Missing the Corpses for the Case

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The New York Times reports on the “disturbing” case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher:

On this episode of “The Weekly,” members of SEAL Team 7 tell Navy investigators that Gallagher was a reckless leader with a disturbing hunger for violence. They say they spent much of their time protecting Iraqi civilians from their battle-crazed chief instead of going after ISIS. And never-before-released video from the SEALs’ deployment shows Gallagher kneeling beside a defenseless ISIS captive moments before Gallagher plunged his knife into the prisoner’s neck.

The problem is, Gallagher was acquitted of the most “disturbing” charges made against him.  But don’t shelve your outrage too quickly. There is something outrage-worthy here. To see this, it may be worth our while to stand back a bit and see the battlefield corpses for the legal case. Continue reading →

Are Equal Rights Anti-Semitic?

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Considering how frequently the “anti-Semitism” card is used against the campaign for equal rights for Palestinians, I thought it’d be useful to reproduce an ordinary donation letter I got the other day from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), an organization blacklisted by the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry. If these demands are your idea of “anti-Semitism” (not that I necessarily agree with them all), maybe it’s your conception of that concept that needs revision, not the demands of USCPR or its allies.  The idea of a “racist campaign for equal rights” is a contradiction in terms. The only question worth asking in this context is which party is guilty of the contradiction involved.

Continue reading →

Quote of the Day

Posted on by under liberty and the left

One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land – their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land should have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of reparations from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. The fact that the land remained in the hands of the lords paved the way inexorably for the Bolshevik Revolution, since the revolution that had freed the serfs remained unfinished.

The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to “reparations”, reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for “40 acres and a mule” to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.

— Murray Rothbard, 1969

Anarchy in Philadelphia

Posted on by under liberty and the left

The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, 8-11 January 2020. Here’s the schedule info:

Molinari Society symposium:
New Work in Libertarian and Anarchist Thought

G5E. Thursday, 9 January 2020, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 noon, Philadelphia 201 Hotel, 201 N. 17th St., Philadelphia PA 19103, room TBA.

chair:

Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

presenters:

Zachary Woodman (Western Michigan University), “The Implications of Philosophical Anarchism for National Identity”

Jason Lee Byas (University of Michigan), “What Is Violence?”

William Nava (New York University), “The Causal Case Against Contributing to Public Goods”

Roderick T. Long (Auburn University), “Ayn Rand’s ‘New’ (Posthumous) Critique of Anarchism: A Counter-Critique”

Just Say Yes: Tulsi Gabbard on Impeachment

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Well, my fan-boy crusade for Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign has come to grief on the shoals of her abstention on impeachment last night. Her decision to abstain strikes me as a serious mistake: it had no clear legal or constitutional justification, and simply managed to alienate the base that’s supported her so far. I get the rationale, but it seems a bridge too far to a political right that’s essentially lost its way and lost its mind. I still have great respect and admiration for Gabbard, and still intend to post the fourth installment of my series on “Tulsi Gabbard vs. Liberal McCarthyism” (haven’t changed my mind on that, and don’t agree with the accusations of “cowardice” that have been leveled against her for this decision),* but the fan-boy crush, alas, has ended. Continue reading →

He Could Do No Other

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In case you hadn’t figured this out, I’m grading final papers–tonight’s harvest being applied ethics. After spending the day making fun of my applied ethics students on Facebook, I turn at last to the final paper of the evening, a dense, single-spaced essay written by a transfer student. The author starts by telling me that while he found my course very interesting, applied ethics just isn’t his thing–and then proceeds to write a sophisticated, cogent, but totally off-topic paper on the problem of evil, written from “a Protestant Christian worldview.”

Image result for sayings of martin luther

Now what?