Iraq Casualty Estimates

The Lancet is publishing a new study, which suggests that excess mortality in Iraq resulting from the US invasion and subsequent conflicts tops 650,000. The number is based on a survey. Iraq Body Count is currently showing a minimum figure of 43,850, based on incidents reported in major media. Check out the Wikipedia page on the earlier Lancet study for background and criticism. There is also a page there about Iraq Body Count.

"T)EAR SIR—Tn reply to the queries eoutaiiied tn YOur note of the 26th nIt.."

Ah, the joys of the transitional library. Google Books, which obviously searches its "full texts" using raw OCR scans, actually returns 37 books with the phrase "T)EAR SIR." (When you do the search, it will tell you there are 50, but. . .) The full phrase, "T)EAR SIR—Tn reply to the queries eoutaiiied tn YOur note of the 26th nIt.." is from Self-paying Colonization to North America: Being a Letter to Captain John P. Kennedy by M. Wilson (A. Thom: 1848), which looks quite interesting, although at least one page-scan is entirely unreadable. That's sad, because this is a genuinely rare work.

Even more interesting is A woman's philosophy of woman; or, Woman affranchised. An answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and other modern innovators, by Madame D'Hericourt (New York: Carleton, 1864), but the copy in the Google Books archive was scanned sideways. Fortunately, this work is a little more generally accessible, and the roughly 80 pages of feminist response to Proudhon are entertaining enough that I've already scanned them and will post them as soon as they are proofread. The entire work looks worthy of web publication. It's too bad that it requires re-scanning in order to make it available.

I keep seeing commentary on the copyright issues involved with Google Books and other electronic archives. Clearly, Google has taken a rather peculiar tack in navigating those issues. By why doesn't "Google Books" + shoddy Google up a storm of criticism? Well, actually, you can try it. I'm not quite the only voice out there complaining about this stuff.

This makes me think a lot about the corporate model of the transitional, and ultimately, virtual library of the future. I work on the Libertarian Labyrinth in my spare time, with no shortage of distraction and no income resulting from the labor. And my quality control beats the corporations all to heck. What's up with that? And can we, perhaps, generalize towards a really useful, open virtual library which would serve us all?

Keywords: Libertarianism

Since class members will be wrapping up their work for the semester with a response to Kevin Carson's "A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance," we need to spend a little time dealing with the two keywords: libertarian and green. Both terms are contested, and are claimed by significantly diverse political movements.

Wikipedia's disambiguation page for the term Libertarianism is useful, essentially dividing those who have claimed the term between libertarian socialist and libertarian capitalist traditions, while acknowledging that the two currents are united by a preoccupation with individual liberty. All libertarians are likely to be definable, positively, in terms of a commitment to the pursuit of equal liberty for all and some adherence to a non-aggression principle, and, negatively, in opposition to various forms of authoritarianism. That's a lot of important ideas in the mix already, many of them open to a range of interpretations.

At various margins of libertarians, you find anarchists. By itself, anarchism means nothing more than a belief that human beings can and should get along without rulers. Obviously, a commitment to anarchism is a commitment to political liberty, and it's a position individuals are unlikely to take unless they belive that human affairs can in fact be worked out between people, with a bare minimum of "government" of any kind. In fact, anarchist seem to agree on liberty, and disagree on pretty much everything else, including how to define their one key term.

Kevin Carson calls himself a "free-market anti-capitalist." It's an accurate description and a teachable scandal all at the same time. There is no contradiction involved, as long as you understand "capitalism" to be the economic system that has developed in history, rather than some abstract ideal to which actual market economies have conformed to some degree. We used to refer to "actually existing socialism," to distinguish what happened in "socialist" countries from the abstract systems they drew upon. Carson takes his inspiration from figures like Benjamin R. Tucker, who opposed existing capitalism, not by advocating communism or the like, but by calling for market forms that would be even more free. Poke around his site to see where that takes him.

When you're dealing with the rather extreme form of libertarian thought espoused by CArson, remember that it was Thomas Jefferson who said that the government governed best when it governed least, and Thoreau who took the next step and suggested it would be best to have a government which governed not at all. And remember that the potentially extreme nature of the position is why we are looking at it in this context. Taking things this far, perhaps too far, shows us something about our own commitments to liberty, tolerance, etc...