The Rest of the Story
Last week Radley Balko had the brief announcement that Mississippi was granting Cory Maye a new trial. Now his weekly crime column gives more detail on the Court of Appeals’ decision.
The Cory Maye case remains, to me, the best example of The Blogosphere doing tangible good in the world, as opposed to winning points in ideological or party-political towel-snapping.
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Comment by Barry —
November 25, 2009 @ 10:20 am
Whenever I say bad sh*t about CATO (or Reason), plese feel free to remind me to explicitly exempt Radley – I usually do, but sometimes forget.
Comment by dhex —
November 25, 2009 @ 11:31 am
good news from mr. balko is like a unicorn crapping out a rainbow – quite rare. i do look forward to his material in the print magazine each month, though it rarely is anything other than another dispatch from we’re totally boned land. folks should go hit up his tip jar.
on a side note, what’s up with you reality based community types censoring single letters in otherwise typed-out curse words? it seems like a poor solution to vulgarity, like showing grade school children porn with all the naughty bits blocked out by black bars. sure, it’s not technically offensive, but if your intent was to avoid showing kids obscene material, why run the video in the first place?
Comment by ajay —
November 25, 2009 @ 12:43 pm
2: the intention is not to avoid offending people but to avoid being blocked by filtering software.
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 25, 2009 @ 12:53 pm
3. Yes. Though sometimes I don’t bother.
2. I don’t usually try to solve vulgarity. I try to be the problem rather than the solution.
1. I think it’s important to recognize, however we feel about Cato or Reason, that Radley’s libertarianism isn’t an ancillary aspect of what he does. It’s what gets him out of bed in the morning to go do this stuff.
Comment by dhex —
November 25, 2009 @ 3:13 pm
highclearing has filtering software? since when?
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 25, 2009 @ 3:44 pm
Since never. But for years this site was blocked by the Panera Bread filter, among others.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 25, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
Indeed.
I would encourage the commenters most critical of libertarianism to ponder this: If they believe that much of the libertarian tent is occupied by apologists for wealth and power, do they believe that the apology is motivated by a deep belief in libertarian ideology, or do they believe that the ideology is a convenient pretext for the apology?
If the later, then Radley is not some sort of anomaly within libertarianism, he is rather the genuine article and the rest are fakers.
Comment by dhex —
November 25, 2009 @ 8:26 pm
But for years this site was blocked by the Panera Bread filter, among others.
really? dang. it’s not just their food that kinda sucks, then.
did they send you a notice?
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 25, 2009 @ 9:28 pm
Nope. I had to pick it up in the street: Readers told me.
Comment by Ray —
November 26, 2009 @ 5:06 am
Thoreau – so what? If someone told you that real communists (both of them) are brilliant and it was only all those ‘communists’ who gave it a bad name, would that change anything for you?
Obviously, there are libertarians who do good things, for reasons connected to their political views. (And obviously too, they are motivated by the bits of their political views that are closest to the correct political views, as held by me) And also there are a lot of self-described libertarians who are dicks. If you’re unhappy with people thinking most libertarians are dicks… well, you could ask all the dicks to start calling themselves something else. That might work.
Comment by Barry —
November 26, 2009 @ 12:33 pm
Jim Henley —
“Nope. I had to pick it up in the street: Readers told me.”
If, in the wee small hours of the morning, you ever hear the thumping of deep base, and then a strange vehicle comes around the corner, bouncing on special shocks with a deep violet glow coming from underneath, then you have laid eyes on Jim in the Highclearing blogmobile, making his nightly run picking up street wisdom.
Comment by Mona —
November 26, 2009 @ 7:39 pm
They won’t stop self-identifying libertarian, and there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it. QandO, and those who decamped from A Second Hand Conjecture to QandO, consider themselves “neo-libertarians” and they ( or at least many) worship as deranged and/or evil a person as Michael Ledeen (who gave one of them an interview).
And Cato, btw, is not Reason. The latter has, in my view, lost a great deal of credibility. But Cato always was critical of Bush, torture, Gitmo, the war in Iraq, warrantless surveillance etc. With one, possibly two, distinctly minority “neo” dissenters.
Comment by Ray —
November 27, 2009 @ 5:28 am
Yes, I was being ironic. The chances of them stopping self-identifying as libertarian are about as low as the chances of other people deciding that the majority of self-identifying libertarians are not representative of libertarianism.
Comment by Ceri B. —
November 27, 2009 @ 7:15 am
I think people of Radley’s quality are pretty rare in every belief system. There are just not that many Balkos, or Fred Clarks, or Jane Hamshers, to pick three from very different worldviews. Sometimes I wonder if X would be better fit to do good deeds with view Y…but then maybe the key to effective action is as idiosyncratic as the rest of this.
Comment by Ray —
November 27, 2009 @ 9:51 am
http://mises.org/daily/110
seems relevant
Comment by Eric the .5b —
November 27, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
Or of libertarians untangling self-described folks say liberals are and stand for from how liberals actually act, what they support, and what the people they vote for do.
Fair enough.
Comment by Ray —
November 27, 2009 @ 6:59 pm
More or less, though I get the impression that in the US, people will describe themselves as ‘libertarian’, but ‘liberal’ is usually a term of abuse. Someone like Yglesias might describe himself as a liberal, but only with some ironic distance.
Comment by dhex —
November 27, 2009 @ 8:14 pm
More or less, though I get the impression that in the US, people will describe themselves as ‘libertarian’, but ‘liberal’ is usually a term of abuse.
what? your impression is infactual, bruh.
Comment by Ray —
November 28, 2009 @ 5:26 am
okay, there are some people who _describe themselves_ as liberals, but there are also a lot of other people who _are described as_ liberals.
Whereas there are some people who _describe themselves_ as libertarians, and relatively few others who _are described as_ libertarians.
…but it’s a small point.
Comment by dhex —
November 28, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
your point being that there are more liberals than libertarians?
if you’re looking for “oh, so you’re a fucking [xyz]” type responses in the political arena, look no further than comment #10.
Comment by Ray —
November 28, 2009 @ 7:00 pm
No, not my point.
The fact that the ’so you’re a fucking libertarian’ comment (if you want to read it like that) was a reply to a post about libertarians might give you a clue to my point. Or not.
I don’t have any particular hate on for libertarians. Someone earlier said, there are people doing good things motivated by their libertarianism, there are people like Slacktivist motivated by his evangelical christianity… look around and you’ll find good Maoists, good Scientologists, whatever. People who have a belief that you find a little crazy or a lot, but because of that belief do some things that you like.
It’s just Thoreau and Mona have both had posts in the last few days, pointing to the same guy (IIRC) and saying “look, not all libertarians are selfish bastards! Now give us cookies!” Some responses are hard to avoid.
Comment by dhex —
November 28, 2009 @ 8:24 pm
i think you missed the point about what thoreau originally wrote, which certainly wasn’t about “give us cookies”. this is the wrong commentariat for that, bruh.
and re: your earlier assertion about liberal being a slur in america rather than a term of self-identification. (both liberal and conservatives are slurs in some contexts, of course, but not generally, whereas identifying someone with a fringe movement/position is probably more likely to be so)
actually, to tie everything together, a few months ago there was another post on balko where a commenter (i forget whom) basically lamented balko’s great position on the war on drugs with other positions that he, as a libertarian, didn’t share with liberals.
Comment by Dan Hardie —
November 29, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
Radley’s done amazing work re Cory Maye. I will say, however, that the UK bloggers’ campaign to get asylum for Iraqis who worked for UK forces got several hundred of them into Britain, against initially very stubborn resistance from the Government.
Against that, of course, the buggers devised a set of rules that excluded several hundred at-risk Iraqi employees, spun the process out for over two years, and did damn-all for the Iraqis when they finally made it to the UK.
Anyone in a poor country who feels like working for foreign troops sent there by an idealistic leader aiming to establish democracy: just remember, when the death threats arrive, you’re on your own.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
November 29, 2009 @ 7:05 pm
Dan Hardie – I’m not very familiar with that, not keeping up with Brit blogs. Sounds very cool, though.
…
It says something about modern America that both Teams Red and Blue, even when their representatives are firmly in charge of the government, like to paint themselves as abused and victimized.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 29, 2009 @ 7:10 pm
Not to detract from the UK bloggers or get into a game of “my favorite writer is better than yours!” but in the process of investigating the Maye case Radley Balko also exposed a good bit of corruption and incompetence in the Medical Examiner’s office, which will have implications for a lot of other people either behind bars or facing trial right now. So his good deed extends beyond just one case.