Free The Animal

Kyle Bennett has up an extensive post dealing with prosecution without the state. Definitely worth a read, though it could be tough for the faint of heart. A question you might ponder: what’s likely to result in a greater number of injustices; a private justice system, where everybody is a prosecutor and 100% accountable for the propriety of all prosecutions, or a state, where every prosecutor is 0% accountable, short of outright fraud?

[Read more →]

Consider this, in the context of the oft quoted Ben Franklin, that, and paraphrasing: “those who would would trade freedom for safety deserve neither.” Let’s suppose it’s true that the purpose of the legal standard of “reasonable doubt” in criminal matters is to protect the innocent. In other words, even if you think he’s probably guilty, if you have doubt/s that are reasonable, i.e., plausible, logical, then you acquit. Period. In this way, it’s far more likely that you’ll let the guilty go (to kill, rape, murder, steal again?) than it will be to convict an innocent. Of course, this all presumes competence on the part of the judge (courtroom referee), honesty and integrity on the part of the prosecution and its witnesses, and intelligence on the part of the jury, which, as we know from The Innocence Project and many other sources, is a shaky assumption at best. (Side note: I’m very often told that the essential justification and necessity for the state is to ensure and guarantee “objective justice.” Did you check that link?) But we’re talking principles and ideas, so let’s proceed. So, do you notice anything in that that’s apropos to the freedom/safety trade off? You…

[Read more →]

I really had only a raw sense of my view of the Ron Paul vs. Some Libertarians (note: I am never referring to the LP, unless I write ‘LP’ or ‘Party’) over racists and other bigoted remarks in newsletters published under his name when I wrote this. Karen De Coster does a far more thorough job of it, touches on other idiosyncrasies concerning the libertarian movement, and hashes out some good background. This is an interesting connection I’d never really thought about. One thing rampant among libertarians is their lack of the ambition gene outside of libertarianism and the web. So many of these people have no real job, no career, and in fact, if they can’t align themselves with some small-time, paid position at some libertarian outfit, they remain unemployed. As such, they will do anything to not make enemies in the movement, and in fact they must win friends in order to write columns and hope for paid gigs. They are low-paid and no-paid libertarians. Their perspective on the real world is warped because they sell their principles for a paycheck or a job. I’d always had a sense about that. I think it was Greg Swann who…

[Read more →]

As an opponent of the state on general principle, I often find myself in opposition to other opponents of the state whose principles don’t encompass as wide of a context, or those whose opposition is principally unprincipled, i.e., “practical,” which is to say: pragmatic. Let me be frank: I find it increasingly difficult to draw many distinctions between various forms of state that have existed in history that amount to a damn, and that includes the state of those United. This article illustrates why pretty clearly. That’s George Monboit in the UK Guardian (via Balko) and it’s about the propensity of the British to forget “their own” atrocities vis-á-vis something going on in Turkey, currently. There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain “promotes one key concept that underpins everything else – the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence … Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show ‘exceptions’ to, or ‘mistakes’ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence”. This idea, I fear, is the true “sense of British cultural identity” whose…

[Read more →]

I’ve been having a bit of discussion here, that turned into a bit of discussion on “utopia” and “fantasyland” vis-a-vis anarchy. The standard set of arguments — my interlocutors being unaware of how poor they are — for the “necessity” of the state issue forth. Amongst other non-arguments, it is apparently “utopian” and “fantasyland” to imagine and argue for an eventual end to the monopoly of the state. But as I point out, it is the advocates of the state that are the utopians and those promoting a fantasy. They all use the same argument: the state is necessary because [blank], and they always, always insert some social or political phenomenon that the state doesn’t actually prevent, like predatory behavior by a few, or produce, like safety and security. It promises plenty, and when it fails — as it always does — the call is for more money and more power, and the cycle repeats. “If there is no law, what is to stop them?” (predators), one asks. The answer, of course, is that nothing necessarily stops them, including laws and the state. Bad people — predators — are largely unpersuaded by so-called “deterrents,” whether they take the form of…

[Read more →]