Kudos to M.R. Jarrell at UnCivil Defence for finding the KXTV report of Steve Kubby’s court appearance today.
Additionally, I endorse Jarrell’s call to request a pardon for Kubby from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. While I don’t necessarily expect it to be granted, it ought to be sought.
Just in time for the Bush State of the Union speech this evening, Samuel Alito has been sworn in.
This is quite obviously bad news for Liberty, as Alito has indicated a personal bias in favor of executive power at the expense of constitutional restraint. I do not, however, think that one one has to embrace a truly Hegelian position of the “Maoists for Nixon” sort to draw the right lessons from this, though.
Libertarians need not welcome or actively seek expansion of state tyranny at the expense of constitutional restraint. Institutional incentives ensure that the State will do this all on its own and certainly doesn’t need libertarian help. It will keep doing that and the only rational response is the radicalization of those who favor freedom — libertarians, constitutionalist conservatives and liberals who believe in constitutional protection for civil liberties.
As the realization dawns that no constitution can effectively restrain State power in the long run…
That the American experiment with “limited government” has been a failed experiment…
Those who value freedom will seek new safeguards for their rights. They’ll find them in the anarchist alternative and revolutionary agorism.
Let me first start by directing your attention to a piece by Jack Ross I only discovered this evening. Ross explores potential common ground between Austrian economics and syndicalism in “A Syndicalist Paradigm For Our Age“.
Excerpt:
So what of Austrian syndicalism as a paradigm for our time? As a completion of the libertarian framework that emerged in the time of the new left, it is highly relevant to our time.
This is important stuff on the very forefront of libertarian political theory, in my opinion. Please read and digest.
Additionally, I’d like to direct your attention to Kevin Carson’s important “Libertarian Property and Privatization: An Alternative Paradigm” from back in 2003 on Anti-State.com as well as Wally Conger’s concise and to the point excerpt from a more recent longer piece by Carson on Uncapitalist Journal.
Of a particularly controversial nature, for libertarians anyway, is the first point of Carson’s proposed radical left libertarian agenda:
“Syndicalist seizure of large enterprises (the Fortune 500 might be a useful proxy) by radical industrial unions.”
This may seem a distinctly non-libertarian point at first glance, but Carson didn’t just pull that out of his ass. He instead arrives at it by examining aspects of the thought of libertarian greats such as Rothbard (”Mr. Libertarian” himself) and Karl Hess. This particular quote from Hess that Carson chose may say it best:
The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.
Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.
I’ve approached this matter myself before and found it convenient to cite this explanation by fictional character Hagbard Celine of why Proudhon was not contradicting himself when he said both that “Property is Theft” and that “Property is Liberty“.
Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction “property” covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists…
“Property[1] is theft” means that property[1] created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on armed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property1; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.
“Property[2] is liberty” means that property[2], that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people’s interests are co-mingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other’s toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly “This is mine and this is thine,” and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by the parties to it, can true independence be achieved.
Although I personally believe that legitimate land title can arise in an anti-state context, that’s an incidental matter in this context. The larger point that R.A. WIlson, through the mouthpiece of his character Celine, alludes to remains valid — that state awards of title to its allies in plunder are fraudulent and that this does not contradict the classical liberal supposition that strong property rights are the bulwark of liberty.
Rather, it is the inconsistency in liberal/libertarian application of that supposed allegiance to property rights that obscure statist, anti-market injustice — which conventional socialists then rightly seize upon to indict hypocritical regimes. It is where the institution of property has been perverted by the State that the word “property” comes into disrepute — for who could be more bitter than a victim of theft who hears that the possession by thieves of that which has been stolen from him must be farcically protected by the State for sake of “property rights”? I’ve taken to summarizing this line of thinking lately as “the defense of stolen property is no defense of property rights“.
In other words, irrespective of the murderous folly state socialism has been, libertarians as a movement have yet to come to grips with the essential correctness of Marx’s indictment of primitive accumulation, despite the marvelous potential of radical libertarian ideas to address it.. Theft is theft and the very existence of a libertarian movement ought to remind libertarians that we do not live in a truly free market society. Libertarian moderates ignore that at peril of their own credibility.
In the case of state-owned enterprises, that means the rank and file workers of the enterprise become the rightful owners. This circumvents the corruption inherent in minarchist libertarian “privatization” schemes — mere transfer of stolen wealth from one arm of the political class to another.
Furthermore, a proper understanding of Libertarian Class Theory, or the more highly developed form of it — Agorist Class Theory (as explained in Agorism Contra Marxism [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, postscript]), results in an understanding that the true “state” consists of not merely just the literal apparatus of government, but those of its ostensibly “private” allies who have profited not through peaceful and honest market means, but through sharing in state expropriation and benefiting unfairly from suppression of market competition by the state on their behalf.
This results in a dawning realization that quasi-Bolshevist seizure of state-allied corporations by their own non-managerial workers, such as Carson suggests, is entirely justified on libertarian grounds and that there is nothing in such actions incompatible with respect for genuine property rights and dedication to the free market ideal. Indeed, it would be the highest expression of that ideal.
If this interests you, then you might also like to read J. Neil Schulman’s novel of agorist revolution, “Alongside Night“.
Windows users, please note that there’s some particularly nasty malware going around out there called Blackworm that you’ll want to protect yourself against — and you’ve only got a couple of days.
From the summary linked above:
Over the last week, “Blackworm” infected about 300,000 systems based on analysis of logs from the counter web site used by the worm to track itself. This worm is different and more serious than other worms for a number of reasons. In particular, it will overwrite a user’s files on February 3rd.
At this point, the worm will be detected by up to date anti virus signatures. In order to protect yourself from data loss on February 3rd, you should use current (Jan 23rd or later) anti virus signatures. Note, however, that the malware attempts to disable/remove any anti-virus software on the system (and does this every hour while the system is up), so if the machine was infected before [updated anti-virus] signatures were deployed, obviously, that anti-virus software can’t be expected to clean up the infection for you.
There will be an arraignment and/or hearings on Tuesday at 1 PM and possibly 8:30 AM at the Placer Co. Courthouse in Auburn [California].
With regard to the Placer County Courthouse, you can get directions to it from MapQuest.
Pot advocate arrested at SFO after arriving from Canada [SFGate.com]
Marijuana advocate and former gubernatorial candidate Steve Kubby, a fugitive for several years, was arrested at San Francisco International Airport on Thursday night on a plane that arrived from Canada, San Francisco police said.
For the latest info from Hammer of Truth on Steve Kubby’s ordeal:
http://hammeroftruth.com/category/people/steve-kubby/
See also my posts on this topic:
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/302
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/304
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/305
KN@PPSTER: Getting things back on the rails …
Now that the phrase “Steve Kubby” is the number one search on Technorati, the opportunists are starting to show up, obfuscating search results and making it difficult for readers to get actual information about the situation at hand by posting material that happens to mention Steve peripherally but is really just stuff pertaining to petty controversies they’re hopped up about.
Not very cool, guys … and I’ll remember and file it away for a day when I’m in a position to help — or harm — you, and act accordingly.
Ditto. A man’s life is on the line here. The only thing that may save Steve Kubby from a cruel and extraordinarily painful death is sufficient public attention for his plight and resulting public pressure to treat him compassionately. Speaking of compassion, anyone who thinks it’s cute to use his name as a spam keyword probably shouldn’t expect any from me if they ever cross my path.
For the latest info from Hammer of Truth on Steve Kubby’s ordeal:
http://hammeroftruth.com/category/people/steve-kubby/
See also my posts on this topic:
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/302
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/304
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/305
Medical Marijuana Activist Returns to State, Is Arrested [Los Angeles Times]
Several physicians who have examined Kubby, a former Libertarian candidate for governor and a driving force behind California’s victorious 1996 medical marijuana initiative, contend the drug blunts the worst symptoms of his cancer, which can be fatal.
For the latest info from Hammer of Truth on Steve Kubby’s ordeal:
http://hammeroftruth.com/category/people/steve-kubby/
See also my posts on this topic:
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/302
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/304
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/305
Kubby transferred to Placer jail to begin 120-day drug sentence [Sacramento Bee]
Medical marijuana activist Steven Wynn Kubby was transferred Friday to the Placer County Jail, where he will begin serving a 120-day sentence for a drug conviction in 2000, Placer County authorities said.
Deported from Canada, the 58-year-old Kubby was arrested Thursday by San Francisco police on a no-bail warrant when his Alaska Airlines flight landed at San Francisco International Airport.
For the latest info from Hammer of Truth on Steve Kubby’s ordeal:
http://hammeroftruth.com/category/people/steve-kubby/
See also my posts on this topic:
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/302
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/304
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/305
Fugitive medipot activist Kubby arrested [Auburn Journal]
Medical marijuana activist Steve Kubby, a fugitive from Placer County, was back in custody Friday at Placer County jail after being arrested at San Francisco International Airport
For the latest info from Hammer of Truth on Steve Kubby’s ordeal:
http://hammeroftruth.com/category/people/steve-kubby/
See also my posts on this topic:
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/302
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/304
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/305
