Post-Election Violence In Iran

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

People have been protesting in Iran in at least four or five cities: Tehran, Shiraz, Rasht, Mashhad and Tabtiz (which is now under some kind of lockdown). There is just too much going to follow in any coherent way right now, but my wife and I are glued to our computer screens (more or less). Here’s a website that seems to have a large number of pictures and videos of what’s going on. There has not been this kind and level of unrest since the 1979 revolution. Protesters have set buildings on fire; and we heard that they even attacked the Ministry of the Interior, where the votes were counted, though I am not sure about this, since I have not been able to find again the page where I either heard or read it. (We’ve been bouncing from page to page so much it’s hard to keep track.) My wife says that now everything depends on how long the people who are protesting are able and willing to keep the pressure on. This has been a long time coming.

Update: Tehran Bureau is another good source of news and analysis.

Another update: I posted this text to It’s All Connected as well:

So my wife and I spent a few hours this evening glued to our computer screens reading and watching the news coming out of Iran about the post-election protests and violence that took place throughout the country after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “victory” was announced. (If you’re on Facebook this page is a good place to start looking, and there are also, of course, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and all the other major news outlets.) My wife talked to her brother in Tehran, who told us that protests went on well into early morning hours; there was gunfire in the area of Tehran where he lives–and it’s important to note that the protests spread to other cities as well: Shiraz, Mashhad, Rasht, Tabriz (which was under curfew last I heard), and I read that Ahvaz was under curfew as well–and one of my Facebook friends posted that an Iranian blogger she knows claims 50 people are dead. One guy on Twitter said his father had a truckload of ballots slated for burning; another said his uncle, a cop, told him they had orders to burn ballots; and everyone is saying the streets of Iran have not seen this kind of unrest since the Revolution in 1979. This image is from TehranBureau

And here is a YouTube video that you can find on TehranBureau’s page of videos:

I have seen pictures of buildings set on fire; people using twitter to report violence at universities, the rumored resignation of the faculty from one university and more; and of course we can never know just how many of these individual reports are accurate, but I have read some interesting, initial political analysis. Here is an excerpt from Juan Cole’s brief piece on TehranBureau:

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran’s western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were fairly standard across Iran’s provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad’s upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi’s spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi’s camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.

This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.

I have been reading this and reading through all the material I can find because of course I feel personally involved. I worry for the safety of my in-laws who are in Tehran; I think about the Iranians I know and the aspirations they have for the country they were, most of them, forced by the Islamic Revolution to leave, either because their lives were in danger, or their parents’ lives were in danger, or because they just couldn’t take living under a totalitarian theocracy anymore; and I think as well about how a McCain administration might have reacted to what is going on in Iran now, and I am grateful I don’t have to find out how close what I think would come to the truth; and I think about how the circumstances of this election in Iran leaves President Obama with no good choices in terms of how to proceed with his agenda for engaging that country, and of the cynicism of the people here who were hoping for an Ahmadinejad victory precisely because they wanted to see Obama’s strategy of engagement scuttled. I think about all this and I really don’t know what to say about it that hasn’t already been said, and yet I feel like I have to say something.

While my wife and I were eating dinner, she said that she hopes this time does not turn out to be like other times, when there were a couple of days of protest and then everything went back to the status quo, and I suggested that will depend on what the leadership of the opposition does. If they find a way to keep the pressure on the regime, it seems to me, people will be willing to keep coming out into the streets. If Moussavi caves in, however, what purpose would be served by continuing to protest? And while we were talking about this, I remembered something I read in the Introduction to A. Hart Edwards’ 1911 translation of Saadi’s Bustan. On page 16, Edwards writes:

Although Persian is only yet in the process of readjusting her ideas of government and the prerogatives of rulers, principles more advanced than seem compatible with despotism have been for many centuries current among her people in theory, at least, if not in practice. Muhammad said that a little practice with much knowledge was better than much practice with little knowledge. On that ground Persia has defence [sic], for the knowledge certainly was there. What could better describe the true relationship between king and people that Sadi’s thirteenth-century epigram?

Subjects are as the root and the king is as the tree,
And the tree, O son, gains strength from the root.

Not many months ago the autocratic tree at Teheran [sic] was rudely severed from its root; perchance the successors of Abu Bakr [Saadi’s patron and ruler] were not of those to whom “the words of Sadi are agreeable” [a phrase that occurs at various times throughout Bustan].

Edwards was referring to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, which was going on while he was making his translation, and he was saying that many of the values that drive resistance to autocratic government have been part of Iran’s culture for centuries, even though Iran’s rulers had rarely acted on them. More specifically, though, Edwards was making the point that Saadi is one of the poets in the Iranian canon for whom those values are most central to his writing. I have written elsewhere about Saadi’s most famous lines, and how they need to be understood not merely as important liberal sentiment, but as a speaking of truth to power:

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.

These lines, however, are about a philosophy, not a practice, and Saadi was also concerned with saying something about the practical aspects of ruling. The poem from which Edwards took the couplet he quoted, for example, is the first in the chapter called “Justice.” It is a poem the lesson of which the Islamic Republic has shown, in this election, that it has not yet learned. Here is the first strophe:

I’ve heard that with his dying breaths Nushirvan
advised his son Hormuz on how to rule:
“Guarantee the poor their peace of mind.
Do not allow your privilege to bind you.
None who call your kingdom home will be
at peace if privilege is all you live for.
No judge will find a shepherd innocent
who slept and let the wolf among the sheep.
Go! Stand guard! Protect their impoverished lives.
The crown you wear would not exist without them.
A tree, my son, is nourished through its roots.
Just so, a monarch draws his kingdom’s strength
through those he rules. Do not betray their trust
unless you have to; you’ll find yourself rootless.

Nushirvan was a king known for his compassion and sense of justice; Hormuz, on the other hand, was known as cruel and unjust.

It’s hard sitting here in the United States to take as seriously as Iran would like me to its assertion that it is a democracy. Even had there been no electoral fraud, it is difficult to see, from the perspective of a country where there is a separation of church and state, and where there is no ideological body that approves the religious integrity of political candidates before they run, how a country where such a body exists, where only the governmentally approved candidates are allowed to run for president, can be called a democracy. Nonetheless, the people of Iran chose in this election to endorse that process by turning out to vote in record numbers. This time, for them, it was personal. The Iranian government betrayed them personally and was, at least for a day and a night, as rootless as Saadi predicted it would be. Hopefully, those roots will not allow themselves to be forced back into the same old soil, but will find instead fertile new ground.

Posted in International issues, Iran | 7 Comments

Obama DOJ to same-sex couples: Go fuck yourselves

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Ampersand

So the Obama Department of Justice decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall — and the 42nd anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia — by filing a brief in a same-sex marriage case that repeats a slew of anti-gay canards, and invents a couple of new ones.

Although some have argued otherwise, I believe (as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers argues) the DOJ has a duty to defend current federal law in all but a few rare cases. I don’t object to them defending the Defense Of Marriage Act. ((Plus, as a matter of tactics, it’s evident that the big LGBT groups want this case dismissed, on technical grounds, to clear the ground for a different, stronger lawsuit that’s also in the pipeline. And that’s very likely what will happen.)) But there are a hundred ways they could have done this that wouldn’t have been an insult to everyone who, unlike Barack Obama and his administration, gives a fuck about equal rights.

As Law Geek writes:

Even if one argues, as I often have, that a government lawyer — from the Department of Justice to state attorneys general — must defend even those laws with which one disagrees, such a lawyer needn’t overstate his or her case.  The government lawyer defending a statute with which she disagrees needn’t add gratuitous demeaning statements into the legal brief she files.

Unlike the Obama Administration’s brief filed in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell case turned away by the Supreme Court this week, last night’s filing in Smelt v. United States goes too far (pdf).  It’s offensive, it’s dismissive, it’s demeaning and — most importantly — it’s unnecessary.  Even if one accepts that DOJ should have filed a brief opposing this case (and the facts do suggest some legitimate questions about standing), the gratuitous language used throughout the filing goes much further than was necessary to make its case.

See also this post from Americablog.

This is really bad. For the next decade, expect to see homophobic talking heads on TV support their most wretched arguments by saying “even the liberal Obama administration says….”  Some of the worse, most dehumanizing arguments — like the argument that if gays want equal rights, they should just marry someone of the opposite sex — are now an official position of the Obama DOJ. Worse, they’ve created brand-new, stupid arguments, like the argument that for the Federal government to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages in states where they are legal represents Federal “neutrality.” (Hint: If there is literally no difference between the policy you espouse, and the policy Maggie Galligher prefers, then you are not being “neutral.”)

Andrew Sullivan writes:

I think we can summarize: the brief is (just about) defensible; its full contents are way over the line; someone in the DOJ must have understood that and decided to file it anyway – without even consulting anyone in the gay community. The deployment of arguments that refer to our relationships as equivalent to incest, that demand that we simply marry someone of the opposite sex if we want our civil rights, that implies federal recognition of our civil marriages would mean taxing some Americans to pay for something they abhor: this is simply salt in the wound, and it will be deployed and used by every far right gay-hater in the future, and cited as endorsed by the Obama administration. In the context of Obama’s failure to fulfill any of his pledges to the gay community since he took office, this is terribly deflating.

We are asked to be patient, and that is fair enough. But we should not be asked to be attacked in this gratuitous manner, shut out of dialogue beforehand, and applaud. We did that for eight years under Clinton. Never again.

David Link has some plausible speculations on how the hell this happened:

But how could this derision not have been noticed by the President’s men?  First, and most obviously, I can only imagine that no lesbian or gay men ever set eyes on this brief.  Perhaps I am wrong, but I honestly can’t see how any self-respecting homosexual in 2009 could possibly think this brief was acceptable.  While California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown has had to both defend and challenge anti-gay laws, his office has the grace and simple common sense to make sure the briefs are reviewed, if not drafted in the first place, by openly gay attorneys.

There is something deeper here, though.  Obama is comfortable with the cliché political rhetoric of gay equality, but this brief shows his understanding doesn’t go a centimeter deeper.  Or (most generously) that his Attorney General knows only the words and not the tune.  To someone who understands gay equality as little more than a set of slogans and bromides, this brief might not have looked particularly offensive.

That, at least, is the most generous understanding I am willing to indulge – that the brief was written and/or edited by civil servants with an anti-gay inclination, and reviewed by political staff who know no more about gay equality than what they read on the President’s website.

The ball is now in the President’s court.  He owes us an apology – and not one of words, but one of action.

Box Turtle Bulletin has a roundup of blogospheric reactions, and a telling comparison to a brief written by an attorney general who really is an advocate for queer rights; Dale Carpenter’s post on the quality of the arguments made in Obama’s brief is worth your while; and I’ll close with another quote from Law Dork.

President Obama, if he intends to regain any credibility with the LGBT community this Pride Month, needs to get an answer from A.G. Holder about how such a brief was allowed to be filed under his rule.  And he needs to start speaking up about LGBT issues and taking action to make his campaign promises a reality.  Obama needs to show that he truly is “a president who supports our cause.”

When he was running for president and needed votes and money, Obama made a lot of promises to LBGTQ voters, but he hasn’t fufilled a single one of those promises. And now his DOJ is actively working against equality with the same enthusiasm and bad faith arguments we would have expected from the Bush administration.

Unless there is a very rapid about-face from the Obama administration, I hope that when Joe Biden shows up to a gay DNC fundraiser in a couple of weeks, he’s greeted by hundreds of angry queer and queer-allied protestors. I hope he’s booed off the stage; I hope he’s pelted with rotton eggs. I hope that lesbians, gays and allies make it clear to Obama that he won’t get a fucking cent for his re-election until he starts keeping his promises. As of yesterday, however, the time when anyone could give Obama the benefit of the doubt on LGBTQ issues has ended.

Posted in In the news, Same-Sex Marriage | 56 Comments

Ahmadinejad Declared Victor In Iran's Elections…

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

…but Moussavi is protesting and charging fraud, the NY Times reports. I don’t have much to say about this right now, except the obvious, and that my heart goes out to those, inside Iran and out, who were hoping this election would bring change.

Posted in In the news, Iran | 1 Comment

Great Pictures of the Elections Going on In Iran

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Check out this photo essay on The Boston Globe’s website. Great pictures. It’s an exciting time over there, and a tense one. A lot hangs on this election.

Posted in In the news, Iran | 1 Comment

NYC Meetup is Tomorrow

Posted on June 12, 2009 by the angry black woman

nyc-meetup-is-tomorrow

Quick reminder, our ABW NYC meetup is tomorrow afternoon from 4 – 7 at Society Coffee @ 2104 Frederick Douglass Blvd @ 114th. Everyone who can see this is invited and you’re welcome to bring friends.

And now a word from our sponsor…


Your ad could be here, right now.

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Ideology versus Effect

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Myca

As long as we’re discussing Libertarianism, I was struck today by a bit from one of Kevin Drum’s posts:

And the second piece of TV news? Something that’s close to my heart: broadcasters have promised Congress that by September they will have standards in place that prevent commercials from being wildly louder than the TV programs they’re embedded in. Hooray! It’s only taken them 40 years to finally address this. “We get it,” an industry flack told Congress about loud ad complaints. “As a matter of pure economics, we do not want to lose viewers.”

The bad news, however, is that the industry’s sweet talk has convinced Congress to halt work on legislation to force broadcasters to address this. Too bad. Like the Do Not Call list, this is one of those things where ideology plays no role for me. I don’t care if this is liberal, conservative, libertarian, or anything else. I just want it to stop, and I don’t care a whit whether or not it’s a justified interference in the free market. JUST MAKE IT STOP!

I think that, in broad terms, this is how most people think about politics. It’s not about whether a certain action is libertarian/socialist/whatever/etc, it’s about, “I want X.” In as much as the free market provides X (quieter commercials, safer food, telemarketers leaving me the fuck alone), they’re happy to go with the free market.

When the free market fails to provide, though, as it can arguably be said to have failed in those examples, I think most people have no problem with compelling action through government means.

An essential part of free market ideology is the idea that, left to its own devices, the market will give customers what they want. So this then, to me, is the ultimate rebuke: the reason why the huge regulatory framework has grown up around certain issues is because the free market explicitly did not give customers what they wanted, and they turned elsewhere. They didn’t turn elsewhere because they love regulation … they just want the effect.


Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Posted in Economics and the like | 4 Comments

Glossophilia

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Nisi Shawl

glossophilia

While at WisCon 33 I was on one panel that wasn’t going to be a panel.  Cultural Appropriation 101 was supposed to be a workshop.  At least, that’s what Programming asked us to do.  But then we only had your normal panel-length time slot of 75 minutes to do it in.

(”We” being myself and Victor J. Raymond of the Carl Brandon Society’s Steering Committee, plus Cabell Gathman of the University of Wisconsin.)

So we talked some, we took questions from the audience some, we did a couple of exercises from the Writing the Other book I co-wrote with Cynthia Ward.  Also, we made a stab at putting together a glossary.  It’s that last thing I’d like to work on a little more now with you.

Here are some of the defnitions we used during the workshop:

RACISM – A system of advantage based on race.  Unfortunately, racism is not dead.

HONORARY WHITENESS: -I first heard of this term from linguistic anthropologist and Carl Brandon Society co-founder MJ Hardman.  If a white person likes a person of color and thinks that person of color is righteous and good, and therefor like themselves, they may accord that person of color honorary whiteness.  This is usually done unconsciously.

PAWS: -As in the paws given out in the course of the children’s show “Blue’s Clues.”  Somebody who’s extraordinarily clueful about cultural and racial issues has four paws.  Four is the max.

COOKIE – A very public reward for behaving commendably in regards to racial or cultural issues.  Often, seeking said cookie is the secret motivation for such behavior.  (Note: cookies are the imaginary and parodic equivalent of paws; paws are often awarded without the recipient ever knowing they have received them.)

CLUEFULNESS – Of a certain level of empathy and understanding when it comes to the situations of those of a nondominant cultural background, race, etc.  Applied to those of the correspondingly dominant background.  Many of my white friends exhibit a high degree of cluefulness.

P.O.S.E.E. – An acronym of my invention, standing for Person of Southern European Extraction.  Some P.O.S.E.E.s argue that they are not white.

P.O.N.E.E. – My companion acronym, standing for Person of Northern European Extraction.  The whitest of the white; John Aegard is my little P.O.N.E.E.

THE UNMARKED STATE – Posessing characteristics which are seen as “normal,” and thus not worth being mentioned.  In this society, at this time, this includes being white, male, heterosexual, affluent, and with certain physical abilities.  Just about everyone deviates from the unmarked state in one way or another, though some ways are deemed important and others are not.

Here are a few terms that could use definitions.  Try to be smart and nice.

PEOPLE OF COLOR

MAGICAL NEGRO

EXOTICIZING

ESSENTIALISM

And I’m sure there must be others.

And now a word from our sponsor…


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Posted in Race, racism and related issues, Syndicated feeds | 45 Comments

2009 Clarion West Write-a-thon

Posted on June 11, 2009 by the angry black woman

2009-clarion-west-write-a-thon

Longtime readers of this blog may remember my doing this fundraising event in years past. I’m at it again! Along with several other people (including, I think, Karnythia and Nisi).

A write-a-thon is like a marathon except there’s no running, just writing. 6 weeks of writing, to be exact, that parallel the 6 weeks that Clarion West students spend in the workshop. Write-a-thon participants set weekly goals (like 6000 words/week or one new story per week) and sponsors pledge money to Clarion West if those goals are met. I plan to revise and send out one story each week. I have far too many still in revision limbo.

I usually add a bit extra to my efforts and use the write-a-thon to also raise money for the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship fund. This scholarship gives financial aid to writers of color attending Clarion West and Clarion. I think it should be obvious why I’m supporting this :)

It may be less obvious why I’m supporting Clarion West, other than the fact that I was a student there in 2003. I have always counted CW as one of the best experiences of my life. I got 6 weeks to focus on writing, I learned a lot, and I was able to meet many amazing people. I didn’t really have the money to go to the workshop (it costs around $3,000) but planned to ask for financial aid and maybe even take out a loan if I had to. Instead, an anonymous donor paid my entire tuition. I still don’t know who that person is or was (I have my suspicions); one of the ways I honor them is by doing what I can to give that gift to someone else.

The money that goes to Clarion West benefits all of the students, the money that goes to the Butler scholarship directly benefits students of color, so it’s a win-win.

My fundraising goal is $1500 total. As of right now I have $1240 in pledges, so I am almost there! I only have $260 to go. That works out to a little less than $44/week. If 9 people pledge $5/week or a flat $30, I’ll make my goal and a bit more. If you can’t afford $30, consider $10. Or $15. The amount doesn’t matter because every bit counts.

Go here to read more details about the whole shebang and sign up to be one of my sponsors. You can also go here and see a list of other participating writers. Not all of them are there right now, so next week I will make a point of listing some of them here (with a particular focus on writers of color).

And now a word from our sponsor…


Your ad could be here, right now.

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Why Are So Many Libertarians Republicans?

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Ampersand

The other day, I quoted from Bruce Bartlett’s editorial about libertarians. It’s worth quoting more:

Libertarians’ views on social policy and national defense make them sympathetic to the Democrats, while their views on economic policy tend to align them with the Republicans. If one views social, defense and economic policy as having roughly equal weight, it would seem, therefore, that most libertarians should be Democrats. In fact, almost none are. Those that don’t belong to the dysfunctional Libertarian Party are, by and large, Republicans.

The reason for this is that most self-described libertarians are primarily motivated by economics. In particular, they don’t like paying taxes. They also tend to have an obsession with gold and a distrust of paper money. As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn’t extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep all the guns they want. Many are survivalists at heart and would be perfectly content to live in complete isolation on a mountain somewhere, neither taking anything from society nor giving anything.

An example of this type of libertarian thinking can be found on the Web site of a group called the Campaign for Liberty. It pays lip service to the libertarian philosophy on foreign and social policy, but says little about them. The discussion of economic policy, however, is much greater. But its only major proposal is abolition of the income tax. No ideas on how government spending would be cut to make this possible are put forward except to eliminate the congressional pay raise. Perhaps this group really believes that will be enough to abolish the income tax, but I suspect not.

Naturally, this reminds me of one of my cartoons:

Bartlett points out that the libertarians you meet in Washington, D.C., aren’t goldbugs or survivalists, but they still seem focused on economics above all else. Ezra argues that it comes down to who pays the bills:

But if the country’s libertarianism is a reaction to taxes, D.C.’s libertarianism is a response to subsidies. And it turns out there are rather a lot of folks interested in subsidizing libertarian arguments against regulation and progressive taxation and not a lot of folks interested in subsidizing libertarian arguments against abortion restrictions. And that’s because libertarianism in D.C. is more of a tool than a movement. It can’t command votes and so can’t wield broad power. But it can summon funds to apply direct pressure to discrete issues of interest to, well, funders.

Rad Geek and Roderick Long both argue that Bartlett unfairly ignores those libertarians who do, in fact, argue quite a lot about foreign policy and civil liberties — although Long concedes that the Libertarian Party has pretty much the focus Bartlett describes. I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.” But it’s true that there are some kick-ass libertarians (like Rad Geek and Long) who aren’t all about how paying taxes is just! like! being! mugged!, and those folks deserve more notice and acknowledgment.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Economics and the like, Libertarianism | 47 Comments

Your Friendly Neighborhood Terrorist

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Jeff Fecke

So the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum is James W. von Brunn, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi, and generally swell guy:

James W. von Brunn holds a BachSci Journalism degree from a mid-Western university where he was president of SAE and played varsity football.

During WWII he served as PT-Boat captain, Lt. USNR, receiving a Commendation and four battle stars. For twenty years he was an advertising executive and film-producer in New York City. He is a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society.

In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn’s “Federal Reserve Caper” HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

jvbrunn.jpgSwell fellow. Lovely that he’s part of Mensa; really, that’s become almost a badge of douchebaggery.

Von Brun’s web site features a few quotes, including this one from Cicero: “A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.” Obviously, in von Brun’s mind, the treason was on the part of white people who weren’t willing to put down the Jewish menace. His website boasts of his book, Kill the Best Gentiles, which is said to be “A new, hard-hitting exposé of the JEW CONSPIRACY to destroy the White gene-pool.” The book includes:

350pp of FACTS condensing libraries of information about the Talmud, Democracy, Marx, Genetics, Money, Aryans, Negroes, Khazars, The Holy Bible, Treason, Mass-media, Mendelism, Race, the “Holocaust” and a host of suppressed “bigoted” subjects, all supported by quotations from many of history’s greatest personages. Learn who is responsible for the millions of Aryan crosses covering the world’s battlefields. Why our sons and daughters died bravely but in vain.

[…]

This carefully documented treatise exposes the JEWS and explains what you must do to protect your White family. Kill the Best Gentiles! Is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History.

So yeah, he completely sucks. But he sucks in a consistent way. I don’t see it as accidental that this is yet another in a series of shootings by conservative white males, striking out violently against the forces of multiculturalism. Whether it’s Scott Roeder killing a doctor providing medical care for women, or Richard Poplawski killing police because of his fear of the “Obama gun ban” and the influence of Jews, or this attack on Jews by a neo-Nazi, we’re seeing exactly the sort of desperate, searing, homicidal anger from the extreme right that we expected we’d see, once an African-American had the temerity to actually win the presidency. I fear that we’ve reached our tipping point, that we are getting close to a point where political violence, and especially right-wing violence, is going to become the norm. I hope not. But hope is awfully hard to find on a day like this.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Elections and politics, In the news, Jews and Judaism | 70 Comments