The liberal paradox: Any one who believes this crazy right-wing shit will not be argued out of their belief.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: not that anything is wrong with that, it’s fine as far as it goes; it just seems somehow out of place in this sort of discussion. Remember, this genre aims to highlight the dogmatism and/or dishonestly of the Jonah Goldbergs of the world by subjecting their scribblings to a sober and dispassionate examination; clearly this is not an occasion for sweeping generalizations and high rhetoric.

Does it make you feel a little better that the author of that comment – namely me – clearly meant the opposite? (It was a reductio ad absurdum and all that.)

“‘White political bloc’ – really? Jeez, that whole paragraph, hard to believe. Talk about racial stereotypes.”

Sorry, Henri, is there any particular reason that the whole paragraph is hard to believe? (That is, I don’t deny that may be experiencing epistemic difficulties, but why blame the poor paragraph?)

On slavery: Lysander Spooner, libertarian hero was a major figure in the abolitionist movement. His book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery was an influence on Frederick Douglass. I am nonplussed at the comment that libertarians would support slavery.

‘White political bloc’ – really? Jeez, that whole paragraph, hard to believe. Talk about racial stereotypes.

Incidentally, the quote from Reason:

Such uneven treatment undermines the rule of law and creates a perception that blacks are being targeted either out of racial animus (which usually is not true) or because busting street dealers in poor neighborhoods is practically and politically easier than going after less conspicuous white dealers catering to the middle and upper classes (which is more often the case).

Goldberg assumes that blacks are disproportionately arrested for selling drugs because they are “disproportionately in this line of work.” That is not at all clear. Considerable research, including studies by the National Institute of Justice, indicates that drug users tend to buy from people of the same racial or ethnic group. (This report [PDF] includes a quick summary of the research.) Given this pattern, since whites are about as likely as blacks to use illegal drugs, they should be about as likely to sell them. Yet blacks, who represent 13 percent of the general population, account for about 40 percent of drug offenders in federal prison and 45 percent of drug offenders in state prison (PDF).

Further evidence that blacks’ disproportionate share of drug arrests cannot be explained by disproportionate involvement with drugs comes from New York City’s little-noticed crackdown on pot smokers under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Survey data indicate that among 18-to-25-year-olds, the age group where these pot busts are concentrated, whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to smoke marijuana. Yet a 2008 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that in the Big Apple blacks and Hispanics are, respectively, five and three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/132739.html

What’s the explanation? Pretty much what I suggested: “Such uneven treatment undermines the rule of law and creates a perception that blacks are being targeted either out of racial animus (which usually is not true) or because busting street dealers in poor neighborhoods is practically and politically easier than going after less conspicuous white dealers catering to the middle and upper classes (which is more often the case).”

Well, I think you might consider getting them checked, under the circumstances. Or else – since you are trusting your eyes – prove to me, empirically, that the following is not true. (Don’t say it’s hard to provide proof of such things! You have your eyes, remember!)

The war on drugs drags on in really stupid ways. One reason lots of white folks – a powerful political bloc, I think you will concede – just don’t care that much about all that is that the brunt of the stupidities is born by poor African-Americans. Lots of white folks fail to identify with the victims of the drug war gone stupid for class reasons, for cultural reasons (yes of course) and (wait for it!) for racial reasons. When white folks in flyover country – in Peoria, in Petaluma – hear that some inner city African-American’s door got kicked down by accident and gramma died of a heart attack and the family dog was shot, they don’t say ‘great!’ but they just don’t care THAT much. Vaguely, it’s normal. It just doesn’t seem that outrageous or urgent. (Vague suspicion that the cops wouldn’t be kicking down your door unless you’d done SOMETHING wrong. Why would the cops be just doing something totally stupid, after all? Are the cops just racist? That doesn’t sound plausible in this day and age. Damn liberals, always crying ‘racism’!) There isn’t as much identification with African-American victims as there would be with white victims, and there isn’t as much concern that something like that could happen to people like me.

Think about New Orleans. The coverage. Remember all the jokes about how the TV coverage described African-Americans scrounging supplies as ‘looters’ but the white folks doing the same thing were just desperate for milk and diapers. It’s not that the news providers were totally unsympathetic to the ‘looters’, but there was a certain suspicious reserve in the extension of sympathy to one group of people, not to another group of people in objectively the same circumstances. Have your eyes never noticed such things?

Why do people – African-Americans included – go along with this nonsense, if they know better? Geeze, what’s so mysterious about it. Why would a big heavy stupid thing, with lots of inertia, just sort of keep going on in the same direction – why don’t more people uselessly toss their careers under the tank treads of the War on Drugs juggernaut, even though that probably wouldn’t do much good? Cynicism, a vague hope of changing things a little from the inside, without getting your own head chopped off, a tendency to get focused on what is one inch in front of your nose, rather than thinking about how the big picture is stupid. Haven’t you watched “The Wire”, man?

But I haven’t even deployed my alwaysalreadium torpedoes!