the decision-making. As noted in Reuben Mees' article, in today's Hattiesburg American:
Political science professor Joe Parker said Mader had a difficult role to fill in recent years and was not often well-liked by the faculty.
"I think she has been a spear-carrier for Shelby Thames and she collected a certain amount of hostility from the faculty," he said.
But he also said some of the tension could have been avoided by varying her approach to the issues.
"Her PR style is more political and more attack-oriented and it really showed up in the Glamser-Stringer incident, when she alluded to criminal charges and tried to put the faculty on the defensive," Parker said, referring to Thames' attempt to fire two tenured professors last year. "It really made her look more like a political flack than a public relations person."
Her move to Wesley Hospital, another Hattiesburg institution that is less prominent locally than the university, smacks more than a little of desperation. She will have to rebuild her credibility with the local media, all the way up from zero. Many observers had thought that she would prefer a job in a different part of Mississippi, if not in another state where her notoriety would be less likely to follow her.
Thames evidently feels some urgency about hiring a new spokesperson:
"But now we need to find an extremely competent person to replace her," Thames said. "We'll start meeting next week and then start advertising to find a top flight PR person."
But why would anyone want to step into that job, while Thames is still president but his days appear numbered? Failing to toe the Thamesian line will get the new PR person fired instantly. Toeing it faithfully it will insure that the PR person will be replaced as soon as Thames' successor arrives. There is a good chance that Mader's former position will lie vacant till next March.
The second wheel to fall off this week is a prominent Thames supporter who currently serves as the President of the USM Foundation. He has not resigned, but has discredited himself so badly that Thames would probably be better off without him. His is the kind of story, however, that deserves to be told in baroque and lurid detail; it would take up several installments of a soap opera, and deserves at least an entire Liberty and Power entry to itself.
To be continued.
Happy 85th, Thomas Szasz!
April 15 was Thomas Szasz's 85th birthday. The Reason Foundation held a small dinner celebration in Washington, D.C., which I was honored to participate in. My remarks are here. You'll see that I highlight key elements of Szasz's work and explore why most libertarians fail to appreciate it. I also touch on the parallel between his work and Austrian economics. Other remarks and photos are here.
Tierney on science and neo-puritanism
I was delighted to learn a couple weeks ago that John Tierney would become the new NY Times op-ed columnist. Today's column is a great example. I apologize for using the reg-required link; I can't do the magic blog-friendly linking trick from my home computer. On Monday, I'll update this blog entry to include the non-reg link, but NYT reg is free, and many readers may already be registered, so go read this.
UPDATE - as promised, here is the blog-friendly no-reg link.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Grand Valley State Grovel Watch
The College Republicans at Grand Valley State University in Michigan are still degrading themselves. They are doing their best to appease the administration and show that they are sorry, yes truly sorry, for holding an affirmative action bake sale. Naturally, the GVSU administration has not hesitated to make the most of the situation by twisting the knife. It has put the chapter on probation and required a public apology. One administrator piously proclaims that the controversy provides a "learning opportunity" to "educate" the benighted.
The only bright spot in this sad affair is the admirable behavior of Kyle Rausch, the ex-head of the chapter. He has continued to stand up for campus free speech against the combined forces of GVSU's administration, timid College Republicans on campus, a cringing faculty advisor, and the Ottawa County Republican party. Says Rausch, “I no longer consider myself part of an organization which is so willing to apologize for their opinions.”
Here's a letter that I sent this Earth Day to the Christian Science Monitor:
Don Kates, the author of many books on gun control and the history of gun rights and gun control, passed along these recollections from a friend who was a Vietnam war vet. They concern two very different activists against the Vietnam War: Jane Fonda and Joan Baez:
For those who don't quite understand, being in favor of one side over another in a war is not "anti-war" activity. To the contrary! The articles about her and her "apology" (for choosing the wrong vehicle of publicity, not for her position in favor of the enemy) should not continue repeating the canard that she engaged in "anti-war activities" when she so clearly sided with a party to a war: North Vietnam. She absolutely refuses to acknowledge that she wasn't just a part of the anti-war or pacifist fringe in the United States at the time, but was in fact a true believer and supporter of North Vietnam during its war with the United States.
By contrast, look at the trip to Hanoi that famous folk singer Joan Baez, with Brigadier General Teleford Taylor (well-known Nuremberg war prosecutor) made just two and one half months after Jane Fonda's notorious propaganda visit. Ms. Baez and Gen Tayor were trapped in Hanoi during the entire "Linebacker II" Christmas bombing raids over and around that city--in which I again was heavily involved. Ms Baez made no bones about her pacifist beliefs and her hatred of wars. Yet, even after suffering through some of the most intense bombing raids of the entire Vietnam War, when asked by her hosts/watchers to make anti-US statements, she stuck to her beliefs, saying she hated all war by all sides, no matter what.
We fighting men heard Baez's statements as soon as they were made. Somehow, we ignorant warriors were sophisticated enough to recognize the difference between Baez's anti-war statements and Fonda's open promotion of North Vietnamese victory--an apparently too-subtle distinction that has escaped the press even today. Most of us respected Baez's view, even if we differed with it--and acknowledged her right as an American to express that view even during a war. I was able to talk personally to Ms Baez about that several years later; she was pleased that we warriors certainly understood her point. From the Associated Press:
Cleaned by Capitalism
22 April 2005
Editor, The Christian Science Monitor
Dear Editor:
Clay Bennett’s Earth Day cartoon shows scissors (labeled “White House”) recklessly slicing through environmental statutes. Without here questioning the merits of the statutes or the reality of the slicing, I plead for protection of a most endangered resource: perspective. Pause for a moment to appreciate just how clean and safe our everyday environments are compared to those of our ancestors.
- Refrigeration keeps our food free of bacterial pollution;
- indoor plumbing immediately whisks away our own waste;
- household detergents clean our homes of germs and grime;
- automobiles keep our streets clean of horse manure and the swarms of flies it attracts;
- antibiotics and other medicines protect our bodies from many diseases, such as tuberculosis, that were major killers just a century ago.
In fact, our everyday lives are more sanitary and healthier today than at any time in history.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
Enterprise Hall
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Joan Baez v. Jane Fonda
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Actresses Oppose Compulsory "Treatment" for Children
Actresses Kirstie Alley and Kelly Preston pleaded with [Florida] lawmakers Tuesday to prohibit schools from denying services to students who won't take mood-altering drugs to treat mental disorders.
Alley sobbed as she told members of the House Education Council the stories of children who committed suicide or died after taking psychotropic drugs....
Children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can be eligible for special education programs for students with disabilities, including curriculum adjustments, alternative classrooms and increased parent and teacher involvement. The bill would prohibit schools receiving state money to deny those services if those students don't take prescribed drugs to treat the condition.
Alley's pleas, though, came after the committee stripped language from the bill that would have required schools to tell parents that there is no medical test to diagnose a mental disorder and that they can refuse a psychological screening for their children.
The committee also removed part of the bill that would have required schools to inform parents that physical conditions may be the cause of mental and behavioral problems, that they should consult with a medical doctor about such problems and that a diagnosed mental disorder will stay on a student's permanent record.
I guess Alley's and Preston's hearts are in the right places, but a more radical plea might have been more forceful. The bill they back would maintain all the "services" for the "diagnosed" children, and therefore the stigma of "mental disorder." The threat to children from the Therapeutic-Education State would continue.
Hat tip: David Beito.
Cross-posted at The Szasz Blog.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Will Muslim Votes Cause Labour to Lose This Safe Seat?
If you’re looking for an interesting article on the British general election, go here. Although this is primarily an account of the fight between Oona King, the Labour incumbent, and George Galloway of Respect to represent Bethnal Green and Bow in the House of Commons, the author also offers insights into national culture and politics. This is the constituency where in 1888 Jack the Ripper stalked his victims. This is the constituency where in 1936 the local Jewish community fought Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. And this is now a constituency where around 55,000 Muslims, mainly Bangladeshis, make up more than half the electorate.
I'm shocked--shocked, I say
A state agency wasting money? Who would have guessed? The only thing to do, I suppose, is to extend the scope of its power and increase its budget.
(Another shock: private agencies are doing it better. Boy these things sure are coming out of left field.)
Thucydides on War
I highly recommend Thomas Cahill’s crystalline little book Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea. Among the many gems you’ll find inside is this quotation from Thucydides; it’s part of the great historian’s reflections on the consequences of the Peloponnesian war.
“Practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state – democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans.... To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.... As a result...there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The plain way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.”
More on Pope Benedict
I'm not a Catholic, so my interest in this stuff is academic in both senses of the word, but I feel like I ought to blog on it anyway.
While I think he's mistaken about gays, I think this is a good message: "One of Cardinal Ratzinger's central, and most misunderstood, notions is his conception of liberty, and he is very jealous in thinking deeply about it, pointing often to Tocqueville. He is a strong foe of socialism, statism and authoritarianism, but he also worries that democracy, despite its great promise, is exceedingly vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority, to "the new soft despotism" of the all-mothering state, and to the common belief that liberty means doing whatever you please. Following Lord Acton and James Madison, Cardinal Ratzinger has written of the need of humans to practice self-government over their passions in private life. He also fears that Europe, especially, is abandoning the search for objective truth and sliding into pure subjectivism. That is how the Nazis arose, he believes, and the Leninists. When all opinions are considered subjective, no moral ground remains for protesting against lies and injustices." (That's from a NYT op-ed by Michael Novak, read the whole thing here.)
All of that is true.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Gun Self-Defense Blog
I recently discovered Clayton Cramer and Pete Drum's "Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog," on which they catalog news stories about defensive gun use around the country. It's full of fun little stories like this one:
Man Fights Back Against Would-Be RobberI found this one a little unsettling, though:A Montgomery man fights back against a would-be robber... and wins.
Police say a deacon from Mount Olive Bapist went to the Normandale Compass Bank to deposit the church's offerings when a man approached him. The man then allegedly knocked the deacon down, took the money and started running away.
The suspect, however, was in for a surprise. The deacon was carrying more than a money bag to the bank... he was carrying a loaded gun. He began firing at the suspect, who slipped, fell to the ground and dropped the cash. When the robber went to retrieve the bag, the deacon threatened to shoot him if he touched it.
The suspect ran away.
Police Look for Victim Turned Shooter in NortheastA would-be carjacking victim in Maryland turned the tables on his alleged attackers by pulling out a gun and shooting them.
The driver shot one teenager in the stomach, and had a bullet graze the face of the other.
Police in Prince George's County believe the carjacking attempt and shooting took place on Route 450. They believe the teens then drove to a Northeast D.C. housing project, where they claimed to have been shot during a robbery.
But investigators soon learned the truth.
Police spokesman Corporal Joe Merkel says both suspects are believed to be 16. A lot less is known about the shooter.
Among the things they want to know is exactly what happened -- and whether the gun is legal.
It seems to me that P.G. County cops--who until recently had the the among the worst records for police brutality and unjustified shootings in the U.S.--have better things to do than pursue a citizen who from all appearances, used a gun justifiably in self-defense.
Pope Benedict, FYI
Here's the scoop: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is the new pope, narrowly edging out my friend Lou, who did toss his hat in the ring, though perhaps too late for anyone to notice.
Minuses: anti-gay-rights
Pluses: likes Beethoven
BTW, when did the MSM stop using the "John Cardinal Doe" arrangement in favor of the "Cardinal John Doe" arrangement?
Futures Market Right on New Pope
Go here for the full story. Yet again futures markets triumph.
Waco, Oklahoma, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic
For the ten-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, and the twelve-year anniversary of the Waco massace, I have an article here about the events and their parallels with foreign policy and 9/11, all in the context of left-right domestic politics. I also have here a short addendum expounding upon one point a bit more.
Warbloggers Agog about Iraqi Poll
For some reason, Powerline is all agog about a survey of over 700 Baghdad residents. It is making the email rounds like greased lightning. In response to a question on if, and when, U.S. troops should leave, they answered:
At once = 12.56%
According to a future timetable= 81.80%
Do not know = 5.64%
John Hinderaker at Powerline were so overjoyed that he led with a headline, "Iraqis Thank U.S." Huh?
I don't understand what is new here. Polls have consistently indicated that the Iraqis want the U.S. want us to leave either now or soon.
In my experience, few opponents of the occupation believe that U.S. troops can, or should, leave "at once." I doubt that is even possible. Most do support a timetable, a position consistently opposed by the Bush administration. Since the first day U.S. troops set foot in Iraq, I have said that we should implement a rapid timetable for withdrawal.
It is noteworthy that the poll did not show any Iraqis who want the U.S. to stay permanently. Perhaps the questions were not asked properly.
It is true that the poll also reports the encouraging news that most of the respondents believe that the security situation has improved since the new government came into office but this result hardly justifies the headline "Iraqis Thank U.S."
Monday, April 18, 2005
Plan 9 From Chicago
The photo of Epstein posted by Gene Healy looks like a still from an Ed Wood movie.
They've Come to Suck the Blood out of the Constitution
I find complaints about media bias increasingly tedious and overworked. But here, in the midst of a generally fair NYT Magazine piece on libertarian constitutionalists, the Times' photog seems to have gone out of his way to make Epstein, Greve, and Mellor look like Johnny Cash in that "I'm-Almost-Dead" video he did right before he died. I've met all three of these guys, worked briefly for one of them, and had another as a professor. I can assure you that none of them have the zombie-like pallor the Times Magazine gives them. In fact, all three are very lively, happy guys. But the photos appear designed to confirm a cartoonish preconception that anti-government intellectuals are humorless, sinister prigs. Subtle.
Betting on the Next Pope
You don’t have to be a cardinal to participate in this election. Go here to find out more. And go here to wager on the outcome of this historic event.
Molinari Society 2005 - Call for Abstracts
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
The Molinari Society will be hosting its second symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, December 27-30, 2005. We plan a two-hour session, with two papers, and hereby solicit abstracts on the general topic of "Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin." Papers should address the general question of whether libertarianism should be thick or thin ("thin" libertarianism is libertarianism understood as a narrowly political doctrine, while "thick" libertarianism is libertarianism understood as essentially integrated into some broader set of social or cultural values) and may (but need not) also address the connection between libertarianism and some specific position or set of positions (environmentalism, left-anarchism, Aristotelianism, feminism, egalitarianism, Christianity, secular humanism, the labor movement, etc.).
Send abstracts to Roderick T. Long at:
BerserkRL@gmail.com
(Those interested in being a commentator at the session should do likewise.)
Deadline for receiving abstracts: 5 May 2005
Notification of acceptance / rejection: 15 May 2005
Accepted papers due: 1 November 2005
Benj. R. Tucker
Following the military defeat of the Southern Jeffersonians in the Civil War and the war reparations placed upon their property and livelihood, the American political world was left to the Hamiltonians for a generation. There were few options left. Jeffersonians in the North were tagged as Copperheads and rebel sympathizers. Southern Jeffersonians were disenfranchised in more ways than one. Tariff increases initiated by the Republican Party sent long-time Jeffersonian strongholds into bankruptcy. Many would later attempt to rebuild the lost economy of the South with the few scraps left by the carpetbaggers of the North; others left for the West in the hopes of finding better opportunities. The power gained by the Republicans was to give political control of the South and most of the other states within the Union to the G.O.P. With this free hand, there was little opposition to the special grants and privileges which were sought by their supporters and interests.
The next political battle Jeffersonians were to undertake was against the Tariff. This effort energized a new generation of Jeffersonians. Tariffs, by the late 1870's not only eliminated the federal debt but filled the coffers of the federal government with a surplus unheard of by any of the previous administrations. Indeed, it was an embarrassing surplus with little reason to exist. There were interest groups fighting over control of this surplus, including railroad interests, Northern banking interests and ex-soldiers and soldier wives' pension demands.
Much of the later American designs in the Pacific and elsewhere were a consequence of this surplus as Republicans fought to gain additional territory through military occupation and continued increasing control over lands reserved for Indians. Imperial designs were made upon Spanish claims.
As the Republicans understood, tariffs are a natural income for a nationalist state. It places control at the border as to what products may or may not enter. It is only a national state dominated by special interests which inherently benefits from these taxes. What is the proper revenue for local needs and focuses on benefits accrued from individuals within states and local jurisdictions for a republican state allied with other republican states in a federal system? Of necessity, it must be a form which, if not a voluntary payment, is of a nature which is controlled by the polity closest to the individual, wherein choices are made on the smallest level possible. Tariffs were certainly not the answer
The growing Free Trade Movement sought an end to the tariffs and corruption in state and federal governments by every means available to them, leading to several outcomes. The first and most important was the rise of the Democratic Party with Grover Cleveland at its helm. The next most important were the rise of the "Mugwumps" within the Republican party. For many Jeffersonian radicals, neither went far enough or sufficiently effective in their efforts and looked for alternatives.
The first major movement of the radical Jeffersonians evolved from the insights of a young journalist and firebrand, Henry George. With the publication of Progress and Poverty, as well as number of other books, pamphlets, essays and articles, a new movement arose with ideas for a dynamic capitalist free society, the single tax movement. The idea of limiting all government to a single tax based upon land value was debated across dinner tables and lecture halls throughout the country. It would preserve the Jeffersonian ideal by its primary emphasis upon providing income for cities and local communities (as land taxes have always done) and little for the higher levels (state and federal) save for what would accrue for a frugal government willing to provide for state and national concerns. This paleolibertarian notion was the direction of political activism for radical libertarians for generations.
Following the Civil War came a growing preoccupation with public corruption, beginning to overshadow concerns among reformers with Reconstruction itself. Their enthusiasm for the Republican party began to evaporate during Grant's administration. Tucker described his only sojourn into politics in The Life of Benjamin Tucker, Disclosed by Himself, In the Principality of Monaco, At the Age of 74:
"Four years of Grant and corruption had disgusted me with the Republican party, and the chance of seeing an honest man in the White House in the person of Horace Greeley, whom I had so long admired, made me eager for the fray. In Theodore Tilton's …establishment of his new paper, The Golden Age, I found an immediate opportunity for participation, as Tilton, in his youth a Tribune reporter under Greeley, had espoused the cause of his old employer, and was devoting both pen and tongue to his election. …I had still a few weeks in New Bedford, and it occurred to me that a part of that time might well be devoted to a canvass for subscriptions to The Golden Age. Less than a week's work in the city resulted in a list of respectable propositions, -- about thirty names, I believe, -- and without previous consultation with the management of the paper, I dispatched both the addresses and the money…, they rose promptly to the occasion. Straightway came a letter … urgently inviting me to take the agency for the entire State of Massachusetts. My refusal [was] based on the ground that I was soon to accompany my parents to Vermont…However, even in hopelessly Republican Vermont, I had one opportunity, while at Bellows Fall, to lift my feeble voice in the good cause..."
The stagnation of party politics in the mire of narrow partisanship and repeated scandals during the "Great Barbecue" of the Gilded Age cleared the way. The abolitionist, freethinker and father of the mutual insurance industry, Elizur Wright, spoke to black voters in the 1872 election that the Party of Lincoln had only freed the slaves as a wartime "expedient…It is you[r] obvious policy not to wed yourselves for better or worse to either party…but to go for that which best deserves and most needs your help…The great question now before the Republican party, and all the rest of us is whether after our bloody cutting out of cancer [slavery], we are to rot by the cancer of our corruption." While he supported Grant's troops ordered to combat the KKK, he would later say, "What is the use of keeping people's throats from being cut, if they are to be perpetually robbed?" (p. 180-81).
By July 4, 1876, Wright would found, with other former abolitionists (such as Moses Harmon), the National Liberal League which supported black emancipation, women's rights, but above all they identified themselves as individualists threatened by the imposition of state-enforced Christian dogma: "The platform of the coming millions is the individual," as Wright would say (p. 182). The League's stress was upon personal rights, civil liberties and freedom of thought. Anthony Comstock's crusade against vice and obscenity was to become their most noted battle front, with Ezra Heywood, who was arrested for the publication of his essay, Cupid's Yoke. D.M. Bennett, editor of freethought periodical, The Truthseeker, was also arrested by Comstock for mailing a copy of Cupid's Yoke through the U.S. Postal Service.
Ezra Heywood, an elderly abolitionist and opponent of the Civil War (he had opposed the violent methods used by Lincoln as well as that of the Confederate States of America), was highly regarded as a "gentle anarchist" who was fighting a battle for freedom of information, and the rights of consenting adults to their own personal relationships. An ardent feminist as well (and married to a strident feminist, Angela Heywood), he believed that men had reduced women to such socioeconomic dependence that, in order to live, women were forced to chose between selling their labor for next to nothing or selling their bodies into unwanted unions. This Heywood believed to be an insufferable injustice and devoted his writings to free love as a form of freedom from another type of slavery, as he explained in Uncivil Liberty as well as in Cupid's Yoke.
Here is the point where the subject of this article comes in, for he meets Ezra Heywood in 1873 at the National Free-Love Convention held in Ravenna, Ohio. Benjamin Tucker, who had become one of the controversial feminist Victoria Woodhull's "boy-toy" at the age of 19. As a long-time friend, J. William Lloyd would describe Tucker as a:
"well-groomed, fashionably dressed, with a neatly trimmed dark beard (beards were fashionable then), a swarthy complexion, flashing black eyes, a frequent if perhaps slightly nervous laugh, and a charmingly genial manner, which I never knew him to lose… Handsome, a brilliant translator, an editor of meticulous care and finish, a trenchant reasoner, with a faith and enthusiasm for his "ism" that had no bounds, he was like a strong current that swept us along… Tucker's manner of writing was what chiefly attracted attention to him. No more fiery and furious apostle ever put pen to paper. A veritable baresark of dialectics. He was dogmatic to the extreme, arrogantly positive, browbeating and dominating, true to his "plumb-line" no matter who was slain, and brooked no difference, contradiction or denial. Biting sarcasm, caustic contempt, invective that was sometimes almost actual insult, were poured out on any who dared criticize or oppose… this swashbuckler, on paper, when you met him in person, was the most genial, affable, and charming gentlemen that you could possibly imagine, kind, gentle and always smiling. I discounted this as toward myself but I could not learn that anyone had ever had a hard spoken word from him, and I have never to this day heard of one who had. Face to face this tiger was a dove."
Benjamin R. Tucker was to become America's greatest expositor of the philosophy of "unterrified Jeffersonianism" (as he called it), most commonly known as anarchism. Child of a Quaker father. a Jeffersonian Democrat and Painite Unitarian mother activist, both of old Yankee stock, he grew up as a child reading Darwin, Spencer, Buckle, Huxley and Tyndall, and listened to speeches by such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Carl Shurz and Charles Bradlaugh. When he moved in 1872 to Boston to study at MIT, he would meet and become friends with other American radicals like Josiah Warren, William B. Greene, Stephen Pearl Andrews and, of course, Ezra Heywood. As a matter of course while beginning his career as a journalist, mainly with the Boston Globe, he would work with journalists, many sympathetic with his views, and become familiar with other writers who would come into his circle of friends as he began publishing, editing and writing in the radical press of this time.
In 1892 in "Why I am an Anarchist" in The Twentieth Century, a New York weekly edited by Hugh O. Pentecost, Tucker said that anarchy is
"the realization of liberty. Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labour will rise at a level with its product. And it is the same with the other monopolies. Abolish the tariffs, issue no patents, take down the bars from unoccupied land, and labour will straightaway rush in and take possession of its own. Then mankind will live in freedom and in comfort. That is what I want to see; that is what I love to think of. And because Anarchism will give this state of things, I am an Anarchist." (reprinted in Man! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commmentaries edited by Marcus Graham, London: Cienfuegos Press, 1976. p. 136)
Tucker's beliefs were set down in the first issue of Liberty in August 1881:
"Liberty insists on the sovereignty of the individual and the just reward of labor; on the abolition of the State and the abolition of usury; on no more government of man by man, and no more exploitation of man by man; on Anarchy and Equity.-Liberty's war-cry is 'Down with authority' and its chief battle with the State-the State that corrupts children; the state that trammels law; the State that stifles thought; the State that monopolizes land; the State that give idle capital the power to increase, and through interest, rent, profit and taxes robs industrious labor of its products."
Tucker is best known as the author of Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One and Individual Liberty, both collections of essays culled mainly from Radical Review (1877-1878-indexed here) and Liberty (1881-1908-indexed here). Tucker's free-wheeling, laissez-faire, free market anarchism tinged with free love, Stirnerism with a good dose of humor, was analyzed, criticized, commended and blackballed, but it could not be ignored. His periodicals included discussion, propaganda, literary writings of note, debates, essays. The periodicals were brilliantly edited, typed in the best formats of its day, with beautiful artwork and photos. It would be in his periodicals that libertarians would know what is available and what were the issues were being debated.
A generation of radicals grew up reading his periodicals, books and essays in America, Europe and elsewhere. His staff of associates and writers were the best that liberty produced. He popularized Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and printed G.B. Shaw prior to any other American publisher. When Liberty stopped publishing in 1908 when Tucker's bookstore burned down, he would continue to write and communicate with others until his death in Monaco.
His impact was considerable, both within his own generation, and to the generations of libertarians that have come afterward as Rudolf Rocker points out in Pioneers of American Freedom (Los Angeles: Rocker Publication Committee, 1949. pp. 118-154)
Sunday, April 17, 2005
JLS 19.1 advenit
The latest issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies -- and the first one to appear under my editorship -- is out. See the contents summary here.
The Lochner Era, the New York Times. and Historical Myths
David E. Bernstein is on a roll. Over at Volokh, he systematically dissects Jeffrey Rosen's piece, "The Unregulated Offensive," which appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Rosen gets it wrong repeatedly in his analysis and description of the era of so-called laissez faire jurisprudence during the early twentieth century and the mythical "Constitution in Exile" movement. This lengthy blog is well-worth reading.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Computer-Generated Gibberish Accepted as Paper for Academic Conference
Some students act like jerks and throw pies (weren't they doing that tired prank way back in the 1980s?). Others pull more creative, and socially productive, stunts. Witness this gem of a story:
In a victory for pranksters at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated
gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a
scientific conference.
Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students
questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a
computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free
grammar," charts and diagrams. Reading Keith Halderman’s insightful post, I can’t seem to get over the fact that so many conservatives these days still believe so much in the drug war, and consider it to be the main weakness of libertarianism. I continue to discuss antibiotics in the free market. The problem runs as follows:
Will this ever happen at the OAH? Perhaps it already has.Friday, April 15, 2005
Drugs, Liberty, and the Right
First of all, the concept of having a free society—without regulations on business, taxation of incomes or sales, protectionist tariffs, gun control laws, government education, government healthcare, subsidies, or violations of basic rights of due process—yet somehow maintaining a “war on drugs” that somehow prevents people from using, manufacturing or distributing certain chemicals to people who want them, is absurd and unimaginable. How can anything close to a libertarian philosophy allow for a State empowered enough to control what people put into their own bodies? It can’t. Conservatives who say libertarianism is fine except the drug issue do not, I believe, truly comprehend the implications of a free society, of individual liberty, of a laissez faire economy. Aside from the ethical and pragmatic problems with drug prohibition, the program is so incompatible with liberty and the free market that they simply could not exist together. There is no such thing as a conservative version of libertarianism that excludes the right to determine what to put in one’s own body. This is why, at the end of the day, most conservatives who say they are libertarians except on the drug issue will reveal all sorts of other qualifications and reservations concerning other areas of civil society, once prodded or questioned enough.
Indeed, as Halderman points out, the Progressives deserve much of the blame for the drug laws. Before the Progressive Era, there were few drug laws and drug problems. There were alcoholics, and the most widely abused drug was probably Laudanum, a beverage of alcohol and opium consumed by middle-class Americans. But even those who drank more than they should have—just like most today who drink more alcohol than they probably should—were still able to function in society and posed no threat to their neighbors, much less "national security."
The first drug laws were on the state level, and pertained mainly to alcohol. In California, Opium became illegal in the late 19th century—mainly as a way to harass Chinese-Americans. It was during the Progressive Era that the federal government passed the first major national drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which forbade heroin and required prescriptions for cocaine and morphine. The culmination of the Progressive Era in domestic policy—the biggest achievement of the Progressives—was probably alcohol prohibition, with the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment. When alcohol prohibition ended, federal bureaucrats like Harry Anslinger were peeved they didn’t have anything to do in the prohibition department, so it wasn’t long before Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1938—which outlawed the drug by making it a tax issue (to have the drug without a tax stamp was illegal, but the tax stamps weren’t printed)—and Franklin Roosevelt signed it. So the first federal marijuana laws were part of the New Deal. The next major federal interventions on the drug issues, such as the creation of drug scheduling and the ban of LSD and other drugs, came during the Great Society.
It is no coincidence that back when America had a much freer market, no Federal Reserve or persistent income tax, no Departments of Education or Health and Human Services, no national price controls, federal gun laws, and all the other things conservatives often claim they do not like, America also had no drug laws of significance. The freedom to control one’s own body was not seen as a federal issue, just as education and welfare weren’t. For the State to expropriate the means of consumption is socialistic, and burdened with all the same moral and practical problems as the worst socialist economic programs.
Furthermore, the Szasz quote Halderman cites relates to an important point about the use of scare language and its impact on discourse and social thinking on drugs. The word “narcotic” has an actual meaning. Narcotics are analgesics and depressants that bring about a state of narcosis—sleep. Marijuana is not a narcotic. Cocaine is not a narcotic. Just like the liberals who talk about “assault weapons,” usually with little understanding of firearms, distinctions between them and the subtleties of language, conservatives talk about “designer drugs” and “narcotics” without having a clue, most the time, what they’re yapping about.
Yes, drugs can be very harmful. So can automobiles, cigarettes and high-fat diets—all of which kill more Americans every year than all illegal drugs combined. Back in the early 20th century—before the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, or the regulatory-welfare state—anyone could walk into a drug store and buy cocaine or heroin. “Heroin” itself was a brand name trademarked by the company that produced it, Bayer. If heroin were legal now, it would probably be used in hospitals in many cases instead of morphine, since it has the same analgesic effects but is more potent, and thus has fewer side effects. Indeed, if we had a true free market in drugs, do conservatives really worry that everyone would start doing heroin all the time? Do they worry about crack—a version of cocaine that became popularized because the drug war made it a less risky and expensive method to distribute higher potency cocaine? Do they worry about powder cocaine—which really took off when the feds were somewhat successful in preventing the proliferation of marijuana and banned coca leaves? In a free market in drugs, people will seek drugs as they do now, but such considerations as safety and fewer side effects will become increasingly important. People will be more selective. If they legalized all the drugs, perhaps marijuana use would go up for a short time, but, just like alcohol use after alcohol prohibition, it would probably go back down. The “harder” drugs would probably not become that much more popular, and I would bet that fewer people would huff paint.
And even if drug use went up somewhat, the drug war is still not worth it. The war on politically incorrect molecules and plants must end, and soon, for its costs are far too high and its benefits dubious.
To believe in the drug war is simply to believe that freedom and the free market are dysfunctional, that consumption is an appropriate thing to nationalize, that it is morally permissible to lock people in cages for personal choices. It’s very hard for me to understand how people can be wrong on this issue but right on most others. And, as I said before, most people who are wrong on the drug issue are wrong on many other issues.
Finally, how can conservatives still think the drug war is working, or that it is doing more good than bad? Hundreds of thousands of non-violent people behind bars at the cost of fifty-or-so-thousand dollars each per year, the systematic destruction of the Bill of Rights, the acceleration of violent crime, a perverse foreign policy of spraying Latin Americans’ crops with poison and propping up their “anti-drug” dictators —are these things still considered worth it, just so “we” don’t “send the wrong message” by re-legalizing drugs? And, I know it has been said over and over, but do these people want to outlaw alcohol again? I know some of them actually do.
Antibiotics Revisited
Antibiotics stay useful only so long as they are not overused or stopped too early. Either one brings the spread of resistant bacteria. In a libertarian property rights regime, where drugs were in principle freely available to any who wanted them, what, if anything, would prevent the quick overuse of antibiotics, meaning a loss to both the drug companies who develop them and the consumers who want to take them only when they are genuinely sick?
I've offered a number of solutions and responded to the feedback from my earlier post. Further discussion is welcome, as I really am just discovering these questions myself.
Tenured Professor Fired (Black Conservative)
The National Association of Scholars has issued a news release calling for protests against the dismissal of Professor Jean R. Cobbs, a tenured professor of Sociology at Virginia State University (VSU). Cobbs has worked at VSU for thirty-three years and is a former department chair. Based on the available evidence, it seems that her only offense is that she is a black conservative in a politically correct department.
For more background on the case, see here . For information on who (and where) to call and write at VSU, see here. After reading Robert Locke’s essay “Libertarianism: The Marxism of the Right” which is linked to in Gene Healy’s perceptive post directly below my first thought was now there is somebody who really does not know very much about the true nature of the state.
Locke puts forth an abundance of nonsense but I want to deal with one particular passage.
He writes; “Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen.” Now, if you equate historical fact with empirical proof then his last sentence here is dead wrong.
During the latter half of the 19th century there was an almost total absence of laws prohibiting or regulating the use of drugs. Opium and its derivative morphine were widely available in many forms to anyone who cared to use them. Yet, when the New York Times index is searched for opium you see a story in its first year, 1852, that would have to be considered favorable to the drug and then that word is not seen again until 1875. For twenty-three years the use of opium did not cause enough of a problem for even one story to be written about it in the nation’s paper of record.
In “The Mythical Roots of U.S. Drug Policy: Soldiers Disease and Addiction in the Civil War“ author Jerry Mandel brilliantly demonstrates how supposed concern over and problems caused by drug use in the late 19th century are in reality artifacts of the progressives’ desire to prohibit in the early 20th century.
My favorite Thomas Szasz quote comes from 1974’s Ceremonial Chemistry. Dr. Szasz wrote, “ We seemed to have learned little or nothing from the fact that we had no problems with drugs until we quite literally talked ourselves into having one: we declared first this and then that drug ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’; gave them nasty names like ‘dope’ and ‘narcotic’; and passed laws prohibiting their use. The result: our present ‘problems of drug abuse and drug addiction.’”
The above are an article and a book that I wish Mr. Locke and many other conservatives would read before they take up the subject of drug prohibition again.
It's kinda important.
For some reason, a number of smart people saw something interesting in this extended exercise in straw-man swatting by Robert Locke: "Libertarianism: The Marxism of the Right." It's made up of a bunch of unsupported assertions about libertarianism, written in the sort of exasperated tone you might expect from someone who just spent a long afternoon at the DMV in line behind a proselytizing teenage Randroid.
Now, it's quite possible that Robert Locke knows something about libertarianism that he actually read in a book. But you wouldn't know it from this essay. He's too lazy even to drop a few names of libertarians cherry-picked from the wider pantheon to support his points.
If I decided to write up an extended critique of conservatism, I'd bother to mention some, you know, conservatives. In any event, 40-some years ago, Ralph Raico had a pretty effective pre-response to some of the french ducks Locke trots out.
Here's another example: In Techcentralstation yesterday, neolibertarian Pejman Yousefzadeh threw down the gauntlet to libertarian opponents of the Iraq War, writing:
Thursday, April 14, 2005
The Natural Order of Drug Use
Understanding What You're Criticizing
I hope to see a comprehensive attempt at a rebuttal of realist theory by the libertarian minimalist school. It will take the debate over the intellectual rigor of realism to a whole new level, and it will allow libertarians in general -- and libertarian minimalists in particular -- to find their own voices on foreign policy.
The rebuttal PY hopes for would be an odd thing to see from libertarian "doves," given that they tend to operate within the realist tradition. (For those of you who don't speak IR--I'm just learning meself--here's a decent primer if you can get access to it, and here are definitions to more of the argot than you want to know).
Like the Framers, and in keeping with the earliest traditions of American foreign policy, most libertarian war-skeptics are realists. If you're not clear on this, you might try, say, going to the website of the leading libertarian think tank, typing in "realism" in the search window, and reading the first thing that comes up.
Republicans at GVSU Continue to Grovel
The administration at Grand Valley State University has put the College Republicans on probation for their "discriminatory" affirmative action bake sale. No doubt with the advice of their advisor, Paul Leidig, the GVSU College Republicans, as is their wont, have responded with yet more groveling and more apologies. Meanwhile, Kyle Rausch is refusing to back down:
The College Republicans say they do not plan to appeal.
"I'm hoping that from here, we can just move forward taking what we've learned," said Karen Hall, a 19-year-old sophomore and vice president of the organization.
In a prepared statement, the new leaders of the group explain that "the club did not support holding a bake sale with discounted prices as a parody of affirmative action. However, without proper support, individuals went forward with such a bake sale."
The group also apologized "that individuals using our club's name failed to adhere to university policies."
For background on this controversy, see here.
Hat Tip John Rosenberg at Discriminations.
Our article, "Who's Undermining Free Speech Now" has appeared at Inside Higher Ed. Ok, who exactly are these people voting for Scott Savol? Talentless, inarticulate, and a wife-beater. Please.
Ok, I've just "outed" myself as a viewer of this show. But hey, it speaks to various problems in philosophy, so I can get away with it. Besides, I'm not the only one! But I won't "out" any of the others. They'll have to make that decision for themselves. He's too modest to have mentioned it here, but one of our regular commenters, and all-around good guy Irfan Khawaja has started a blog of his own, eleswhere in the HNN quadrant of the blogosphere. It's called Theory & Practice, and it's blogrolled under "HNN Blogs," top right of this page. Check him out! He's a very sharp philosopher, and a good writer, so I for one am looking forward to his contributions, and the corresponding decline in my own productivity. Dear Sirs,
I read today that you are considering no longer carrying the E channel because of Howard Stern's program. This letter is to let you know that if you drop Howard then I will be dropping you. Both the cable TV and the internet connection. Also, I will do everything I can to encourage other people to make the same decision. I am sick and tired of the censorship in this country, which being driven by a very tiny minority (look at the ratings), and those who cowardly cave into them. If you do not respect my rights as an adult viewer then I will no longer do business with you.
Keith Halderman
John Leo discusses the College Republican affirmative bake sale controversy at Grand Valley State University here: I have a question about antibiotics as a public good over at Positive Liberty. Health policy is not my speciality, so it's likely that someone can set me aright pretty quickly. And no, it has nothing to do with this. A blurb from the University of Alabama’s faculty and staff newspaper, Dialogue: It's tempting to think that the coming age of video surveillance poses insuperable challenges to civil liberties. But sometimes, the cameras are a peaceful protester's best friend. This comes via the New York Times: John R. Lott Jr. and Sonya D. Jones had an excellent column in yesterday’s Washington Times about the furor over the fact that some people on terrorist “watch lists” were able to legally buy guns. They described hearings on renewing the Patriot Act during which two Democratic Senators called for action. The piece told us, “Messrs. Kennedy and Schumer's proposed solution? Simply ban the sale of guns to people law enforcement places on the watch list.”
The authors also pointed out that, “Ironically, the same Mr. Kennedy who wants to rely on "watch lists" was understandably upset last year and publicly complained to the Senate Judiciary committee when he was prevented from flying on an airplane because his name was placed on just such a "watch list." Rules did not allow him to be told at the airport why he was being denied a ticket, but fortunately for him being a U.S. senator meant the problem was eventually resolved with a few telephone calls.”
This OP-ED is raising two very important and disturbing questions. If a United States Senator can be put on a terrorist “watch list”, what then is the criteria for being put on such a list? And, what oversight is there to see that said criteria is followed? If there is a person who lives next door to someone in “law enforcement” and they have a dog who barks too much, does that mean they are going to get stuck at the airport?
I happen to agree with the late and hateful Timothy McVeigh that something profoundly wrong happened back when those people were incinerated at Waco, Texas and that certain people in government, who were not, needed to be held accountable for their conduct during the proceedings surrounding the siege. Even though I consider Bill Clinton’s presidency a fairly successful one, mainly because he really did not do very much, I will also always deem him pond scum because not only did he fail to punish those working for his administration who during the events of Waco committed truly evil acts but he later rewarded them. Does this opinion make me a terrorist?
A few years ago, I spent a lovely spring morning, near Easter, with Carol Moore setting up symbolic graves representing the people attacked and killed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, for organizational propaganda purposes, at Waco. This occurred on the White House Ellipse in front of tens of thousands of people waiting for hours in line to get a cheesy plastic egg and cheap paper bunny ears from their beloved government. There was what I believed to be an FBI agent in the crowd whose absolutely brilliant disguise consisted of a Hard Rock Café jeans jacket and sunglasses. He took about a million photographs of our small group. Because of that day do I now no longer have the right to own a gun or fly on an airplane? I really don’t know because I have not tried to do either in quite some time. If it is the case that my name is on a “watch list“ will I be able to fix it with a few quick phone calls like the senator did?
Literally millions of people have seen and been moved by the award winning film Waco: The Rules of Engagement. Lately it has been playing somewhat often on cable TV. Many of you reading this have probably viewed the movie, does that make you candidates for the administration’s lists?
Until today I was only vaguely aware of the controversy surrounding Joseph Massad, an untenured assistant professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. This lunchtime I read up on the dispute and after some reflection decided to sign the Petition to Professor Lee Bollinger of Columbia University.
To read what Massad has to say, go here. To read one of his recent articles, go here. And for a recent article in the Columbia Spectator, go here. For another, very different, take on the question, go here and here. I encourage readers to peruse these stories and to consider signing the petition. [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Kyle Rausch, the ousted head of the College Republicans at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, has responded to Professor Paul Leidig's comments. Rausch was removed from his position after he organized an affirmative action bake sale. Leidig, his faculty advisor and the chair of the Ottawa County GOP, supported the ouster.
Rausch says, in part:
If anyone has any questions or comments, you can reach me at rauschk@student.gvsu.edu. It would be greatly appreciated if everyone could write a letter to the state and local parties along with the university. Thank you.
For Leidig's comments and more background on the case, see here and here. An article by Ralph E. Luker, K.C. Johnson, and yours truly calling for a campaign to promote academic freedom across-the-board is now up at HNN. We include critiques of both speech codes and the recent campaign in Florida by David Horowitiz to implement an academic bill of rights.
Here is an excerpt: Bettina Bien Greaves has a review of the latest issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (a symposium issue on Rand and the Austrians which includes contributions by L&P-er Steve Horwitz as well as your humble correspondent) on the Mises Institute site.
On Thursday April 7, Richard Crofts, the interim IHL Commissioner, met with the officers of the three most important faculty committees at the University of Southern Mississippi. The purpose of his meeting with the leadership of the Faculty Senate, the Academic Council, and the Graduate Council was to seek comments on the performance of USM's president, Shelby F. Thames. No one is divulging what was said at the meeting, but we can take it to the bank that no one from the USM faculty delegation had anything favorable to say about Thames. Crofts' official statement was distributed at the monthly meeting of the USM Faculty Senate on Friday April 8.
This may not seem like a big deal. Crofts is operating with a traditional "stakeholder" model for public institutions. That means he will be soliciting commentary from a bunch of constituencies, one of them the same local business interests that got Shelby Thames elevated to the throne in the first place. Another constituency is alumni, and the directors of USM's alumni association have been put in place to promote the Thamesian line.
What's more, while it seems unlikely, Crofts could choose to ignore anything he gets from faculty sources. Or a majority of the Board, displeased that he has been listening to faculty complaints, might still choose to ignore his final recommendation. The fact remains that Crofts' procedure was endorsed on the editorial page of Saturday's Jackson Clarion-Ledger.
In an article in Friday's Clarion-Ledger, covering a meeting of university presidents in the Misssissippi state system that took place on April 6, there were complaints from 2 of the 8:
Meanwhile, Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat and Jackson State University President Ronald Mason Jr. confined their public comments to suggesting tweaks to the list of constituencies. The president who is serving as its poster child has just enough sense remaining to know that he cannot criticize the new presidential review procedure in public. Here was Shelby Thames' response to response to Reuben Mees of the American:
Sure, and Thames was also "very comfortable" with Crofts' decision to "look into" the Black Friday memo...
In the narrow little universe of the Mississippi Institution of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, Crofts' decision to consult faculty leaders while evaluating a president is nonetheless cataclysmic. There has never been any official line of communication from the professors at the universities in the system to the Board. The Board operates as though the only information it would ever need can be obtained from the university presidents or their designated upper administrators. And many other universities' governing boards still avoid communication with the faculty.
At Clemson, the Board of Trustees was prevailed on during the late 1990s to accept a nonvoting faculty representative--but only on condition that the Board select the representative! Clemson professors are now somewhat better informed about what's happening with the Board, but so far the faculty representatives have all been former Faculty Senate presidents with a track record of not confronting the upper administration. In fact, the Senate leadership appeased the administration on several major issues while the faculty representative was still in the proposal stage, for fear that otherwise the Board would torpedo the arrangement. Still, this is a much better system than has prevailed at the 8 state universities in Misssissippi.
Friday's Faculty Senate meeting also brought confirmation that Shelby Thames' enforcer-without-portfolio Ken Malone simply will not appear in front of any faculty body at USM. In the fall, after two months of false promises and excuses, Shelby Thames declared that Malone would not appear in front of the President's Council to explain his role in USM's Economic Development program and the decision to move it out of the College of Business. In the Spring the Senate has sought to question Malone about his decision to close the Continuing Education office in the middle of a semester. Last month, Malone was on the agenda, but ducked out with a purported last-minute schedule conflict. This month, Thames ruled that Malone need not appear because all appearances in front of the Faculty Senate must henceforward be made by Joan Exline, his special assistant in charge of accreditation issues.
Obviously, Malone does not want to say anything to faculty members in front of reporters. (Of course, when word gets around that you called for the public lynching of a senior reporter from the Hattiesburg American, the folks from the media do tend to become hostile.) For this very reason, the Faculty Senate leadership now needs to inform Malone that either he appears at the Senate's next meeting--or a resolution calling for his immediate removal from office will take over his spot on the agenda.
Another significant development at Friday's meeting was a report by Bill Gunther, Professor of Economics and former Dean of the College of Business. The Thames administration has repeatedly asserted that the Spring 2003 reorganization, in which Thames fired 9 academic deans and replaced them with 5, saved USM $1.8 million, which was redirected to the classroom. The alleged savings (which have expanded to $2 million in the retelling, most recently in the newspaper ad paid for by Thames' allies in the local business community) always lacked credibility. Gunther estimates that the actual net savings from replacing 9 deans with 5 at $287K and the additional amount reallocated to teaching at $467K, for a total of $755,000--over $1 million short of the figure trumpeted by Thames. When I am able to obtain the full report, which contains 5 data tables, I will post a further analysis here.
No one in the Thames administration has ever documented the alleged savings from the reorganization. Thames and his PR machine have just repeated an impressive sounding number, and media outlets have kept on printing it. Unfortunately, the media often uncritically print false or misleading information about university finances. Here, however, is a direct public challenge to a false and misleading financial report. I hope the Faculty Senate will follow with a demand that Thames and his Chief Financial Officer, Gregg Lassen, either substantiate the $1.8 million figure in detail, or issue a public apology for lying about the savings from the reorganization. And that if Lassen fails to do either, his very own personalized resolution of no confidence will go on the agenda for the next Senate meeting. Lots could still happen between now and the third week of May, when the Board is expected to evaluate Thames for possible contract renewal. According to the article in Saturday's Hattiesburg American, Crofts is moving with all deliberate speed:
Meanwhile, the Misssissippi state legislature has failed to pass a budget, because it could not agree on cuts to education, so it will have to return for a special session. And without official assurances of lame duckitude for one of the worst university presidents in American history, senior faculty are continuing to hemorrhage out of the University of Southern Misssissippi. Many of you probably read BoingBoing already. If you don't, you should check out the story of sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow's ongoing difficulties with American Airlines, the FAA, the TSA, and some creepy undisclosed "regulations." I've been writing about the rise of the religious right for quite a while now, most recently in connection with the re-election of George W. Bush. Starting with my essay, "Caught Up in the Rapture," I have argued that the political impact of the religious right is second only to its cultural and economic impact, which is growing significantly:
Except that in this instance, the "Left Behind-ers" are praying that God will be the ultimate constructivist, and fix things for good. The fact that so many of them voted for George W. Bush as His messenger is not a comforting thought.
Well, God makes a prime-time appearance on NBC in a major network mini-series that begins this Wednesday, April 13, 2005. As Frank Rich puts it (hat-tip to Arthur Silber): "It's all too fitting that 'Revelations,' which downsizes lay government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time slot of 'The West Wing'" (the show aired its season finale on April 6th). Fitting indeed. The typically liberal "West Wing" is being replaced by a Left Behind knock-off that will merge an "X-Files" sensibility, an Omen-like horror quotient, and an apocalyptic scenario worthy of the Millennium Group.
In the end, of course, the Apocalypse is not the most disturbing prospect; it's the fact that the Apocalypse has become so marketable in this culture. Thomas A. Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute writes, "The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise—to declare that society or God must give you permission to kill yourself—is to contradict the right to life at its root."
If that is so, then why does Bowden, in the same article, endorse the assisted-suicide law in Oregon (and the proposed law in Vermont), which, in his words, "permits physicians to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to a mentally competent, terminally ill patient who makes written and oral requests, consults two doctors, and endures a mandatory waiting period"?
That sounds like the "right" to ask permission to commit suicide, rather than the right to end one's own life. That "contradict[s] the right to life at its root." A consistent advocate of the right to commit suicide would oppose "assisted-suicide" laws and endorse full self-determination, which of course includes repeal of professional licensing, prescription laws, and the ban on forbidden drugs.
Cross-posted at The Szasz Blog. Directly below you can follow the story of the Grand View State College Republican Affirmative Action Bake Sale. The Grand Rapids Press quotes the new College Republicans President Mike Westcott as saying "We should admit wrong where wrong was done." The wrong being that people were offended.
Now, my question for Mr. Westcott is; why is it offensive to charge someone an extra dollar for a cupcake because of the color of their skin but it is not offensive to deny someone a place at a university because of the color of their skin?
Over at SCSU Scholars, Paul Leidig has replied in the comments section to Banaian Halderman, Nuckolls, and yours truly. Banaian and I, in turn, posted replies.
UPDATE: John Rosenberg at Discriminations has also criticized Leidig's behavior. Back in February Randy Barnett posted the following on the Volokh Conspiracy; In hindsight, I think that the creation of the Libertarian Party has been very detrimental to the political influence of libertarians. Some voters (not many lately) and, more importantly, those libertarians who are interested in engaging in political activism (which does not include me) have been drained from both political parties, rendering both parties less libertarian at the margin. His and a considerable number of other libertarians’ solution to the above problem is to work for freedom within the Republican Party. Barnett believes the Libertarian Party should cease to exist.
What we are seeing in Michigan from the chair of the Ottawa County GOP, Professor Paul Leidig, demonstrates the bankruptcy of the above strategy. David Beito and Charles Nuckolls have posts directly below ( here, here, here ) which describe the controversy over an affirmative action bake sale held by the Grand View State College Republicans. When judicial referrals were filed against students involved with the sale, despite the administration having allowed a feminist group to have a pay equity bake sale, group advisor Leidig behaved disgracefully by engineering the ouster of the student leader who planned the event and having the College Republicans apologize.
It has been suggested and I agree with the notion that Leidig took the actions he did with an eye towards protecting his political prospects. So my question to Randy Barnett is, how are self respecting libertarians supposed to work within a party where abandoning the principle of free speech, personally betraying a student, worshipping at the altar of identity politics, and telling transparent lies are seen as means of advancement?
Leidig is the faculty advisor to the College Republicans at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and also the chair of the Ottawa County GOP. Rather than defend the right of the College Republicans to have an affirmative action bake sale, Leidig immediately caved in and helped remove, Kyle Rausch, the head of the chapter who had supported the sale.
Here is what King said:
UPDATE: Good news. FIRE is mobilizing.
SECOND UPDATE: Peter Gordon has now blogged on this.
Dear Professor Leidig,
I have read of your action supporting the removal of the president of the campus young Republicans. His only "offense" as I understand it, was to defend his right to free speech -- a value one would think you would support.
Instead, you caved in to those who lead the fight against freedom of speech under the guise of protecting people from "being offended." I can assure you that as the sponsor of a student organization myself, I would have acted in entirely the opposite way. You bring no credit on yourself or the Republican Party when you sacrifice basic principles to political convenience.
You owe the offended student an immediate (and public) apology, which should be tendered with your own letter of resignation as faculty sponsor of the Young Republicans.
Sincerely,
Charles W. Nuckolls, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Anthropolgy
Brigham Young University
As many feared, one big cost of the War on Terror and Other Stuff We
Don't Like has been the violation of civil liberties under the pretext
of national security. For what appears to be another example of
this phenomenon, take a look at this
story (brief registation may be required) out of Louisiana: Kris Wartelle, spokeswoman for Attorney General Charles Foti,
denied Fontenot was forced to retire, but could confirm that he was
retiring.... The students from Antioch New England Graduate School in New
Hampshire were touring the state to learn about environmental racism,
and the photographs were to be used in PowerPoint presentations
required for their class, said Abigail Abrash Walton, a professor who
led the trip.
"We had just met with (Baton Rouge) Mayor Kip Holden and went out
to drive around and look at the industry in the area," she said. "We
came to a house directly across from the facility and Willie let us
know that the woman who lived there had decided not to relocate.
"So we pulled the van over on a side street and the students got
out and took photos," she said.
"Two or three minutes later, two security vehicles showed up," she
said, and off-duty Baton Rouge police and East Baton Rouge sheriff's
deputies pulled the van over and demanded the licenses of those inside.
Not that a contest for dumb comments by politicians wouldn't bring in a lot of
good entries, but Rep. Ed Markey D-Mass jumps out in the lead in this
analysis of talk of extending Daylight Savings Time a month in each direction as part
of an energy bill: "The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said
Markey I'm very curious to hear how the two-month extension of DST will actually
create MORE daylight. Congress indeed has many powers, but altering the
rotation of the earth or its angle to the sun are not, last I checked, among
them. Markey has clearly never heard the joke about daylight savings
being akin to cutting six inches off the end of a blanket and sewing it on
the other end in order to make it longer. And, yes, I know what he meant was something like "more light at times of
the day when more people are up and about." Even so, what this extension
of DST would mean for me here in the North Country is November sunrises at
around 815am, and sunrises as late as 900am in western parts of the Eastern
Time zone. No thanks.
Bad things keep happening at the University of Southern Mississippi, though
gradually. A whole week has gone by without sudden collapses or colossally boneheaded
administrative maneuvers. Better things may be on the horizon, but the new system that makes
the IHL Commissioner the direct supervisor of university presidents in the Mississippi state system is still shaping up. Shelby F. Thames has yet to be told that he has become
a lame duck, or that his health problems necessitate his prompt retirement. I'll have more to say about both trends soon enough. In the meantime, the momentary absence of flamboyant foolishness
gives us an opportunity to appreciate the longer-term institutional dynamics of a badly managed state university.
USM's public relations apparatus has been desperate to place favorable stories in the national media. Six weeks, it got one. Or so the story might appear before you
read it, and set to thinking about what you've read. "Heading South, Looking for an Edge," by Barnaby J. Feder appeared in the Business
section of the New York Times, on February 22. The article is no
longer accessible electronically, except to those paying a fee, so I'll quote the key passage from it. Hybrid Plastics, a nanotechnology firm founded 7 years ago in Southern California,
moved to Hattiesburg in July of 2003. Its arrival was duly ballyhooed by Lisa Mader and the rest of Shelby Thames' publicity machine. And Shelby Thames didn't hesitate to "brag on" the Hybrid deal in his first self-congratulatory presidential letter, which came out on May 6, 2004.
The Times story speaks loosely of incentives that were provided variously by the University of Southern Mississippi, the Mississippi Development Authority, and the Area Development Partnership, plus earmarked Federal funds obtained by Senator Thad Cochran: Feder goes to some length to explain why nanotechnology in general is considered
too far from profitable applications to attract much in the way of venture capital,
and how the development of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes, the class of
molecules in which Hybrid specializes, still requires substantial funds that Hybrid has had trouble obtaining from private investors. Hybrid is now looking for larger companies that are willing to pay it to use its molecules as additives to improve their products.
So a company that stands a long way from major success is
getting $25 million worth of facilities and equipment out of the University of Southern Mississippi. Most of that equipment was ultimately paid for by the taxpayers of Misssissippi, or by taxpayers elsewhere in
the United States (via Federal grants to USM's Polymer Science department).
And nowhere in Feder's article is there a word about the revenues that USM expects to derive from its alliance with Hybrid Plastics.
The USM press release claims that the deal with Hybrid will increase USM's competitiveness for Federal research grants to its Polymer Science program. I'll review USM's performance in that area in a future post; suffice it to say that Thames' monomaniacal insistence on the pursuit of research grants hasn't paid off particularly well. The release also claims that Hybrid will add up to 25 new high-tech jobs at its Hattiesburg location by 2006. As of February 2005, the company's Hattiesburg-area workforce had grown from "about a dozen" to 14.
Now this is the same USM that has closed an anthropology
professor's lab because water is leaking in and making the rooms unusable,
while the administration is unable or unwilling to find money to pay for repairs. It is
the same USM where the building that houses the School of Nursing is full of mold
because the hot water pipes keep cracking, and no funds are available to
renovate the former grocery store that Nursing was supposed to move into.
The Hybrid Plastics story provides an exemplary model for USM's "economic development" efforts. Economic development means making alliances with politically connected businesses that may not produce revenue for USM, while USM
assuredly enhances the revenues of its partners. The net benefit to the university,
let alone to the population of the southern third of Mississippi, is hard to substantiate, but the net benefit to the companies and their principals is undeniable. In public-choice parlance, the function of such economic development efforts is to
offer major rewards to rent-seekers.
By contrast, USM's MA and PhD programs in Economic Development draw their
own rent-seekers, and impair the institution's academic credibility, but everyone knows they will produce revenue in the form of tuition
payments. Oh, and while we're speaking of economic development, it's time to celebrate
another Thamesian anniversary. USM's Van Hook Golf Course has been
lying vacant and overgrown for a year. Deciding to turn it into an industrial park, to house all the companies that would flock to Hattiesburg in the wake of Hybrid Plastics, the Thames administration officially closed the course on
March 31, 2004. It has yet to find a single company willing to build there. The College Republican chapter of Grand Valley State University in Michigan, has removed Kyle Rausch, as the head of the organization. Apparently, Rausch's only offense was that he tried to stage an affirmative action bake. Instead of defending Mr. Rausch's free speech rights, Professor Paul Leidig, the faculty advisor of the College Republicans, caved in and supported the removal.
After reading this, I wrote this email to Professor Leidig:
If the story is true, your actions are deplorable and deserve the strongest
criticism from those of us who believe in academic freedom.
As a member of the history department at the University of Alabama, I too am
an advisor for a student organization. When I accepted that position, I took
on the moral obligation to defend the academic freedom of the students I
supervised. By all indications, you have failed completely in this obligation.
Free speech is under attack on campuses throughout the United States.
Usually, this attack is led by administrators. For this reason, it is
especially unfortunate that a member of the faculty has not only failed to
fight back but has joined the front ranks of this attack.
You not only owe Mr. Rausch an unqualified and public apology but you have a
obligation to immediately urge his reinstatement as head of the College
Republicans. Ralph E. Luker reports a major embarrassment (or, at least, what should be a major embarrassment) for The New York Times and Columbia University:
Want to stake some cash on the papal prophecies of a twelfth-century Irish saint? Here, let me show you how it's done... John Tabin's most recent article in "The American Spectator" opens with the words, "If you're a Canadian, be advised: Your government doesn't want you to know what lies herein. If you're a blogger in Canada, you may actually get in legal trouble for linking to this column." The caution is not hyperbolic. Canadian bloggers are actually being charged with contempt of court for linking to American blog sites that discuss the Adscam scandal. Accordingly, I have a request to make of all non-Canadian bloggers. Essentially it is the same request beamed out by Canadian blogger Colby Cosh who writes, "it would actively help free the hands of Canadian webloggers and reporters if our foreign cousins were to be aggressive about 'publishing' the substance of the Brault testimony outside the reach of Canadian law." Please spread the links that Canadian law prohibits me from providing. For more commentary by Wendy McElroy and her Merry Band of Bloggers, see McBlog. Yes, ok, but this nevertheless strikes me as wrong. VC blogger and law prof Randy Barnett came down here to BSC to give a talk yesterday on “Medical Cannabis, The Commerce Clause & Arguing in the Supreme Court.” Barnett, of course, was lead counsel in Ashcroft v. Raich, which is ostensibly about medical marijuana, but which is really about whether there can be any limits to federal power under the commerce clause. (He is also one of the most important libertarian legal theorists – if you haven’t read The Structure of Liberty yet, you should.) I’m pleased, and not at all surprised, to report that his talk went very well – exciting and engaging, and also very helpful in terms of enhancing undergrads’ understanding of both the legal issues involved in this case and constitutional argumentation generally. (Not just the undergrads, either – I learned something about those as well.) Today Tony Blair announced a general election for Thursday, May 5, just over four weeks away. I’ve followed British politics for forty-five years and every general election since October 1964. Indeed I can even remember the election of October 1959. And, regardless of my anarchist sympathies, I’ll be closely following developments in what promises to be a much more interesting election than the previous one in 2001.
I’m sure few if any readers of Liberty & Power need reminding that the government of the United Kingdom depends upon majority support in the House of Commons. If the composition of the Commons changes sufficiently, the government will change. Thus next month’s election will indirectly determine the administration for the next four or five years—unless, of course, no party received an overall majority, in which case another election might well occur sooner rather than later.
The number of Scottish parliamentary constituencies has been reduced from 72 to 59 (and their boundaries redrawn) to reflect the devolution of power to the Scottish Assembly. This means the new parliament will have 646 MPs instead of 659.
Many bills currently before Parliament will lapse, including the government's plans to introduce compulsory ID cards.
Useful sites include the BBC News and several sites dedicated to British elections and this one in particular. Go here for forecasts, including one which shows how even if the Conservatives were to receive eight per cent more votes than Labour, Labour would nonetheless win a plurality of seats. Go here and here for polls. Go here to follow the betting. (Over there you can bet on the election results by visiting your local betting shop and millions of Britons do.) And go here to read details of past elections.
What is not generally known is that in 1997, when Labour swept the Conservatives from power, Labour received 575,096 votes fewer than had the Conservatives in 1992, when the Tories narrowly retained power under John Major. Even more striking is that in 2001 Labour received 835,531 votes fewer than Labour had gotten under Neil Kinnock when they lost in 1992. The outcome of the 1997 and 2001 elections reflected differential falls in turnout (the Tory vote slumped in 1997 and both Labour and Tories lost millions more votes in 2001). And now it looks as if the result of next month’s election will turn not only on a moderate Conservative recovery under Michael Howard but also on a further huge slump in the Labour vote thanks to the disillusionment of Labour voters with Tony Blair. Freedom-loving administrators at Northeastern Illinois University have banned an "affirmative action bake sale" by the College Republicans even after they had allowed a feminist group to stage a "pay equity bake sale." Incredible and shameless.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is helping the students to fight back. David Brooks makes an interesting point in his NYT column today. He argues that dissent and division within conservatism is actually a healthy thing, because (among other reasons) it requires them to pay attention to the philosophical underpinnings of the different wings (e.g., neocon vs theocrat, free-market vs trad-values, etc.). It occurs to me that this is also applicable within libertarianism. Brooks notes that (modern) liberalism doesn't really have any philosophical parentage. I'm not sure whether this is true - Rawlsians might argue that Rawls is the philosophical underpinning of welfare-state liberalism, but OTOH the existence of the liberal-democratic welfare state predates A Theory of Justice. But in any event, it's clearly true that libertarianism, both in its minimal-state and anarchist varieties, does have a rich philosophical heritage, which, according to Brooks, ought to be able to help us in the battle of ideas. And, apparently, he once met with Eliott Abrams during the Reagan administration. You can't make this stuff up....or can you? A recent report in the New Scientist by Celeste Biever of a yet-unpublished study suggests that modern humans may have driven Neanderthals to extinction 30,000 years ago because Homo sapiens unlocked the secrets of free trade, say a group of US and Dutch economists. The theory could shed new light on the mysterious and sudden demise of the Neanderthals after over 260,000 years of healthy survival. Anthropologists have considered a wide range of factors which may explain Neanderthal extinction, including biological, environmental and cultural causes. Jason Shogren, an economist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, US, says part of the answer may lie in humans’ superior trading habits. Trading would have allowed the division of labour, freeing up skilled individuals, such as hunters, to focus on the tasks they are best at. Others, perhaps making tools or clothes or gathering food, would give the hunters resources in return for meat. The idea that specialisation leads to greater success was first used in the 18th century to explain why some nations were wealthier than others. But this is the first time it has been applied to the Neanderthal extinction puzzle, says Shogren. He cites archaeological evidence that suggests that humans, who joined Neanderthals in Europe about 40,000 years ago, specialised and traded both within and between regions. The evidence includes complex living quarters with different sections partitioned for different functions. Neanderthals, in contrast, lived in “largely unorganised” living spaces. There is also evidence that the early humans, mainly one population called the Gravettians, imported materials. Ivory, stones, fossils, seashells and crafted tools were found dispersed through many regions. This greater pool of resources led to increased innovation, says Shogren. Shogren tested his theory with simulations of population growth. He even gave the Neanderthals, who were larger than Homo sapiens, a head start by assuming they were better hunters and individually brought home more meat - which may or may be true. But because humans were allowed to trade, in two of three similar simulations, they overcame this initial handicap and ousted the Neanderthals within 7000 years. In the third simulation, the two ended up co-existing. “It’s an intriguing and novel idea,” says Delson. “But it requires stronger support.” He points out that the Gravettians in particular only emerged 28,000 years ago, while the last of the Neanderthals died about 29,000 years ago. So the Gravettians could not have had very much influence in the extinction of the Neanderthals, he argues. “He also assumes that all they ate was meat, which of course is not true,” he adds. The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, co-authored by Erwin Bulte of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Richard Horan at Michigan State University in East Lansing, US. Thanks to Sean Corrigan for mentioning this report in the Mises Blog. I have posted a reply to those who urged me to reconsider my views on Herbert Spencer. It may be read here (scroll down). The short verdict: He seems to offer a lot of good, but also one very serious mistake. Bayard Taylor Rustin (b. 3/17/1912) was raised by his maternal grandmother in Pennsylvania, a Quaker by inclination, although nominally with the AME Church, and a charter member of the NAACP (in 1910). He adopted those Quaker principles--the equality of all human beings before God, the vital need for nonviolence, and the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect. Rustin was one of the most important leaders of the American civil rights movement from the advent of its modern period in the 1950s until well into the 1980s. His behind-the-scenes role never garnered Rustin the public acclaim he deserved. Rustin's career as political activist began in high school when he was arrested for refusing to sit in the balcony of the local moviehouse, dubbed Nigger Heaven. As offensive lineman on the football team, he instigated a revolt among his black teammates to their Jim Crow accommodations. He led a group of classmates in acts of defiance to such practices in restaurants, soda fountains, movie houses, department stores, and the YMCA. Graduating with honors in 1932, Rustin was class valedictorian and received a prize for excellence in public speaking. In 1937, his permanent residence became New York City and enrolled in the City College of New York, , while singing in local clubs with African American folk artists Josh White and Huddie Ledbetter. At this time, Rustin began to organize for the Young Communist League of City College as their position on racial injustice appealed to him, although he later became disillusioned after the Communist Party's abrupt about-face on the issue of segregation in the American military in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He broke with the Young Communist League and sought out A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the leading articulator of the rights of Afro-Americans. Rustin led the youth wing on a march on Washington that Randolph envisioned. Randolph called off the demonstration when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 8802, forbidding racial discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries. Randolph's calling off of the march caused a breach between them and Rustin transferred his organizing efforts to the peace movement. A member of one of the government-recognized peace churches (the Fifteenth Street Meeting), he was entitled to do alternative service rather than serve in the armed services. Rustin found himself unable to accept this, given that many young men not members of recognized peace churches received harsh prison sentences for refusing to serve. In 1944, Rustin was found guilty of violating the Selective Service Act and was sentenced to three years in a federal prison. In March 1944 Rustin was sent to the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky where he set about to resist pervasive segregation in U.S. prisons. Rustin faced frequent cruelty with courage and nonviolent resistance. After release from prison, Rustin became involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which staged a Journey of Reconciliation through four Southern and border states in 1947 to test the application of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that discrimination in seating in interstate transportation was illegal. Rustin's resistance to North Carolina's Jim Crow law against integration in transportation earned him hard labor on a chain gang, where he met with the expected racist taunts and tortures. Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin traveled to India and then to Africa under the aegis of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, exploring the nonviolent dimensions of Gandhi. Most of FOR's leaders were disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. With James Farmer as its race relations secretary and Rustin as field secretary, FOR was the progenitor of the Congress of Racial Equality. Founded in 1940 with Rustin as its first field secretary. CORE combined the racial militancy of Randolph with the tactics of the pacifist movement, centered around nonviolent direct action, for challenging Jim Crow in the South. Although CORE's experiments with sit-ins and boycotts were minimally effective in the 1940s, they constituted a political legacy that was readily adopted by the evolving civil rights movement in the 1950s. Then he worked for several years in a campaign against America's development of nuclear weapons and its programs for war preparedness. Soon after the abortive Journey of Reconciliation he traveled to Paris and Moscow with David Dellinger and other pacifists. In Paris he learned of emerging anticolonial struggles in Africa. In 1953 Rustin was arrested for public indecency in Pasadena, California. Rustin's conviction and his relatively open attitude about his homosexuality set the stage for him to become an elder gay icon in the decades to come. Gay rights became a part of his belief in the inherent dignity of all oppressed people. As a consequence of his arrest, Rustin was to lose his position on the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Rustin then began a twelve-year stint as executive secretary of the War Resisters League. Rustin also contributed greatly to a compilation of pacifist strategy, published in The Progressive and also as a monograph in 1959 by the American Friends Service Committee titled Speak Truth to Power. When Rosa Parks's act of courage in December, 1955 precipitated the Montgomery bus boycott which would catapult Martin Luther King into a leadership position, Rustin was summoned to Montgomery the following February. In 1956 Rustin was approached by Lillian Smith, the Southern author of Strange Fruit, to provide Dr. Martin Luther King with some practical advice on how to apply Gandhian principles of nonviolence to the boycott of public transportation then taking shape in Montgomery, Alabama. On leave from the War Resisters League, Rustin spent time in Montgomery and Birmingham advising King, who had not yet completely embraced principles of nonviolence in his struggle. At 44 he was a seasoned organizer; King, at 27, was a neophyte who by sheer accident was drawn into the swirling vortex of black revolt. King had previous academic exposure to Gandhi, but it was Rustin who prevailed on King to dispense with armed guards and to embrace nonviolent action as the trademark of the budding movement. It was also Rustin who forged links to radicals in the North. In April 1956 Liberation carried King's first piece of political journalism, and Rustin and the War Resisters League mobilized leading pacifists and radicals into a Committee for Nonviolent Integration which funneled aid to King. Rustin helped to organize yet another group, In Friendship, which sponsored a rally at Madison Square Garden that raised some $20,000 for the Montgomery Improvement Association. There was always nervousness among King's advisors about Rustin's Communist past and his homosexuality, but his organizing skills and political savvy proved indispensable. It would be difficult to exaggerate Rustin's contribution as the Montgomery boycott evolved into a broad strategy for protest. Rustin "conceived and charted" the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, along with Ella Baker and Stanley Levison. This was to serve as the organizational mechanism for King's ascent to national prominence. Over the next decade Rustin remained a close advisor to King, especially during moments of crisis. Rustin was the chief organizer of the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington that took place on May 17, 1957 to urge President Eisenhower to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that the nation's schools be desegregated. Held at the Lincoln memorial on the third anniversary of the Brown decision, the Pilgrimage drew some 30,000 participants from labor, student, religious, and civil rights organizations. This was King's first major protest event outside the South, and his oratorical gifts captured the attention of commentators both inside and outside the movement. Rustin also had a hand in drafting King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom, which reached a national audience with the riveting story of the Montgomery boycott. In 1958 Rustin organized yet another mass demonstration in Washington -- the Youth March for Integrated Schools. These were the feats of creative organizing through which the civil rights movement grew from a regional protest against Jim Crow to a national movement for racial justice. Rustin was "a leading member of the radical jet set," flying off to conferences in Europe, India, and Africa. In late 1959 Rustin was abroad protesting France's first nuclear test in the Sahara, and was absent from the planning for the 1960 national conventions, much to the ire of Randolph. According to Anderson, "Rustin therefore found himself in the middle of a tug-of-war between the two political causes to which he was equally committed, pacifism and black protest activism." The high point of Bayard Rustin's political career was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which took place on August 28, 1963, the place of Dr. Martin Luther King's stirring "I Have a Dream" speech. King's celebrated I-have-a-dream oration has been embraced precisely because it vented no anger, cast no aspersions, but on the contrary, invoked America's ideals and substituted utopian reverie for political action. Rustin was by all accounts the March's chief architect. To devise a march of at least one-quarter of a million participants and to coordinate the various sometimes fractious civil rights organizations that played a part in it was a herculean feat of mobilization. While the March had all of the earmarks of protest, it represented the ascendancy of a new brand of coalition politics, the antithesis of the politics of confrontation that were at the core of the black protest movement. By 1965 Rustin felt that the period for militant street action had come to an end; the legal foundation for segregation had been irrevocably shattered. Now came the larger, more difficult task of forging an alliance of dispossessed groups in American society into a progressive force. Rustin saw this coalition encompassing Afro-Americans and other minorities, trade unions, liberals, and religious groups. That Rustin's plan failed was due to the Vietnam war, which diverted the efforts into antiwar activism. Rustin's steadfast opposition to identity politics also came under criticism by exponents of the developing Black Power movement. His critical stance toward affirmative action programs and black studies departments in American universities was not a popular viewpoint among many of his fellow Afro-Americans, and as at various other times of his life Rustin found himself to a certain extent isolated. Rustin worked as a delegate for the organization Freedom House, monitoring elections and the status of human rights in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe. In all his efforts Rustin evinced a lifelong, unwavering conviction in behalf of the value of democratic principles. It was Rustin's human rights expedition to Haiti in 1987 that drew the final curtain on his life. After his visit, Rustin became ill. His symptoms were initially misdiagnosed as intestinal parasites and on August 21, 1987, Rustin was diagnosed with a perforated appendix. He died of cardiac arrest on August 24, 1987. Although Bayard Rustin lived in the shadow of more charismatic civil rights leaders, he was an indispensable unsung force behind the movement toward equality for America's black citizens, and more largely for the rights of humans around the globe. Throughout his life, Rustin's Quakerism was a unifying force in his life. His efforts toward coalition politics, both within the labor movement and in Democratic Party politics, was to overtake his personal beliefs when he supported the Administration's line on Vietnam. In "An Open Letter to Bayard Rustin," Staughton Lynd had this objection: This from a man who chose prison over the Civilian Public Service; who had been a leading crusader for nonviolence in international affairs. There is paradox and tragedy that in his pursuit of coalition politics, The civil libertarian (although hardly an economic libertarian) Rustin betrayed the principles and the movement that he had done so much to advance. Once Rustin committed himself to the false god of coalition politics, all of his lifelong principles went asunder. There is also a lesson to be drawn from Rustin's political fall: to resist the blandishments of power during those rare moments of radical ascendancy. A Selection of Articles by Bayard Rustin: We Challenged Jim Crow, Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang, From Protest to Politics, The Blacks and the Unions, Bayard Rustin Meets Malcolm X At my own blog, I've posted a Review of Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge. I found it an amazing book, one that fully lived up to the warm recommendations it received. Even journalists are now beginning to recognise faintly that people can get on happily without a central government -- that there can be life without the State.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12725209%255E2703,00.html
Nicholas Rothwell describes in The Australian 2 April 2005 how neighbourhood, local & regional, social & ‘political’ arrangements in Iraq have continued operating serenely -- while occupation troops, various local thugs (‘insurgents’), & ‘national’ politicians have squabbled & fought across the surface of people’s lives. Rothwell naturally dates these arrangements to the days of the Ba’athist regime, but this is how people have always lived - while all their various rulers have strutted & postured on the political stage. With a large hat tip to the excellent Cafe Hayek, this Coyote Blog piece on the
effects
of minimum wage hikes is fascinating and informative. I was just saying to myself, you know, it's about time that somebody worked the insights of Irving Kristol about making peace with the welfare state into a flexible framework of pragmatic libertarianism. And presto, along comes the New Libertarian: a Journal of Neolibertarian Thought. Frankly, I like a journal whose inaugural essay begins "Frankly..." because then you know you're going to get some frank talk, like this, from editor Dale Franks: "Neos understand that a transformation towards what I like to call a Society of Liberty, will probably take a fair amount of time." I like to call it a "society of liberty" too. But it is better with the capitals.
As one of the editorials notes, "Doctrinaire hackles were raised recently" by Dale Franks' iconoclasm. And those are exactly the right hackles to raise. They'll probably even get some doctrinaire heckles, but I say that pomposity in defense of liberty is no vice, linguistic clarity in the pursuit of pragmatism no virtue.
Who is this "New Libertarian"? Contributor Max "Boil 'Em" Borders explains that, among other things, she "lives in a socio-political reality," and "is prepared to define her own rectitude." And how! Big news! Henry Hazlitt's classic, Economics in One Lesson, is now online, compliments of the Foundation for Economic Education. This is truly one of the great books on economics for lay readers. See the pdf file here. See here. So much in the news on this April Fool's Day, 2005. For example, the "final verdict" on prewar "intelligence" has been issued. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The "final verdict" won't be issued for years and years. But this particular verdict does make it appear that there were plenty of fools running America's "intelligence" community. American "homeland security" is gravely dependent on the quality of its intelligence. That should make all of us feel very safe.
And then, on the heels of the departure of NBC's Tom Brokaw and CBS's Dan Rather, another Long-Time Talking Head will be Leaving the Airwaves—this coming December: Ted Koppel, long-time host of ABC News' "Nightline." I've actually been a fan of "Nightline" for many years, if only because it does offer an opportunity for a more comprehensive look at the news of the day, with more in-depth interviews and coverage than that offered on the nightly news broadcasts.
I'm also a religious viewer of the Sunday morning news broadcasts, but I have found them infuriating for the last few years. I spend most Sunday mornings doing a most un-Godly thing: Cursing at the TV Screen. Not only because of what is being said, but because it's the same people saying the same things. Ted Koppel puts his finger on it. As the NY Times reports this morning:
Quite honestly, let me put it another way: ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
There.
That felt better.
[begin rant] Why don't they just call the Sunday morning news programs: The Condi Rice Show? Or The Don Rumsfeld Show? Or The John McCain Show? Or (up until recently) The Colin Powell Show? EVERY DAMN WEEK, the same people, over and over and over again. On every channel. Sometimes simultaneously. Taped broadcasts putting to rest the maxim that one can't be in two or three different places at the same time. Who needs a Pentagon Channel? [/end rant]
April Fool's Day? The Washington establishment makes fools of all of us, every day of the year.
Cross-posted to Notablog. Following last Friday's misconduct hearing, the five-member review board decided to put the student group on probation until Dec. 1.
The review board also required the student group to make a public apology and create a leadership development plan to make sure club leaders are aware of university policies and procedures. The group will retain university funding and campus organization privileges.
Campus Free Speech Article Update
Problems with Democracy
New Neighbors
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
An Open LetterTo Comcast Cable Network
Baking up Trouble at Grand Valley State
Proving that muddled thinking is not confined to campuses, the Detroit Free Press weighed in with an editorial denouncing the bake sale as “tasteless”and perhaps deserving of disciplinary action. The university charged the club with a violation of the student code and threatened sanctions. The students folded under pressure from the administration and issued an apology. When the president of the group refused to back down, he was asked to resign and did. The students’ retreat is understandable, if not very courageous. The university was in effect putting them on trial for bias, with the likelihood that a notation of racial discrimination would become part of their academic record and follow them to post-college job interviews. This is a major example of a politically correct college abusing its power.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Antibiotics
In case you're in the area . . .
Dr. Jennifer Purvis of the University of Alabama's Department of Women's Studies is hosting a Queer Movie Series this spring semester for WS 440/EN 444, "Feminism and Queer Theory." These films are being screened in media classrooms. Attendance is free and open to interested students and faculty. The first in the series, "You Don't Know Dick" and "XXXY" is scheduled for Wednesday, April 13. For more information, contact the women's studies department at 348–5782.
Video Cameras and Civil Liberties
Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
Crossposted at Positive Liberty.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Come Fly With Me, But Not If You Are On The List
Monday, April 11, 2005
Academic Freedom under Fire: The Case of Joseph Massad
Rock Me Ludwig
At the last Austrian Scholars Conference several of the faculty, including myself, were brutally conscripted into performing a musical skit based on the songs that Ludwig von Mises and the other members of the Mises Circle back in 1920s Vienna used to sing at dinner after meetings of Mises' Privatseminar. (The lyrics were written by philosopher Felix Kaufmann, a member of both the Mises and Vienna Circles.)
For this performance Jeff Tucker actually did most of the singing while we drank wine, scarfed down chocolate creams, and read our lines off notes. Guido Hülsmann played Mises (appropriately, since in the songs Mises is about to abandon Vienna for Geneva, just as in real life Guido is abandoning Auburn, the Vienna of the South, for Angers); Walter Block played Hayek ('cause you need a moderate to play a moderate …); and so on. I was cast as the villainous Hans Mayer, a follower of Max Weber who later ditched Austrian economics for National Socialism.
This painfully unrehearsed performance is now available in online video format. Don't say I didn’t warn you.
Kyle Rausch responds to Paul Leidig
Paul Leidig and the local Republicans who support him have undermined the cause of free speech at GVSU in the hopes of pandering to certain social groups which may find it offensive. I resigned because I would not be associated with a group willing to so quickly apologize for something that was not wrong.
HNN Academic Freedom Article (Left/Right Coalition)
....freedom of speech is now under siege. What is new in our academic communities is that it is threatened both from within and from outside them. The internal threat to free speech in academia is posed by "speech codes." They take many forms and vary from one college to the next university. After the 1960s, when American colleges and universities ceased to operate in loco parentis, campus speech codes emerged on one campus after another as a means of securing a "safe space" for some students who were offended by certain kinds of speech. On one campus or another, speech that is discomforting, embarrassing, flirtatious, gender specific, inappropriate, inconsiderate, harassing, intimidating, offensive, ridiculing or threatens a loss of "self-esteem" is banned by speech codes. Too often, they target student critics of academic bureaucracy.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has linked to the article. Sunday, April 10, 2005
JARS Fell on Alabama
1. Can you believe I'm posting this before Chris did? He's getting slow .... :-)
2. Looks like Greaves has already received her copy. How come I haven't gotten my copy? >:-(
USM: Is Richard Crofts Building a Case against Shelby Thames?
The Board of Trustees has a policy of evaluating Presidents during the mid-term of the President’s four-year contact. The Board also has a practice of evaluating a President as a prelude to a decision about renewing the President’s contact. Under the new governance model, it is anticipated that the Commissioner will be evaluating the Presidents and reporting on those evaluations to the Board of Trustees.
The Board of Trustees has asked me to prepare a report for their use in evaluating President Thames as part of the process of determining if his contract will be renewed. The new policy of annual evaluations of the Presidents includes a list of constituent groups that will be offered the opportunity for input into the evaluation. I am working off that kind of list to accomplish this task.
The proposed College Board plan to change the job performance evaluations of university presidents from one dominated by the board to one in which the higher education commissioner would conduct annual appraisals with significant input from faculty, administrators, students and community leaders is one that seems appropriate.
During a Presidents' Council meeting Wednesday, Claudia Limbert, president of Mississippi University for Women, said she was worried about how much weight each constituent would have.
She also was concerned about how having made hard decisions that haven't pleased everyone could come back to haunt her. "I don't know how that will play," Limbert said during the videoconference meeting. Mississippi Valley State University President Lester Newman expressed similar sentiments.
Thames said he welcomes Crofts' report.
"I'm very comfortable with the idea that he is looking into this," Thames said. "As a matter of fact we were the first university in the state to invite him to come down and see all the things we've got going down here."
There is no timeline for when the report will be complete, Crofts said. Thames' four-year contract, however, will expire in March.
"It's hard to say when it will be finished," Crofts said. "It depends on when I can meet with everyone, but it's going slower than I thought."
Cory Doctorow's Travel Woes
Saturday, April 9, 2005
The Apocalypse Will Be Broadcast
Christian merchandising is a $4.2 billion industry, which includes a $100 million video game business. The Christian book market is particularly lucrative: Evangelist Rick Warren has sold 15 million copies of his book, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? There are even Christian diet books that sit alongside Atkins and South Beach manuals: The Maker’s Diet helps you to lose weight by eating just like Jesus. From number one best-selling books such as The Da Vinci Code to "Joan of Arcadia" on television and "Bruce Almighty" on the silver screen, God is Hip and Hot. ... A blockbuster film such as "The Passion of the Christ"—which was condemned initially as "anti-Semitic" by some critics—has now grossed nearly $400 million. That figure does not include director Mel Gibson’s cross-promotional merchandising efforts—sales on such items as metal replica crucifixion nails and thorn-adorned necklaces and bracelets. ... [And the] 12-volume LaHaye-Jenkins work—from its first installment, Left Behind, to its action-packed finale, Glorious Appearing: The End of Days—now qualifies as the best-selling Christian fiction book series of all time[, having] sold in excess of 60 million copies in the past nine years.
Ultimately, the Left Behind series is not simply a religious narrative. It is a political one. Glenn W. Shuck, author of Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity, argues persuasively that "the novels have less to do with escaping and more to do with remaking the modern world" (emphasis added). It is the kind of "remaking" that Friedrich Hayek would have characterized as thoroughly rationalist or "constructivist" in its political implications.
Self-Determination vs. "Assisted-Suicide"
Which is Actually Offensive?
Friday, April 8, 2005
Leidig Replies: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Randy Barnett Meet Paul Leidig
Grand Valley State University Disgrace (Developing)
In a bizarre turn of the series of stories we've seen on "affirmative action bake sales", David Beito reports that this one takes the cake. A faculty advisor decides to go Quisling against his advisees, the Grand Valley State University College Republicans. The students who tried to organize the bake sale were dismissed from their posts in the CRs, and have been sent to Turkey to join Trotsky. The putschists say "There was outside advice, but the group made the decision on its own," and that the group wants to "apologize for offending and move on."
Here is more on the story:
The group's faculty advisor, Professor Paul Leidig, happens to also be the chair of the county Republican Party. And the deposed student leader of the CRs, Kyle Rausch, clearly fingers him as the guilty party.
Leidig said he advised the students to consider a leadership change to acknowledge they respect the fact people were offended by the bake sale.
King suggests that we write in protest not only to Leidig but to the Republican leadership in Michigan. Thursday, April 7, 2005
Ignominy and Disgrace at Grand Valley State
More Bullying in the Name of Homeland Security
Two weeks ago, while accompanying one of those groups, this one of
15 university students from New England, on a tour of a Baton Rouge
neighborhood being bought out by the ExxonMobil refinery, the group was
stopped and questioned by law enforcement concerned about homeland
security after taking pictures of the plant. Fontenot was asked to
collect the student's driver's licenses and
refused, saying he wasn't leading the trip. On Monday, Fontenot, 62,
said he was told to retire or face a disciplinary hearing that would
end in his firing. Concerned about the loss of his pension and health
insurance, he chose to retire.
One other comment: when you present cases like these to many
conservatives, they wind up saying things like "well, that was just
some over-zealous individuals and really doesn't represent what the
policy is all about." Funny how similar that sounds to "all those
stories about problems with public education are really just about a
few bad teachers or out-of-control administrators/bureaucrats - there's nothing
fundamentally wrong with the system." When you give people
political power to do what you think they should, don't be surprised
when they do what you think they shouldn't. And don't blame the
people, blame the power.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: Fontenot is also blind and a cancer
survivor, for whatever that's worth.
Politician Stupid Remarks Contest, First Entry
Economic Development, Southern Mississippi Style: The Hybrid Plastics Story
Besides offering a bargain-basement location, Hattiesburg lured
Hybrid with the promise of a close relationship with the University of Southern
Mississippi's highly regarded polymer chemistry department. Hattiesburg became
irresistible when the state promised to make university equipment and laboratory
space available at virtually no cost. Lower taxes were a factor, too.
"It's a sweetheart deal," said Joseph D. Lichtenhan, Hybrid's chief
executive. "Trying to raise $25 million to duplicate what we get here didn't make business sense." And Dr. Lichtenhan realized that there would be other business benefits from leaving a region where nanotechnology companies "are a dime a dozen." Hybrid has just 14 employees locally and sales of under $5 million, but it represents
the kind of small business Mississippians view as crucial to overcoming the state's
reputation as a business backwater. "There's not a lot of folks here to steal your
good employees away."
Faculty Advisor Fails to Defend Academic Freedom
I just read the story in the Grand Rapids Press about your apparent failure
to defend the free speech rights of the College Republicans on your campus.
If others want to do the same, Professor Leidig's address is Leidig@gvsu.edu
All the News that Fits
"The Times admits and Columbia confirms that the University gave the newspaper a privileged one day advance release of its report on its Middle Eastern studies program in return for a commitment by the Times reporter not to ask critics of the program for their reaction. Great Institutions may expect one hand washing the other treatment from Great Institutions, but they do so to their mutual embarrassment."
Much as I would like to single out The Times, it is not the only newspaper which has a much too cozy relationship with large and powerful institutions of higher learning. In Tuscaloosa, for example, The Tuscaloosa News is the major de facto public relations arm of the University of Alabama. By contrast, it does not hesitate to run negative stories on smaller, less politically and financially powerful, institutions in the area such as Stillman College of Tuscaloosa. Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Papal Prophecies: Saint Malachy and Gloria Olivae
A Request From Wendy McElroy
Value Pluralism
Barnett speech at BSC
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
The UK General Election
Spectacular Double Standard on Campus "Bake Sales"
Divide and Conquer?
Monday, April 4, 2005
Ward Churchill's Alliance with the Contras!?
Sunday, April 3, 2005
Did Free Trade Kill Off the Neanderthals?
Darwin/Spencer/Hayek
Bayard Rustin
"Why, Bayard? You must know in your heart that your position betrays your essential moralism over the years. The lesson of your apostasy on Vietnam appears to be that the gains for American Negroes you advise them to seek through coalition within the Democratic Party come only at a price. . . . The price is to make our brothers in Vietnam a burnt offering on the altar of political expediency."
[Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen: A Biography (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), pp. 295-96] Saturday, April 2, 2005
A Review of Hayek's Challenge
Surprise! Iraqis Can Live Without a Government in Baghdad!
Friday, April 1, 2005
Great Piece on the Minimum Wage
A Journal of Neolibertarian Thought
Economics in One Lesson Now Online!
Mallard Fillmore is on FIRE!
April, May, June, July ... Fools
Mr. Koppel said he had been concerned about what he saw as the uniformity of all the Sunday public affairs programs—particularly when a viewer can flip from one channel to the other and see people like the secretary of defense or secretary of state interviewed on each. "That seems to be the general understanding in Washington these days," Mr. Koppel said. "The administration sets the tone and theme and presents the same guests to all the programs at the same time. I don't think anyone is served by that."
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